Hello World

Anthropocentrism/OOO Ks
We stand somewhere between the mountain and the ant. - Onondaga Proverb
We are the earth, made of the same stuff; there is no other, no division between us
and "lower" or "higher" forms of being. - Estella Lauder
Ecological awareness is a detailed and increasing sense, in science and outside of
it, of the innumerable inter-relationships among lifeforms and between life and nonlife. Timothy Morton
Strategy NotesTop
Its easiest to think of Anthro and object-oriented ontology
(OOO) as a spectrumanthro rejects the idea that humans are
an ethically superior lifeform, and OOO says that lifeforms
arent ethically distinct from non-lifeforms.
Anthro seems relatively straight-forward, with one caution; its

a lot more than youre mean to animals. Its about the Affs
ethical and political vision being intimately tied to/supportive
of a system of human mastery that produced the true
ecological catastrophe.
OOO Stategy Notes

Below is a lecture I gave the lab about OOO that should answer
most questions
Monday, July 710AM
PART ONE IS THE OVERVIEW (SLIDES 14)
-- Why start with OOO? (not oval office orders) New waveCalum said that what
postmodernism was to philosophy from the 70s to the 90s, OOO is now
If Debate Wolf is the lecture of mine students are most excited to receive, this is
the one I am, without question, most excited to deliver.
OOO has a bad wraprocks are people! No theyre not. They are rocks. They simply
arent ethically inferior to us simply because they cant talk or breathe.
-- What is object-oriented ontology? Lets go backwards and break this down
What is ontology? Study of being
What is object-oriented? Lifeforms are merely entitiesthey exist relative
to both other human
and non-human things. I am a thing among stuff. Morton kills this in an
interview;
So when you say, My view is that Im a material being. Actually, no, Im not a
material being. Im an entity, maybe thats a wordobject is a word that some of
us use right now. Im one of these weird guys called object-oriented ontologists and
I think that there are real objects but these objects are not objects like objectified
objects, its impossible to objectify them, right? Because however much I know
about the polar bear, my knowledge of the polar bear is not a polar bear. I pull a
hair off the polar bear, the hair of the polar bear is not the polar bear. All that
knowledge, the honors thesis about the polar bear (i.e. the epistemology args most
people make) is not the polar bear. Even the polar bear doesnt know about the
polar bear, right? So theres a way in which objects have a kind of mystery to them,
and I think that in a way what this means is what we live in a universe that is kind
of in anarchy, okay? I think that fundamentally, since there are discrete objects that
subtend relations between them, any attempt to create a structure is obviously
secondary. It doesnt necessarily means its bad, but just that we live in anarchy.
We live in anarchy all the way down and all the way up, and there might be
important political ramifications to that.
-- What does it mean to be an entity, or a discrete object?
Morton got his start writing about food, and I think that stuff is also fascinating. Take
a look here at this photo (show Savas with Jumbles photo)
Interconnections; think of all the delicious beings on that plate! The ocean lifeforms
(shrimp, oysters, etc.), several pigs mashed into that bacon and prosciutto atop the
deviled eggs, the eggs that came from chickens in objects called CAFOs and were
turned into deviled eggs and egg cake, the milk that came from the cows to produce
that cheese, the several places on Earth that produced the sweet potatoes, potato
hash, watermelon, pineapple etc.
Who knows how all that stuff turned into food and got there? It got from place to
place to place in a process Ill never fully understand and can only vaguely put into
comprehension. I cant know all of it, but I can eat it and enjoy it and be aware of it.
-- Why this lecture? Well, again, two things;
1) Morton is currently my favorite K author, and he profoundly changed my view of
who I am and how I relate to the world.
Ill only really have time to discuss OOO in relation to the topic, and even then
through a very limited prism; the work of my favorite philosopher, Timothy Morton.
Morton is a professor at Rice, where he now ostensibly teaches English, but he left
UC-Davis, where he was a professor of both ecology and English.
I define this object named Morton by his experience because it reflects deeply in his
work, and thus in his utility in debateMorton is great about developing narratives
and weak on policy solutions, which is Dr. Brickers K of Morton in his real life book
review.
Ive only talked to two other people about Hyperobjects, and theyre Bricker and
Calum. We all seem to agree that Morton is brilliant, fascinating and worth exploring
deeply.
2) It will (if I dont muck it up) profoundly change how you view yourself, the
environment and things around you.
One more cautionthis lecture will be inherently incomplete. If you really dig this,
I would encourage you to;
**Follow @the_eco_thought on twitter
**Visit ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
**Listen to other Morton interviewsI can send them to you via mp3
**Read Hyperobjects, The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature
PART TWO IS PRE-REQUISITE CONCEPTS (SLIDE 5)

Anthropocenethis is the current ecological era were in. Most people April 1784 as
the dawn of industrial capitalism, but thats a very reductionist view. More
fundamentally, a new ecological era began in April 1784, when James Watt
patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in
Earth's crustnamely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a
planetary scale. That ushered in
End of the World/Beginning of the WorldThe end of the world has already
occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended.
Convenience is not readily associated with historiography, nor indeed with
geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily clear.
Two implications;
a) Beings; Without a world, there are simply a number of unique beings (farmers,
dogs, irises, pencils, LEDs, and so on) to whom I owe an obligation through the
simple fact that existence is coexistence
b) No more background for ethics; No conversation is separate from warming
nature is no longer a neutral background for human affairs, but has now ripped
into the foreground. What good is it to win a small score for social relations if we lost
the very world itself that forms the background against which all of those things
play out?
Lifeforms and non-lifeforms obviously there is some very clear distinction between
me, the entity you all know as Rubaie, and the floor beneath us. Lifeforms (all living
breathing perishable things) and non-lifeforms (non-perishable things)
The point isnt that there arent humans, but that there isnt human specialness in
any meaningful ethical sense.
PART THREE IS WHATS THE POINT? (SLIDES 6-7)

Central purposes of the K(s) is three-fold
(1) produce a new view of what ecology really isone not tied simply to nature or to
the environment but one that recognizes all objects as their own forms. Ecology
isnt natureecology isnt the environmentecology isnt a thing out there
ecology is the stuff around you. This classroom, these artificial lights, are as much a
part of your ecology as the trees you pass by on the way here.
That new ecological thought produces a new ecological awarenessthe detailed
and increasing sense of the inter-relationships among lifeforms and between life and
non-life. Without a world, there are simply a number of unique beings to whom I
owe an obligation through the simple fact that existence is coexistence
Similarly to what I said before about humans, Morton isnt some weirdo denying
humans or the Earth exist. Earth does exist but it isnt bowl containing other
ecological objects; Earth is one object coexisting with mice, sugar, elephants etc.
(2) shatter the myth of human cognitive mastery that has produced a view of
nature/the world that has contributed to the slow-motion modern ecological
catastrophe. The optimal ethical and political judgments develop new relationships
between objects, particularly shattering the way human lifeforms currently
view/attempt to perfect and dominate other lifeforms and non-lifeforms
(3) expand ecological awareness to account for the radical nature of new
hyperobjectstwo parts to unpack;
a) Ecological awareness Ecological awareness is a detailed and increasing sense,
in science and outside of it, of the innumerable inter-relationships among lifeforms
and between life and non-life.
It is awareness of coexistence
b) What are hyperobjects things like warming are uncannythey are both far
away and immediate, there at the very same moment present and real and yet
distant and invisible, etc.they transcend our current comprehension, which is why
we need to think in newer and bigger scales than we ever have before.
PART FOUR IS HYPEROBJECTS (SLIDE 8)

Big word #1 is hyperobjects. I will let Morton start to explain that here (4:48
6:14ish)
Examples of hyperobjectswarming, pollution, etc.things that exist constantly
around us that seem distant because they transcend time and place but are always
already present
Morton, 13Timothy, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice
University, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World,
University of Minnesota Press, page 99-100 //BR
You are walking out of the supermarket. As you approach your car, a stranger calls
out, "Hey! Funny weather today!" With a due sense of caution--is she a global
warming denier or not?you reply yes. There is a slight hesitation. Is it because she
is thinking of saying something about global warming? In any case, the hesitation
induced you to think of it. Congratulations: you are living proof that you have
entered the time of hyperobjects.
Why? You can no longer have a routine conversation about the weather with a
stranger. The presence of global warming looms into the conversation like a
shadow, introducing strange gaps. Or global warming is spoken or either way
the reality is strange.
A hyperobject has ruined the weather conversation, which functions as part of a
neutral screen that enables us to have a human drama in the foreground .
In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no
foreground. It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and
foregrounds. World is a fragile aesthetic effect around whose corners we are
beginning to see. True planetary awareness is the creeping realization not
that "We Are the World," but that we aren't.
Why? Because world and its cognatesenvironment, Natureare ironically more
objectified than the kinds of "object" I am talking about in this study. World is more
or less a container in which objectified things float or stand. It doesn't matter very
much whether the movie within the context of world is an old-fashioned Aristotelian
movie decorated with accidents; or whether the movie is a more avant-garde
Deleuzian one of flows and intensities. World as the background of events is an
objectification of a hyperobject: the biosphere, climate, evolution, capitalism (yes,
perhaps economic relations compose hyperobjects). So when climate starts to rain
on our head, we have no idea what is happening. It is easy to practice denial in such
a cognitive space: to set up, for example, "debates" in which different "sides on
global warming are presented. This taking of "sides" correlates all meaning and
agency to the human realm, while in reality it isn't a question of sides, but of
real entities and human reactions to them. Environmentalism seems to be
talking about something that can't be seen or touched. So in turn environmentalism
ups the ante and preaches the coming apocalypse. This constant attempt to shock
and dismay inspires even more defiance on the opposite side of the "debate."
Both sides are fixated on world, just as both sides of the atheism debate are
currently fixated on a vorhanden ("present at hand"), objectively present God. As
irritating for New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins to hear that atheism is just
another form of belief, it nevertheless isor, at any rate, it holds exactly the same
belief about belief as fundamentalisms. Belief is a token, a mental object that you
grip as hard as possible, like your wallet or car keys. In exactly the same way, it is
armoring for environmentalists to talk about ecology without Nature. The argument
is heard as nihilism or postmodernism. But really it is environmentalism that is
nihilist and postmodernist, just as fundamentalisms belief about belief marks it as a
form of ontotheological nihilism. The ultimate environmentalist argument would be
to drop the concepts Nature and world, to cease identifying with them , to
swear allegiance to coexistence with nonhumans without a world, without sonic
nihilistic Noah's Ark.
In any weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at
some point. Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation
like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an This failure of the normal rhetorical
routine, these remnants of shattered conversation lying around like broken
hammers (they must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and
deeper ontological shift in human awareness. And in turn, this is a symptom of a
profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little
rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac, these upgrades are not
necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of philosophers and other humanities
scholars to attune ourselves to the upgrading process and lo help explain it.
What is the upgrading process? In a word, the notion that we are living in a world
one that we can call Natureno longer applies in any meaningful sense, except as
nostalgia or in the temporarily useful local language of pleas and petitions. We don't
want a certain species to be farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature
to convince a legislative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and
create nostalgic visions of hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have been
going on now since the Industrial Revolution began to take effect.
As a consequence of that revolution, however, something far bigger and more
threatening is now looming on our horizonlooming so as to abolish our horizon,
or any horizon. Global warming has performed a radical shift in the status of the
weather. Why? Because the world as suchnot just a specific idea of world but
world in its entiretyhas evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had
it in the first place.
PART FIVE IS LINKS vs. POLICY (SLIDE 9)

Warming and environmental apocalypticism
ANumbers and intimacy
University of Minnesota Press, page 137 //BR
Think of the weight of the sheer numbers with which global warming is thrust on us :
like something from a book of records, global warming is spectated as the biggest,
the most, the hugest. This "number crunching" stance toward global warming is far
from simply "scientific" or "informational: which is not to say that this is merely a
matter of "culture" or "worldview." Indeed, it directly embodies a philosophical
stance that gave rise to global warming in the first place . Earth and actually
existing beings that live here are bathed in a giant sea of numbers. Yet from within
the nihilism of this phenomenon, which is what Heidegger calls the giganticthe
rise of sheer quantityemerges the "other beginning" of history, not its end.'' The
ontological, not to mention the psychic and social, economy of such an arrangement
is startling. I need no special props, no deus ex machina. I don't need the
apocalypseindeed, as we saw in the previ-ous section, such thoughts inhibit
intimacy with the strange strangeness of nonhumans. The trivially mathematized
fact of hyperobjects longevity is all the help I need. It is simply a matter of getting
used to this mathematical factgetting used to is a fair translation of the Greek
mathesis
b) THE UNIQUENESS TRICK
The spooky thing is, we discover global warming precisely when it's already here. It
is like realizing that for some time you had been conducting your business in the
expanding sphere of a slow-motion nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for
amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts
away. All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the "end of the world are ,
from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By
postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us
against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and
psychic space. As we shall see, the hyperobject spells doom now, not at some
future date. (Doom will assume a special technical meaning in this study in the
"Hypocrisies" section.)
If there is no backgroundno neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but rather a
very visible, highly monitored, publicly debated climatethen there is no
foreground. Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of
dragging weather phenomena into the fore-ground as part of our awareness of
global warming has been the gradual realization that there is no foreground! The
idea that we are embedded in a phenomenological lifeworld, tucked up like little
hobbits into the safety of our burrow, has been exposed as a fiction. The specialness
we granted ourselves as unravelers of cosmic meaning , exemplified in the
uniqueness of Heideggerian Dasein, falls apart since there is no meaningfulness
possible in a world without a foreground-background distinction . Worlds need
horizons and horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds. When we can
see everywhere (when I can use Google Earth to see the fish in my mom's pond in
her garden in London), the worldas a significant, bounded, horizoning entity
disappears. We have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible
scenery have dissolved.
Util / self & self-interest theoryrelies on the distinction that humans are
meaningfully separate from other lifeforms
Naturedoesnt existthere is no singular stable, unchanging world, a separate
ontological plane reserved for humans. Thinking things as Nature is thinking them
as a more or less static, or metastable, continuity bounded by time and space. The
classic image of Nature is the Romantic or picturesque painting of a landscape.
Already mentioned environment, world, wilderness, etc.
Regulations/monitoringWhy is it better to stir the shit around inside the toilet
bowl faster and faster than just leaving it there? Monitoring, regulating, and
controlling flows; Is ecological ethics and politics just this? Regulating flows and
sending them where you think they need to go is not relating to nonhumans.
-- Resource shortages/Marxism style links.
University, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press. Accessed p. eBrary
from May 24-June 1, 2014. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/apus/docDetail.action?
docID=10496853..page 37-38 //BR
We should be careful about ideas of meagerness and poverty. Environmentalism
commonly finds them quite attractive. There is a less is more argument that
ecological social policy is always about limits. You hear it frequently, especially
when it comes to the fear that there are too many humans on Earth. This is one of
the central platforms of deep ecology. Its a very suggestive idea, made more
suggestive by a dash of Darwin and a pinch of Thomas Malthus. 56 When I lived in
Colorado, I found the Malthus was right bumper stickers disturbing. Here we were,
in the middle of nowherefrom my dense urban European perspectiveworrying,
basically, about immigrants spoiling our view. Conservatism and neoliberalism have
used Darwin to justify welfare cuts, just as Malthus himself wrote his book on
population to justify the British government slashing the welfare laws of his day. The
model behind this justification is a view of limited, scarce resources. But Darwins
story is also one of proliferation, randomness, contingency, and useless display. The
jungle isnt the concrete jungle. The theory of evolution transcends attempts to turn
it into a theological defense of the status quo. 57
Beyond the disturbing racism of the population debate, what bothers me is that
the language of limits edits questions of pleasure and enjoyment out of the
ecological picture. Marxs criticism of capitalism wasnt so much that its overrun
with evil pleasuresthe standard environmentalist view, as a glance at an almost
progressive magazine such as Adbusters will confirmbut that it is nowhere near
enjoyable enough. Im not talking about the right of Big Oil to enjoy its massive
profits at the expense of the soil and the worker (Marxs phrase). 58 Im talking
about how the language of curbs turns ecology into personal and interpersonal
puritanism. If the ecological thought is about thinking big as much as or more than
small is beautiful, then it must explore and expand upon existing pleasures. If
interconnectedness implies radical intimacy with other beings, then we had better
start thinking about pleasure as a coordinate of the ecological thought. We must
take a new path, into the vast mesh of interconnection. Who lives there?
Oilthe aff thinks oil as a locality rather than as a hyperobject. Yet from my point
of view, oil makes America look the way it does: it covers the plains with highways
while weeds grow through the rotting wood on a railway track When I think
nonlocality in this way, I am not negating the specificty of things, evaporating them
into the abstract mist of the general or the larger or the less local. Nonlocality is far
weirder than that. When it comes to hyperobjects, nonlocality means that the
general itself is compromised by the particular. When I look for the hyperobject oil, I
don't find it. Oil just is droplets, flows, rivers, and slicks of oil.
PART SIX IS LINKS vs. K AFFS

Morton is kinda tired of traditional philosophy and deconstruction. He is a huge critic
of cynicism"Anything you can do, I can do meta, right? That's a sort of
philosophical game we've been playing for 200 years, actually, which is that I can
see through you better than you can see through me, so I'm more cynical than you,
so I'm cleverer than you. I think cynicism is the problem because cynicism is about
difference. Cynicism is now radically impossible because we now realize we coexist."
There is no neutral place from which one can sit back and judge the world or point
to the hopelessness of incrementalism (recycling, driving a Prius, etc). We are no
longer walking the edges of the volcano, but instead are like Wile E. Coyote hanging
over the cliff.
New relationship to nature/center left/sustainability When I hear the word
"sustainability I reach for my sunscreen. What exactly are we sustaining when we
talk about sustainability? An intrinsically out-of-control system that sucks in grey
goo at one end and pushes out grey value at the other.
Race and identity---K of the local/human-centered ontologywrong starting
point/have to start with the ecological thought angle against race/identity. A good
quote; Could we have a progressive ecology that was big, not small; spacious, not
place-ist; global, not local (if not universal); not embodied but displaced, spaced,
outer spaced? Our slogan should be dislocation, dislocation, dislocation. To answer
their angle; Human beings are each others environment. Thinking ecologically
isnt simply about nonhuman things. Ecology has to do with you and me.)
Also the K of cognitive thought and human masteryif I as human master of the
world can think it and make it so, can radically reshape other objects
His a2 thats a flattening view of the worldno, it isntmicrophone example
PART SEVEN IS THE ALT (SLIDE 10)

Big picture thingI think you have to win framework/ROB is to produce most
accurate ecological narrative or best ecological thought to really have a shot. If
debate = question of BPO youre in trouble. With that in mind, three things that go
into producing this new ecological thought
Coexistence
Intimacy
Ecological awareness
PART EIGHT IS ANSWERING MORTON AND OOO (SLIDE 11/11)

(1) attack the alt. All well and good to indict ecological narratives, but whats the
alt?
Example: Morton Ks the 350 movement, but his alt is atonal music
Plus how sweet is it to read Bricker cards? TRY TO DEBATE THE QUALS
(2) death bad/extinction outweighs world mightve ended, but beings still exist.
End of world = more metaphorical than physical. Even Morton kinda agrees
from May 24-June 1, 2014. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/apus/docDetail.action?
docID=10496853 page 31 //BR
Were losing the very ground under our feet. In philosophical language, were not
just losing ontological levels of meaningfulness. Were losing the ontic, the
actual physical level we trusted for so long. Imagine all the air we breathe becoming
unbreathable. There will be no more environmental poetry because we will all be
dead. Some ecological language appears to delight in this, even sadistically, by
imagining what the world would be like without us. Some deep ecological writing
anticipates a day when humans are obliterated like a toxic virus or vermin. Other
texts imagine the day after tomorrow. 32 Its hard to be here right now. There is
some relief in picturing ourselves dead. I find this more than disturbing. Awareness
of the mesh doesnt bring out the best in people. There is a horrible bliss in
becoming aware of what H. P. Lovecraft calls the fact that one is no longer a
definite being distinguished from other beings.
(3) Perm/incrementalism = okay
Cynicism is enabled by the left: "Since no one person's action will solve global
warming, better to do nothing, or at most await the revolu-tion to come." As I
argued above, vegetarians, Prius owners, and solar power enthusiasts often
encounter this logic. The trouble is, left cynicism maps perfectly both onto U.S.
Republican do-nothing-ism and Gaian defeatism ("Gaia will replace us, like a
defective component"). Nothing happens. Result? Global warming continues.
(4) Impact turnworld making good
(broader tipcut book reviews)
Morton calls this review one of the best
Mitchell, 13PhD, Dr. Audra, Professor of Politics @ NYU, Apocalypse then:

worldliness after the end of the world, Nov 18, Worldly IR,
http://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/apocalypse-then-worldliness-after-theend-of-the-world/. //BR
Whats more, he works hard to dissolve one of the few concepts that could form a
basis of an ethics for the end of the world. He focuses much of his attack on the
concept of world, one of the few ideas powerful enough to harness human
attachment and care on a large scale and to translate these affects into ethical
action.
In fairness to Morton, he uses the term world in a highly specific and welldelineated way albeit one which is almost the diametric opposite from my own
understanding of it. Morton adopts a Heideggerian notion of world as sphere to
which humans have privileged (if not exclusive) access. World, from this
perspective, is a reified object which floats in a metaphysical void, immune to the
extrusions of other objects and to change. This is, from my viewpoint, an extremely
limiting notion of world.
I prefer the non-metaphysical (and post-Heideggerian) conception of world
developed by Jean-Luc Nancy (see my previous post on this topic). Nancy also
believes that (the) world is being destroyed, or at least exhausted, by the processes
of globalization and the over-saturation of meaning. But at the same time, he is
concerned with understanding how a new world can emerge without metaphysical
grounding. Like Morton, Nancy suggests that the event (like the object) ultimately
withholds itself or withdraws, leaving a strange absence of presence. It is from
this nothing that world cultivates itself, as a form of creation-as-being. World
from this perspective, is being-with, or the direct relation of beings to one another. It
has no outside, no metaphysics and no teleology.
It is also the condition of being-toward that is, the co-constitution of plural beings
rather than a metaphysical plane in which beings are separated. This seems to be
very much in line with the object-oriented ontology that Morton espouses.
For me, a world is an instantiation of the conditions of worldliness discussed here
just as, for Morton, what we see of hyperobjects are instantiations of conditions like
viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation and phasing. In other words, there are
conceptions of world that seem to fit very well with Mortons notion of
hyperobjects.
But I dont want to gloss over Mortons rejection of world as a matter of a
difference in rhetoric or interpretation. When Morton says that the world has
ended, he is certainly referring to the notion of a metaphysical world. This is also
the case in Nancys work. But Nancy also urges humans should address themselves
to (not produce) a new world emerging in the wake of this ending. If I understand
him correctly, Morton argues that humans should do away with worlds and worldmaking altogether in other words, that world can only be a metaphysical concept.
This, I think, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Certainly, we can and
should do away with the idea that there is a stable, unchanging world, a separate
ontological plane reserved for humans. But can we really exist without the notion of
attachment to and care for other beings that shapes non-metaphysical notions of
world?
I think not. One of the main reasons is that, even if we are able to grasp, at least to
some extent, other temporal and physical scales (whether macro or micro), we still
experience ourselves, along with other living beings, in a meso-level in which we
perceive some degree of stasis or consistency. In other words, even if we can try to
see our lives from the perspective of a planet (like the fictional Melancholia), we
cannot actually live in that spatio-temporal scale . Instead, we live in a scale that
allows, and also forces, us to overlap with the lives of other beings.
This means that we can experience attachments to other beings, even if these
attachments are temporary. Simply because these beings (and we) will not exist in
the future does not mean that we should not care for them as they are now. This is
akin to saying that we should love in the full knowledge that we will lose the beings
we love, or that they will change irrevocably.
In other words, we should not try to save the world by attempting, in vain, to arrest
change, or by denying finitude from behind the windshields of fantasy worlds. But
there is nothing wrong with remaining attached to our world(s) in a melancholy way:
that is, caring for them in the full knowledge that they are finite .
From this perspective, it is crucial to hold onto a sense of worldliness at the end of
the world. This enables us to avoid the two horns of apocalyptic reasoning: the
reactionary and futile desire to capture the world in a freeze frame; and the nihilistic
attitude that nothing matters unless it is forever. Instead, we need an ethics of
care for finite and dying worlds, and for the attachments between beings that
constitute them.
At the end of the day (world?), it is these attachments that save us from falling into
the paralysis that grips Justine in Melancholia. She spends a great deal of the film
inert, unable to eat, move or think. She even plunges into a dark mood in which she
claims that no one will mourn the Earth or the evil life that it fostered. In short,
she is aware of her conditions but can not find a way to be within them. I worry that
banishing world as a concept will produce precisely this mood.
Thats why its interesting to follow Justines arc throughout the film. At various
points, she tries to merge with the Earth, whether by lying naked in the moonlight
or immersing herself in a creek. And at the end of the film, as Earth is pulled into
Melancholias gravitational field, she mourns the planet to which she initially denies
any attachment. This is reflected in the tears running down her face in the final
scene, and the force with which she grips the hands of her sister and nephew.
Despite her attitude of fatalistic acceptance and her rejection of redemption, she
faces the end of the world by building a small world the magical cave. She coconstitutes this tiny world with her loved ones along with some sticks, soil, trees,
grass and air which are just as integral to the magical cave as the humans that sit
inside it. In so doing, she makes one final attempt to co-constitute a world in the
face of absolute finitude.
I suspect (although I may be wrong) that Morton would see this as a collapse into
the fantasy of world-building in the face of terror. But I think its something quite
different. Justine creates this world, and fully experiences it, knowing fully that it will
not save her or anyone/thing else. It is an ethical act without instrumentalism,
without an end. It is an expression of love for, and in, an ending world.
This, from my perspective, is an attitude that can ground ethics in the face of
radical finitude. Only with a melancholic sense of the world, and love for it, can
humans confront the enormity of the challenges that face them without being
paralyzed by fear or nihilism.
****Anthro
1NCs
Anthro K Extinction Shell

Their extinction claims require a defense of the intrinsic value
of human survival as separated from other forms of life. This
involves the image of distinctly good human life contrasted to
the banal useless existence of the genes. This makes the affs
political subjectivity an affect of a species-contingent survival
paradigm which abandons bare life.
KOCHI & ORDAN 2K8 [tarik and noam, queens university and bar llan
university, an argument for the global suicide of humanity, vol 7. no. 4.,
bourderlands e-journal]
If only some of our genes but not our species has survived, maybe the emphasis we place
upon the notion of survival is more cultural than simply genetic. Such an emphasis stems
not only from our higher cognitive powers of self-consciousness or self-awareness, but also from our
conscious celebration of this fact: the image we create for ourselves of humanity, which is
produced by via language, collective memory and historical narrative. The notion of the
human involves an identification of our species with particular
characteristics with and upon which we ascribe certain notions of value. Amongst
others such characteristics and values might be seen to include: the notion of an inherent
human dignity, the virtue of ethical behaviour, the capacities of creative and aesthetic
thought, and for some, the notion of an eternal soul. Humans are conscious of themselves as
humans and value the characteristics that make us distinctly human. When many, like
Hawing, typically think of the notion of the survival of the human race, it is perhaps this culturalcognitive aspect of homo sapiens, made possible and produced by human selfconsciousness, which they are thinking of. If one is to make the normative argument that the human
race should survive, then one needs to argue it is these cultural-cognitive aspects of humanity, and not merely a
portion of our genes, that is worth saving. However, it remains an open question as to what cultural-cognitive
aspect of humanity would survive in the future when placed under radical environmental and evolutionary
pressures. We can consider that perhaps the fish people, having the capacity for self-awareness, would consider
themselves as the continuation or next step of humanity. Yet, who is to say that a leap in the process of evolution
would not prompt a change in self awareness, a different form of abstract reasoning about the species, a different
self-narrative, in which case the descendents of humans would look upon their biological and genetic ancestors in a
similar manner to the way humans look upon the apes today. Conceivably the fish people might even forget or
suppress their evolutionary human heritage. While such a future cannot be predicted, it also cannot be controlled
from our graves. In something of a sense similar to the point made by Giorgio Agamben (1998), revising ideas
the question of survival can be thought to

involve a distinction between the good life and bare life . In this instance, arguments
in favour of human survival rest upon a certain belief in a distinctly human
good life, as opposed to bare biological life , the life of the gene pool. It is thus
such a good life, or at least a form of life considered to be of value, that is held up by
a particular species to be worth saving. When considering the hypothetical example of the fish
found within the writings of Michel Foucault and Aristotle,
people, what cultural-cognitive aspect of humanitys good life would survive? The conditions of life under water,
which presumably for the first thousand years would be quite harsh, would perhaps make the task of bare survival
rather than the continuation of any higher aspects of a human heritage the priority. Learning how to hunt and
gather or farm underwater, learning how to communicate, breed effectively and avoid getting eaten by predators
might displace the possibilities of listening to Mozart or Bach, or adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, or playing sport, or of even using written language or complex mathematics. Within such an extreme
it becomes highly questionable to what extent a human heritage would survive and
thus to what extent we might consider our descendents to be human. In the case where
what survives would not be the cultural-cognitive aspects of a human heritage considered a
valuable or a good form of life, then, what really survives is just life. Such a life may well
hold a worth or value altogether different to our various historical valuations and
calculations. While the example of the fish people might seem extreme, it presents a similar set of acute
example
circumstances which would be faced within any adaptation to a new habitat whether on the earth or in outer space.
Unless humans are saved by radical developments in technology that allow a comfortable colonisation of other
even if the
promise of technology allows humans to carry on their cultural-cognitive heritage within
another habitat, such survival is still perhaps problematic given the dark, violent, cruel and
brutal aspects of human life which we would presumably carry with us into our
colonisation of new worlds. Thinkers like Hawking, who place their faith in technology, also place a great
deal of faith in a particular view of a human heritage which they think is worth saving. When considering the
question of survival, such thinkers typically project a one-sided image of humanity into the
future. Such a view presents a picture of only the good aspects of humanity climbing aboard a
space-craft and spreading out over the universe. This presumes that only the good aspects of the
human heritage would survive, elements such as reason, creativity, playfulness,
compassion, love, fortitude, hope. What however happens to the bad aspects of the human
heritage, the drives, motivations and thoughts that led to the Holocaust for example?
worlds, then genetic adaptation in the future retains a reasonable degree of probability. However,
This species-contingent paradigm creates unending genocidal

violence against forms of life deemed politically unqualified.
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the

Holocaust are considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often
portrayed as an example of evil, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of evil
given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity comprehend its own
weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again. However ,
if we
take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was evil,
then one must surely include along side it the almost uncountable
numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human
history. Hence, if we are to think of the content of the human
heritage, then this must include the annihilation of indigenous
peoples and their cultures across the globe and the manner in
which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased
from what the people of the West generally consider to be the
content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds
us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation
of different forms of human life and culture have been throughout
human history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises,
points to the fact that so many of our legal institutions and forms
of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on
protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been
founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of
other peoples land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of
colonialism highlights the central function of race war that often
underlies human social organisation and many of its legal and
ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern
colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that events such
as the Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are
closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage of
humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was
justified by arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially
inferior and in some instances that they were closer to apes than to humans
(Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view of race
is in many ways merely an extension of an underlying attitude of
speciesism involving a long history of killing and enslavement of
non-human species by humans. Such a connection between the
two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of
differing human races) and interspecies violence, is well
expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singers comment that whereas humans consider
themselves the crown of creation, for animals all people are
Nazis and animal life is an eternal Treblinka (Singer, 1968, p.750).
The alternative is that the judge should vote negative to reject

the 1ACs human survival ethic. This rejection enables an
understanding of the species-being. That solves the ethical
contradiction of their species-level racism.
HUDSON 2K4 [Laura, The Political Animal: Species-Being and Bare Life,
mediations journal, http://www.mediationsjournal.org/files/Mediations23_2_04.pdf]
We are all equally reduced to mere specimens of human biology, mute and
uncomprehending of the world in which we are thrown. Species-being, or humanity
as a species, may require this recognition to move beyond the pseudoessence of the religion of humanism. Recognizing that what we call the human is an
abstraction that fails to fully describe what we are, we may come to find a new way of
understanding humanity that recuperates the natural without domination. The bare life
that results from expulsion from the law removes even the illusion of freedom. Regardless
of ones location in production, the threat of losing even the fiction of citizenship and
freedom affects everyone. This may create new means of organizing resistance across the
the concept of bare life allows us to gesture
toward a more detailed, concrete idea of what species-being may look like.
Agamben hints that in the recognition of this fact, that in our essence we are all
animals, that we are all living dead, might reside the possibility of a kind of redemption.
particular divisions of society. Furthermore,
Rather than the mystical horizon of a future community, the passage to species-being may
be experienced as a deprivation, a loss of identity. Species-being is not merely a positive
result of the development of history; it is equally the absence of many of the
features of humanity through which we have learned to make sense of our world. It
is an absence of the kind of individuality and atomism that structure our world under capitalism and underlie liberal
democracy, and which continue to inform the tenets of deep ecology. The development of species-being requires
the collapse of the distinction between human and animal in order to change the shape of our relationships with the
A true species-being depends on a sort of reconciliation between our human

and animal selves, a breakdown of the distinction between the two both within ourselves
and in nature in general. Bare life would then represent not only expulsion from the law
but the possibility of its overcoming. Positioned in the zone of indistinction, no longer a
subject of the law but still subjected to it through absence, what we equivocally call the
human in general becomes virtually indistinguishable from the animal or nature. But
natural world.
through this expulsion and absence, we may see not only the law but the system of capitalism that shapes it from a
The structure of the law is revealed as always

suspect in the false division between natural and political life, which are never truly
separable. Though clearly the situation is not yet as dire as Agambens invocation of the Holocaust suggests, we
are all, as citizens, under the threat of the state of exception. With the decline of the nation
as a form of social organization, the whittling away of civil liberties and, with them, the
states promise of the good life (or the good death) even in the most developed nations,
with the weakening of labor as the bearer of resistance to exploitation, how are we to
envision the future of politics and society?
position no longer blinded or captivated by its spell.
Anthro K Warming Shell

Their calls for widespread change fall into the same logic of
progress that has resulted in speciesist violence and the
destruction of the environment
Kochi and Ordan 08 [Tarik Kochi, Queens University School of Law lecturer,
and Noam Ordan, linguist, Borderlands Volume 7 Number 3, 2008, "An Argument for
the Global Suicide of Humanity,"] JB
the ethical demand to respond to historical and present environmental

destruction runs onto and in many ways intensifies the question of radical or
revolutionary change which confronted the socialist tradition within the 19th and
20th centuries. As environmental concerns have increasingly since the 1970s come into greater prominence, the pressing issue for many
within the 21st century is that of social-environmental revolution. [9] Social- environmental revolution involves the
creation of new social, political and economic forms of human and environmental
organisation which can overcome the deficiencies and latent oppression of global
capitalism and safeguard both human and non-human dignity. Putting aside the old, false assumptions
In another sense
of a teleological account of history, social-environmental revolution is dependent upon widespread political action which short-circuits and tears apart
This action is itself dependent upon a widespread change

in awareness, a revolutionary change in consciousness, across enough of the
populace to spark radical social and political transformation. Thought of in this
sense, however, such a response to environmental destruction is caught by many of
the old problems which have troubled the tradition of revolutionary socialism. Namely,
current legal, political and economic regimes.
how might a significant number of human individuals come to obtain such a radically enlightened perspective or awareness of human social reality (i.e. a
dialectical, utopian anti-humanist revolutionary consciousnesse) so that they might bring about with minimal violence the overthrow of the practices and
institutions of late capitalism and colonial-speciesism? Further, how might an individual attain such a radical perspective when their life, behaviours and
attitudes (or their subjectivity itself) are so moulded and shaped by the individuals immersion within and active self-realisation through, the networks,
systems and habits constitutive of global capitalism? (Hardt & Negri, 2001). While the demand for social-environmental revolution grows stronger, both
theoretical and practical answers to these pressing questions remain unanswered. Both liberal and social revolutionary models thus seem to run into the
same problems that surround the notion of progress; each play out a modern discourse of sacrifice in which some forms of life and modes of living are set
aside in favour of the promise of a future good. Caught between social hopes and political myths, the challenge of responding to environmental
destruction confronts, starkly, the core of a discourse of modernity characterised by reflection, responsibility and action. Given the increasing pressures
upon the human habitat, this modern discourse will either deliver or it will fail. There is little room for an existence in between: either the Enlightenment
fulfils its potentiality or it shows its hand as the bearer of impossibility. If the possibilities of the Enlightenment are to be fulfilled then this can only happen
if the old idea of the progress of the human species, exemplified by Hawkings cosmic colonisation, is fundamentally rethought and replaced by a new
This self-comprehension would need to negate and limit the old

modern humanism by a radical anti-humanism. The aim, however, would be to not
just accept one side or the other, but to re-think the basis of moral action along the
lines of a dialectical, utopian anti-humanism . Importantly, though, getting past inadequate
conceptions of action, historical time and the futural promise of progress may be
dependent upon radically re-comprehending the relationship between humanity and
nature in such a way that the human is no longer viewed as the sole core of the
subject, or the being of highest value. The human would thus need to no longer be
thought of as a master that stands over the non-human . Rather, the human and the non-human need to be
form of self-comprehension.
grasped together, with the former bearing dignity only so long as it understands itself as a part of the latter.

bourderlands e-journal] JB

portrayed as an example of evil, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of evil given in Neiman,
2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the
, if we take seriously the differing

ways in which the Holocaust was evil, then one must surely
include along side it the almost uncountable numbers of
genocides that have occurred throughout human history . Hence, if we
are to think of the content of the human heritage, then this must
include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures
across the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours
and social practices have been erased from what the people of the
West generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again
the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular
and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of human life
and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed the
history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of
our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states
which pride themselves on protecting human rights through the
rule of law) have been founded upon colonial violence, war and
the appropriation of other peoples land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the
history of colonialism highlights the central function of race war
that often underlies human social organisation and many of its
legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of
modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that
events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration and exception
but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any
heritage of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the
globe was justified by arguments that indigenous inhabitants
were racially inferior and in some instances that they were closer to apes than
to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view
of race is in many ways merely an extension of an underlying
attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing and
enslavement of non-human species by humans. Such a connection
between the two histories of inter-human violence (via the
resolve that such actions will never happen again. However
mythical notion of differing human races) and interspecies

violence, is well expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singers comment that whereas humans
consider themselves the crown of creation, for animals all
people are Nazis and animal life is an eternal Treblinka (Singer, 1968,
p.750).

JB
abstraction that fails to fully describe what we are, we may come to find a new way of understanding
humanity that recuperates the natural without domination. The bare life that results from
expulsion from the law removes even the illusion of freedom. Regardless of ones location in
production, the threat of losing even the fiction of citizenship and freedom affects
everyone. This may create new means of organizing resistance across the particular divisions of society.
the concept of bare life allows us to gesture toward a more
detailed, concrete idea of what species-being may look like. Agamben hints that in
the recognition of this fact, that in our essence we are all animals, that we are all
living dead, might reside the possibility of a kind of redemption. Rather than the mystical
Furthermore,
horizon of a future community, the passage to species-being may be experienced as a

deprivation, a loss of identity. Species-being is not merely a positive result of the
development of history; it is equally the absence of many of the features of
humanity through which we have learned to make sense of our world. It is an absence of the
kind of individuality and atomism that structure our world under capitalism and underlie liberal democracy, and which continue to
inform the tenets of deep ecology. The development of species-being requires the collapse of the distinction between human and
A true species-being depends on a

sort of reconciliation between our human and animal selves, a breakdown of the
distinction between the two both within ourselves and in nature in general. Bare life would
then represent not only expulsion from the law but the possibility of its overcoming.
Positioned in the zone of indistinction, no longer a subject of the law but still subjected to it
through absence, what we equivocally call the human in general becomes virtually
indistinguishable from the animal or nature. But through this expulsion and absence, we may see not only the
law but the system of capitalism that shapes it from a position no longer blinded or captivated by its spell. The structure of
animal in order to change the shape of our relationships with the natural world.
the law is revealed as always suspect in the false division between natural and political life,
which are never truly separable. Though clearly the situation is not yet as dire as Agambens invocation of the
Holocaust suggests, we are all, as citizens, under the threat of the state of exception. With the
decline of the nation as a form of social organization, the whittling away of civil liberties
and, with them, the states promise of the good life (or the good death) even in the most
developed nations, with the weakening of labor as the bearer of resistance to exploitation,
how are we to envision the future of politics and society?
Anthro K Race Shell

The 1AC ignores that racism is merely one amongst many tools
of axiological anthropocentrism whereby violence can always
be justified when applied to racially inferior groups. Only a
critique which focuses on rejecting subhuman thinking can
contest the myriad forms of racism.
Deckha 2k10 [Maneesha, faculty of law, university of Victoria, its time to
abandon the idea of human rights, the scavenger, dec. 10]
While the intersection of race and gender is often acknowledged in understanding the etiology of justificatory narratives for war, the presence of
species distinctions and the importance of the subhuman are less appreciated. Yet, the race (and gender) thinking that animates Razacks
argument in normalizing violence for detainees (and others) is also centrally sustained by the subhuman figure. As Charles Patterson notes with
Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master

species, our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our
victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans
exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animas and do the same to
them. Patterson emphasizes how the human/animal hierarchy and our ideas about animals and
animality are foundational for intra-human hierarchies and the violence they promote.
The routine violence against beings designated subhuman serves as both a justification and
blueprint for violence against humans. For example, in discussing the specific dynamics of the Nazi camps, Patterson
respect to multiple forms of exploitation:
further notes how techniques to make the killing of detainees resemble the slaughter of animals were deliberately implemented in order to make
the killing seem more palatable and benign. That the detainees were made naked and kept crowded in the gas chambers facilitated their
animalization and, in turn, their death at the hands of other humans who were already culturally familiar and comfortable with killing animals in
this way. Returning to Razacks exposition of race thinking in contemporary camps, one can see how subhuman
thinking is
foundational to race thinking. One of her primary arguments is that race thinking, which she defines as the denial of
a common bond of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not,
is a defining feature of the world order today as in the past. In other words, it is the species
thinking that helps to create the racial demarcation. As Razack notes with respect to the
specific logic infusing the camps, they are not simply contemporary excesses born of the
wests current quest for security, but instead represent a more ominous, permanent
arrangement of who is and is not a part of the human community. Once placed outside
the human zone by race thinking, the detainees may be handled lawlessly and thus with
violence that is legitimated at all times. Racialization is not enough and does not
complete their Othering experience. Rather, they must be dehumanized
for the larger public to accept the violence against them and the
increasing culture of exception which sustains these human bodily
exclusions. Although nonhumans are not the focus of Razacks work, the centrality of the subhuman to the logic of the
camps and racial and sexual violence contained therein is also clearly illustrated in her
specific examples. In the course of her analysis, to determine the import of race thinking in enabling violence, Razack quotes a
newspaper story that describes the background mentality of Private Lynndie England, the white female soldier made notorious by images of her
holding onto imprisoned and naked Iraqi men with a leash around their necks. The story itself quotes a resident from Englands hometown who
says the following about the sensibilities of individuals from their town: To the country boys here, if youre a different nationality, a different
race, youre sub-human. Thats the way that girls like Lynndie England are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from
shooting a turkey. Every season here youre hunting something. Over there theyre hunting Iraqis. Razack extracts this quote to illustrate how
race overdetermined what went on, but it may also be observed that species overdetermined what went on. Race
has a formative
function, to be sure, but it works in conjunction with species difference to enable the
violence at Abu Ghraib and other camps. Dehumanization promotes racialization, which
further entrenches both identities. It is an intertwined logic of race, sex, culture and species
that lays the foundation for the violence.


if we
The alternative is that the judge should vote negative to

REJECT THE HUMAN/ANIMAL DIVIDE. This rejection enables an
abstraction that fails to fully describe what we are, we may come to find a new way of
understanding humanity that recuperates the natural without domination. The bare life
that results from expulsion from the law removes even the illusion of freedom. Regardless
of ones location in production, the threat of losing even the fiction of
citizenship and freedom affects everyone. This may create new means of
organizing resistance across the particular divisions of society. Furthermore, the concept of bare
life allows us to gesture toward a more detailed, concrete idea of what
species-being may look like. Agamben hints that in the recognition of this fact, that
in our essence we are all animals, that we are all living dead, might reside the
possibility of a kind of redemption. Rather than the mystical horizon of a future
community, the passage to species-being may be experienced as a deprivation, a loss of
identity. Species-being is not merely a positive result of the development of history; it is
equally the absence of many of the features of humanity through which we
have learned to make sense of our world. It is an absence of the kind of individuality and atomism that
structure our world under capitalism and underlie liberal democracy, and which continue to inform the tenets of
deep ecology. The development of species-being requires the collapse of the distinction between human and animal

sort of reconciliation between our human and animal selves, a breakdown of the
distinction between the two both within ourselves and in nature in general. Bare life would
then represent not only expulsion from the law but the possibility of its overcoming.
Positioned in the zone of indistinction, no longer a subject of the law but still subjected to it
through absence, what we equivocally call the human in general becomes virtually
indistinguishable from the animal or nature. But through this expulsion and absence, we may see not
in order to change the shape of our relationships with the natural world.
only the law but the system of capitalism that shapes it from a position no longer blinded or captivated by its spell.
The structure of the law is revealed as always suspect in the false division between natural
and political life, which are never truly separable. Though clearly the situation is not yet as dire as
Agambens invocation of the Holocaust suggests, we are all, as citizens, under the threat of the state
of exception. With the decline of the nation as a form of social organization, the whittling
away of civil liberties and, with them, the states promise of the good life (or the good
death) even in the most developed nations, with the weakening of labor as the bearer of
resistance to exploitation, how are we to envision the future of politics and society?
2NC Extensions
Anthro o/w2nc overview

The calculation is simple: 40 billion animals are killed every
human to sustain the expansion of humanity. There is no world
in which humanity can continue to develop without the
continued and unending genocide of the inhuman animal. The
affirmative and the permutation can never resolve this
violence.
A nuclear war would kill billions of life forms, but you most
compare that to the infinite subordination and domination of
the inhuman animal.
And, nuclear war will be on par with previous mass extinctions
radiation only risks rapid mutation enabling evolution for
populations who survive.
Phillips 2k1 [alan, peace magazine, v17, n1,p13, nuclear winter revisited,
http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v17n1p13.htm] JB
nuclear winter would be an ecological disaster of the same sort of magnitude as the
major extinctions of species that have occurred in the past, the most famous one being 65 million years ago at the
Cretaceous extinction. Of all the species living at the time, about half became extinct. The theory is
that a large meteor made a great crater in the Gulf of Mexico, putting a
Altogether,
trillion tons of rock debris into the atmosphere. That is a thousand times
as much rock as is predicted for a nuclear war, but the soot from fires blocks
sunlight more effectively than rock debris. In nuclear winter there would also be radioactive contamination giving
The radiation
would notably worsen things for existing species, though it might, by increasing mutations, allow quicker evolution of
new species (perhaps mainly insects and grasses) that could tolerate the post-war
conditions. (I should just mention that there is no way the radioactivity from a nuclear war would
worldwide background radiation doses many times larger than has ever happened during the three billion years of evolution.
destroy "all life on earth." People must stop saying that. There will be evolution after a
war, but it may not include us).
Even if they win that it does kill the biosphere, they have
conceded the bare life portions of our criticism meaning
ethics come first. The paradigm of survival of the species
abandons the form of bare life. This is an unethical
arrangement of the political which makes the domination,
genocide, and continual suffering for forms of life deemed
unqualified.
Species-Being extension
The radical incoherence of the alternative is key to shatter the
conception of humanity. The political can act as a site of
redemption for the inhuman animal allows for transformative
lines of thought outside of the affirmatives privileged speciest
paradigm thats Hudson
Root Cause
The inhuman animal is a necessary backdrop for domination,
intervention, and nuclear war. When a person, group of people,
or country can been seen as less than human extermination is
all but inevitable history proves. Only removing this
discursive and political figure of the Homo Sacer can resolve
the justification for war, violence, and animosity to the other.
Tricks
1. Error replication policy making that precedes from a
paradigm of humanism makes violence against anything
that falls off of that register inevitable this has included
the environment and ethnic minorities.
2. Serial Policy Failure the plan refuses to recognize the
political system as it exists will always see some people or
things fungible which makes their unfruitful annihilation
inevitable
LinksPolicy
Biodiversity
Calls for biodiversity rely upon divisions in forms of life and
ensures continued exploitation by humans.
ROWE 2K0 [Stan, Professor of Plant Ecology at the University of Saskatchewan.
Natur und Kultur: Transdisciplinare Zeitschrift fur okologische Nachhaltigkeit. It has
been translated into German and published in Volume 1(2): 106-120. 2000.
http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/RoweEarthEthics.html] JB
Many human attitudes to the planet hinge on the idea that only organisms
are imbued with life. Traditionally Earth has been thought to consist of
relatively unimportant "dead" elements, collectively called "environment,"
and very important entities: organisms, living beings, things like us. From
this misconception the conclusion follows that only biodiversity is valuable and
worthy of conservation. And of all the diversity of organisms, by human consensus,
humans are the most important. Meanwhile air, sea and land, with their misnamed
"raw materials" and "natural resources," are open for business, exploited without
restraint. But if Earth = Life, the foolishness of such ideas is exposed.
Preservation of biodiversity only sustains human economic

growth your motive will be conflated production and growth
Aton 97, (Donald K. Aton, Anton Director of Policy and International Law
University of Melbourn, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 1997.)
In order to appreciate the need for new international law to provide greater protection to marine biological diversity beyond the
continental shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), it is necessary to appreciate the value of such diversity, why we care about
From some ethical points of view all forms of

life, and the habitats that support them, can be considered as intrinsically valuable
to their own sake. - Under this premise, it follows that protection and preservation
ought to follow as a matter of course. However, excepting certain philosophical,
religious or cultural [*347] systems, the value of biological diversity
overwhelmingly has been viewed from the narrow position of economic worth to
humans. Of course, this presents problems for the protection of biological diversity,
because it has recognized value that cannot be calculated in dollar terms. Further, under
conserving it, and why threats to it arc a matter of concern.
current accounting systems. the cost of losing biodiversity is ordinarily shifted to society rather than internalized by private actors
The problem is even more acute in the case of marine biodiversity

found beyond national jurisdiction because of its commons nature. Consequently,
systems for valuing biodiversity need to use monetary valuation as one tool among
many. The debates surrounding the C.B.D. have suffered from this myopic economic view of the value of biodiversity. Instead of
responsible for the loss.
focusing on the wide spread protection and conservation of ecosystems. scies, and genetic variability, the debates have primarily
involved access to biological diversify and rights to profits generated through the exploitflon of genejc material.
Biotech/nanotech
***wrong anthro but whatever***
Bio and nanotech ensures the ontological and physical death of

the entire biosphere the ultimate goal is order and control
the world as we see fit.
Lee 99, (Keekok Lee, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University, 1999,
The Natural and the Artefactual p. 81.)
a conceptual clarification of the notion

of nature and its cognate, that of 'the natural' in order to highlight a crucial sense,
namely, 'natural^' which in turn is tied up with the notion of independence the book
goes on in Chapter 5, however, to argue that independence, unlike intricacy, complexity, sentience
or other such attributes, is a primary characteristic and, therefore, constitutes an
ontological rather than an axiological value; (b) in the next two sections, an examination of the
ambiguities surrounding the notion of 'human impact upon the environment,' by
distinguishing unwanted side-effects of technological impact from the deliberate
and systematic transformation of the natural to become the artefactual . The final two
This chapter examines, in the main, two issues: (a) in the first section,
sections are used to illustrate further some of the key points raised in the preceding ones and the relationship between them.
These clarifications are attempts to put in place a further stage in establishing the
fundamental thesis of the book, namely, that nature has independent value and
that the most radical and critical threat to it is yet to come. The threat amounts to
its elimination, both ontologically and empirically, via the science and technology of
our modern civilization, especially when its most recent technologies
biotechnology and computer technology will combine with certain others promised
in the near future, such as molecular nanotechnology, to produce powerful
synergistic effects in a profound transformation of the natural to become the
artefactual.1
Death
***Also not really an argument
All things are alive the binary between living/nonliving

facilities environmental destruction and extinction.
Rowe 96, (Stan Rowe, Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan,
1996, From Shallow To Deep Ecological Philosophy, Trumpeter, Volume 13,
Number 1, Available Online at
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/278/413, Accessed
07-26-2011)
Organisms can be alive one moment and dead the next with no quantitative
difference. The recently deceased organism has lost none of its physical parts yet it
lacks lifean unknown quality of organization (perhaps that mystery called energy?) but not
the organization itself. A still stronger reason exists for not equating life and organisms. The latter only
exhibit aliveness in the context of life-supporting systems , though curiously the vitality of the
latter has mostly been denied. By analogy, it is as if all agreed that only a tree trunks cambial layer
is alive while its support systemthe trees bole and roots of bark and wood that envelops and supports the
cambiumis dead. Instead we perceive the whole tree as alive. The separation of
living organisms from their supportive but dead environments is a reductionist
convention that ecology disproves. Both organic and inorganic are functional parts
of enveloping ecosystems, of which the largest one accessible to direct experience is the global ecosphere. To
attribute the organizing principle life to Earth to the ecosphere and its sectoral aquatic and terrestrial
ecosystemsmakes more sense than attempting to locate it in organisms per se, divorced
from their requisite milieus. The aquatic ecologist Lindeman (1942) who pioneered examination of lakes as energetic systems
adopted the ecosystem concept because of the blurred distinction between living and dead in the components of the Minnesota
The Biological Fallacy, equating organisms with life, is the result of a

faulty inside-the-system view (Rowe 1991). Pictures of the blue-and-white planet Earth
taken from the outside are intuitively recognized as images of a living cell. Inside that
lakes he studied.
cell, cheated by sight, people perceive a particulate world separable into important and unimportant parts: the organic and the
inorganic, biotic and abiotic, animate and inanimate, living and dead. Religions, philosophies and sciences have been
constructed around these ignorant taxonomies, perpetuating the departmentalization of a global ecosystem whose aliveness is as
much expressed in its improbable atmosphere, crustal rocks, seas, soils and sediments as in organisms. When did life begin? When
did any kind of creative organization begin? Perhaps when the ecosphere came into existence. Perhaps earlier at time zero and the
Important human attitudes hinge on the idea of life and where it resides. If
only organisms are imbued with life, then things like us are important and all else is
relatively unimportant. The biocentric preoccupation with organisms subtly supports
anthropocentrism, for are we not first in neural complexity among all organisms? Earth has traditionally been thought to
Big Bang.
consist of consequential entitiesorganisms, living beingsand their relatively inconsequential dead environments. What should be
attended to, cared for, worried about? The usual answer today is life in its limited sense of organisms, of biodiversity. Meanwhile
sea, land and airclassified as dead environmentcan be freely exploited. In the reigning ideology as long as large organisms are
We demean Earth by equating life and organisms, then

proving by text-book definition that Earth is dead because not-an-organism. In this
way mental doors are barred against the idea of liveliness everywhere . Certainly Earth is not
an organism, nor is it a super organism as Lovelock has proposed, any more than organisms are Earth or mini-Earth. The
planetary ecosphere and its sectoral volumetric ecosystems are SUPRA-organismic,
higher levels of integration than mere organisms. Essential to the ecocentric idea is
safeguarded, anything goes.
assignment of highest value to the ecosphere and to the ecosystems that it

comprises. Note the use of ecosphere rather than biosphere, the latter usually defined as a life-filled (read organismfilled) thin shell at Earths surface. The meaning of ecosphere goes deeper; it is Earth to the core, comprising the totality of
gravity and electro-magnetic fields, the molten radioactive magma that shifts the crustal plates, vulcanism and earthquakes and
mountain building that renew nutrients at the surface, the whole dynamic evolving stage where organisms play out their many
roles under the guidance of the larger whole, shaped at least in part by the morphic fields of the living Gaia (Sheldrake 1991:162).
In different times and places the source of life has been attributed to the air, to soil, to water, to fire, as well as to organisms. As with
the blind men touching the elephant, each separate part has been the imagined essential component of the whole Earth. Now that
the planet has been conceptualized as one integrated entity, can we not logically attribute the creative synthesizing quintessence
When life is conceived as a function of the

ecosphere and its sectoral ecosystem the subject matter of Biology is cast in a
bright new light. The pejorative concept of environment vanishes . The focus of
vital interest broadens to encompass the world. Anthropocentrism and biocentrism
receive the jolting shock they deserve. The answer as to where our preservation
emphasis should center is answered: Earth spaces (and all that is in them) first, Earth
species second. This priority guarantees no loss of vital parts . The implications of
locating animation where it belongs, of denying the naive Life = Organisms equation , are many.
Perhaps most important is a broadening of the Schweizerian reverence for life to embrace the
whole Earth. Reverence for life means reverence for ecosystems . We should feel the
same pain when the atmosphere and the seas are poisoned as when people are
poisoned. We should feel more pain at the destruction of wild ecosystems , such as the
temperate rain forest of the West Coast, than at the demise of any organism, no matter how sad
the latter occasion, because the destruction of ecosystems severs the very roots of
evolutionary creativity.
called life to it, rather than to any one class of its various parts?
Environmentalism
Their calls for widespread change fall into the same logic of
progress that has resulted in speciesist violence and the
destruction of the environment
Kochi and Ordan 08 [Tarik Kochi, Queens University School of Law lecturer,
and Noam Ordan, linguist, Borderlands Volume 7 Number 3, 2008, "An Argument for
the Global Suicide of Humanity,"] JB
the ethical demand to respond to historical and present environmental

destruction runs onto and in many ways intensifies the question of radical or
revolutionary change which confronted the socialist tradition within the 19th and
20th centuries. As environmental concerns have increasingly since the 1970s come into greater prominence, the pressing
issue for many within the 21st century is that of social-environmental revolution. [9] Social- environmental
revolution involves the creation of new social, political and economic forms of
human and environmental organisation which can overcome the deficiencies and
latent oppression of global capitalism and safeguard both human and non-human
dignity. Putting aside the old, false assumptions of a teleological account of history, social-environmental revolution is
dependent upon widespread political action which short-circuits and tears apart current legal, political and economic regimes. This
action is itself dependent upon a widespread change in awareness, a revolutionary
change in consciousness, across enough of the populace to spark radical social and
political transformation. Thought of in this sense, however, such a response to
environmental destruction is caught by many of the old problems which have
troubled the tradition of revolutionary socialism. Namely, how might a significant number of human
In another sense
individuals come to obtain such a radically enlightened perspective or awareness of human social reality (i.e. a dialectical, utopian
anti-humanist revolutionary consciousnesse) so that they might bring about with minimal violence the overthrow of the practices
and institutions of late capitalism and colonial-speciesism? Further, how might an individual attain such a radical perspective when
their life, behaviours and attitudes (or their subjectivity itself) are so moulded and shaped by the individuals immersion within and
active self-realisation through, the networks, systems and habits constitutive of global capitalism? (Hardt & Negri, 2001). While the
demand for social-environmental revolution grows stronger, both theoretical and practical answers to these pressing questions
remain unanswered. Both liberal and social revolutionary models thus seem to run into the same problems that surround the notion
of progress; each play out a modern discourse of sacrifice in which some forms of life and modes of living are set aside in favour of
the promise of a future good. Caught between social hopes and political myths, the challenge of responding to environmental
destruction confronts, starkly, the core of a discourse of modernity characterised by reflection, responsibility and action. Given the
increasing pressures upon the human habitat, this modern discourse will either deliver or it will fail. There is little room for an
existence in between: either the Enlightenment fulfils its potentiality or it shows its hand as the bearer of impossibility. If the
possibilities of the Enlightenment are to be fulfilled then this can only happen if the old idea of the progress of the human species,
This
self-comprehension would need to negate and limit the old modern humanism by a
radical anti-humanism. The aim, however, would be to not just accept one side or
the other, but to re-think the basis of moral action along the lines of a dialectical,
utopian anti-humanism. Importantly, though, getting past inadequate conceptions of action ,
historical time and the futural promise of progress may be dependent upon radically
re-comprehending the relationship between humanity and nature in such a way that
the human is no longer viewed as the sole core of the subject , or the being of
highest value. The human would thus need to no longer be thought of as a master
that stands over the non-human. Rather, the human and the non-human need to be grasped together, with the
exemplified by Hawkings cosmic colonisation, is fundamentally rethought and replaced by a new form of self-comprehension.
former bearing dignity only so long as it understands itself as a part of the latter.
Exploration
Exploration and discovery of the worlds oceans propagates
nontraditional forms of sovereignty and existence. The drive to
increase our knowledge of the oceans is rooted in
anthropocentrism episteme that results in ecological
destruction
Montroso 14, (Alan Montroso, graduate teaching assistant at George
Washington University, Ocean is the New East: Contemporary Representations of
Sea Life and Mandevilles Monstrous Ecosystems, March 23, 2014,
http://bacchanalinthelibrary.blogspot.com/2014/03/ocean-is-new-eastcontemporary.html) Magotes
Spring Break was, well, hardly a break at all, but I celebrated its conclusion with some friends from Ohio who were visiting for the
weekend. We dined, we drank, we danced and we toured a few of the MUST SEE sights of DC. Our last stop was the Smithsonians
I reveled in the gorgeous new exhibit: The Sant Ocean

Hall. The only one of our cadre enamored of oceanic discoveries, I hurried from
display to display, basking in bioluminescent beings, awe-struck at extremophiles
and trembling before the model of Phoenix, the North Atlantic right whale. Deeply
affected by these strange strangers, I stretched my imagination towards the
inconceivable and wondered at the sheer breadth of possibilities for ways of living in
these still-occult abyssopelagic regions . I found solace in the evidence that so
many vast and heterogeneous lives can flourish without the intrusive light
of the sun or human reason, and that such animacy is possible in the darkness , in
a world where the Copernican revolution is irrelevant. (1) I attempted to think with and alongside such
creatures, to make myself uncomfortable by imagining myself breathing without
oxygen, thriving at thermal vents, manifesting light with my own body, an aqueous
and somewhat amorphous body squeezed and strangled by the only just bearable
pressures of the deep sea. I attempted a posthumanist thought project similar to
what Stacy Alaimo describes in Violet-Black, her contribution to Prismatic Ecology,
in which she insists that Thinking with and through the electronic jellyfish, seeing
through the prosthetic eye, playing open-ended, improvisational language games
with deep-sea creatures, being transformed by astonishment and desire enact a
posthumanist practice. (2) Responding to the highly-stylized illustrations in books from the Census of Marine Life,
Alaimo finds in such affective imagery an invitation to new ways of
thinking life, and consequently the possibility for the dethronement of
terrestrial ideas of sovereignty. Each Smithsonian display, like each vibrantly hued
illustration of marine life, defamiliarizes this planet and renders a world that simply will not
surrender to humanitys hubristic desire for authority . Each impossible way of being,
now proven possible, works to dismantle what Mel Y. Chen calls the animacy
hierarchy by begging us to reconsider just what the hell comprises an animate
body anyway. (3) And yet, as I wandered from station to station examining these oceanic bodies summoned from the
abysses of the sea, lifeless, entombed in glass jars and carefully arranged for an American viewing public , I could not
National Museum of Natural History, where
forget the relation between observers and observed, nor that human
science and politicking still fashion a sovereign/subject relation between
humans and the myriad strangers that populate the seas . Thus as I wandered the Sant
Ocean Hall, I thought about what it means to wander, who gets the privilege of
wandering (Americans, human knowledge-seekers), and what remains the
stationary object of scrutiny (the nonhuman body, the foreign object, the
subject of scientific knowledge). These marvelous displays are discrete islands
of monstrous creatures that underscore humanitys desire to safely
navigate strange waters. I chose the adjective marvelous very carefully, for my wandering about the various
exhibits reminded me of a medieval journey to the marvels of the East and, more specifically, of Mandevilles travels around the
the ocean, it seems, is the new

East, compared against the way the medieval Western hegemony represented the
East in its travel literature. The inhabitants of Earths oceans are put on
display to be navigated, plundered, studied and represented by the
sovereign powers of Western thought. Like Mandevilles tale of fish that deliver themselves to the
shore for human consumption, we expect the seas to divulge their mysteries for our
ravenous desire to control by means of knowledge-making.
monstrous islands just past the Holy Lands and off the coasts of Africa and India. For
Human Rights
Their human rights claims are just a Kantian modification of
the Westphalian model of legitimate war which masks the
species war in order to achieve its idea of the good life
KOCHI 2K9 [tarik, lecturer in law and international security @ U of Sussex,
Doctorate in Law from Griffith, species war: law, violence, and animals, law,
culture, and the humanities, 353-359] JB
Modern international humanitarian law both inherits aspects of the Westphalian system and moves beyond it. While international
humanitarian or human rights law still relies upon the sovereignty of nation-states and accepts to a limited degree the states right
to go to war and its internal monopoly upon the legitimacy of violence, each of these forms of right are re-shaped and limited in
accordance with a higher standard of legitimacy located around the ideals of international peace and the cosmopolitan concept of
attempting to place human rights as a category that

stands above or at least challenges the traditional rights of the
state, international humanitarian law morally orders war and sets out a
humanity. By
cosmopolitan and global conception of the good life . While the category of peace is held
onto, survival is displaced by human rights as the central category for deriving the legitimacy of the international order and the
Of course, the category of survival is not erased

completely as the human-animal distinction of species war
continues to operate at a subterranean level. One of the first thinkers to sketch out the
legitimacy of war.
theoretical justifications for such a re-ordering of inter-state relations and the legitimacy of global violence was Immanuel Kant.32 In
proposing a universal moral theory which attempted to equally value all members of humanity, Kant rejected the way in which
previous Western intellectual traditions had legitimated particular forms of violence and killing by valuing the lives of Europeans
Kant challenged the over-valuation of the life of

the state against the lives of humans in general. In re-thinking the
relation between war and law Kant enunciated a form of sovereignty
located around the idea of humanity. On the basis of this higher and
universal right of humanity Kants approach demanded that state
action be guided by moral reasoning and moral duty and in this
respect Kant asked that the juridical persona of states adopt a
distinctly moral persona states are conceptualized and expected to
act as if they are moral persons.33
over non-Europeans. Further,
Human rights rhetoric creates a duality in which in the

inhuman animal becomes a negative mirror for the
normalization of inhuman violence
Deckha 10, Maneesha Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of
Law in Victoria, Canada. Its time to abandon the idea of human rights, The
Scavenger, dec 10
Time for a new discourse That the human/subhuman binary continues to inhabit so
much of western experience raises the question of the continuing relevance of
anthropocentric concepts (such as human rights and human dignity) for
effective theories of justice, policy and social movements. Instead of fighting
dehumanization with humanization, a better strategy may be to minimize the
human/nonhuman boundary altogether. The human specialness claim is a
hierarchical one and relies on the figure of an Other the subhuman and nonhuman to be
intelligible. The latter groups are beings, by definition, who do not qualify as human
and thus are denied the benefits that being human is meant to compel. More to the
point, however, a dignity claim staked on species difference, and reliant on dehumanizing Others to establish the moral worth of
This figure is easily deployed in

inter-human violent conflict implicating race, gender and cultural identities as we
have seen in the context of military and police camps, contemporary slavery and
slavery-like practices, and the laws of war used in these situations to promote
violence against marginalized human groups . A new discourse of cultural and legal protections is required
human beings, will always be vulnerable to the subhuman figure it creates.
to address violence against vulnerable humans in a manner that does not privilege humanity or humans, nor permit a subhuman
We need to find an
alternative discourse to theorize and mobilize around vulnerabilities for subhuman
humans. This move, in addressing violence and vulnerabilities, should be productive
not only for humans made vulnerable by their dehumanization, but nonhumans as
well.
figure to circulate as the mark of inferior beings on whom the perpetration of violence is legitimate.
Appeals to human rights are inherently exclusiveit relies

on the exclusive of the inhuman
Tittle 98, The Humanist View of Animal Rights
First, if humanism 'just' emphasized human-as-opposed-to-god, that is, if it were merely a reaction to belief in the supernatural, it
would put at its centre, the natural. But it goes one further, it goes one narrower, it puts at its centre the human. It's called
humanism, not naturalism.In fact, humanism seems to pride itself on not being merely 'a reaction to.' On more than one occasion,
and in "Are You a Humanist?" in particular, it compares itself to atheism: atheism is merely reactionary, negative, anti-religion;
humanism, on the other hand, is proactive, positive, pro-human. So whereas naturalism is more general and would include nonhuman animals, humanism seems specifically, almost intentionally, to exclude them.Second, humanism, "as defined in most
dictionaries, [is] a way of life centred on human interests and values..." ("The Humanist Alternative" p.1, emphasis added). Now this
is not to say that non-humans can't also be in the centre. But the word 'human' appears in so many principles, the specific-ness
seems hardly accidental: "Humanism aims at the full development of every human being" (#1, emphasis added); " Humanists
uphold the broadest application of democratic principles in all human relationships "
(#2, emphasis added); "Humanists affirm the dignity of every person and the right of the
individual to maximum possible freedom compatible with the rights of others " (#4
emphasis, added); "Humanists acknowledge human interdependence , the need for mutual
respect, and the kinship of all humanity..." (#5, emphasis added); "Humanists call for
continuous improvement of the quality of life so that no living human being may be
deprived of the basic necessities of life " (#6, emphasis added); "Humanists support the
development and extension of fundamental human rights ..." (#7 emphasis added).Given such a
relentless focus on human development, relationships, and quality of life, one hardly needs to ask, regarding the third principle,
"Humanists advocate the use of the scientific method, both as a guide to distinguish fact from fiction, and as a tool to develop
beneficial and creative uses of science and technology"--beneficial for who?And though a hierarchy with humans at the top is not
described, I believe
this view of human at the centre puts animals as much in a subordinate
area. Indeed, "...humanists regard ethical inquiry as evolving like any other human endeavour, changing over time to meet the
changing needs of the human species" ("The Humanist Alternative" p.2, emphasis added) [5].My third reason for thinking that the
humanist view leans away from animal rights is that any extrapolations I can make from the principles that
might support animal rights are rather weak. The fourth principle insists that the rights of the individual to
freedom must be compatible with "the rights of others" and the ninth principle speaks of "a
sense of responsibility to oneself and to others." Could those others include animals? It didn't say "the
rights of other humans" or "the responsibility to...other humans." But I think I'm grasping at straws here.The eleventh principle
states that "Humanists
affirm that human and world problems can be resolved only by

means of human reason, compassion, and intelligent effort." World problems might involve
animals, yes? And the compassion we are directed to use might at least justify their right not to be tortured, yes? Maybe.Given these
the overwhelmingly strong focus on human interests, it seems to me

that the only animal rights arguments humanists would accept are instrumental
ones. Instrumental arguments, such as those put forth by Baxter [6], Passmore [7], and Guthrie [8], claim that animals
have rights only insofar as they are of value to us. Animals are viewed, thus, as
means to our ends, as instruments for our development, our interests, our quality of
life.Contrary, perhaps, to initial assumptions, instrumental arguments do not necessarily lead to rather limited animal rights.
weak arguments and
Animals may have scientific and medical value (they may be good for research), commercial value (parts of them can be sold, they
can be used for income-generating activities), game value (they're used for food), observational value (we like to look at them, in
zoos and sanctuaries), recreational value (they're fun to play with), and/or ecological value (the species may be important to the
ecosystem) [9].So insofar as their rights are derived from their value [10], they may have many rights (or at least the most
important ones). Humanists can argue that cows have the right to graze (rather than be fed a chemical diet) because it's in our best
interests to eat such cows (and not the ones pumped full of steroids and what have you). And I can argue that because my
happiness depends on chessie's happiness [11], she has a right to be happy (and therefore will get a new stuffed toy for her
birthday). In fact, the more we understand that we live in a complex web of life, that we depend on the ecosystem's stability for our
survival, the more favourably we'll consider the other lifeforms in that ecosystem [12]. So humanists may argue that plankton have
rights too.Even though instrumental arguments might justify a sufficiently broad range of animal rights, I'm uncomfortable with
There's something a little distasteful about using others--any others--as a

means to one's own ends. And there's something very egocentric, very speciesist
[13] in the anthropocentricity of this view. Isn't it selfish exploitation , pure and
simple? If it gives pleasure and thus improves the quality of our lives to injure and
sometimes kill animals just for the hell of it, well, that would be justified on
instrumental grounds. It seems then that humanism must condone sport hunting.
stopping here.
Liberalism
Liberalist ideals by definition place human beings above
animals this generates inevitable violence against the
subhuman only a critique of liberal practices allows us to
evaluate why humans destroy nature in the first place
Steiner 10prof of philosophy @ Bucknell Univ (Gary, Anthropocentrism and its
Discontents, pg. 202-204, Google Books, DA: 5/2/2012//JLENART)
claims of liberalism are significant. for they embody not only an ethic of human
self-assertion against nature, but also a set of values that are definitive for the task of what
Freud calls "regulating human beings' relations with one another." Liberal society takes
as axiomatic the values of equality, reciprocity, and respect. The sacrifice of these
values brings disastrous consequences of the kind seen on an epic scale in Nazi
Germany and Stalin`s Soviet Union, where liberal ideals were rejected in the name
of totalitarianism and the "virtues" of centralized planning." Against this background, Romantic
appeals to "homecoming," wholeness, totality, and belonging threaten to undermine
the ideals of civility that champions of the Enlightenment fought to secure . And yet the
anthropocentric terms of liberalism virtually define human beings as superior to
animals. To this extent, liberalism fails animals precisely where it vindicates human
beings. As a theory for "regulating human beings' relations with one another,"
liberalism is inextricably linked to that other key value of society lauded by Freud.
"the protection of human beings from nature." Liberal values are the modern form
of the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis or belonging, according to which all and only rational beings
possess full moral worth. All other beings are viewed either as potential means to
human security and happiness or as threats to be neutralized. Even if we
acknowledge that animals, unlike trees and streams, suffer, their suffering nonetheless counts less
than human suffering, because according to the anthropocentric logic of liberalism
only human beings possess the highest and purest moral status. Unless limits are
placed on liberalism, animals in our society will invariably be sacrificed for the sake of
promoting human interests in all except those uncontroversial cases in which the
recognition of the interests of animals does not interfere with the promotion of
human interests. As Kant recognized. to subject a discipline to critique is not to condemn it but
rather to explore its nature and its limits. But Kant never performed a critique on
liberalism: instead, he took the basic terms of liberalism for granted and turned his
critical eye toward the faculties of understanding and reason, which together
address three anthropocentrically posed questions: what can I know, what ought l to
do, and what may l hope for? This anthropocentric orientation pervades Kant's
conception of morality and is responsible for his classification of duties toward
animals as "indirect" at best. It seems, then, that only a genuine critique of liberalism holds
the promise of establishing a coherent and substantial sense of the moral status of
animals. The purpose of a critique of liberalism is not to dispense with liberal ideals,
but rather to recognize the inability of liberal ideals to do _justice to the moral
The
status of animals. Democratic notions such as equality, reciprocity, and duty are not
by themselves well suited to the task of establishing human obligations to animals
and the environment because these notions are designed to regulate relations
between rational, self-conscious human beings. What is needed is a way of seeing
how liberal notions can function within a broader understanding of the relationship
between human beings and the rest of nature .
Liberalism rests on a binary of civilized/uncivilized, blaming

those uncivilized beings for all the bad things of the world
this results in mass violence against the Other
Buchan 2prof of political science @ Australian National University (Canberra,
Australia) (Bruce, Explaining war and peace: Kant and liberal IR theory,
Alternatives, Vol. 27, http://asrudiancenter.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/explainingwar-and-peace-kant-and-liberal-ir-theory/, DA: 5/2/2012//JLENART)
The assumption in liberal IR theory that violence can be eliminated only within and
between liberal-democratic states is but one feature of the discourse of civilization
that has shaped the development of liberal political thought. Within the liberal
tradition, civilization has been conceived as a process of pacification of social
relations necessary for the creation and maintenance of a civil society. Violence has
thus been defined as alien to the requirements of liberal civil societies, an attribute of
uncivilized peoples, or of the barbaric past. As Frederick von Hayek makes clear, the
liberal conception of civilization rests on the inculcation of disciplines of self-control
and self-mastery: The transition from the small band to the settled community and finally
to the open society and with it to civilisation was due to men learning to obey the same
abstract rules instead of being guided by innate instincts . And although we still share most of the
emotional traits of primitive man, he does not share all ours, or the restraints which made civilisation possible. [T]he discipline of
civilisation protects [individuals] by impersonal abstract rules against the
arbitrary violence of others and enables each individual to try to build for himself a
protected domain. (90) A key feature of this liberal view, as Hayek presents it, is that having
become civilized, modern liberal civil societies have left violence behind. In drawing
an opposition between civilized peace and uncivilized violence, the responsibility for
perpetrating violence and war is too easily traced to peoples, societies, or states
deemed uncivilized. To be uncivilized means that one exists in the unruly and
undisciplined condition of normlessness. The significance of norms in IR has been emphasized by constructivists,
who tell us that institutions express norms that emerge from and shape the development of individuals and societies. (91) On this view, liberal
states and societies are to be understood as products of multiple processes of
construction, embodying liberal norms. Domestically, these processes are said to
give rise to inclusive communities constituted by similarly constructed individuals.
Internationally, an inclusive community of similarly constructed states is established
embodying a liberal commitment to the inclusion of all peoples and states in the
universal moral community. (92) Seeing liberal peace as the product of processes of norm-oriented construction of selves and
Liberalism
has always been associated with theories of civilization in which the construction of
liberal selves, societies, and s tates was juxtaposed to the threat posed by the
uncivilized. Within liberal thought, civilization was understood not only as a process
of instilling norms of civility, but of subduing, subjecting, and governing (often by illiberal
means) those people deemed uncivilized . In general, contemporary liberal theorists have
been unwilling to address this legacy. (93) Some, however, have lamented the decline of
supposedly more civilized international standards and the rise of uncivil wars. Such
wars are thought to lack any logic or structure. defy sober restrictions covering
the ground rules of war, threaten to ransack the legal monopoly of armed force,
and put an end to the distinction between war and crime. (94) There are even those who call for a
states, however, tells us comparatively little about how liberal thinkers actually conceptualized liberal norms and their application.
new imperialism committed to imposing order on unruly and stateless peoples, without degenerating into the injustice and bloodshed of nineteenth-
We are led to believe here that Western civilization has been

responsible for the limitation of war and violence, or that the norms of that
civilization, if reimposed, might bring an end to uncivil wars. To accept this
assumption, however, leaves us blind to the inseparability of liberalism, civilization,
and imperialism in the nineteenth centuryand indeed to the lethal intensification of
war (and the technology of mass killing) by apparently civilized liberal states and civil
century-style colonialism. (95)
societies in the twentieth century. (96)
Nuclear War
Focus on flashpoint violence and nuclear war marginalizes the
ongoing ecological catastrophe of the developing world
Plling-Vocke 05, (Bernt, Master of International Relations. Victoria University,
Wellington, New Zealand, The End of Poverty: The globalization of the unreal and
the impoverishment of all,
http://www.hockeyarenas.com/berntpv/jeffreysachs/endofpovertydeepecology.pdf)
These world affairs are dark, and the old rough equivalency of GNP with Gross National Pollution still holds.280
Hundreds of millions of years of evolution of mammals and especially of large, territory-demanding animals will come to a halt281
perceptions, as by Jeffrey Sachs, that that which is not of value to any human being is
not of value at all, are egocentric. Newtons laws were made by Newton, but
stones fall without him, and value statements are only uttered by Homo sapiens, but not necessarily the only values,
just because values are formulated not by mosquitos in mosquito language282 . Humanity uses its uniqueness
and special capacities among millions of kinds of other living beings for constant
domination and mistreatment283, but life is fundamentally one284. For millions of
animals, disasters feared by humans are commonplace, as these animals live and
die in a nuclear war today, locked away in laboratories and tortured for
experiments285. A lack of identification leads to indifference 286. Wilderness has become so scare
and
that many national parks are so overloaded with people that extremely strict regulations have been introduced instead of
entering a realm of freedom, one feels that one is in some kind of museum ruled by angry owners287. Responsible participants of
contemporary societies have slowly but surely begun to question whether we truly accept this unique, sinister role we have
previously chosen, our roles within a global culture of a primarily techno-industrial nature288. How dire are these world affairs?
The threat of ecocatastrophe has become apparent 289. Apocalypse now is

happening all around, and only continued deterioration of human life conditions may strengthen and deepen the deep
ecological movement, hopefully resulting in major changes in economic, political and ideological structures290.Then, human
development might follow another path and abandon Jeffrey Sachs ladder of modern, economic growth. The process is probably
slow and its direction revolutionary, but its steps are reformatory291.
Oil Spills
The BP oil spill proves that the narrative of ecological recovery
will always be coopted by the economy, perpetuating crisis and
ecological destruction.
Chen 12, (Mel Y. Chen, associate professor of Gender and Womens Studies at the
University of California Berkeley, Animacies: Bipolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer
Affect, Duke University Press, 2012, pages 223-224.) Magotes
On September 19, 2010, the oil well in the Macondo Prospect region of the Gulf of
Mexicowhich had ruptured five months earlier, on April 20, spilling an estimated two hundred million barrels of oil into the Gulf
was finally declared to be sealed. This closure led to a wave of relief that the threat
had somehow been contained, and that further pollution of the Gulf would no longer
occur (at least not at such an uncontrollable pace). The next day, the spills National Incident
Commander, Thad Allen, acknowledged in an interview that were actually
negotiating how clean is clean, going on to explain that this phrase was a
euphemism we use at the end of an oil spill to say, is there anything else we can
do? And, sometimes, there will still be oil there, but then the agreement is that
there can be no more technical means applied to it, and were all going to agree
that this one is done as far as what we can do. 1 Allen concluded the interview with
a lively mixture of metaphors: both immediate cleanup and long-term
recovery should be the goal: the residents of the coast have had a lot of stuff
laid at their door and they have a way of life that has been threatened down
there. It was unclear whether recovery meant the health of the Gulf or
the economic well-being of the human residents of the Gulf , but clearly some kind of
affliction was implied. Of course, metaphors of health and treatment have a peculiar
history in national economic discourses; consider the phrase shock therapy (commonly associated
with the economist Jeffrey Sachs) used to describe a radical economic reform in the direction of free markets, deregulation, and
articulations of the oils danger, or the oil

dispersants toxicity (untested at such quantities), to sea creatures were made not for
their sake but for the purpose of identifying a risk to an economic source
of livelihood for the human professional residents of the U.S. Gulf
shores, the fishermen and fisherwomen and the economy built around them. Many of the fishermen and -women (though it is
public disinvestment.2 More often than not,
unclear how many, and it is hard to disentangle such language from locally controlled ni media interests) were content to rely on
their symbiotic relationship to their local environment, using cash payments and barter systems, and did not see fit to record and
report income to the IRS tax system, habits of nonengagement which imperiled their future compensation by bp. In interviews with
the distinction between sources of revenue and living

beings was often blurred: their expressed pain did not appear to
distinguish between the lost generations of shrimp and their own
generativity of income.
those workers, however,
Politics
The political is already cededinvestigation of values offer the
only hope for radical change in the face of environmental
destruction.
Best 04, (Steven, professor of philosophy at Texas El Paso, From Earth Day to
Ecological Society http://www.drstevebest.org/Essays/FromEarthDay.htm, date
accessed: 7/27/11
Homo sapiens have embarked on an insane, destructive, and unsustainable path of existence .
The human species is

driving off a cliff at 100 miles an hour without brakes, and yet people live is if the most urgent issue of
the day is Janet Jacksons wardrobe malfunction or who will win American Idol. There is much talk about national security but
nothing is said about the basis of all security environmental security. Problems like global warming,
desertification, and food and water shortages will wreak havoc throughout the
planet. As Homeland Security turns ever-more fascist, environmentalists are vilified as eco-terrorists
and legal forms of activism are criminalized under the Patriot Act. While Ashcroft prosecutes activists
working to help the planet, corporate eco-terrorists continue to pillage and plunder.
Meanwhile, Americans, who make up less than 5% of the worlds population,
consume 30% of its resources and produce 25% of total greenhouse gas emissions .
Whatever forces striving to save the environment are doing, it is not to ward off corporate and state Pac-men greedily devouring the
National environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club are tepid,

compromise-based, reform-oriented bureaucracies unable to challenge corporate
and state power, and grass-roots forces are not great enough in force and numbers.
We are in the midst of a major ecological crisis that stems from a social crisis rooted
in corporate power and erosion of democracy. In Greek, the word crisis means decision, suggesting that
planet.
humanity, currently poised at a critical crossroads in its evolution, has crucial decisions and choices to make concerning its
Human identity, values, ethics, worldviews, and mode of social

organization need major rethinking and reconstruction. In Chinese, crisis means both calamity and
opportunity. In a diseased individual, cancer often provides the catalyst for personal growth. As a diseased species,
human beings can perish, survive in dystopian futures prefigured by films like Mad
Max and Waterworld, or seize their opportunity to learn from egregious errors and
rise to far higher levels of social and moral evolution. The Human Plague The crisis in human
existence on the planet.
existence is dramatically reflected in the 1996 film, Independence Day. The movie is about hostile aliens with no respect for life;
they come to earth to kill its peoples, devour its natural resources, and then move onto other planets in a mad quest to find more
fuel for their mega-machines and growth-oriented culture. The film is a veiled projection of our own destructive habits onto
monstrous beings from another world.
We are the aliens; we are the parasites who live off the
death of other life forms; we are the captains of the mega-machines that are
sustainable only through violence and ecological destruction . We do to the animals
and the earth what the aliens do to human life -- the only difference is, we have no other planet to move
on to, and no superheroes to save us. We are trapped in a Dawn of the Dead living nightmare
where armies of hideous corpses, people thought long dead and buried, walk again
with a will to destroy us. The dead represent all the waste, pollution, and ecological
debts accrued to our growth culture that we thought we could walk away from
unscathed and never again face. But we are waking up to the fact that the dead
are storming our neighborhoods, crashing through our doors and windows, and hell-
bent on devouring us. In his article entitled A Plague of Human Proportions, Mark Lynas frames the crisis this way:
Within the earth's biosphere, a single species has come to dominate virtually all living systems. For the past two centuries this
species has been reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an infectious plague envelops its host. Three hundred thousand new
population of bodies now exceeds by a hundred

times the biomass of any large animal species that has ever existed on land since
the beginning of geological time. The species is us. Now numbering more than six billion souls, the human
individuals are added to its numbers every day. Its
population has doubled since 1950. Nothing like this has happened before in the earth's history. Even the dinosaurs, which
Thus, a single
biological type has wreaked havoc on the estimated ten million other species in
habiting the planet. Lynas suggests that because Homo sapiens dominates the planet today as dinosaurs did one
dominated for tens of millions of years, were thinly spread compared to the hairless primate Homo sapiens.
hundred million years ago, We are entering a new geological era: the Anthropocene. According to a March 2004 Earth Policy
Institute report, Humans
have transformed nearly half of the planet's ice-free land areas,

with serious effects on the rest of nature Each year the earth's forest cover shrinks by 16 million hectares
(40 million acres), with most of the loss occurring in tropical forests, where levels of biodiversity are high A recent study of 173
species of mammals from around the world showed that their collective geographical ranges have been halved over the past several
decades, signifying a loss of breeding and foraging area. While insipid ideologues like Tibor Machan still publish books such as
Putting Humans First: Why we are Natures Favorite (2004),
it is more accurate to see Homo sapiens as

the invasive species and agent of mass extinction par excellence -- not natures
favorite but rather natures bete noir.
Robot Exploration
The post human nature of robotic exploration distances us
from the material world, perpetuating masculine domination of
knowledge and experience
Alaimo 11, Stacy Alaimo, researcher and professor of environmental humanities,
animal studies, posthumanism, science studies, new materialism, gender theory,
cultural studies, and multicultural studies at the Univeristy of Texas, Arlington, New
Materialisms, Old Humanisms, or, Following the Submersible, December 2011,
Taking Turns, NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Vol. 19, No. 4,
pg 280-284, Magotes
The early twenty-first century has ushered in a new era of deep-sea exploration,
marine science, industrial fishing, mining, drilling, and, consequently, ecological
devastation. Feminists, environmentalists and new materialists of all sorts must
follow these ventures in order to witness not only the dazzling newly discovered
creatures of the abyssal zone1 but also the outdated yet obdurate narratives
projected into the depths. Robert D. Ballard, former Director of the Center for Marine Exploration at Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution (Massachusetts, USA), concludes his personal history of ocean exploration
with a section entitled Leaving the Body Behind, describing the drawbacks of
human occupied diving machines and submersibles . Tethers, he writes, remain a problem: They snap,
they tangle, they restrict (Ballard 2000: 310). Ballard muses that robotics and telecommunications
technologies will allow us to... cut the ultimate tether the one that binds our
questioning intellect to vulnerable human flesh . Through telepresence, a mind
detaches itself from the bodys restrictions and enters the abyss with ease ... As Jacques
Cousteau used to say, the ideal means of deep-sea transport would allow us to move like an angel. Our minds can
now go it alone, leaving the body behind. What could be more angelic than that? (Ballard 2000: 311)
A material feminist critique would point out the gender dichotomies lurking in
Ballards mind/body dualism and examine how the wish to be free of the vulnerable
(mothers) body betrays an epistemology that distances and supposedly protects
the masculine, transcendent knower from the realities, complications, and risks of
the material world. The fantasy of masculinist knowledge, of control over the
depths of the ocean, relies upon the projection of corporeality onto the
womb-like submersibles with their umbilical-cord tethers. Conversely, the more
advanced robotics and telecommunications technologies are cast as pure
intellect, a masculine melding of mind and machine that weirdly erases
the eyes and hands not to mention the hearts, lungs, and other bodily organs that these
technologies will still require. (A feminist cyborg submersible a heretical mix of body, mind, technology, and
prosthesis -is unimaginable within Ballards conceptual universe.) This small but symptomatic example
suggests why the reconceptualization of materiality remains crucial for feminist
theory, since female bodies continue to be cast as the dumb matter that male
intellect seeks to escape. Moreover, the intersecting categories of race and class have also been constituted by their
pernicious associations smith brute matter. Ballards desire to sever himself from the very world he
would seek to know also suggests why new materialist theories should not divide
human corporeality from a wider material world, but should instead submerse the
human within the material flows, exchanges, and interactions of substances,
habitats, places, and environments. As new materialisms proliferate, some bear an uncanny resemblance to
(old) Humanisms, in that they ignore the lively, agential, vast, material world, and the multitude of other-than-human creatures who
inhabit it. Some of the essays within Diana Coole and Samantha Frosts fascinating collection, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency,
and Politics, for example, focus on the materiality of human life worlds, ignoring non-human animals and ecosystems. Meanwhile,
Cary Wolfes momentous and provocative book What is Posthumanism? pays scant attention to gender theory, feminist corporeal
theory, or feminist science studies, even though all three are relevant to the questions he poses. There is certainly not enough space
here to detail the intersections, alliances, and productive interrelations between new materialisms, feminisms, post-humanisms, and
I would like to propose that materialisms transgress the outline of the

human and consider the forces, substances, agencies, and lively beings that
populate the world. Post-humanist new materialisms, I contend, are poised to topple the
assumptions that confine ethical and political considerations to the domain of the
Human, while feminist theories, of many sorts, offer decades of scholarly
contestations of the very ethics, epistemologies, and ontologies that have
underwritten Human exceptionalism.
science studies,2 but
Science
Modern science has reframed nature anthropocentrically such
that it has been pushed beyond the ontological boundaries of
reality.
Plling-Vocke 05, (Bernt, Master of International Relations. Victoria University,
Wellington, New Zealand, The End of Poverty: The globalization of the unreal and
the impoverishment of all,
modern regard of nature reached an unprecedented scale with the enlightenment
Our
project, and the rise of the scientific worldview. Ever since, the world seems to operate according to certain clear, calculable, and unchanging laws, not
by the whims of any living, sentient being318. Jeffrey Sachs feels deeply indebted, as all of us who work toward a brighter future are intellectually
indebted to the awe-inspiring geniuses of the Enlightenment, who first glimpsed the prospect of conscious social actions to improve human well-begin on a
With the rise of the western, modernist project, nature ceased to be

either beautiful or scary, but merely there, ready to be used by humans, for
humans320, Sale argue. It became de-mystified and was interpreted as slave and raw
material321, Arne Naess adds. For radical environmentalists as them, Sachs vision of an enlightened
globalization a globalization of democracies, multilateralism, science and
technology, and a global economic system designed to meet human needs 322 is
troublesome. If Sachs program of development allows each and everyone of
humanity to join in on the rising tide of globalization, non-human life will be
drowned out. When Rene Descartes, often claimed to be the father of modernity, started doubting everything he could manage to doubt,
global scale319.
arithmetic and geometry stood out as more certain than sensual perceptions323, and the cornerstone for Sachs enlightened globalization was placed.
the method of critical doubt brought to

completion the detachment of man from nature, the dualism of man and the rest of
nature that reserved goals and purposes for humans alone 324. For Descartes, reasoning and science
For Descartes, it become impossible to appraise the world by intuition, and
allowed a reduction of chemistry and biology to mechanics, thus the process by which a seed develops into an animal or plant is purely mechanical325,
modern sciences, indebted to the enlightenment project,

often portray nature along the lines of a meaningless and colourless collision of
lifeless atoms falling through the void327. By comparison, only humans have minds
and bodies, while animals have only bodies 328. Industrialism and urbanization have
transformed experiences of nature, as the earth itself is sold in plastic bags and,
for many urbanized city-dwellers, contact with unmediated nature is contained in
parks, where ironically the sense of danger resides in encounters with ones fellow
citizens. The constructed reality of urban life is confirmed by contrast with lesser realities as Disneyland, but in essence, the real is no longer
therefore animals are automata326. Nowadays,
real329. Furthermore, the rampant urbanization led to the establishment of national parks, but since parks are limited, they often cannot qualify as areas
of what Arne Naess describes as friluftsliv330, because heavy usage in the era of mass tourism severely restricts what friluftsliv is about; one cannot
walk off path, camp wild, prepare food except in provided grills and so on331. Naess remarks that instead of entering a realm of freedom, one feels that
one is in some kind of museum ruled by angry owners. Additionally, a highly unnatural outfitting pressure exists, and norms about equipment
replacement are impressed upon and accepted by large sections of the population, therefore people swallow the equipment hooklengthen their work
If this is in accordance with what we, enmasse, regard as nature, the real is once again no longer real. Science and technology go hand in
day and increase stress in the city to be able to afford the latest 332.
hand to aid in environmental exploitation in the name of security. Lee 99, [Keekok Lee, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University, 99 [The
Natural and the Artefactual p. 62-64, $$] Initially, one would be tempted just simply to distinguish between Phase I and Phase II by proposing that the
word "technology" be confined only to the former, and that some other term, such as "applied science," be used in connection with the latter. It follows
the relationship between science and technology in Phase I is a

contingent one, and (b) the relationship between science and applied science in Phase
II is more than contingent. However, this possible way of defining terms may not
from this proposed usage that (a)
find favor, as it produces too much of a discontinuity in the history of humans in

their attempts to modify nature in order to secure their own ends, be it survival,
improvement of material well-being or whatever. The new technology is but a form
of technology in the long history of that subject . It would be less misleading and distorting in recognizing it as such.
So it would be clearer to say that science and technology are really two separate, though related, forms of activities, and that the
very intimate relationship that has grown up between the two since roughly 1850 is,
nevertheless, a contingent one, in spite of the avowed aim of modern science to produce a
technology which can control nature in a thoroughly systematic manner , guided by
theoretical understanding rather than crude empirical happenstance. To prevent
misunderstanding of what has just been said, one needs to return to one of the main points raised in the last chapter. There, it was argued that (a) modern
its
ideological goal was the advancement of material well-being via its technology to
control and manipulate nature. These two theses may be said to constitute the Modern Project of Science and Technology. The
science from its first beginnings was backed up by the new philosophy, in particular by its metaphysics of Scientific Naturalism, and (b)
ideological goal to control and manipulate nature renders the Modern Project au fond a technologically oriented one. Under the Modern Project,
modern science may be said to be really theoretical technology, a view associated

with, for instance, Heidegger and Jonas. From this standpoint, the science and the technology appear to
be inextricably linkedthe linkage is more than an accidental one . As such, it is more than merely
contingent. It is, then, not surprising that such Science should eventually spawn successful Technology, even though the Modem Project itself took over
lies behind or beneath

modern technology as a revealing that sets up and challenges the world is what he
calls Ge-stell. Ge-stell names, to use Kantian language, the transcendental precondition of modern
technology. ... "Ge-stell" refers to the gathering together of the setting-up that sets up human beings, that
is, challenges them, to reveal reality, by the mode of ordering , as Bestand" or resource. ... "Ge-stell
two hundred years, since its inception, 'to deliver the goods,' so to speak. To quote Mitcham: For Heidegger what
refers to the mode of revealing that rules in the essence of modern technology and is not itself anything technological." ... Not only does Ge-stell "set-up"
The essence of
modern technology starts human beings upon the way of that revealing through
which reality everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes resource ."32 The same point about
Heidegger is, more or less, made by Zimmerman: Far from being a dispassionate quest for truth, scientific methodology had
become the modern version of the power-oriented salvific methodologies developed
in the Middle Ages. Hence, Heidegger argued, even though modern science preceded the rise of modern technology by about two hundred
years, modern science was already essentially "technological" in character, i.e.,
oriented toward power. ... Science ... seeks not to let the entity show itself in ways
appropriate to the entity in question, but instead compels the entity to reveal those
aspects of itself that are consistent with the power aims of scientific culture .31 Jonas has
and "challenge" the world ... it also sets upon and challenges human beings to set upon and challenge the world. ... "
written in the same vein about Bacon's view of science: Theory must be so revised that it yields "designations and directions for works," even has "the
invention of arts" for its very end, and thus becomes itself an art of invention. Theory it is nonetheless, as it is discovery and rational account of first
It thus agrees with classical theory in that it has the nature of

things and the totality of nature for its object; but it is such a science of causes and
laws, or a science of such causes and laws, as then makes it possible "to command
nature in action." It makes this possible because from the outset it looks at nature
gua acting, and achieves knowledge of nature's laws of action by itself engaging
nature in actionthat is,-in experiment, and therefore on terms set by man himself.
causes and universal laws (forms).
It yields directions for works because it first catches nature "at work." A science of "nature at work" is a mechanics, or a dynamics, of nature. For such a
science Galileo and Descartes provided the speculative premises and the method of analysis and synthesis. Giving birth to a theory with inherently
technological potential, they set on its actual course that fusion of theory and practice which Bacon was dreaming of.34 In the light of the above and of the
points raised in the preceding section, there is, perhaps, some justification in saying that Modern Science is Theoretical Technology. But all the same,
Modern Technology, nevertheless, is applied science. To see why this latter claim
may be justified, one must distinguish the Modern Project itselfembedded in a
certain metaphysical and ideological frameworkfrom (a) the formulation and the
testing of specific scientific theories in the history and philosophy of science, (b) the
relationship, if any, between a specific theoiy and a related specific technology, and
(c) the epistemic goals of theory formulation and theory testing on the one hand,
and the testing of technological hypotheses on the other. Here, as we have seen, the linkage in the case of
any one specific theory and any one specific technology throughout the modern period, in particular during Phase I, appears to be much looser than the
postulated linkage between Science and Technology in the Modern Project itself. (However, in Phase II and especially IIB the intensely intimate causal
relationship does obtain between certain specific theories and the specific technologies they induce and render possible.35) Moreover, the epistemic goals
of theory formulation and testing are also perceived to be somewhat different and distinct from those of testing hypotheses in the technological domain
even in Phase II.
Sea Technology
Seafaring technological advancements gave rise to civilization
the domination of the unknown and the unlimited space of
the ocean furthers a humanist, anthropocentric agenda that
gave way to colonialist violence
Messier and Batra 11, Vartan Messier, assistant professor of English at the
City University of New York, and professor of English at University of Puerto Rico,
The Multitudinous Seas: Matter and Metaphor, 2011, This Watery World: Humans
and the Sea, Pg. 17-19. ***GENDERED LANGAUGE NOT ENDORSED*** Magotes
While the land/water opposition was taken up by Barthes as we have seen earlier, Bachelard extends the antithetical relationship
not merely to that between water and land, but to fresh water/sea water as well. Bachelard distinguishes between the human
response to fresh water and sea water: La mer donne des contes avant de donner des rves (206) the sea generates stories better
generating dreams (translation ours)], noting that the first experience of the sea is in the shape of a story: la premire exprience
the timelessness and

signlessness that humans have seen in the sea have produced the desire to order
and temporize it, and thus to establish a sense of order and sequence. In an extended
sense, he sees this desire borne out of the ways in which our understanding of human
existence is mediated by narrative as it systemizes and orders our experiences of
the world both spatially and temporally. Juxtaposed against the seas vast cultural
void, the advent of seafaring produced not only new territories but an entire culture ,
de la mer est de lordre du rcit (emphasis his, 206). Bachelards observation suggests that
claimed Michel Foucault, one exemplified by heterotopia, which juxtapos[e] in a single real place several spaces, several sites
that are themselves incompatible. Heterotopias are not utopias but real emplacements that simultaneously represent, contest
and reverse...all the other real emplacements in their environment, and for him the ship is the heterotopia par excellence (178-
domination of the sea marks not merely the

beginning of biological life but the beginning of civilization, observing that
the sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which
civilization emerged (6). Domination of the sea thus encapsulates the ordering of
nature by humans and, as Philip de Souza points out, was crucial to both the best and the
worst aspects of civilisation (cover blurb). Although the first boats were probably created for rivers and lakes rather
than for the sea (de Souza 7), seafaring has produced the world as we now know it through the
discovery and exploitation of new territories, new peoples and new ideas, which
led the way to the expansion of the worlds history, its cultures and religions, and to
economic globalization as we now have it. In addition, as Bernhard Klein has shown, it is the early modem
81). Meanwhile, W.H Auden suggests that
era that produced permanent maritime links and trade routes across vast oceanic spaces in contrast to earlier great seafaring
empires (such as the Roman, Carthaginian, Viking and Ming), which lacked the technical means to effect a permanent expansion
the history-making voyages of Vasco da Gama,

Magellan and Columbus, among others, paved the way for imperialism. Klein
therefore places the imperial project of the sixteenth century as marking the true
beginning of globalisation (Klein, Historicizing) Nevertheless while these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century oceanic
of their borders on other shores. In contrast,
voyages might have changed history, the most famous theoretic argument for the Free Sea was produced in the early years of the
seventeenth century in Hugo Grotius 1604 Mare Liberum (or Freedom of the Sea), which argued (on behalf of the Dutch East India
Company) for freedom of not only the oceans and coastal waters but of seafaring, trade and tithing on the grounds that the law of
the land (private property) could not be applied to the boundless sea. Initially, it was opposed by the British: John Seldens 1635
Mare Clausum argued that the sea could indeed be possessed. Eventually Mare Liherum was superceded by Cornelius Bunkeshoeks
De domino maris (1702), which set cannon range as the limit of maritime control and was eventually adopted at the three-mile
limit.The
tension between this human imposition of a limit on the apparent
limitlessness of the sea echoes the idea mentioned above of the human desire to
order the sea along spatio-temporal coordinates and hence, for Hegel, ocean-going activated Western
history. The geographical opportunity for ocean exploration was the condition of
possibility for Western Europes entry into world history: The sea gives us the idea of
the indefinite, the unlimited, and the infinite; and in feeling his own infinite in that
Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited: the sea
invites man to conquest, and to piratical plunder, but also to honest gain and to
commerce. The land, the mere valley-plain attaches him to the soil; it involves him
in an infinite multitude of dependencies, but the sea carries him out beyond these
limited circles of thought and action. (90) Without a doubt, the broader human outlook on the sea seems to
have changed in the past few centuries with the advent of seafaring technology that permitted long-range exploration, commerce,
This change of attitude

runs parallel to historical shifts in the cultural trends of the so-called old continent
and the coming of age of humanism; Enlightenment ideas transformed European society and in the modern
conquest, and colonization, particularly by Western European and Euro-Americancivilizations.3
era the development of empiricism in the sciences was perceived as a means to attain absolute knowledge about what constitutes
dominion of the sea was asserted by similar advances in

the field of technology and the increased opportunity for transoceanic
voyages, which in turn gave way to a reconsideration of the relationship
between humans and the sea. This reconsideration towards the sea has been attributed to largely material
human existence. In parallel,
causes by Alain Corbin in his informative book The Lure of the Sea. The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840.
the sea has shifted its cultural

signification in the West since the eighteenth century . He shows how attitudes to the sea altered with
Once considered a sinister, threatening power that was home to monsters,
the Enlightenment and concurrent changes in art and literature, so that bathing in the sea became viewed as therapeutic and
regenerative rather than unhealthy. This change became reflected at all levels, from the political in the exploration that resulted
from an increased interest in travel, to the economic in the rise of sea towns, and to the cultural level in artistic and literary
production.
Survival
Their extinction claims require a defense of the intrinsic value
of human survival as separated from other forms of life. This
involves the image of distinctly good human life contrasted to
the banal useless existence of the genes. This makes the affs
political subjectivity an affect of a species-contingent survival
paradigm which abandons bare life.
If only some of our genes but not our species has survived, maybe
the emphasis we place upon the notion of survival is more cultural
than simply genetic. Such an emphasis stems not only from our higher cognitive
powers of self-consciousness or self-awareness, but also from our conscious
celebration of this fact: the image we create for ourselves of
humanity, which is produced by via language, collective memory
and historical narrative. The notion of the human involves an
identification of our species with particular characteristics with and
upon which we ascribe certain notions of value. Amongst others such
characteristics and values might be seen to include: the notion of an
inherent human dignity, the virtue of ethical behaviour, the
capacities of creative and aesthetic thought, and for some, the
notion of an eternal soul. Humans are conscious of themselves as
humans and value the characteristics that make us distinctly
human. When many, like Hawing, typically think of the notion of the survival of the human race,
it is perhaps this cultural-cognitive aspect of homo sapiens, made
possible and produced by human self-consciousness, which they are
thinking of. If one is to make the normative argument that the human race should survive, then one needs to argue it is
these cultural-cognitive aspects of humanity, and not merely a portion of our genes, that is worth saving. However, it remains an
open question as to what cultural-cognitive aspect of humanity would survive in the future when placed under radical environmental
and evolutionary pressures. We can consider that perhaps the fish people, having the capacity for self-awareness, would consider
themselves as the continuation or next step of humanity. Yet, who is to say that a leap in the process of evolution would not
prompt a change in self awareness, a different form of abstract reasoning about the species, a different self-narrative, in which case
the descendents of humans would look upon their biological and genetic ancestors in a similar manner to the way humans look upon
the apes today. Conceivably the fish people might even forget or suppress their evolutionary human heritage. While such a future
cannot be predicted, it also cannot be controlled from our graves. In something of a sense similar to the point made by Giorgio
the question of survival

can be thought to involve a distinction between the good life and bare life . In this
instance, arguments in favour of human survival rest upon a certain belief in
a distinctly human good life, as opposed to bare biological life , the life of
Agamben (1998), revising ideas found within the writings of Michel Foucault and Aristotle,
the gene pool. It is thus such a good life, or at least a form of life
considered to be of value, that is held up by a particular species to be
worth saving. When considering the hypothetical example of the fish people, what cultural-cognitive aspect of
humanitys good life would survive? The conditions of life under water, which presumably for the first thousand years would be quite
harsh, would perhaps make the task of bare survival rather than the continuation of any higher aspects of a human heritage the
priority. Learning how to hunt and gather or farm underwater, learning how to communicate, breed effectively and avoid getting
eaten by predators might displace the possibilities of listening to Mozart or Bach, or adhering to the Universal Declaration of Human
it
becomes highly questionable to what extent a human heritage
would survive and thus to what extent we might consider our
descendents to be human. In the case where what survives would
not be the cultural-cognitive aspects of a human heritage
considered a valuable or a good form of life, then, what really
survives is just life. Such a life may well hold a worth or value
altogether different to our various historical valuations and
calculations. While the example of the fish people might seem extreme, it presents a similar set of acute circumstances
Rights, or playing sport, or of even using written language or complex mathematics. Within such an extreme example
which would be faced within any adaptation to a new habitat whether on the earth or in outer space. Unless humans are saved by
radical developments in technology that allow a comfortable colonisation of other worlds, then genetic adaptation in the future
even if the promise of technology allows

humans to carry on their cultural-cognitive heritage within another
habitat, such survival is still perhaps problematic given the dark,
violent, cruel and brutal aspects of human life which we would
presumably carry with us into our colonisation of new worlds. Thinkers like
retains a reasonable degree of probability. However,
Hawking, who place their faith in technology, also place a great deal of faith in a particular view of a human heritage which they
When considering the question of survival, such thinkers

typically project a one-sided image of humanity into the future.
Such a view presents a picture of only the good aspects of humanity climbing
aboard a space-craft and spreading out over the universe. This presumes that only the good
aspects of the human heritage would survive, elements such as
reason, creativity, playfulness, compassion, love, fortitude, hope.
What however happens to the bad aspects of the human heritage ,
the drives, motivations and thoughts that led to the Holocaust for
example?
think is worth saving.
All of these survival claims are not neutral but rather already
presume the annihilation of the nonhuman as the raw
material for preserving human survival. This hidden
foundation of species war has also perpetuated patriarchy,
colonialism, and genocide
Kochi 09, species war: law, violence, and animals, 353-359
The natural law theories of Hugo Grotius23 and Thomas Hobbes24 are often viewed as laying down the theoretical justifications for
the modern secular state, the legitimacy of sovereign violence, and the Westphalian international order. Within the context of bloody
intra-state civil wars such as the Thirty Years War (161848) and moments of domestic chaos such as the English Civil War (1642
51) thinkers such as Grotius and Hobbes reacted to widespread social violence often motivated by actors party to differing Christian
Grotius and Hobbes, albeit in different

responded by producing a de-sacralized natural law that was grounded not upon theological
conceptions of right and justice but upon more earthly, secular, concepts of the preservation of human
life and survival. For these thinkers the chaos of civil war and intra-state civil war could
be nullified if the criteria of what counted as legitimate violence were determined by
an institution that guaranteed peace and security .25 Roughly, Grotius and Hobbes attempted to
theoretically re-order territory and space around the figure of sovereignty and inter-sovereign relations. The legitimacy of
human violence is no longer grounded upon a universal conception of divine authority but is instead located
around the figure and office of the sovereign who maintains peace and security over a particular, limited
territory.26 Such an approach to the chaos of civil war can be termed the juridical ordering of the
concept of war. This de-legitimisation of the right to private violence in the name of peace creates what Max Weber later
confessions all claiming adherence to a universal religious, moral or political truth.
ways,
describes as the states monopoly upon the legitimacy of violence.27 Modern war, juridically ordered, takes on the definition of a
By this definition violence carried out

by the state against a non-sovereign group is excluded from the language of war
proper as is private violence (including rebellion, sabotage and terrorism) which is defined as crime. Grotius and
form of violence waged between sovereigns, who hold a particular status.
Hobbes are sometimes described as setting out a prudential approach,28 or a natural law of minimal content29 because in contrast
to Aristotelian or Thomastic legal and political theory their attempt to derive the legitimacy of the state and sovereign order relies
less upon a thick conception of the good life and is more focussed upon basic human needs such as survival. In the context of a
response to religious civil war such an approach made sense in that often thick moral and religious conceptions of the good life (for
example, those held by competing Christian Confessions) often drove conflict and violence. Yet ,
it would be a mistake
to assume that the categories of survival, preservation of life and bare life are neutral
categories. Rather survival, preservation of life and bare life as expressed by the Westphalian theoretical tradition
already contain distinctions of value in particular, the specific distinction of value
between human and non-human life. Bare life in this sense is not bare but contains within it a distinction of
value between the worth of human life placed above and beyond the worth of non-human animal life. In this respect bare life within
The foundational moment of the modern

juridical conception of the law of war already contains within it the operation of
species war. The Westphalian tradition puts itself forward as grounding the legitimacy of violence upon the preservation of
this tradition contains within it a hidden conception of the good life.
life, however its concern for life is already marked by a hierarchy of value in which non-human animal life is violently used as the
raw material for preserving human life. Grounded upon, but concealing the human-animal distinction, the Westphalian
conception of war makes a double move: it excludes the killing of animals from its
definition of war proper, and, through rendering dominant the modern juridical definition of war proper the
tradition is able to further institutionalize and normalize a particular conception of the good
life. Following from this original distinction of life-value realized through the juridical language of war were other forms of human
life whose lives were considered to be of a lesser value under a European, Christian, secular30 natural law conception of the good
life. Underneath this concern with the preservation of life in general stood veiled preferences over what particular forms of life (such
The business
contracts of early capitalism,31 the power of white males over women and children, and,
as racial conceptions of human life) and ways of living were worthy of preservation, realization and elevation.
especially in the colonial context, the sanctity of European life over non-European and Christian lives over non-Christian heathens
were some of the dominant forms of life preferred for preservation within the
Modern international humanitarian law both inherits
aspects of the Westphalian system and moves beyond it . While international humanitarian or
human rights law still relies upon the sovereignty of nation-states and accepts to a limited degree the states right to go to
war and its internal monopoly upon the legitimacy of violence, each of these forms of right are re-shaped and
limited in accordance with a higher standard of legit imacy located around the
ideals of international peace and the cosmopolitan concept of humanity. By attempting
and Muslims,
early modern juridical ordering of war.
to place human rights as a category that stands above or at least challenges the traditional rights of the state, international
humanitarian law morally orders war and sets out a cosmopolitan and global conception of the good life. While the category of
peace is held onto, survival is displaced by human rights as the central category for deriving the legitimacy of the international
order and the legitimacy of war. Of course, the category of survival is not erased completely as the human-animal distinction of
species war continues to operate at a subterranean level. One of the first thinkers to sketch out the theoretical justifications for such
a re-ordering of inter-state relations and the legitimacy of global violence was Immanuel Kant.32 In proposing a universal moral
theory which attempted to equally value all members of humanity, Kant rejected the way in which previous Western intellectual
traditions had legitimated particular forms of violence and killing by valuing the lives of Europeans over non-Europeans. Further,
Kant challenged the over-valuation of the life of the state against the lives of humans in general. In re-thinking the relation
between war and law Kant enunciated a form of sovereignty located around the idea of humanity. On the basis of this higher and
universal right of humanity Kants approach demanded that state action be guided by moral reasoning and moral duty and in this
respect Kant asked that the juridical persona of states adopt a distinctly moral persona states are conceptualized and expected to
act as if they are moral persons.33 One common critique of the Kantian, cosmopolitan approach to the law of war and of
international humanitarian law is put forth by Carl Schmitt. For Schmitt, the use of concepts such as peace and humanity to
justify war hides less altruistic motivations. Behind a grand language of peace and humanity reside the political motivations of
assisting friends and destroying enemies and the pursuit of political and economic interests.34 In contemporary times the abuse of
the language of peace, humanity and human rights by states who wish to legitimate their aggressive acts of war has become
While humanity in general is invoked to justify war, only particular

humans within particular territorial states (and particular groups within these) benefit from these
aggressive acts. As such, one can discern within the use of the term humanity distinctions with regard to the relative
widespread.35
values of differing human lives. By viewing the notion of humanitarian war as neither politically nor economically neutral one can
see evidence of the way in which a practice of making determinations about life-value are inherited by international humanitarian
law from its Westphalian predecessor. The law of war under international humanitarian law inherits the foundational human-animal
distinction of life-value from the Westphalian tradition. While international humanitarian law makes more open claims about the
This
foundation may be seen to re-assert itself in the ways in which the category of
humanity is so easily manipulated by warring actors to realize the desires of
particular humans against others. The cosmopolitan or international humanitarian law approach to war does,
nature of the good life being focussed upon the human it also re-instates the foundational moment of species war.
however, open-up a possible mode of introducing species war back into the modern legal definition of war. Kants move of extending
the concept of war from states rights to include universal human rights could again be extended to include non-human animal
rights. For example, one could envision the possibility of the crime of genocide under international law being extended to cover the
genocide of non-human animals and following this, the United Nations intervention by force to protect the lives of non-human
animals who would otherwise not be protected by domestic courts under the crime of murder.36 The opportunity for a cosmopolitan
extension of moral standing to nonhuman animals so as to bring non-human animals into the legal concept of war may, however,
turn out to be missed because of recent events in history. A contemporary tendency towards the re-sacralization of war may see the
Enlightenment movement of human rights, and their possible extension towards non-human animal rights, be displaced. This
displacement may occur because of the reassertion of hierarchies of cosmic life-value prescribed by particular fundamentalist
Jewish, Christian and Muslim world views which similarly presuppose species war. The possibility of such a historical turn can be
viewed more clearly by considering the relation between the moral ordering of war and religious war. To the extent that the act of
war might be used to defend humanity, human rights or to secure peace, the moral ordering of war can be seen to draw upon older
religious, Christian traditions of just war thinking in which a universal moral or religious truth justifies and legitimates acts of
violence.37 In some respects the moral ordering of war opens up a re-sacralized realm of war located around transcendent concepts
such as justice, humanity, and freedom. These are drawn upon by both genuine moral believers and by manipulative political
actors who use a moral language as a propaganda or rhetorical device to legitimate violence driven by other interests. In what can
be termed post-secular war the moral ordering of war marks a renewal of pre-Westphalian religious wars but undertaken in a new
form. Within this movement the Westphalian form of ordering the legitimacy of violence around secular state sovereignty is reshaped. What grounds legitimate violence is no longer control over particular territory but a claim to an adherence to principles
governing a non-terrestrial conceptual realm. This is not to say that the Westphalian ordering of the state is completely done away
with, but that it loses its monopoly upon the ordering of legitimate violence cases trump a states right to mastery over its own
territory and in others are mobilized by states to pursue moral, religious, economic and other interests. While thinkers such as Carl
Schmitt had seen the re-emergence of religious war within the moral and humanitarian claims of twentieth century international law,
the contemporary re-sacralization of war has been taken a step further by the language and motivations of the so-called war on
terror. In many ways competing actors within the climate of contemporary post-secular war no longer hide behind the language
and concepts of secular cosmopolitan morality but now more openly justify the asserted legitimacy of their acts of war with
reference to religious faith, divine law and the word of God.38 This breakdown of the Westphalian order is driven further by the
renewal of partisan, guerrilla, or non-sovereign warfare39 carried out by groups who justify their violence with reference to
transcendent religious concepts. Precisely what this might mean for the future of secular and humanitarian international law is
the humanism of twentieth century international law and its

attempts to ground the legitimacy of violence upon human rights might, in the not
too distant future, be displaced by a more dominant conceptual language that
places humanity again as secondary to God a clash of messianisms between
Jewish, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists. Such a movement involving the re-assertion of religious,
unclear. It is possible that
cosmic hierarchies of life-value pushes species war further out of mainstream conceptions of what constitutes the laws of war.
Viewed from the perspective of species war, the breakdown of the Westphalian international order and the re-sacralization of war via
an emerging clash of messianisms does not really usher-in anything new. The Westphalian conception of war, international human
rights law and the cosmic hierarchies of life-value invoked by Jewish, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists all share a conception of
the good that contains at its heart the everyday slaughter of non-human animals. From the perspective of species war, all of these
conceptions, regardless of whether they are secular, humanist, liberal or religious, are fundamentalist, in that they rigidly and
uncompromisingly hold onto a world-view that promotes the killing of non-human animals.
Sustainability
Sustainable development destroys natureit relies on the
belief that everything was put here so that humans could use
it.
Worster 93, (Donald, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at
the University of Kansas. The Shaky ground of Sustainability, in Deep Ecology
for the 21st Century, ed. George Sessions, p. 424-425)
I find the following deep flaws in the sustainable development ideal: First, it is based
on the view that the natural world exists primarily to serve the material demands of
the human species. Nature is nothing more than a pool of "resources" to be
exploited; it has no intrinsic meaning or value apart from the goods and services it furnishes people, rich or poor. The
Brundtland Report ,makes., this point clear on every Page: the "our" in its title refers to people. exclusively, and the only
moral issue it raises is the need to share what natural resources there are more
equitably among our kind, among the present world population and among the
generations to come. That is not by any means an unworthy goal, but it is not adequate to the challenge. Second,
sustainable development, though it acknowledges some kind of limit on those
material demands, depends on the assumption that we can easily determine the
carrying capacity of local regional ecosystems. Our knowledge is supposedly
adequate to reveal the limits of nature and to exploit resources safely up to that
level. In the face of new arguments suggesting how turbulent, complex, and
unpredictable nature really is, that assumption seems highly optimistic . Furthermore, in
light of the tendency of some leading ecologists to use such arguments to justify a more accommodating stance toward
development, any heavy reliance on their ecological expertise seems doubly dangerously they are experts who lack any agreement
Third, the sustainability ideal rests on an uncritical, unexamined

acceptance of the traditional worldview of progressive, secular materialism . It
regards that worldview as completely benign so long as it can be made sustainable .
on what the limits are.
The institutions associated with that worldview, including those of capitalism, socialism, and industrialism, also escape all criticism,
or close scrutiny. We are led to believe that sustainability can be achieved with all those institutions and their values intact.
Terrorism
Their fear of the decay of the Westphalian order of sovereign
states into the dissolution of a chaotic world of terrorism is a
nonunique impact from the perspective of the species war. All
of these perspectives require the systemic mass annihilation of
nonhuman organisms as a means of daily sustenance. If
anything, we need inner-species terrorism carried out on the
behalf of nonhumans.
culture, and the humanities, 353-359]
While thinkers such as Carl Schmitt had seen the re-emergence of religious war
within the moral and humanitarian claims of twentieth century international law,
the contemporary re-sacralization of war has been taken a step

further by the language and motivations of the so-called war on
terror. In many ways competing actors within the climate of contemporary postsecular war no longer hide behind the language and concepts of secular
cosmopolitan morality but now more openly justify the asserted legitimacy of
their acts of war with reference to religious faith, divine law and the word of God.38
This breakdown of the Westphalian order is driven further by the

renewal of partisan, guerrilla, or non-sovereign warfare39 carried
out by groups who justify their violence with reference to
transcendent religious concepts. Precisely what this might mean for the
future of secular and humanitarian international law is unclear. It is possible that
the humanism of twentieth century international law and its attempts to ground the
legitimacy of violence upon human rights might, in the not too distant future, be
displaced by a more dominant conceptual language that places humanity again
as secondary to God a clash of messianisms between Jewish, Christian and
Islamic fundamentalists. Such a movement involving the re-assertion of
religious, cosmic hierarchies of life-value pushes species war further

out of mainstream conceptions of what constitutes the laws of war.
Viewed from the perspective of species war, the breakdown of the
Westphalian international order and the re-sacralization of war via
an emerging clash of messianisms does not really usher-in anything
new. The Westphalian conception of war, international human rights law
and the cosmic hierarchies of life-value invoked by Jewish, Christian and
Islamic fundamentalists all share a conception of the good that
contains at its heart the everyday slaughter of non-human animals. From
the perspective of species war, all of these conceptions, regardless
of whether they are secular, humanist, liberal or religious, are

fundamentalist, in that they rigidly and uncompromisingly hold
onto a world-view that promotes the killing of non-human animals.
It is possible that in the future the fundamentalism of species war
may be challenged in ways that mirror a history of secular and
religious guerrilla and partisan wars waged against Western
colonialism and Western economic and cultural hegemony. The reemergence of non-state violence in the form of terrorism linked
with a contemporary trend towards perhaps a greater concern for
the environment, may lay the groundwork for a new global
battlefield. The eco-warriors of the present who have so far
generally relied upon non-violent forms of protest might transform
into eco-partisans and openly use violence to defend the lives of
animals. Under another just war banner such eco-partisans may
claim to bring an otherwise hidden species war back into the center
of the debate about the laws of war by carrying out acts of war
against humans on behalf of non-human animals.
War
The juridical war language of their impact claims mask the
species war at the foundation of the law of war. Their control
over the framing of what constitutes war enables all forms of
coercion, mass extermination, and cultural annihilation.
Kochi 09, species war: law, violence, and animals, 353-359
In everyday speech, in the words of the media, politicians, protestors, soldiers and dissidents, the language of
war is linked to and intimately bound up with the language of law . That a war might be said to
be legal or illegal, just or unjust , or that an act might be called war rather than terror or crime,
displays aspects of reference, connection, and constitution in which the social meaning of the concepts we use to talk about and
The manner in which specific terms (i.e. war, terror,

are defined and their meanings ordered has powerful and bloody
consequences for those who feel the force and brunt of these words in the realm of
human action. In this paper I argue that the juridical language of war contains a hidden foundation species war. That is, at
the foundation of the Law of war resides a species war carried out by humans
against non-human animals. At first glance such a claim may sound like it has little to do with law and war. In
understand war and law are organised in particular ways.
murder, slaughter, and genocide)
contemporary public debates the laws of war are typically understood as referring to the rules set out by the conventions and
customs that define the legality of a states right to go to war under international law. However, such a perspective is only a narrow
and limited view of what constitutes the Law of war and of the relationship between law and war more generally. Here the Law of
The Law of
war denotes a broader category that includes differing historical senses of positive law
as well as various ethical conceptions of justice, right and rights. This distinction is clearer in
the Law of war needs to be understood as involving something more than the limited sense of positive law.
German than it is in English whereby the term Recht denotes a broader ethical and juristic category than that of Gesetz which refers
more closely to positive or black letter laws.1 To focus upon the broader category of the Law of war is to put specific (positive law)
The Law of war contains at its heart

arguments about and mechanisms for determining what constitutes legitimate
violence. The question of what constitutes legitimate violence lies at the centre of the relationship between war and law, and,
formulations of the laws of war into a historical, conceptual context.
the specific historical laws of war are merely different juridical ways of setting-out (positing) a particular answer to this question. In
this respect the Law of war (and thus its particular laws of war) involves a practice of normative thinking and rule making concerned
with determining answers to such questions as: what types of coercion, violence and killing may be included within the definition of
war, who may legitimately use coercion, violence and killing, and for what reasons, under what circumstances and to what extent
may particular actors use coercion, violence and killing understood as war? When we consider the relationship between war and law
in this broader sense then it is not unreasonable to entertain the suggestion that at the foundation of the Law of war resides species
war. At present, the Law of war is dominated by two cultural-conceptual formulations or discourses. The Westphalian system of
interstate relations and the system of international human rights law are held to be modern foundations of the Law of war. In the
West, most peoples conceptions of what constitutes war and of what constitutes a legitimate act of war are shaped by these
two historical traditions. That is to say, these traditions have ordered how we understand the legitimate use of violence.2 These
discourses, however, have been heavily criticized. By building upon a particular line of criticism I develop my argument for the
foundational significance of species war. Two critiques of sovereignty and humanitarian law are of particular interest: Michel
Foucaults notion of race war and Carl Schmitts notion of friend and enemy. Foucault in Society Must Be Defended set out a
particular critique of the Westphalian juridical conception of state sovereignty and state power.3 Within the Westphalian juridical
conception, it is commonly argued that sovereign power and legitimacy are grounded upon the ability of an institution to bring an
Foucault claimed that war is never

brought to an end within the domestic sphere, rather, it continues and develops in
the form of race war. Connected to his account of bio-power, Foucault suggests a historical discourse of constant and
end to internal civil war and create a sphere of domestic peace. Against this
perpetual race war that underlies legal and political institutions within modernity.4 In The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt
offered a critique of the liberal conception of the state grounded upon the notion of the social contract and criticized legal and
political conceptions of the state in which legitimacy (and the legitimacy of war) was seen to be grounded upon the notion of
For Schmitt the juridical notion of the state (and international human rights law)
presupposes and continually re-instates through violence the distinction and
humanity.5
relation between friend and enemy. Schmitt claimed that the political emerges from the threatening and
warlike struggle between friends and enemies and that all political and legal institutions, and the decisions made therein, are built
upon and are guided by this distinction.6 In relation to the issue of war/law these two insights can be taken further. I think Foucaults
notion of race war can be developed by putting at its heart the differing historical and genealogical relationships between human
beyond race war what should be considered as a primary

category within legal and political theory is that of species war. Further, the
fundamental political distinction is not as Schmitt would have it, that of friends and
enemies, but rather, the violent conflict between human and non-human animals.
Race war is an extension of an earlier form of war, species war. The friend-enemy distinction is
and non-human animals. Thus,
an extension of a more primary distinction between human and non-human animals. In this respect, what can be seen to lay at the
foundation of the Law of war is not the Westphalian notion of civil peace, or the notion of human rights. Neither race war nor the
what sits at the foundation of the Law

of war is a discourse of species war that over time has become so naturalised within
Western legal and political theory that we have almost forgotten about it. Although species
friend-enemy distinction resides at the bottom of the Law of war. Rather,
war remains largely hidden because it is not seen as war or even violence at all it continues to affect the ways in which juridical
mechanisms order the legitimacy of violence. While species war may not be a Western monopoly, in this account I will only examine
a Western variant. This variant, however, is one that may well have been imposed upon the rest of the world through colonization
and globalization. In what will follow I offer a sketch of species war and show how the juridical mechanisms for determining what
constitutes legitimate violence fall back upon the hidden foundation of species war. I try to do this by showing that the various
modern juridical mechanisms for determining what counts as legitimate violence are dependent upon a practice of judging the value
of forms of life. I argue that contemporary claims about the legitimacy of war are based upon judgements about differential lifevalue and that these judgements are an extension of an original practice in which the legitimacy of killing is grounded upon the
valuation of the human above the non-human. Further, by giving an overview of the ways in which our understanding of the
legitimacy of war has changed, I attempt to show how the notion of species war has been continually excluded from the Law of war
and of how contemporary historical movements might open a space for its possible re-inclusion. In this sense, the argument I
develop here about species war offers a particular way of reflecting upon the nature of law more generally. In a Western juridical
tradition,
two functions of law are often thought to be: the establishment of order (in the
and, the realization of justice (a thick conception of the good).
Reflecting upon these in light of the notion of species war helps us to consider that at the heart of both of these
functions of law resides a practice of making judgements about the life-value of
particular objects. These objects are, amongst other things: human individuals, groups of humans, non-human animals,
plants, transcendent entities and ideas (the state, community, etc.). For the law, the practice of making
judgements about the relative lifevalue of objects is intimately bound-up with the
making of decisions about what objects can be killed. Within our Western conception of the law it is
context of the preservation of life, or survival);
difficult to separate the moment of judgement over life-value from the decision over what constitutes legitimate violence.
Species war sits within this blurred middle-ground between judgement and decision
it points to a moment at the heart of the law where distinctions of value and acts of violence operate as fundamental to the
founding or positing of law. The primary violence of species war then takes place not as something after the establishment of a
regime of law (i.e., after the establishment of the city, the state, or international law). Rather, the violence of species war occurs at
the beginning of law, at its moment of foundation, as a generator, as a motor.7In J.M. Coetzees The Lives of Animals 8 the
protagonist Elizabeth Costello draws a comparison between the everyday slaughter of non-human animals and the genocide of the
Jews of Europe during the twentieth century. In addressing you on the subject of animals, she continues, I will pay you the honour
of skipping a recital of the horrors of their lives and deaths. Though I have no reason to believe that you have at the forefront of your
minds what is being done to animals at this moment in production facilities (I hesitate to call them farms any longer), in abattoirs, in
trawlers, in laboratories, all over the world, I will take it that you concede me the rhetorical power to evoke these horrors and bring
them home to you with adequate force, and leave it at that, reminding you only that the horrors I here omit are nevertheless at the
center of this lecture.9 A little while later she states: Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation,
cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without
end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them. And to
split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but
death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life (once its victims are dead, after all, it does not burn them
to ash or bury them but on the contrary cuts them up and refrigerates and packs them so that they can be consumed in the comfort
of our own homes) is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been pardon the tastelessness of the following to ask
the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses
Yet, when most of us think about the term

war very seldom do we bother to think about non-human animals. The term war commonly
with.10 Similar comparisons have been made before.11
evokes images of states, armies, grand weapons, battle lines, tactical stand-offs, and maybe even sometimes guerrilla or partisan
Surely the keeping of cattle behind barbed wire fences and butchering them
in abattoirs does not count as war? Surely not? Why not? What can be seen to be at
stake within Elizabeth Costellos act of posing the modern project of highly efficient breeding and
violence.
factory slaughtering of non-human animals beside the Holocaust is a concern with

the way in which we order or arrange conceptually and socially the legitimacy of
violence and killing. In a Western philosophical tradition stretching at least from Augustine and Aquinas, through to
Descartes and Kant, the ordering of the relationship between violence and legitimacy is such that, predominantly, non-human
animals are considered to be without souls, without reason and without a value that is typically ascribed to humans. For example,
for Augustine, animals, together with plants, are exempted from the religious injunction Thou shalt not kill. When considering the
question of what forms of killing and violence are legitimate, Augustine placed the killing of non-human animals well inside the
framework of religious and moral legitimacy.12
LinksCritical
AT: Link of Omission

Their ignorance of violence against animals ensures that
anthropocentric violence inevitable. Omission IS commission.
Bell 2k, York University department of education, and Russell, Lakehead
University associate professor, 2k (Anne C. and Constance L., department of
education, York University, Canada, and Canadian Journal of Environmental
Education, Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy,
and the Poststructuralist Turn, CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 25, 3
(2000):188203, http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3bell.pdf, p. 192)
Of primary concern and

are relationships among humans and the more-than-human world
(Abram, 1996), the ways in which those relationships are constituted and prescribed
in modern industrial society, and the implications and consequences of those
constructs. As a number of scholars and nature advocates have argued, the many manifestations of the
current environmental crisis (e.g., species extinction, toxic contamination, ozone
depletion, topsoil depletion, climate change, acid rain, deforestation) reflect
predominant Western concepts of nature, nature cast as mindless matter, a mere
resource to be exploited for human gain (Berman, 1981; Evernden, 1985; Merchant, 1980). An ability
to respond adequately to the situation therefore rests, at least in part, on a willingness to critique
prevailing discourses about nature and to consider alternative representations (Cronon,
We come to critical pedagogy with a background in environmental thought and education.
interest to us
1996; Evernden, 1992; Hayles, 1995). To this end, poststructuralist analysis has been and will continue to be invaluable.It would be
disrupting the social scripts that structure and legitimize the human domination of
nonhuman nature is fundamental not only to dealing with environmental issues, but
also to examining and challenging oppressive social arrangements. The exploitation
of nature is not separate from the exploitation of human groups . Ecofeminists and
activists for environmental justice have shown that forms of domination are often
intimately connected and mutually reinforcing (Bullard, 1993; Gaard, 1997; Lahar, 1993; Sturgeon, 1997).
Thus, if critical educators wish to resist various oppressions, part of their project must
entail calling into question, among other things, the instrumental exploitive gaze through
which we humans distance ourselves from the rest of nature (Carlson, 1995).For this reason, the
various movements against oppression need to be aware of and supportive of each
other. In critical pedagogy, however, the exploration of questions of race, gender,
class, and sexuality has proceeded so far with little acknowledgement of the
systemic links between human oppressions and the domination of nature . The morethan-human world and human relationships to it have been ignored, as if the
suffering and exploitation of other beings and the global ecological crisis were
somehow irrelevant. Despite the call for attention to voices historically absent from traditional canons and narratives
(Sadovnik, 1995, p. 316), nonhuman beings are shrouded in silence . This silence characterizes even the
an all-too-common mistake to construe the task at hand as one of interest only to environmentalists. We believe, rather, that
work of writers who call for a rethinking of all culturally positioned essentialisms.Like other educators influenced by
poststructuralism, we agree that there is a need to scrutinize the language we use, the meanings we deploy, and the
epistemological frameworks of past eras (Luke & Luke, 1995, p. 378).
To treat social categories as stable and
unchanging is to reproduce the prevailing relations of power (Britzman et al., 1991, p. 89). What
would it mean, then, for critical pedagogy to extend this investigation and critique to include taken-for-granted understandings of
human, animal, and nature?This question is difficult to raise precisely because these understandings are taken for granted.
The anthropocentric bias in critical pedagogy manifests itself in silence and in the
asides of texts. Since it is not a topic of discussion, it can be difficult to situate a critique of it. Following feminist analyses,
we find that examples of anthropocentrism , like examples of gender symbolization, occur in those
places where speakers reveal the assumptions they think they do not need to
defend, beliefs they expect to share with their audiences (Harding, 1986, p. 112).Take, for
example, Freires (1990) statements about the differences between Man and animals. To set up his discussion of praxis and the
importance of naming the world, he outlines what he assumes to be shared, commonsensical beliefs about humans and other
animals. He defines the boundaries of human membership according to a sharp, hierarchical dichotomy that establishes human
superiority. Humans alone, he reminds us, are aware and self-conscious beings who can act to fulfill the objectives they set for
themselves. Humans alone are able to infuse the world with their creative presence, to overcome situations that limit them, and
thus to demonstrate a decisive attitude towards the world (p. 90).Freire (1990, pp. 8791) represents other animals in terms of
their lack of such traits. They are doomed to passively accept the given, their lives totally determined because their decisions
belong not to themselves but to their species. Thus whereas humans inhabit a world which they create and transform and from
which they can separate themselves, for animals there is only habitat, a mere physical space to which they are organically
bound.To accept Freires assumptions is to believe that humans are animals only in a nominal sense. We are different not in degree
but in kind, and though we might recognize that other animals have distinct qualities, we as humans are somehow more unique. We
have the edge over other creatures because we are able to rise above monotonous, species-determined biological existence.
Humans are thus cast as active

agents whose very essence is to transform the world as if somehow acceptance,
appreciation, wonder, and reverence were beyond the pale .This discursive frame of
reference is characteristic of critical pedagogy. The human/animal opposition upon
which it rests is taken for granted, its cultural and historical specificity not
acknowledged. And therein lies the problem. Like other social constructions, this one derives its
persuasiveness from its seeming facticity and from the deep investments
individuals and communities have in setting themselves off from others (Britzman et al.,
1991, p. 91). This becomes the normal way of seeing the world, and like other discourses
of normalcy, it limits possibilities of taking up and confronting inequities (see Britzman,
1995). The primacy of the human enterprise is simply not questioned.Precisely how
an anthropocentric pedagogy might exacerbate the environmental crisis has not
received much consideration in the literature of critical pedagogy , especially in North America.
Although there may be passing reference to planetary destruction, there is seldom
mention of the relationship between education and the domination of nature, let
alone any sustained exploration of the links between the domination of nature and
other social injustices. Concerns about the nonhuman are relegated to
environmental education. And since environmental education, in turn, remains
peripheral to the core curriculum (A. Gough, 1997; Russell, Bell, & Fawcett, 2000), anthropocentrism
passes unchallenged.1p. 190-192
Change in the service of human freedom is seen to be our primary agenda.
Agamben
Agamben is anthropocentric- his foundational structures of
thought are all determined by the concept of the human.
Calarco 2k (Matthew Calarco, On the borders of language and death: Agamben
on the question of the animal, Philosophy Today, Vol. 44, p. 91) JB
Even where Agamben ventures a figure beyond the refugee in order to rethink
community (such as "whatever singularity" in The Coming Community or the "sacred person" in Homo Sacer), these
"concepts" remain analogous in form to the refugee. Whatever singularities, sacred
persons, and refugees all find their being in im-propriety, in ex-propriation, in a form
of existence that is irreducible to bios and the State. What is troubling about these
figures as they function in Agamben's discourse is that they are all to a certain
extent limited to human beings alone. While we do not mean to imply here that Agamben relies on a humanist
subject to ground his politics, we do want to suggest that his rethinking of the ground of the coming
community remains anthropocentric. And it is this anthropocentric limit to which we
are responding in forming our question .
Agency
The 1acs attempt to activate their agency in the space of the
debate mimics the anthropocentric subjectivity of the squo
Guardiola-Rivera, 2k2
(Oscar, professor at the Universidad Javeriana's Instituto Pensar in Bogot, In

State of Grace Ideology, Capitalism, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge, Nepantla: Views from South 3.1)
The position advanced in previous paragraphs is indebted to the critiques of the disembodied and foundationalist character of
predominant perspectives in modern political ontotheology. Chief among these perspectives is one I term manifest destiny
the idea that there is a world out there (Nature) devoid of any
significance, and that it is the cognitive destiny of man to provide that
world with meaning (the one story referred to by Peter Watson), thus giving rise to a better, enhanced, more
autonomous second nature. This view implies (1) that the world is ready-at-hand,
existing only insofar as it is fit for human instrumentalization and
consumption, and (2) that all knowledge (including knowledge about the
world) is self-knowledge. Both implications are untenable. As I have [End Page 21]
already suggested, this is mere anthropomorphism-cum-ontology . It entails a
conflation of knowledge and the known, at times associated with the radical constructivism and
nihilism:
culturalist stance of postmodernism. If manifest destiny nihilism is so untenable, why should Latin American scholars bother about
postmodernism? In short, because of postmodernity. As Michael Stanford (1998, 54) argues, the importance of postmodernism is
not that it is all true, but that some of it could become true if we do not take action to prevent it. What needs to be prevented in
postmodernity is the pervasiveness of manifest destiny nihilism as global biopolitics. Fueled by late capitalism's renewed
relationship with external and internal forms of extractive neocolonialism, this brand of nihilism pushes even further the ideology of
an anthropocentric conception of the world already present in the belief that human action is purposive. This kind of nihilism is
This is
accomplished by introducing the promise of a definitive autonomy of
human intellect with respect to nature (so dear to computer revolution discourse and late
justified as well by the supposed realization of a manifest destiny in the West (Fukuyama's end of history).
cyberpunk cinema) that is completely analogous to that of the final liberation of capitalist production from its dependence on labor
force (thus fulfilling mankind's destiny).
The politics of the 1ac perpetuates anthropocentric

oppression- their faith in the progressive nature of their
affirmative a priori excludes the non-human and leads to a
view of the individual that makes the exploitation of nature
inevitable
Bell and Russell 2K
(Anne C. by graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University and Constance L. a graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Educa- tion, University of Toronto,
Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,
http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3-bell.pdf [10/24/11])
a number of root metaphors or analogs in critical pedagogy that
reinforce the problem of anthropocentric thinking . These include the
notion of change as inherently progressive , faith in the power of rational thought, and an
understanding of individuals as potentially free, voluntaristic entities
who will take responsibility for creating themselves when freed from
Bowers (1993a, 1993b) has identified
societal forms of oppression (1993a, pp. 2526). Such assumptions, argues Bowers, are
part of the Enlightenment legacy on which critical pedagogy, and indeed liberal education generally, is
based. In other words, they are culturally specific and stem from a period in Western
history when the modern industrial world view was beginning to take
shape. To be fair, Bowers understates the extent to which these assumptions are being questioned within critical pedagogy
(e.g., Giroux, 1995; Peters, 1995; Shapiro, 1994; Weiler & Mitchell, 1992, pp. 1, 5). Nevertheless, his main point is well taken:
proponents of critical pedagogy have yet to confront the ecological

consequences of an educational process that reinforces beliefs and
practices formed when unlimited economic expansion and social progress
seemed promised (Bowers, 1993b, p. 3). What happens when the expansion of human possibilities is equated with the
possibilities of consumption? How is educating for freedom predicated on the
exploitation of the nonhuman? Such queries push against taken-for-granted understandings of human,
nature, self, and community, and thus bring into focus the underlying tension between freedom as it is constituted within critical
This
tension is symptomatic of anthropocentrism. Humans are assumed to be
free agents separate from and pitted against the rest of nature, our fulfillment predicated on overcoming material
constraints. This assumption of human difference and superiority, central to Western thought since Aristotle (Abram,
1996, p. 77), has long been used to justify the exploitation of nature by and for
humankind (Evernden, 1992, p. 96). It has also been used to justify the exploitation
of human groups (e.g., women, Blacks, queers, indigenous peoples) deemed to be closer to
nature that is, animalistic, irrational, savage, or uncivilized (Gaard, 1997; Haraway, 1989, p. 30; Selby, 1995, pp. 1720;
Spiegel, 1988). This organic apartheid (Evernden, 1992, p. 119) is bolstered by the belief
that language is an exclusively human property that elevates mere
biological existence to meaningful, social existence . Understood in this way, language
pedagogy and the limits that emerge through consideration of humans interdependence with the more-than-human world.
undermines our embodied sense of interdependence with a more-than-human world. Rather than being a point of entry into the
language becomes a medium through which we set

ourselves apart and above . This view of language is deeply embedded in
the conceptual framework of critical pedagogy, including poststructuralist approaches. So
too is the human/nature dichotomy upon which it rests. When writers assume
that it is language that enables us to think, speak and give meaning to
the world around us, that meaning and consciousness do not exist
outside language (Weedon, 1987, p. 32) and that subjectivity is constructed by
and in language (Luke & Luke, 1995, p. 378), then their transformative projects are
encoded so as to exclude any consideration of the nonhuman . Such
assumptions effectively remove all subjects from nature. As Evernden (1992) puts it, if
webs of communication all around us,
subjectivity, willing, valuation, and meaning are securely lodged in the domain of humanity, the possibility of encountering anything
What is forgotten? What is erased when the real is

equated with a proliferating culture of commodified signs (see Luke & Luke, 1995, on Baudrillard)? To begin, we forget
that we humans are surrounded by an astonishing diversity of life forms . We
no longer perceive or give expression to a world in which everything has intelligence, personality, and voice. Polyphonous
echoes are reduced to homophony, a term Kane (1994) uses to denote the reduced sound of human
language when it is used under the assumption that speech is something belonging only to human beings (p. 192). We
forget too what Abram (1996) describes as the gestural, somatic dimension of language,
its sensory and physical resonance that we share with all expressive
bodies (p. 80). The vast forgetting to which these scholars allude is a
culturally and historically specific phenomenon. In Western culture, explains Evernden (1992), it
more than material objects in nature is nil (p. 108).
is to the Renaissance that we owe the modern conceptualization of nature from which all human qualities, including linguistic
expression, have been segregated and dismissed as projection. Once scoured of any normative content assigned to humanity,
nature is strictly constrained, knowable, and ours to interrogate (pp. 28, 3940, 48). It is objectified as a thing, whereas any status
as agent or social being is reserved for humans (Haraway, 1988, p. 592). The language best suited to this cleansing of nature is that
of the natural sciences. Scientific accounts, written in languageexclusively descriptive and avowedly neutral (Evernden, 1992, p.
85), are widely regarded as factual and unbiased and thus are granted a privileged role in naming nature. As Haraway (1986)
explains: A scientist names nature in written, public documents, which are endowed with the special, institutionally enforced
quality of being perceived as objective and applicable beyond the cultures of the people who wrote those documents. (p. 79)
According to Haraway (1986), the aesthetic of realism that underlies the truth claims of the natural sciences means many
practitioners tend to see themselves not as interpreters but as discoverers moving from description to causal explanation (p. 89).
Haraways analysis reminds us that poststructuralism can and should be used to call into question the universal legitimacy of
science insofar as it is used to explicate not only the human domain but also the natural sciences. This questioning almost never
takes place. Whereas accusations of reductionism have been levelled at the biobehavioural sciences when focused on humans (e.g.,
explaining behaviour solely in genetic terms), rarely are these accusations made against similar studies on nonhumans (Noske,
1997, p. 83). The reason, presumably, is that the sorts of questions that could be raised about how culture, class, race, and gender
shape knowledge about human experience do not pertain to truth claims about the nonhuman. Humans alone are understood to
have histories open to interpretation. Everything else is matter for measurement and prediction, physical stuff that can be described
To move beyond such taken-for-granted notions of

human and nature, Evernden and Haraway suggest, we must admit into the conversation
some non-common-sensical insights and some unsettling possibilities
(Evernden, 1992, p. 102 and Haraway, 1988, p. 593, respectively). Haraway (1992) writes of otherworldly
conversations, a metaphor helpful in pointing to the possibility of
conversants in a discourse in which all of the actors are not us (p. 84). To this
end, we consider a few promising reconceptualizations of what might
constitute language, agency, and meaningful existence beyond the human
realm.
and classified once and for all.
The affirmative imbues the space of the debate with a human

centered form of subjectivity that replicates the
anthropocentric order
Bell and Russell 2K
(Anne C. by graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University and Constance L. a graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Educa- tion, University of Toronto,
Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,
theories have provided a discursive framework through which to
critique and contest many of the key tenets of humanism. In drawing attention to the
cultural and historical specificity of all human knowledge, they have been used to
disrupt assumptions about objectivity, the unified subject, and the universality of human experience, and thereby to
expose the classist, racist, sexist, and heterosexist underpinnings of
Western humanist thought. For this reason poststructuralism offers promising theoretical perspectives for
Poststructuralist
educators who wish to challenge cultural representations and structures that give rise to inequities. Although we acknowledge the
important contribution of poststructuralism to analyses of oppression, privilege, and power in education, we believe that
educators must continue to probe its limitations and implications . Accordingly,

we consider here how poststructuralism, as it is taken up within critical pedagogy, tends to reinforce
rather than subvert deepseated humanist assumptions about humans and
nature by taking for granted the borders (as in Giroux, 1991) that define nature
as the devalued Other. We ask what meanings and voices have been preempted by the virtually exclusive focus on humans and human language in
a humancentred epistemological framework . At the same time, we discuss how
relationships between language, communication, and meaningful
experience are being conceptualized outside the field of critical pedagogy
(in some cases from a poststructuralist perspective) to call into question these very assumptions .
Although we concentrate primarily on societal narratives that shape understandings of human and nature, we also touch on two
the forgetting of nonverbal, somatic experience and the

misplaced presumption of human superiority based on linguistic
capabilities. In so doing, our intention is to deal constructively with some of the
anthropocentric blind spots within critical pedagogy generally and within
poststructuralist approaches to critical pedagogy in particular. We hope to
illuminate places where these streams of thought and practice move in
directions compatible with our own aspirations as educators.
related issues of language:
Anti-Colonialism
Anti-colonial resistance over determines the human leading to
the perpetuation of anthropocentrism
DeLoughrey, 2k7
(Elizabeth, Cornell university, QUANTUM LANDSCAPES A Ventriloquism of Spirit
http://www.english.ucla.edu/documents/DeLoughreyQuantumLandscapesMelvilleFin
al2007.pdf [10/24/11])
Postcolonial theory has arrived belatedly to the scene of ecocritical studies, even as the latter field has
generally neglected the historical process of colonization and the body of scholarship
that has emerged in its wake. A focus on the temporal and spatial contingencies of
power would seem to facilitate an environmental framework for
postcolonial studies, but the nexus of space-time has generally been
defined in social rather than ecological terms. Understandably, postcolonial
scholarship has been more concerned with an anthropocentric recovery of
a subaltern subject that is metonymically linked to land than with
examining a wider biotic community through what Wilson Harris calls the quantum imagination.1 With
a few exceptions, the process that Alfred Crosby (1986) terms ecological imperialism has not been
brought into a productive relation with the ways in which Caribbean writers have inscribed an
environment that exceeds the bounds of human knowledge.2 Here I negotiate these gaps by turning to Pauline Melvilles Guyanese
novel, The Ventriloquists Tale (1997), engaging postcolonial ecocriticism through an interdisciplinary prism that includes colonial
natural sciences and structuralist anthropology, as well as relativity and quantum theory. Turning to recent developments in physics
not only serves to mend the postRenaissance split between art and science, as Melville and Harris have argued, but also expands
our phenomenologies of the natural world, pressing against the realist boundaries of ecocritical studies. Melvilles ventriloquism of
the spirit of the Guyanese interior eschews the Euclidean geometries of colonialism by embracing Einsteins unity of space-time
and the transformative powers of cosmological radiation. While the novel inscribes epistemological uncertainties through the lens of
quantum theory, it also tests the boundaries of both classical and quantum physics through the trickster element of nature,
symbolized in the shape-shifting ventriloquism of Melvilles deity-narrator, Macunama. How might we define postcolonial
ecocriticism, and how does it contribute to our understanding of empire and its consequences? Postcolonial ecocriticism is
necessarily interdisciplinary, an emergent field committed to exploring the biotic contours of empire and its discursive inscriptions,
drawing from fields as diverse as history and anthropology, the natural sciences and theoretical physics. It recognizes the
importance of what Crosby (1986) has called the portmanteau biota of European expansion, considering how the exchange of
diseases, pathogens, crops and seeds helped to constitute the diverse experiences of colonial contact. Yet, unlike Crosbys work, it
Postcolonial
ecocriticism helps destabilize the universalist conceit of the AngloEuropean human subject by examining the ways in which this
anthropocentricity is constituted by a limited conception of the natural
universe. One of the fields most important contributions is to foreground
the human bias of historical narrative itself. Its most profound challenge is
to provide an alternative rendering of natural history through an
environmental ventriloquism that circumvents the material and
anthropocentric bias of colonialism.
does not position (male) Europeans and their biotic companions as the determining agents of history.
Butler
Butlers work rests on Levinass conception of the face of the
Other
Gillingham 2K7 (Review of Precarious life http://subrationedei.com/?p=458
DipHe - Biblical and Theological Studies, (2001) - Merit. Awarded by Manchester University
through Regents Theological College. BTh (Hons) - Theology, (2002), First. Awarded by
Liverpool University but studied at University College, Chester. MA - Religion, Politics, and
International Relations, (2004), Distinction. Awarded by the University of Wales, Lampeter.)
Butler appropriates Levinas idea of the Face of the Other (which I confess I did not
entirely follow) to introduce a very interesting discussion, reminiscent of her previous point on the politics of the
obituary, on the media control of images of enemy dead and suffering to
project a sanitised vision of war and a dehumanised picture of the Other. It is
this rhetorical control of who is human and the manufactured representation
of the Other which is perhaps the central theme of Precarious Life. Whilst there are
Finally,
occasions when her argument is difficult to follow (which incidentally is not surprising for a previous winner of the Bad Writing
Contest). Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and challenging book. If you take nothing else from this book Butler clearly
shows that the art of propaganda is most certainly not dead.
Changing Debate
The 1ac failure to attend to our relationship as debaters,
judges and coaches beyond the human sphere makes them a
part of an educational practice that sustains anthropocentric
ordering of world despite the empowerment offered by the
affirmative
Bell and Russell 2K (Anne C. by graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental
Studies, York Universi- ty and Constance L. a graduate student at the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Educa- tion, University of Toronto, Beyond Human, Beyond
Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,
queries in critical pedagogy have been limited by their

neglect of the ecological contexts of which students are a part and of
relationships extending beyond the human sphere . The gravity of this oversight is brought
So far, however, such
sharply into focus by writers interested in environmental thought, particularly in the cultural and historical dimensions of the
our inability to acknowledge our

human embeddedness in nature results in our failure to understand what
sustains us. We become inattentive to our very real dependence on others
and to the ways our actions affect them. Educators, therefore, would do well to
draw on the literature of environmental thought in order to come to grips
with the misguided sense of independence, premised on freedom from
nature, that informs such notions as empowerment. Further, calls for
educational practices situated in the life-worlds of students go hand in
hand with critiques of disembodied approaches to education . In both cases, critical
environmental crisis. For example, Nelson (1993) contends that
pedagogy challenges the liberal notion of education whose sole aim is the development of the individual, rational mind (Giroux,
1991, p. 24; McKenna, 1991, p. 121; Shapiro, 1994). Theorists draw attention to the importance of nonverbal discourse (e.g., Lewis
& Simon, 1986, p. 465) and to the somatic character of learning (e.g., Shapiro, 1994, p. 67), both overshadowed by the intellectual
authority long granted to rationality and science (Giroux, 1995; Peters, 1995; S. Taylor, 1991). Describing an emerging discourse of
the body that looks at how bodies are represented and inserted into the social order, S. Taylor (1991) cites as examples the work of
Peter McLaren, Michelle Fine, and Philip Corrigan. A complementary vein of enquiry is being pursued by environmental researchers
and educators critical of the privileging of science and abstract thinking in education. They understand learning to be mediated not
only through our minds but also through our bodies. Seeking to acknowledge and create space for sensual, emotional, tacit, and
communal knowledge, they advocate approaches to education grounded in, for example, nature experience and environmental
practice (Bell, 1997; Brody, 1997; Weston, 1996). Thus, whereas both critical pedagogy and environmental education offer a critique
of disembodied thought, one draws attention to the ways in which the body is situated in culture (Shapiro, 1994) and to the social
construction of bodies as they are constituted within discourses of race, class, gender, age and other forms of oppression (S. Taylor,
1991, p. 61). The other emphasizes and celebrates our embodied relatedness to the more-than-human world and to the myriad life
forms of which it is comprised (Payne, 1997; Russell & Bell, 1996). Given their different foci, each stream of enquiry stands to be
enriched by a sharing of insights. Finally, with regard to the poststructuralist turn in educational theory, ongoing investigations stand
to greatly enhance a revisioning of environmental education. A growing number of environmental educators question the empiricalanalytical tradition and its focus on technical and behavioural aspects of curriculum (A. Gough, 1997; Robottom, 1991). Advocating
more interpretive, critical approaches, these educators contest the discursive frameworks (e.g., positivism, empiricism, rationalism)
that mask the values, beliefs, and assumptions underlying information, and thus the cultural and political dimensions of the
problems being considered (A. Gough, 1997; Huckle, 1999; Lousley, 1999). Teaching about ecological processes and environmental
hazards in a supposedly objective and rational manner is understood to belie the fact that knowledge is socially constructed and
therefore partial (A. Gough, 1997; Robertson, 1994; Robottom, 1991; Stevenson, 1993). N. Gough (1999) explicitly goes beyond
critical approaches to advocate poststructuralist positions in environmental education. He asks science and environmental educators
to adopt skepticism towards metanarratives, an attitude that characterizes poststructuralist discourses. Working from the
assumption that science and environmental education are story-telling practices, he suggests that the adequacy of narrative
strategies be examined in terms of how they represent and render problematic human transactions with the phenomenal world (N.
Gough, 1993, p. 607). Narrative strategies, he asserts, should not create an illusion of neutrality, objectivity, and anonymity, but
rather draw attention to our kinship with nature and to the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding (N.
Gough, 1993, p. 621). We contend, of course, that Goughs proposal should extend beyond the work of science and environmental
The societal narratives that legitimize the domination of nature, like

those that underlie racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and so on,
merit everyones concern. And since the ecological crisis threatens
especially those most marginalized and vulnerable (Running-Grass, 1996; D. Taylor, 1996),
proponents of critical pedagogy in particular need to come to terms with
the human-centred frameworks that structure their endeavours. No doubt
poststructuralist theory will be indispensable in this regard. Nevertheless, anthropocentric assumptions
about language, meaning, and agency will need to be revisited. In the meantime,
educators.
perhaps we can ponder the spontaneous creativity of spiders and the life-worlds of woodticks. Such wondrous possibilities should
cause even the most committed of humanists to pause for a moment at least.
Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitan understandings of war exclude the animal to the
worst forms of bare life naturalizing war
Kochi 9JD in Law from Griffith University (Australia) and Senior Lecturer in Law @
USussex (Tarik, Species War: Law, Violence and Animals, Law, Culture and the
Humanities, 2009, 5: 353369, Sage, DA: 04-04-2012//JLENART)
Grotius and Hobbes are sometimes described as setting out a prudential approach,28 or a
natural law of minimal content29 because in contrast to Aristotelian or Thomastic legal and political theory their
attempt to derive the legitimacy of the state and sovereign order relies less upon a thick
conception of the good life and is more focussed upon basic human needs such as
survival. In the context of a response to religious civil war such an approach made
sense in that often thick moral and religious conceptions of the good life (for example, those
held by competing Christian Confessions) often drove conflict and violence. Yet, it would be a mistake to
assume that the categories of survival, preservation of life and bare life are neutral categories.
Rather survival, preservation of life and bare life as expressed by the Westphalian
theoretical tradition already contain distinctions of value in particular, the specific distinction
of value between human and non-human life. Bare life in this sense is not bare but
contains within it a distinction of value between the worth of human life placed
above and beyond the worth of non-human animal life. In this respect bare life
within this tradition contains within it a hidden conception of the good life . The
foundational moment of the modern juridical conception of the law of war already
contains within it the operation of species war. The Westphalian tradition puts itself
forward as grounding the legitimacy of violence upon the preservation of life,
however its concern for life is already marked by a hierarchy of value in which nonhuman animal life is violently used as the raw material for preserving human life .
Grounded upon, but concealing the human-animal distinction, the Westphalian conception of
war makes a double move: it excludes the killing of animals from its definition of
war proper, and, through rendering dominant the modern juridical definition of
war proper the tradition is able to further institutionalize and normalize a
particular conception of the good life. Following from this original distinction of life-value realized through the
juridical language of war were other forms of human life whose lives were
considered to be of a lesser value under a European, Christian, secular30 natural
law conception of the good life. Underneath this concern with the preservation of life in general stood veiled preferences over
what particular forms of life (such as racial conceptions of human life) and ways of living were worthy of preservation, realization and elevation. The
business contracts of early capitalism,31 the power of white males over women and children, and, especially in the colonial context, the sanctity of
European life over non-European and Christian lives over non-Christian heathens and Muslims, were some of the dominant forms of life preferred for
preservation within the early modern juridical ordering of war.
Critical Pedagogy
Critical pedagogy reifies anthropocentrism by not addressing
the damage humans constantly produce against others
Bell & Russell 2kPhD Candidate at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York
University AND prof of education @ Lakehead University (Anne and Constance,
Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the
Poststructuralist Turn, CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 25, 3 (2000): 188203,
http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3-bell.pdf, DA:
4/30/2012//JLENART)
movements against oppression need to be aware of and supportive
of each other. In critical pedagogy, however, the exploration of questions of race, gender,
class, and sexuality has proceeded so far with little acknowledgement of the
systemic links between human oppressions and the domination of nature. The
more-than-human world and human relationships to it have been ignored, as if the
suffering and exploitation of other beings and the global ecological crisis were somehow
irrelevant. Despite the call for attention to voices historically absent from traditional
canons and narratives (Sadovnik, 1995, p. 316), nonhuman beings are shrouded in silence. This
silence characterizes even the work of writers who call for a rethinking of all
culturally positioned essentialisms. Like other educators influenced by poststructuralism, we agree that
there is a need to scrutinize the language we use, the meanings we deploy, and the
epistemological frameworks of past eras (Luke & Luke, 1995, p. 378). To treat social categories as stable and unchanging
is to reproduce the prevailing relations of power (Britzman et al., 1991, p. 89). What would it mean , then, for critical
pedagogy to extend this investigation and critique to include taken-for-granted
understandings of human, animal, and nature? This question is difficult to
raise precisely because these understandings are taken for granted. The
anthropocentric bias in critical pedagogy manifests itself in silence and in the asides
of texts. Since it is not a topic of discussion, it can be difficult to situate a critique of
it. Following feminist analyses, we find that examples of anthropocentrism, like examples of gender symbolization, occur in those places where speakers
For this reason, the various
reveal the assumptions they think they do not need to defend, beliefs they expect to share with their audiences (Harding, 1986, p. 112).
Ethics
The ethical judgment at the heart of the aff is one which
preserves the systematic extermination of animals because
they have no place within the ontological purview of the 1ac
Kochi, 2K9
(Tarik, Sussex law school, Species war: Law, Violence and Animals, Law Culture and Humanities
Oct 5.3)
the comments so far might be to reject the notion of species war and counter-claim that
what is going on in the relationship between humans and animals is not
war as such but merely a struggle for biological survival between
species. It might be argued by some that the correct concept for this case is not war but survival. Viewed through such a lens
One response to
the violence carried out by humans against non-human animals is understood as similar to the killing that takes place between
different animal species as they rely upon the eating of each other for food and the violence some species use to ward competitors
and predators away from their territory. In this sense what would really be going on here between humans and non-humans is
merely the playing-out of behaviors linked to biological need the biological imperative which appears to be programmed into life
Such an account is somewhat compelling and it

has sat at the basis of a Western narrative which for a long time has
attempted to justify violence used by humans against non-human animals.
However, the account can only ever be a part of the story and not its whole if
we accept the notion that humans possess certain capacities for
reflection15 that allow us to make decisions about how we behave in
relation to particular ends. So even given the human biological demand for
survival, with regard to our treatment of animals, humans are able to make a range of
choices about how we ought to behave. In this respect a distinction drawn by Aristotle,16
Thomas Hobbes17 and more recently by Giorgio Agamben,18 between mere life or bare life and a life
which is bound up with some form of normative content of the good is
relevant here. The former can be thought as something like the pure demand for survival sometimes even in
and issues the command: though shalt survive!
circumstances of the survival of life that we might view as not worth living. The latter contains value judgments about the quality,
ethos and consequences of the life which is lived. The distinction between bare life and the good life is a legal-political distinction. It
has, at least since Aristotle, resided at the foundation of Western legal and political theory. The law which holds together and
governs the political community is posited with the view of not merely sustaining the bare needs of life, but of establishing and
the distinction between bare life and the good

life already contains within it a prior distinction, one which arises when
the survival of humans is distinguished from and affirmed against the
survival of non-human animals. At the basis of the distinction between
bare life and the good life, and hence, at the basis of law, resides the
human-animal distinction a determination of value that the human form
of life is good and that it is worth more or better than the lives of nonhuman animals. There is a certain Nietzschean sense of the term good which can be drawn upon informatively here.
realizing some form of the good life. However,
My argument is that what occurs prior to the racial and aristocratic senses of the term good suggested by Nietzsche19 as residing
the concept of the good life, is more deeply, an elevated

sense of life-worth that humans in the West have historically ascribed to
themselves over and above the life-worth of non-human animals. Following this,
when the meaning of the term war is explained by legal and political
theorists with reference to either the concepts of survival or the good life,
the linguistic and conceptual use of the term war already contains within
it a value-laden human-animal distinction and the primary violence of
species war. Survival and the biological imperative (survive!) may be seen as
genealogically with
components of a concept of war broadly defined.20 For non-human

animals the killing and violence that takes place between them (and with respect to
their eating of plant life) may be viewed not as species war but merely as action driven by the biological imperative. However, for
humans the acts of killing and violence directed at non-human animals can
be understood as species war . While such violence and killing may be
thought to be driven, in part, by the biological imperative, these acts also
take place within the context of normative judgments made with respect
to a particular notion of the good often drawing upon a cosmic hierarchy
of life-value established by religious theories of creation or scientific
theories of evolution.
Heidegger
Heideggers basis for human subjectivity is a celebration of
centering humanity and its capacity to know at the center of
the universe
Irwin 03, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Volume 22, Numbers 3-4, May
2003, pp. 227-244(18) HEIDEGGER AND NIETZSCHE; THE QUESTION OF VALUE AND
NIHILISM IN RELATION TO EDUCATION
The potential and fruition of Being has been strongly influenced by Aristotles
notion of essence which causes the substance to be formed in a way that shows
what it is. Guignon argues that Heidegger distinguished himself from Aristotle because neither Being nor Dasein has an
inevitable telos. Taking a Nietzschean stance, the subject, das Dasein styles her/himself by
projecting towards the future (promising), and recouping the past in a process which
looks at ones life as a whole, and as an ongoing becoming. But the future is not linear, as it is for
Aristotle. There is no precise goal in this collation of our finite life as a whole . Similarly to
Nietzsche, there is no determinant end point; no Ideal of the good or heaven to guide or complete a life. Any faith resides
in life, and fate for Nietzsche, and in Being for Heidegger. Thus, as an entity, humans are an
example of how Being exhibits itself. More than this though, Heidegger argues that
humans have a unique relation to Being because unlike any other animal, vegetable
or mineral, we are open to comprehending the appearance of Being which shines
forth from beings, (A) privileged, unique relation arises between (beings as a whole)
and the act of questioning. For through this questioning beings as a whole are for the first time opened up as such
with a view to its possible ground, and in the act of questioning it is kept open (Heidegger, 1973a, p. 4). On the one hand,
Heidegger recognises that humans are insignificant in the scale of the history of the
earth, let alone the universe. What is the temporal extension of a human life amid
all the millions of years? (ibid.). On the other hand, Heidegger has developed Kants
theory of time, such that time is not simply a priori to subjectivity but emerges
commensurately with human subjectivity. There is the pure possibility that man might not be at all. After all
there was a time when man was not. But strictly speaking we cannot say: There was a time when man was not. At all times
man was and is and will be, because time produces itself only insofar as man is.
There is no time when man was not, not because man was from all eternity and will
be for all eternity but because time is not eternity and time fashions itself into a
time only as a human, historical being-there [Dasein] (ibid., p. 84). The term Dasein was invented in the
19th century as a Germanic transliteration of existence (Guignon, 1999, private communication). Heidegger has
limited the term into a technical designation for the human relation with the world.
Das Dasein is a play on words. On the one hand, Dasein translates as das, the and ein or one; the one or any one.
Anyone being there projects Dasein away

from here towards a future. Being-there is the movement of potentiality .
Alternatively Da means there and sein is being; being-there.
History
Your historical discussions silence on the place and space of
the nonhuman is anthropocentric knowledge production that
must be rejected
Domanska, 10
(Ewa, Assoctiate professor of theory and history or historigophy at Adam Mickiewicz Univ,
visiting associate prof dept of Anthro @ Stanford, Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies
http://www.nnet.gr/historein/historeinfiles/histvolumes/hist10/historein10domanska.pdf [10/24/11])
debates about historical narration, historical
representation, and, generally speaking, relations between text and past
reality, debates which predominated in historical theory from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. I propose that it is time
to challenge and transcend the specific approach to the past called history
understood as the science of people in time (Marc Bloch) and its not only eurocentric and phallocentric but, above all,
anthropocentric character . Our reflection about the past should extend to
those nonhuman beings that have recently been studied across various disciplines. Today, with the development
of insurrectional and militant historiography, things, plants and nonhuman animals should also
be incorporated into history as something other than passive recipients of
human actions. The future of thinking about the past will depend on
whether and how scholars manage to modify their understanding of
nonhuman agents: nonhuman animals, plants and things. Questions
concerning the status of nonhuman agents in the past, relations between
the human and the non-human, the organic and the inorganic, between
people and things and between things themselves are of fundamental
importance for reconceptualising the study of the past. Therefore, an important
challenge is to rethink the nonhuman aspect of the past in a context other
than semiotics, discourse theory or representation theory, with a special
focus on the materiality, concreteness, relations and interactions and socalled presence of the past.18 What we need is to establish a human
nonhuman relationship based on a nonanthropocentric approach and on a
relational epistemology. As anthropologist Nurit Bird-David has shown, thinking based on relational epistemology
I attempt to move beyond
is marked by an absence of the ontological dualism of nature and culture, and body and mind, that are characteristic of western
thought; self and personhood are relational to, and not separated from, the world. The world in this approach is a heterarchical one,
rather than hierarchical. I relate, therefore I am, writes Bird-David, describing the intimate engagements of the natives with their
environment. Moreover, she does not reify the notion of relationship into an entity but prefers to talk about relatedness meaning
two beings/ things mutually responsive to one other.19
Imperialism/Eurocentrism
The affirmatives politics centers around a challenge to the
racist imperial order of the United States fails to interrogate
their own human-centered formation of subjectivity that is the
foundation of anthropocentrism which will drive the planetary
wide repetition of the racist ideologies of imperialism- turning
the aff and leading to the systematic slaughter of the nonhuman
Huggan and Tiffin, 10
(Graham, chair of commonwealth and postcolonial literatures at Leeds and Helen, Adjunct professor of post-colonial
and animal studies at University of New England, Australia, Postcolonial ecocriticism: literature, animals,
environment, pg. 5-7)
For Plumwood, thesethroughout this book
For Plumwood, these claims extend both to environmental and animal actors, since what she calls 'our [collective] failure to situate
our failure to situate non-humans

ethically, as the plight of non-human species continues to worsen' (2001: 2). 'Hegemonic centrism' thus
accounts not only for environmental racism, but also for those forms of
institutionalised speciesism that continue to be used to rationalise the
exploitation of animal {and animalised human) 'others' in the name of a
'human- and reason-centred culture that is at least a couple of millennia
old' (2001: 8). As Plumwood argues, the western definition of humanity depended - and still depends - on the presence of the
'not-human': the uncivilised, the animal and animalistic. European justification for invasion and
colonisation proceeded from this basis , understanding non-European lands and the people and
dominant forms of human society ecologically [has been] matched by
animals that inhabited them as 'spaces', 'unused, underused or empty* {2003: 53). The very ideology of colonisation is thus one
with the anthropocentrism underlying

Eurocentrism being used to justify those forms of European colonialism that
where anthropocentrism and Enrocentrism are inseparable,
see 'indigenous cultures as "primitive", less rational, and closer to children, animals and nature' (2003: 53). "Within many cultures and not just western ones - anthropocentrism has long been naturalised. The absolute prioritisation of one's own species' interests
over those of the silenced majority is still regarded as being 'only natural'. Ironically, it is precisely through such appeals to nature
animals and the environment are often excluded from the privileged
ranks of the human, rendering them available for exploitation . As Gary Wolfe, citing
Jacques Derrida, puts it: [T]he humanise concept of subjectivity is inseparable from
the discourse and institution of a speciesism which relies on the tacit acceptance that the full
that other
transcendence to the human requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic
economy in which we can engage in a 'noncriminal putting to death', as Derrida phrases it, not only of animals but of humans as
well by marking them as animal. (1998: 39) The effectiveness of this discourse of species is that 'when applied to social others of
it relies upon 'the taking for granted of the systematic,

institutionalized killing of non-human others (39). In other words, in assuming a
natural prioritisation of humans and human interests over those of other
species on earth, we are both generating and repeating the racist
ideologies of imperialism on a planetary scale. In working towards a genuinely post-imperial,
environmentally based conception of community, then, a re-imagining and reconfiguration of the
whatever sort,,
human place in nature necessitates an interrogation of the category of the

human itself and of the ways in which the construction of ourselves
against nature with the hierarchisation of life forms that construction
implies has been and remains complicit in colonialist and racist
exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to the present day . Postcolonial
studies has come to understand environmental issues not only as central to the projects of European conquest and global
domination, but also as inherent in the ideologies of imperialism and racism on which those projects historically - and persistently depend. Nor only were other people often regarded as part of nature - and thus treated instrumentally as animals but also they
were forced or co-opted over time into western views of the environment, thereby rendering cultural and environmental restitution
difficult if not impossible to achieve. Once invasion and settlement had been accomplished, or at least once administrative
structures had been set up, the environmental impacts of western attitudes to human being-in-the-world were facilitated or
reinforced by the deliberate (or accidental) transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout the European empires, instigating
Despite the recent advances of

eco/environmental criticism, English studies in general, and postcolonial studies more particularly, have yet
to resituate the species boundary and environmental concerns at the
centre of their enquiries; yet the need to examine these interfaces
between nature and culture, animal and human, is urgent and never more
pertinent than it is today. After all, postcolonialism's concerns with conquest, colonisation, racism and sexism,
widespread ecosystem change under conspicuously unequal power regimes.3
along with its investments in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and the relations between native and invader societies and
cultures, are also the central concerns of animal and environmental studies. Moreover, as the American environmental historian
it is in the myriad relationships between material

practices and ideas - especially in cross-cultural contexts - that day-to-day planetary life is
lived and futures are governed : practices and ideas that are inseparable
from issues of representation - as will be made clear throughout this book.
Donald Wotstcr acknowledges,
Levinas
The face of the face to face encounter is always a human facethis ethics not only repeats the anthropocentric human
tradition but also fails to allow the earth to reveal itself
Benso, Prof. of Philosophy @ Penn State, 2K (Silvia,
The Face of Things, pg. xxix-xxxi)
The nonlocative place within which the encounter with the Other
in his or her otherness comes to pass is, for Levinas, ethics . As chapter 2
indicates, it is within such a space that the ontological subject is called
into question by the Other, and opened up to a movement of selftranscendence that transforms it into an ethical subjectivity . Beyond the
transcendental foundationalism of ontology and epistemology, ethics is for Levinas the space
of a face to face, in which the I and the Other remain separate
despite their relation. Ethics is not a place of foundations, but of
transformations, a place of love meetings within which
ambivalences and differences are allowed to flourish and thrive. The
present essay is greatly and gratefully indebted to Levinass thematization of ethics as the dimension within which
a nonviolating encounter with otherness can come to pass. However, its aspiration reaches further than the limits
that Levinass philosophy has imposed on itself, and thus registers the limitations into which such limits incur. By
investigating who is the other whom Levinas places at the core of his philosophy, this essay advances beyond Lev -
the face
of the other that interrupts and disrupts the economy of the same
and summons it to ethics is always the human face , certainly the face of the
other man, hopefullyand arguablyalso the face of the other woman and child. A human presence
is what is required, according to Levinas, for the same to be placed in the
position of transcending itself and enter the space of ethics.
Levinass configuration of ethics takes place if not at the expense,
at least in the deliberate ignorance of another form of exclusion
that such a formulation of the relation ship between the I and the
Other brings about: the exclusion of nonhuman presences. Levinass
ethics arrests itself in front of the entire realm of nature, animate or
inanimate, which is deprived of any notion of otherness . The present project
understands things, at least initially, undifferentially as vegetal, mineral, artificial (and maybe
even animal) entities. As such, for Levinas, things do not have a face. Therefore,
they cannot place any ethical demands on the subject that confronts
them. Human ethics, Levinas is not weary of repeating, is the archetype. A discourse about the face of animals, plants, or things, if possi ble at all,
would be only as derivative and as the result of the transference
from one realm, which remains privileged, to another. The question with which
chapter 3 concludes is thus: Does Levinass ethics remain, along with the very tradition other
aspects of which he so successfully contributes to disrupt, an anthropocentric humanism?
inas, offering a critique that primarily intends to be a supplement to his own position. For Levinas,
Accessible through the hand that handles and manip ulates them in
labor, things are pure presence, for Lev inas, whose mystery briefly
glimmers in the enjoyment to which the subject abandons itself, but
which is immediately recuperated through the awareness of ones
own sensibility and sensory perception. If things, as gifts, ~re important, they are so as
functional to the annunciation of the relationship between the same and the Other. They serve the possibility of the
donation of the sells world to the Other, thus contributing to the dimension of intersubjec tivity and, eventually, of
social justice. Despite the laudability of the service rendered by things, service which is oriented to the Other rather
in Levinas things are not other, not even in a

sense divergent from and incongruous with the sense in which the
other person is Other.
than to the same, as chapter 4 reveals,
The affirmatives call to respond to the face of the Other

assumes that only those beings endowed with a face and a
voice can determine my subjectivity and are worthy of having
their call responded to. Yet the history of social movements
and the ever changing nature of what is a human means their
call for a face to the face with Other is rooted in the
anthropologic thinking of the West.
Nealon,
Dept of English at Penn State,
95
(Jeffery T. Junk and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs PMC 6.1)
Levinas's reasons for insisting on the primacy of the face-to-face are easy enough to understand: as we have seen, in an attempt to
save something like Mitsein in Heidegger from the monadic interiority of Dasein's fascination with "anonymous" death and being as
Levinas introduces the ethical as the exterior irreducibility of

human contact in the face-to-face (in OTB the animated ethical "saying" that is irreducible to the neutrality
of the ontological "said"). But the ethical, we should note, is thematized here strictly in
humanist terms -- the face and the voice. Burroughs allows us to pose an essential question to
possibility,
Levinas: What happens when one encounters, within the world rather than in the realm of being, the "face" of the inhuman (as junk)
and the "voice" that makes voice (im)possible (as an anonymous serial network of subjective substitutions)? If, as we have seen,
Levinas's problem with Heidegger is that Dasein's relation with being is posed in terms of possibility rather than impossibility, one
has to wonder then about Levinas' own evasion of the radical impossibility named by the il y a -- about the work done in his own
Levinas's posing of the other in terms of the

face and the voice may surreptitiously work to evade the "experience" of
the impossible that is alterity measured on other-than-human terms. To
discourse by the face and the voice. In other words,
unpack this question, we could perhaps turn back to Burroughs -- specifically, his "Christ and the Museum of Extinct Species," a
story that, among other things, points to the ways in which extinction haunts existents. The domination of "man" has brought about
the extinction of its other -- animals -- but this extinction haunts "man" as it experiences its closure; and "man" is constantly kept in
touch with the extinction of animals -- with its other -- by the virus of language: "What does a virus do with enemies? It turns
enemies into itself . . . . Consider the history of disease: it is as old as life. Soon as something gets alive, there is something waiting
to disease it. Put yourself in the virus's shoes, and wouldn't you?"29 Of course, "Wouldn't you?" is the junkie's question from Naked
Lunch the question of the "inhuman" junkie posed to the human society, the question which should merely reveal the need of the
junkie -- who seemingly justifies him- or herself with this response -- but which also reveals the structure of infinite desire which
grounds all mere need. This, finally, returns us to the quotation marks around the "'evil' virus" in the quotation from Burroughs that
serves as one of this essay's epigraphs: junk is an "evil" to human culture -- to thinking and action -- because it is quite literally
inhuman, that which carries the other of anthropos: "junk" brings the denial of logos, the sapping of the will, the introduction of
impossibility, and the ruining of community. One must be suspicious of anyplace in Burroughs's text where he seems to be
moralizing; it seems that the liminal states that "junk" gestures toward make its ham-fisted identification as merely "evil"
impossible, insofar as this liminal state quite literally names the exterior field of alterity in which any particular opposition must
configure itself. "Junk" forces us to confront the face of that which is wholly other -- other even to the other person. And it is also
here that one can call attention to Burroughs's continuing fascination with the "virus"; as Benway introduces the concept to the
Burroughs oeuvre in Naked Lunch, "'It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life from. It may at one time
have been capable of independent life. Now it has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living
qualities only in a host, by using the life of another -- the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine,
toward dead matter'" (p. 134). The virus, famously related to language in Burroughs, carries or introduces the alterity-based
temporality of the postmodern subject, which "may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now it has fallen to the
borderline between living and dead matter": between the individual and the "parasitic" network of iterable substitution from which it
arises. Insofar as Levinas teaches us that the individual is nothing other -- but nothing less -- than a hypostasis within the shifting
categories of substitution for-the-other, his own account of subjectivity as such an iterable substitution would seem to create
problems for the privileging of the category "human." Levinas himself warns us "not to make a drama out of a tautology" (E&EM, p.
87/150), not to mistake the hypostasis of subjectivity for an originary category of supposed discovery or self-revelation. Both Levinas
and Burroughs force us to acknowledge that the parasitic network of substitution, which seems merely to feed on the plenitude of
human identity, in fact makes the plenitude of that identity (im)possible in the first place.30 But this very logic of the iterable
network of performative identity would seem to pose essential questions to Levinas's thematization of identity and alterity by
questioning his insistence on what he calls the "priority" of the "human face"31 and voice (and concomitant evasion of "junk" as
radical material iterability). Despite Levinas's well-taken criticisms concerning ontology's fetishizing of "anonymous" being, it may be
that the wholly other is traced in other than human beings. That (im)possibility, at least, needs to be taken into account; and the
attempt to analyze such an (im)possibility in terms of Burroughs's thematization of "junk" helps to draw Levinasian ethical desire
Levinas attempts to exile

the very thing that makes his discourse so unique and compelling: the
irreducibility of the confrontation with the wholly other. In his insistance that the subject
outside the human, where it is not supposed to travel. In the end, it seems to me that
must overcome the crippling hesitation of the il y a to respond to the other, Levinas offers us an important rejoinder to those ethical
systems that would be content to rest in generalizations and pieties. Levinas insists instead on an ethics of response to the
when Levinas argues that one is

subjected solely by other humans in the face-to-face encounter, he elides
any number of important ethical considerations. First is the role of
inhuman systems, substances, economies, drives and practices in shaping
the hypostatic response that is both the self and the other. Certainly
Levinas teaches us that the subject is never a monad: it is always
beholden to the other in its subjection; it is always a hostage. But if
subjective response is a "saying," the material networks of languages and
practices available to the subject in and through its subjection need to be
taken into account. The subject's daily confrontation with interpellating
inhuman systems is, it would seem, just as formative as his or her daily
confrontation with the humans that people these systems . As Levinas insists, contact
neighboring other in the light of justice for the others. But
with something anonymous like "work" is not of the same order as contact with coworkers. People overflow the roles they are
assigned within such systems; Larry in Accounting is more than Larry in Accounting. What we do at work or have for lunch today
sinks into anonymity, while in our face-to-face meetings -- on break from our tasks, over cigarettes and coffee -- Larry somehow isn't
simply consumed or forgotten. If we attend to his difference as difference, Larry can't sink into anonymity. Burroughs, however,
teaches us also to ask after the lunch, cigarettes and coffee, which may not disappear into anonymity quite so quickly. Neither, he
might add, should the spaces in which we work and the systems that parse out such space, and therefore frame many of our daily
Levinas recognizes
this when he brings the third into the drama of the face-to-face. As he writes of
face-to-face encounters. These "inhuman" considerations likewise call for response. Certainly,
social justice, "If proximity ordered to me only the other alone, there would not have been any problem."32 But the others confront
me also in the face-to-face with the other, and demand that the "self-sufficent 'I-Thou'" relation be extended to the others in a
relation of justice. Here Levinas -- responding, always, to Heidegger -- is careful not to pose the relation of social justice with the
others as an inauthentic falling away from the authenticity of the face-to-face: " It
is not that there first would

be the face, and then the being that it manifests or expresses would
concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens
humanity."33 While the face-to-face has a certain quasi-phenomneological
priority in Levinas -- there has to be the specificity of bodily contact and
response if one is to avoid mere pious generalizations -- the face to face
opens more than the closed loop of my responsibility for you: insofar as
"the face qua face opens humanity," my repsonsibility for the others is
inscribed in my very responsibility for you. The specific other and the
social-historical realm of others cannot be separated in the revelation of
the face-to-face.34 But even in his thematization of justice, there

nevertheless remains the trace of Levinas's most pervasive ethical
exclusion, an absolute privilege of the same that lives on in this discourse
of the other: "justice" in Levinas -- infinite response in the here and now -remains synonomous with "humanity"; justice is owed to the others who
are as human as the other. The face-to-face extends my responsibility to
all that possess a face; the saying of my response to the other human's
voice extends to all other humans' voices. I must respond to -- and am the
"brother" of -- only that which has a voice and a face. But what about the
face of systems, the face of total need confronted in intoxicants, or the
face of animals? As Levinas responds, I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called "face." The human
face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don't know if a snake has a face . . . . I do not
know at what moment the human appears, but what I want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always
a persistence in being . . . . [W]ith the appearance of the human -- and this is my entire philosophy -- there is something more
In thematizing response solely in terms of

the human face and voice, it would seem that Levinas leaves untouched the oldest
and perhaps most sinister unexamined privilege of the same: anthropos
and only anthropos has logos and as such anthropos responds not to the
barbarous or the dumb or the inanimate, but only to those who qualify for
the privileges of "humanity," only to those deemed to possess a face, only
to those recognized to be living in the logos 36 Certainly, as the history of anticolonial and feminist movements have taught us, those who we now
believe unproblematically to possess a "face" and a "voice" weren't always
granted such privilege, and present struggles continue to remind us that
the racist's or homophobe's first refuge is a distinction between humanity
and its supposed others. In addition, we might ask about those ethical calls of
the future from "beings" that we cannot now even imagine, ethical calls
that Donna Haraway categorizes under the heading of the "cyborg [which]
appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal
is transgressed."37 Certainly, the historical and theoretical similarities that
Haraway draws among the discourses surrounding her title subjects, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, should
force us to ask after and hold open categories that have not been yet
recognized as ethically compelling.38 As Judith Butler maintains in her work on performative identity,
"the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces
the more and the less 'human,' the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable.
These excluded sites come to bound the 'human' as its constitutive
outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of
their disruption and rearticulation."39 The "human," in other words, may
name the latest -- if certainly not the last -- attempt to circumscribe a
constitutive boundary around ethical response. Of course, the permeability of this boundary is
important than my life, and that is the life of the other.35
traced in nearly all the crucial socio-ethical questions of today. From abortion to cryogenics to cybernetics, from animal research to
gene therapy to cloning, we see the ethical necessity surrounding the "disruption and rearticulation" of any stable sense or site we
might offer to define (human) life itself. And any strong or useful sense of ethics would seem to entail that such response is not
In the end, Levinas's insistence on the "human" as sole

category of ethical response further protects and extends the imperialism
of western subjectivity -- what Butler calls, in another context, an "imperialist humanism
that works through unmarked privilege" (118). Despite the Levinasian
advances toward a non-ontological ethics of response as substitution for
the other, Levinas nevertheless also extends the privilege of "man," which,
limited from before the fact.
as Haraway reminds us, is quite literally the "the one who is not animal,
barbarian or woman."40 And to quote selectively from Levinas's citation of
Pascal, "That is how the usurpation of the whole world began:" with the
protection of the category "human" from its others.41
Marx
Marxs alternative is anthro doesnt concern animal rights or
socio-economic constructions
Barr 95 [Judi Bar, EarthFirst!, Judi Bari Web Site of the Redwood Summer Justice
Project. 1995, http://www.judibari.org/revolutionary-ecology.html]
As you can probably tell, my background in revolutionary theory comes from Marxism, which I consider to be a brilliant critique of
capitalism. But as to what should be implemented in capitalism's place, I don't think Marxism has shown us the answer. One of the
communism, socialism, and all other left ideologies that I know of

speak only about redistributing the spoils of raping the earth more evenly among
classes of humans. They do not even address the relationship of the society to the
earth, Or rather, they assume that it will stay the same as it is under capitalism - that of a gluttonous consumer. And that the
purpose of the revolution is to find a more efficient and egalitarian way to produce and
distribute consumer goods. This total disregard of nature as a life force, rather than
just a source of raw materials, allowed Marxist states to rush to industrialize without
even the most meager environmental safeguards. This has resulted in such noted disasters as the
reasons for this, I believe, is that
meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the oil spill in the Arctic Ocean, and the ongoing liquidation of the fragile forests of
Marx
stated that the primary contradiction in industrial society is the contradiction
between capital and labor. I believe these disasters show that there is an equally
important contradiction between industrial society and the earth .
Siberia. It has left parts of Russia and Eastern Europe with such a toxic legacy that vast areas are now uninhabitable.
Economic rationality theorization is inherently anthropocentric

alt merely reinscribe power dynamics over the animal
Plling-Vocke 05, (Bernt, Master of International Relations. Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, The End
of Poverty: The globalization of the unreal and the impoverishment of all,
Under capitalism, nature can be privately owned. Most of nonhuman nature is

regarded as stuff which can be owned and disposed of as a right of the owner. It
is disenchanted of intrinsic value and viewed as raw materials and raw
resources 306 thus, as Jeffrey Sachs puts it, natural capital(ought to provide) the environmental services
needed by human society307. Consequently, nonhuman nature is not seen as what it is but
as what it might become 308. The whale isnt primarily a whale, but either a steak or
something to showcase to buzzing video-cameras from around the world. Under
capitalism, the future is frequently discounted, and economic rationality requires
that the distant future be disregarded309. Scarcities of resources tend to fasten their depletion, unless a
business is remodelled, as in the case of whales. Economic rationality can only be overcome with sufficient wealth and a desire for
capitalistic economies will not likely be ecologically rational 310. The

whale might have gotten away, but it is the exception. There are no grounds to assume that socialism ,
as an alternative to contemporary capitalism, would embrace nature any different,
as there is no compelling reason to believe that a society evolved beyond human
relations involving domination would also automatically reject domination over the
a sustainable yield, but
rest of nature311. From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs, Karl Marx once stated, prompting Garrett Hardin to challenge And then
what?312
Nietzsche
Nietzsches misunderstands the concept of Aletheia which
makes his attempt to overcome the human non-human gap a
mere inversion of western thought without an overcomingsuch logic ends in Nazi biologism
Agamben,
(Giorgio,
professor of philosophy university of Verona,
2K4
The Open: Man and Animal translated Kevin Attell)
At stake in the course is the definition of the concept of open as one of the names, indeed as the name
katexochn {preeminent}, of being and of world. More than ten years later, in full world war, Heidegger returns to
this concept and traces a summary genealogy of it. That it arose out of the eighth Duino Elegy was, in a certain
sense, obvious; but in being adopted as the name of being (the open, in which every being is freed. . . is being
itself), Rilkes term undergoes an essential reversal, which Heidegger seeks to emphasize in every way. For in the
eighth Elegy it is the animal (die Kreatur) that sees the open with all its eyes, in distinct contrast to man, whose
eyes have instead been turned backward and placed like traps around him. While man always has the world
before himalways only stands facing opposite (gegenuber) and never enters the pure space of the outside
This reversal of the

hierarchical relationship between man and animal is precisely what
Heidegger calls into question. First of all, he writes, if we think of the open as the
name of what philosophy has thought of as alitheia, that is, as the
unconcealedness-concealedness of being, then this is not truly a reversal
here, because the open evoked by Rilke and the open that Heideggers
thought seeks to give back to thought have nothing in common. For the
open meant by Rilke is not the open in the sense of the uncon cealed. Rilke
knows and suspects nothing of aletheia, no more than Nietzsche does.2 At
work in both Nietzsche and Rilke is that oblivion of being which lies at
the foundation of the biologism of the nineteenth century and of
psychoanalysis and whose ultimate consequence is a monstrous
anthropomorphization of. the animal and a corresponding animalization
of man.3 Only man, indeed only the essential gaze of authentic thought,
can see the open which names the unconcealedness of beings. The animal,
on the contrary, never sees this open. Therefore neither can an animal
move about in the closed as such, no more than it can comport itself toward
the concealed. The animal is excluded from the essential domain of the
conflict between unconcealedness and concealedness. The sign of such an
exclusion is that no animal or plant has the word.4 At this point Heidegger, in an
the animal instead moves in the open, in a nowhere without the no.
..
extremely dense page, explicitly evokes the problem of the difference between animal environment and human
world which was at the center of the 192930 course For the animal is in relation to his circle of food, prey, and
other animals of its own kind, and it is so in a way essentially different from the way the stone is related to the
earth upon which it lies. In the circle of the living things characterized as plant or animal we find the peculiar
stirring of a motility by which the living being is stimulated, i.e., excited to an emerging into a circle of excitability
on the basis of which it includes other things in the circle of its stirring. But no motility or excitability of plants and
animals can ever bring the living thing into the free in such a way that what is stimulated could ever let the thing
which excites be what it is even merely as exciting, not to mention what it is before the excitation and without it.
Plant and animal depend on something outside of themselves without ever seeing either the outside or the inside,
i.e., without ever seeing their being unconcealed in the free of being. It would never be possible for a stone, any
more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation and to stir like the lark, and yet not even the
lark sees the open.
Wonder
Embracement of wonder is anthropocentric
McManus, 2k7
(Susan, Lecturer in Political Theory Queens University Belfast, Theorizing Utopian
Agency: Two Steps Toward Utopian Techniques of the Self Theory and Event 10.3)
As with dreaming, an implicit critique of the affective violence of modernity can be discerned. In feelings and sensibilities the
this inscription of wonder, and its

relationship with a world that has become its object, a possessive,
appropriative affectivity is at work. This informs , again, the docile capitalist
subject, thus demonstrating the ways in which "interest" is always-already
a matter of disciplined, shaped, invested affect.96 The utopian inflection is
the fantastic explorative moment of this process; but its underside turns
into an exoticizing gaze, plunder, conquest, violence.97 Wonder, and
wonder's products, are thus critical in the formation of the early
capitalist/colonial economy.98 Such a mode of wonder sustains
anthropocentric hierarchy, and functions within relations of domination
and exploitation between self and other and self and world .
macropolitical can be traced and made available for critique. In
Anthro v. Race
Link Dehum
Anthro is the root cause of racism the distinction as less than
human psychologically structures all oppression and
discrimination
Singer 02, (Peter Singer is the author of Writings on an Ethical Life, Practical
Ethics; and Rethinking Life arid Death; among many others. Re is currently the Ira
W. De Camp Professor of Bio ethics at Princeton Universitys Center for Human
Values Animal Liberation 2002. Pg. 8-9.)
If a being suffers there cart be no moral justification for refusing to take that
suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of
equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like sufferinginsofar as
rough comparisons can he madeof any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of
experiencing enjoyment or happiness there is nothing to be taken into account. So
the limit of sentience (using the term as a convenient if not strictly accurate shorthand for the capacity to suffer and/or experience) is
the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To mark this
boundary by some other character tic like intelligence or rationality Would he to
mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like skin
color? Racist violate the principle of equ1ity by giving greater weight to the interests
of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the
interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex.
Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of members of their own species to override
the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each
case.
Link Liberation
Their focus on liberation requires re-affirmation of a distinction
between human and animal re-entrenches specieism
Kim 09, Claire Kim, UC Irvine political science professor, Slaying the Beast:
Reflections on Race, Culture, and Species, http://aapf.org/wpcontent/uploads/2009/05/kalfou.pdf)
Dyson gives a perfunctory nod to the animal question and then turns to focus on the
issue of true moral significance and urgency: racism. It is as if defending the humanity of Black people
requires reaffirming the animality of animals, their categorical subordination.
Similarly, feminist Sandra Kobin asks why Vick was treated more harshly than
professional athletes who beat their wives and girlfriends , writing: Beat a woman? Play on; Beat a dog?
Youre gone (Kobin 2007). Kobin does not critique dog fighting for its promotion of masculinist violence or show any appreciation of the fact that women
Instead, she bristles at the idea that dogs might be valued

more than women and insists that women are the victims that really matter. What is
troubling about the racial persecution narrative advanced by Vicks defenders is not
that it is wrong per se but that it subsumes, deflects, and ultimately denies
the other moral question being raised, the animal question. Its response to the
interdependency of Blackness and animalness in the white imagination is not to
deconstruct both notions but rather to vigorously affirm that Blacks are human and
therefore deserving of better treatment than animals . It is a narrative that embraces
an ideology of human supremacy in the name of fighting white supremacy
and sees no contradiction in this position. It is as if Dyson and Kobin are saying that
people of color and women have the most at stake in reinscribing the impassable
line between humans and animals, whereas these groups may in fact have the most
at stake in its erasure. Most humans are unaccustomed to thinking about how their politics reinscribe notions of human superiority over
all other species, but the notion of species-free space is as improbable as that of race-free
space. Categories of difference saturate our thinking, our discourse, our experience,
and our actions.
and animals are both victims of male violence.
Link Middle Passage

Problematizing the middle passage and human slavery ignores
that these tools were not produced and then simply applied to
a racial group of humans to force their migration but instead
were first the means of dominating nonhumans. We must
begin with this hidden foundation of species violence.
HEYDT 2K10 [samantha, american abattoirs, December 20th,
http://samheydt.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/224/, BA Communications New School
and Universitat van Amsterdam] JB
The American abattoir paved the road to Auschwitz. The industrialization of death developed at the turn of the century in the US stockyards was
adopted by the Nazi Concentration camps, where sectors of humanity relegated into the realm of subhuman were slaughtered. History
repeats itself with the algorithms of domination shifting not in construct but in context. The
assembly-line technology and eugenic ideology that buttresses the mechanized mass
murder of animals share the rationalized cruelty that has historically been used in the
Western context against humans in the state of exception. Branded inferior, crammed into railcars, forced into
labor and killed when no longer of use, the victims of the Holocaust experienced the same fate as the chattel of slaughterhouses do today. The
justification for this brutality is hinged on the biological inferiority of the victims who are dehumanized and denigrated as animals. The
as long
as the exploitation and violent slaughter of animals occurs unrefuted, the potential for
genocide remains. As history has shown us time and time again: the realm of nonhuman is
not solely occupied by animals. Historical Context:
______________________________________________________________________________ Patriarchy, slavery and the social
matrix of speciesism emerged in tandem to one another from the same region that fathered
agriculture in the Middle East during the Chalcolithic Age. Sumer, now modern Iraq, was the first
civilization to engage in core agricultural practices such as organized irrigation and
specialized labor with slaves and animals. They raised cattle, sheep and pigs, used ox for
draught their beast of burden and equids for transport (Sayce 99). The knowledge to store food
as standing reserve meant migration was no longer necessary to survive. The population
density bred social hierarchies supported at its base by slaves (Kramer 47). In Sumer, there were only two
anthropological machine distinguishing humans from animals collapses when man is stripped down to bare life (Agamben). Thus,
social stratas to belong to: lu the free man and arad the slave (Kramer 47). Technologies
such as branding irons,

chains and cages that were developed to dominate animals paved way for the
domination over humans too. The human rule over the lower creatures
provided the mental analogue in which many political and social
arrangements are based (Patterson 280). Caged and castrated, slaves were treated
no different from chattel. Thousands of years later, the tools developed in the
Middle East for domestication were used by the Europeans during colonization to
shackle slaves. When the European settlers arrived in Tasmania in 1772, the indigenous people seem not to have noticed themBy
1830 their numbers had been reduced from around five hundred to seventy-two. In their intervening years they had been used for slave labour and
sexual pleasure, tortured and mutilated. They had been hunted like vermin and their skins had been sold for a government bounty. When the
males were killed, female survivors were turned loose with the heads of their husbands tied around their necks. Males who were not killed were
usually castrated. Children were clubbed to death. (Gray 91). This horrific account illustrates how the indigenous people of Tasmania were
enslaved,skinned and slaughtered by the Europeans. Meanwhile across the globe, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was at its peak in the 18th century.
Africans were taken from their native land, branded, bred, and sold as
property. Linguistically these acts of violence and exploitation are tied to animals- branded,
skinned, slaughtered, sold. Be that as it may, as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other (Pythagoras in Patterson 210).
Racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism and sexism all stem from the same systems of
domination that initially subjugated animals. Until we cease to exploit living beings as
resources, the threat of man being stripped of his humanity looms. Although we cringe at
the inhumane actions of our ancestors, the scale and efficiency of murder and oppression
has only advanced, while the notion of human remains increasingly obscured.
Link Race
foundation of anthropcentrism which will drive the planetary
For Plumwood, these claims extend both to environmental and animal actors, since what she calls 'our [collective] failure to situate dominant forms of
our failure to situate non-humans ethically, as the

'Hegemonic centrism' thus accounts not only for
environmental racism, but also for those forms of institutionalised
speciesism that continue to be used to rationalise the exploitation of
animal {and animalised human) 'others' in the name of a 'human- and
reason-centred culture that is at least a couple of millennia old' (2001: 8). As
human society ecologically [has been] matched by
plight of non-human species continues to worsen' (2001: 2).
Plumwood argues, the western definition of humanity depended - and still depends - on the presence of the 'not-human': the uncivilised, the animal and
European justification for invasion and colonisation proceeded from

this basis , understanding non-European lands and the people and animals that inhabited them as 'spaces', 'unused, underused or empty*
{2003: 53). The very ideology of colonisation is thus one where anthropocentrism and Enrocentrism are inseparable, with the
anthropocentrism underlying Eurocentrism being used to justify those
forms of European colonialism that see 'indigenous cultures as "primitive", less rational, and closer to children, animals
animalistic.
and nature' (2003: 53). "Within many cultures - and not just western ones - anthropocentrism has long been naturalised. The absolute prioritisation of
one's own species' interests over those of the silenced majority is still regarded as being 'only natural'. Ironically, it is precisely through such appeals to
animals and the environment are often excluded from the

privileged ranks of the human, rendering them available for exploitation . As
Gary Wolfe, citing Jacques Derrida, puts it: [T]he humanise concept of subjectivity is inseparable
from the discourse and institution of a speciesism which relies on the tacit acceptance that the full
nature that other
transcendence to the human requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we can
engage in a 'noncriminal putting to death', as Derrida phrases it, not only of animals but of humans as well by marking them as animal. (1998: 39) The
it relies upon 'the taking for

granted of the systematic, institutionalized killing of non-human others (39).
In other words, in assuming a natural prioritisation of humans and human
interests over those of other species on earth, we are both generating and
repeating the racist ideologies of imperialism on a planetary scale . In working
towards a genuinely post-imperial, environmentally based conception of community, then, a re-imagining and
reconfiguration of the human place in nature necessitates an interrogation
of the category of the human itself and of the ways in which the
construction of ourselves against nature with the hierarchisation of life
forms that construction implies has been and remains complicit in
colonialist and racist exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to
the present day. Postcolonial studies has come to understand environmental issues not only as central to the projects of European
effectiveness of this discourse of species is that 'when applied to social others of whatever sort,,
conquest and global domination, but also as inherent in the ideologies of imperialism and racism on which those projects historically - and persistently depend. Nor only were other people often regarded as part of nature - and thus treated instrumentally as animals but also they were forced or co-opted
over time into western views of the environment, thereby rendering cultural and environmental restitution difficult if not impossible to achieve. Once
invasion and settlement had been accomplished, or at least once administrative structures had been set up, the environmental impacts of western
attitudes to human being-in-the-world were facilitated or reinforced by the deliberate (or accidental) transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout
Despite the recent

advances of eco/environmental criticism, English studies in general, and postcolonial studies more particularly, have
yet to resituate the species boundary and environmental concerns at the
pertinent than it is today. After all, postcolonialism's concerns with conquest, colonisation, racism and sexism, along with its
the European empires, instigating widespread ecosystem change under conspicuously unequal power regimes.3
investments in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and the relations between native and invader societies and cultures, are also the central concerns of
it is in the myriad
relationships between material practices and ideas - especially in cross-cultural contexts - that
day-to-day planetary life is lived and futures are governed : practices and
ideas that are inseparable from issues of representation - as will be made clear throughout
animal and environmental studies. Moreover, as the American environmental historian Donald Wotstcr acknowledges,
this book.
ImpactTurns Case
Anthropocentric discourse and tropes cause racial
criminalization and stigma faster than it can be recognized.
That means our internal link is triggered at a level which your
solvency mechanism has no risk of capturing by contrast to our
alt which can arguably solve a proximate cause of racism.
Stanford University 2k8 [February 7). Discrimination Against Blacks Linked
To Dehumanization, Study Finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080207163811.htm]
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2008) Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream
U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of
California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes. In addition, the findings show that
society is more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects

as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully
human, according to the researchers. Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is
black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights
movement. "This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions
when you do the workintuitionsyou have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] was
how we were able to pick it up every time." The paper, "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and
Contemporary Consequences," is the result of a series of six previously unpublished studies conducted by
Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State University psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff (the lead author and a former student of Eberhardt's) and
Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively. The paper is scheduled to
appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association. The
research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male
undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to
"prime" the students, researchers
found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much

faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces. The researchers
consistently discovered a black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations.
The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other non-
dehumanization and
animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against
many oppressed groups. "Despite widespread opposition to racism, bias
white groups, such as Asians. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that
remains with us," Eberhardt said. "African Americans are still dehumanized; we're still
associated with apes in this country. That association can lead people to
endorse the beating of black suspects by police officers, and I think it has lots of
other consequences that we have yet to uncover." Historical background Scientific racism in the United States was graphically
promoted in a mid-19th-century book by Josiah C. Nott and George Robins Gliddon titled Types of Mankind, which used misleading
illustrations to suggest that "Negroes" ranked between "Greeks" and chimpanzees. "When we have a history like that in this country,
I don't know how much of that goes away completely, especially to the extent that we are still dealing with severe racial inequality,
which fuels and maintains those associations in ways that people are unaware," Eberhardt said. Although such grotesque
characterizations of African Americans have largely disappeared from mainstream U.S. society, Eberhardt noted that science
education could be partly responsible for reinforcing the view that blacks are less evolved than whites. An iconic 1970 illustration,
"March of Progress," published in the Time-Life book Early Man, depicts evolution beginning with a chimpanzee and ending with a
white man. "It's a legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white man," Eberhardt said. "I don't think it's intentional, but
when people learn about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that
people of African descent are closer to apes than people of European descent. When
people think of a civilized person, a white man comes to mind ." Consequences of socially
endorsed violence In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white male undergraduates with words
associated with either apes (such as "monkey," "chimp," "gorilla") or big cats (such as "lion," "tiger," "panther"). The latter was used
as a control because both images are associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt said. The subjects then watched a two-minute
video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. A
mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a
description conveying that, although described by his family as "a loving husband and father," the suspect had a serious criminal
record and may have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest. The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating
was. Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with
either ape or big cat words, Eberhardt said. But those
who thought the suspect was black were more

likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat words.
"Taken together, this suggests that implicit knowledge of a Black-ape association led to
marked differences in participants' judgments of Black criminal suspects ," the researchers
write. According to the paper's authors, this link has devastating consequences for African Americans because it "alters visual
perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against black suspects." For example, the paper's sixth study
African Americans convicted of

were about four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to
be described with ape-relevant language , such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute,"
"savage" and "wild." "Those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more
likely to be executed by the state than those who are not, " the researchers write.
showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer,
capital crimes
ImpactRoot Cause
Speciesm is the foundational logic of oppression multiple
independent examples prove that the tools learned through
animal exploitation were the foundation of historys largest
incidents of racism elevating speciesm is crucial to form any
effective response to the enormity of animal suffering
Best, 7. Steven, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas, El Paso.
The Killing Fields of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, and Total
Liberation, Fast Capitalism,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/best.html.
To give some indication of these complex relations by way of concrete examples, we can first examine the connections between
speciesism and racism, between animal and human slavery. Beginning in the 1870s, numerous cities including Paris, London,
Hamburg, Barcelona, and New York opened new exhibits, called "human zoos."[66] These pathetic spectacles displayed indigenous
peoples (Africans, Samoans, and others) in cages, often semi-nude or nude, as living trophies demonstrating white European
superiority over "primitive" dark cultures. Tens of millions of people gawked "savage" and "exotic" peoples, their first and lasting
impression of the colonial Other. In 1906, Madison Grant, the head of the New York Zoological Society and a prominent eugenicist,
exhibited pigmy Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo. Grant placed him in a cage with an orangutan, and labeled the exhibit "The Missing
Link," thus suggesting that Africans such as Benga were closer to apes than to human beings. Human zoos, of course, would not
have been possible without the prior existence of animal zoos, which were created in the nineteenth century when colonialists
institutions first
used to exploit animals were adapted to exploit human beings, framing indigenous
peoples as sub-human animals. With their large worldwide audience, zoos, in fact, were important institutions for
captured and displayed wild animals in a similar display of human supremacy and power over nature. Thus,
the construction and dissemination of racist ideologies, eugenics, and Social Darwininism, thereby legitimating colonialism as just
and right, as the path to Progress. Anthropology and the social sciences were accomplices to this enterprise, as racist theories
The systematic extermination of millions of Jews and

others by the Nazis was inspired, informed, and justified by racist theories and
"might is right" worldviews, such as zoos helped to construct and bring to a mass
audience. Indeed, there are profound relationships between speciesism and racism,
became increasingly influential in society.
animal and human exploitation, and mass animal slaughter and human genocide .
there are deep

and disturbing connections between the enslavement of animals and human
slavery; between the breeding of domesticated animals and compulsory
sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide; and between the assembly-line killing of
animals in slaughterhouses and the mass killing techniques employed in Nazi
concentration camps.[67] "A better understanding of these connections," Patterson states, "should help make our planet
As Charles Patterson demonstrates in The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust,
a more humane and livable place for all of uspeople and animals alike, A new awareness is essential for the survival of our
endangered planet."[68] The construction of industrial stockyards, the total objectification of other species, and the mass
mechanized killing of animals should have come as a warning to humanity that such a process might one day be applied to humans,
as it was in Nazi Germany. Thus, the poignant relevance of a quote attributed to Theodor Adorno, to the effect that,
"Auschwitz
begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks:

they're only animals." Similarly, in The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel shows that
the exploitation of animals provided the models, metaphors, technologies, and

practices for the dehumanization and enslavement of blacks .[69] From castration and
chaining to branding and ear cropping and breeding slaves like horses and mules,
white Europeans drew on a long history of subjugating animals to oppress blacks. In
the nineteenth century a popular sentiment was that blacks were a "sub-species," more like gorillas than full-fledged humans. Once
perceived as beasts, blacks were treated accordingly; pariahs from the moral community, animals provided a convenient discard bin
in which to throw blacks. By demeaning people of color as "monkeys," "beasts of burden," and "filthy animals," animal metaphors
derived from systems of speciesist exploitationfacilitated and legitimated the institution of slavery. The denigration of any people
Once Europeans began the colonization

of Africa in the fifteenth century, the metaphors, models, and technologies used to
as a type of animal is a potential prelude to violence and genocide.
exploit animals were applied to human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and
homeland, breaking up families, wrapping chains around their bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for
weeks or months with no regard for their suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as
servants, separating family members who scream in anguish, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating
them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbersall these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves
began with the exploitation of animal slaves. Popular anthropological schemes of the nineteenth century placed "Aryans" on the top
and blacks at the bottom; previously referred to with terms such as "lineage," nineteenth-century concepts of race were clear
examples of scientific racism. As Felipe Fernandez Armesto observes: "Racism provided ample justification for the victimization,
persecution, oppression, and extermination of some groups by others. Working off the initial hierarchy forced in relation to animals,
it became necessaryeven for advocates of Nazism or apartheidto insist that different human groups constituted different
species, sub-species, or potential species."[70] By the late-twentieth century, however, science had discredited scientific races, for
"Not only were there no inferior races: there are no races; there is practically no racial differentiation among humans. Although we
may look different from one another, the genetic space between the most widely separated humans is tiny, by comparison with
other species. The same science has exploded the notion of human `subspecies'."[71] There are important parallels of speciesism to
racism and sexism in the elevation of male rationality to the touchstone for judging moral worth .
The same arguments

European colonialists used to justify exploiting Africansthat they were less than
human and inferior to white Europeans in rational capacitiesare the very same
justifications humans use to exploit, consume, and kill animals. There is
undoubtedly a significant link between animal exploitation and human exploitation
as ancient speciesist arguments were adapted to underpin modern racist outlooks
and are parallel as well to patriarchal ideology that women are emotional creatures incapable of advanced reasoning. Moreover, the
confinement and killing of billions of animals in factory farm and slaughterhouse systems has a profound negative impact on the
environment and thus on human life. To provide grazing land for cattle, animal agriculture industries destroy habitats and rainforests
and habitats, and spread desertification. The release of carbon dioxide from cut forests, use of fertilizers, and release of methane
gas from billions of cattle are major causes of ozone deterioration and global warming. In a world where energy, land, and water are
scarce, the global meat production/consumption system is fueled by enormous quantities of resources. Moreover, in the shift from
food to feed production, most crops are grown for animal feed rather than human food, wasting precious crops. The relation
between agribusiness and resource depletion is particularly poignant in the context of Africa as a whole, for it raises the specter of
famine. One of the leading causes of world hunger, in fact, is animal agriculture and meat consumption, whereby most of the world's
land, water, and crops are fed to animals fattened and slaughtered for human consumption. Besides the toll this system takes on
animals and the environment, and its impact on human health, it is an incredibly inefficient use of scare land and water resources.
As Jeremy Rifkin explains, People go hungry because much of arable land is used to grow feed grain for animals rather than people.
In the United States, 157 million tons of cereals, legumes and vegetable proteinall suitable for human consumptionis fed to
livestock to produce just 28 million tons of animal protein in the form of meat. In developing countries, using land to create an
artificial food chain has resulted in misery for hundreds of millions of people. An acre of cereal produces five times more protein than
an acre used for meat production; legumes such as beans, peas and lentils can produce 10 times more protein and, in the case of
soya, 30 times more .... Despite the rich diversity of foods found all over the world, one third of its population does not have enough
to eat. Today, hunger is a massive problem in many parts of Africa, Asia and South America and the future is not looking good. The
global population is set to rise from 6.1 billion ... to 9.3 billion by 2050 and Worldwatch reports forecast severe global food shortages
leading to famine on an unprecedented scale. This misery is partly a direct result of our desire to eat meat. Children in the
developing world starve next to fields of food destined for export as animal feed, to support the meat-hungry cultures of the rich
world. While millions die, one third of the world's grain production is fed to farmed animals in rich countries.... If animal farming were
to stop and we were to use the land to grow grain to feed ourselves, we could feed every single person on this planet. Consuming
crops directlyrather than feeding them to animals and then eating animalsis a far more efficient way to feed the world ... By
squandering the vast bulk of land and water resources, resources that could produce far greater quantities of nutrient rich food in a
plant-based agriculture, the global meat culture directly contributes to world hunger. Moreover, the global meat exacerbates
inequality and poverty among the world's peoples, as resources from impoverished Southern nations flow to wealthy Northern
nations. The human consequences of the global shift from food to feed production were dramatically evident in 1984, when
thousands of Ethiopians were dying of famine each day. The problem was not that Ethiopia had no viable land on which to grow
crops and feed its people, but that it was using millions of acres of land to produce linseed cake, cottonseed cake, and rapeseed
meal for livestock feed to export to Europe. Rifkin notes the perverse irony of such an irrational and unsustainable system of food
production: "Around six billion people share the planet, one quarter in the rich north and three quarters in the poor south. While
people in rich countries diet because they eat too much, many in the developing world do not have enough food simply to ensure
their bodies work properly and stay alive.[72] And yet, despite the overwhelming, irrefutable fact of the immense destructive power
(to humans, animals, and the earth alike) of the global meat and dairy industries, institutions such as the World Hunger
Organization, the IMF, and the World Bank promote the destructive myth that factory farming is the best way to feed a hungry
world, as advertisements promoting meat and diary consumption and fast food chains such as McDonalds and KFC proliferate
throughout the world. In contexts such as this, people must recognize the larger significance of vegetarianism and veganismnot
only as a health and personal growth movement, but also as a social justice and environmental movement. The tragedy of famine
clearly does not stem from "natural" causes such as scarcity and the "stinginess" of nature, but rather from the socio-economic
dynamics of meat-based agriculture, the appropriate of land to export cash crops to the Western world rather than to feed domestic
populations, the domination of transnational corporations and global banking institutions, and the corruption of national
Given just a few examples of the devastating effect of animal exploitation on

the social and natural worlds, the oft-heard diatribes that animal rights activists
care more about animals than humans, are elitists, or have misplaced priorities
misses the point entirely. Such a dismissive reaction represents a moral failure to
rulers.
respond to the enormity of animal suffering and an intellectual failure to understand

the enormous social and environmental implications of the human attempt to
subjugate, colonize, and plunder the earth and its sundry species. Besides the speciesist
assumption that animal suffering does not warrant a serious moral or political response, this objection proceeds from an atomistic
outlook unable to see the connections between animal exploitation, environmental destruction, patriarchy, racism, violence, and
world hunger. The exploitation of animals causes profound social and environmental problems for the human world itself, such that
we should stop treating animal rights as trivial to human and environmental problems, and rather see it as fundamental to resolving
crises in both realms.
Our argument isnt an attempt to weigh species oppression

against racial oppression instead, the obvious corollaries
inform the necessity of taking action against species apartheid
Best, 7. Steven, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas, El Paso.
The Killing Fields of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, and Total
Liberation, Fast Capitalism,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/best.html.
South Africa inherited and maintained an ugly legacy of violence and domination from European colonialists, a
system of exploiting humans and nature, racism, and discrimination. In 1948, Dutch Afrikaners referred to this
social structure they received and developed as "apartheid" (which literally means "separate state"). Apartheid was
a brutal system of class and racial domination maintained by repression, violence, and terror, whereby a minority of
Apartheid was a
conceptual and ideological system, whereby white elites positioned themselves as
superior in relation to the black masses they branded as inferior , and an institutional
wealthy and powerful white elites exploited and ruled over the black majority.
system, which exploited black labor power, stripped them of basic rights, and strictly segregated the races. Whites
declared blacks noncitizens, and confined them to different beaches, hospitals, schools, churches, theatres,
restrooms, trains, buses, and other public areas. The respective sexes too were kept apart, as interracial sex and
marriage was illegal. Reviled throughout the world, pressured economically, and attacked at every point by the
black resistance movement, the apartheid system began to fall. Nelson Mandela, imprisoned on Robben Island for
27 years, was set free in February 1990, and apartheid was dismantled in 1994. South Africa's first democratic
elections were held on April 27, 1994, and Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress (ANC), became the
country's first black state president. From May 1994 to June 1999, Mandela presided during the transition from
apartheid and minority rule to a fledgling democracy, a system that unfortunately remains plagued by great
poverty, unemployment, inequality, and discontent.[13]
Despite the changes that (officially, at least)
ending social apartheid, nothing changed in the underlying structure of species

apartheid.[14] Just as social apartheid is anchored in white hatred of blacks, so
species apartheid stems from human contempt for nonhuman species such as
expressed in the iconic images of joyful hunters power-posing with their "kill."[15] Just as racism arbitrarily
defines one group of humans as superior to another, out of sheer prejudice and
ignorance, so speciesism position human animals as superior to nonhuman animals ,
and anoint themselves as the end to which all other life forms are mere means. Whereas the racist
mindset roots its hierarchy in skin color, the speciesist mindset devalues and
objectifies animals by dichotomizing the evolutionary continuum into human and
nonhuman life. As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism, so speciesism
draws from a malignant human supremacism , namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a
natural or God-given right to use animals for any purpose they devise. Akin to social apartheid, the conceptual
segregation of species apartheid informs an institutional segregation, in which animals are removed from social
purview and confined to cramped pens and cages, where their oppression is mainly hidden. As much as possible,
South African whites tried to hide black oppression by relegating them to "homelands" and designated public
spaces apart from white society. Similarly, while some animals like elephants roam in public parks and are
spectacles for eco-tourism, the most vicious forms of exploitation occur in dungeon-like laboratories, factory farms
and slaughterhouses in rural outposts, and private hunting enclosures. As South African journalist, Mantsadi
Molotlegi, writes in regard to the epiphany that radically changed her worldview, moral compass, and politics,
"The
way we treat animals has all the hallmarks of apartheidprejudice, callous
disregard for suffering, and a misguided sense of supremacy ... group areas and
Like
racism, speciesism deploys a "Might is Right" philosophy that sees the ability of the
powerful to rule over the powerless as its justification for doing so, ignoring the fact
that the greater the power the greater the responsibility to use it humanely,
democratically and ecologically. Like social apartheid, species apartheid is rooted in
the enslavement of beings exploited for profit , as global capitalist markets continue to thrive
segregation helped to keep the suffering of black people hidden from view. So too with the animals."[16]
through extreme exploitation and slavery. Victims of severe oppression, both animals and black Africans were slaves
subject to economic exploitation within capitalist systems. Whereas speciesism and racism are pernicious ideologies
that underlie animal and black oppression, their subjugation was also informed and determined by capitalist logic
and market networks that thrive from slave labor. Speaking of the complex causes of apartheid, an African National
Congress (ANC) article states that, "Afrikaner nationalism was [not only about] evicting African blacks simply
because of their race; much of it was [about a desire to appropriate land, resources and labour power... it must
never be forgotten that Apartheid and racial discrimination in South Africa, like everywhere else, has an aim far
more important than discrimination itself: the aim is economic exploitation. The root and fruit of apartheid and
racial discrimination is profit."[17] As the white South African minority enjoyed the highest standard of living in
Africa, on par with many western nations, the black majority were marginalized and impoverished in every area
such as income, housing, and schools. As with blacks toiling in the fields and mines of capitalist, whether it be
horses transporting people and goods in urban cities; or cows, pigs, and chickens confined in stalls, crates, and
cages manipulated (including genetically) to produce maximum quantities of meat, milk, and eggs; or mice, rats,
rabbits, cats, cogs, and chimpanzees in research laboratories who are artificially sickened and serve as sheer bodies
for the production of meaningless quantitative data or to provide organs for human "harvest." As bad as black
Africans had it throughout the era of social apartheid, species apartheid is an even more oppressive system. This is
because a significantly greater number of animals (dying by the billions) are killed each year, the methods of
exploitation typically are more brutal, and there is far less outcry over their suffering and death. Although blacks
were violently repressed and many were beaten, tortured, and killed, they were not bred, farmed, confined, and
exploited for hunters to shoot down in a demented drama of "sport" and human mastery of nature. While jailed and
beaten, blacks were not captured and sent to laboratories for experimentation, cut into pieces and consumed for
meat, nor dismembered and sold for jewelry and paperweights. Although black victims of apartheid were murdered
over 40 billion animals die each year at the hands of human

oppressors in various systems of exploitation, from slaughterhouses and fur farms
to hunting fields and laboratories. While the world conscience was slow to awaken to condemn the
by the thousands,
exploitation of blacks, they ultimately did and were crucial factors in the abolition of apartheid; the cries against
species apartheid, however, are barely audiblethose quickly growing. And even those opposed to the trade of
ivory and chimpanzee meat condone, approve, and participate in myriad forms of animal exploitation such as meat,
The crucial point here is not to quantify

suffering or to privilege one form of oppression over another, but rather to draw
parallels among different forms of oppression and to call attention to the plight of
animals within global species apartheid systems. In the time span since 1994, with the tripartite
dairy, and egg consumption or wearing leather products.
alliance of the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and the South African
Communist Party, a democratization process has begun to improve life for human beings. But absolutely nothing
has been done to ameliorate the slaughter and suffering of animals. In post-apartheid South Africa, one finds the
same pseudo-"park" and "conservation" policies, the same cronyism and corruption, the same morass of legal
codes and lack of regulation, the same systematic violation of treaties such as CITES, and the same arrogant and
violent speciesism that deems animals beings and uses force and aggression to unconscionably exploit them for
human purposes.
1NC Species Being Alt

abandon the idea of human rights, the scavenger, dec. 10]
While the intersection of race and gender is often acknowledged in understanding the etiology of justificatory narratives for war, the presence of species
distinctions and the importance of the subhuman are less appreciated. Yet, the race (and gender) thinking that animates Razacks argument in
normalizing violence for detainees (and others) is also centrally sustained by the subhuman figure. As Charles Patterson notes with respect to multiple
Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the

master species, our victimization of animals has served as the
model and foundation for our victimization of each other. The study
of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and
slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animas and do
the same to them. Patterson emphasizes how the human/animal hierarchy and our
ideas about animals and animality are foundational for intra-human
hierarchies and the violence they promote. The routine violence
against beings designated subhuman serves as both a justification
and blueprint for violence against humans. For example, in discussing the specific dynamics of the
forms of exploitation:
Nazi camps, Patterson further notes how techniques to make the killing of detainees resemble the slaughter of animals were deliberately implemented in
order to make the killing seem more palatable and benign. That the detainees were made naked and kept crowded in the gas chambers facilitated their
animalization and, in turn, their death at the hands of other humans who were already culturally familiar and comfortable with killing animals in this way.
Returning to Razacks exposition of race thinking in contemporary camps, one can see how
subhuman thinking is
foundational to race thinking. One of her primary arguments is that race thinking, which she defines as the
denial of a common bond of humanity between people of European
descent and those who are not, is a defining feature of the world
order today as in the past. In other words, it is the species thinking that
helps to create the racial demarcation. As Razack notes with
respect to the specific logic infusing the camps, they are not
simply contemporary excesses born of the wests current quest for
security, but instead represent a more ominous, permanent
arrangement of who is and is not a part of the human community.
Once placed outside the human zone by race thinking, the
detainees may be handled lawlessly and thus with violence that is
legitimated at all times. Racialization is not enough and does not
exclusions. Although nonhumans are not the focus of Razacks work, the centrality of the subhuman to the logic of the
camps and racial and sexual violence contained therein is also

clearly illustrated in her specific examples. In the course of her analysis, to determine the import of
race thinking in enabling violence, Razack quotes a newspaper story that describes the background mentality of Private Lynndie England, the white female
soldier made notorious by images of her holding onto imprisoned and naked Iraqi men with a leash around their necks. The story itself quotes a resident
from Englands hometown who says the following about the sensibilities of individuals from their town: To the country boys here, if youre a different
nationality, a different race, youre sub-human. Thats the way that girls like Lynndie England are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no
different from shooting a turkey. Every season here youre hunting something. Over there theyre hunting Iraqis. Razack extracts this quote to illustrate
Race has a
formative function, to be sure, but it works in conjunction with
species difference to enable the violence at Abu Ghraib and other
camps. Dehumanization promotes racialization, which further
entrenches both identities. It is an intertwined logic of race, sex,
culture and species that lays the foundation for the violence .
how race overdetermined what went on, but it may also be observed that species overdetermined what went on.
1NC Paradigmatic Analysis Alt

Anthropocentric violence is justified at an epistemic, linguistic,
and cultural level. Only the alternatives casuistry, or case
based reasoning and rejection of the anthropocentrism
inherent in the 1ac at more than a morally elitist level is key to
create an effective paradigmatic analysis. Practice must come
before theory.
Aaltola, 10
[Elisa, Ph. D., is a Lecturer in Philosophy (East Finland University). In her research,
she has focused on animal ethics and, more generally, animal philosophy, The
Anthropocentric Paradigm and the Possibility of Animal Ethics, pg. 29-34, Ethics &
the Environment Volume 15, Number 1, spring 2010, Muse] JB
Casuistry maintains that we ought to approach ethical issues
from the viewpoint of paradigms rather than theory . More specifically, we are to scrutinize the
normative nature of particular cases by reflecting them on the "paradigm cases," over which there is little dispute.
Anthropocentric Casuistry
For instance, when considering whether stealing in a given situation is justified, we are to compare this with a
paradigm situation, where stealing is either clearly wrong or clearly justified (here casuistry comes close to case law
and its emphasis on precedent cases). In the contemporary context, casuistry has become popular particularly in
medical ethics and bioethics (on history and nature of casuistry, see Jonsen & Toulmin 1992). This approach has
also been applied to non-human animals, albeit with a bit of a twist. It is argued that particular normative
We
are to compare specific norms and situations with the common, widely accepted
paradigms that stipulate how animals ought to be treated . At the extreme, the approach is
rather Kuhnian (if one replaces "science" with "ethics")it is the moral climate of the moment that
determines how animals are to be evaluated and treated . Whereas standard casuistry is
understandings concerning animals are justified, if they fit the general, paradigmatic ways of valuing animals.
interested in specific paradigms involving specific cases (for instance, "stealing"), the interest here extends to a
The paradigmatic way of valuing animals is to be given priority,

whilst theory (and thus standard animal ethics) is of secondary relevance. The casuistic
criticism of animal ethics often defends explicitly anthropocentric views. The claim is
that given anthropocentric notions (particularly the higher moral status of humans and the dualistic
framework) are fundamental to basic paradigms, and cannot be criticized merely on
the grounds of theory. Pro-animal arguments have a tendency to seem 'bizarre' in the context of basic
whole moral ideology.
paradigms, and ought to be viewed critically (Posner 2004, 60). The emphasis placed on cognitive capacities
(central to many pro-animal arguments) is especially criticizedcognitive capacities may be morally relevant on a
theoretical level, but not necessarily so on [End Page 29] the paradigmatic level. Since casuistry per se does not
imply anthropocentrism, and since it does not by necessity involve a whole value-system, the casuistic stance used
to criticize pro-animal arguments is here given the specific name "anthropocentric casuistry". A very frank version
of anthropocentric casuistry comes from Tony Lynch and David Wells, who (after presenting the popular "baby or
puppy" example to manifest that we would prioritise humans at the expense of other animals) claim that: "It is plain
humanity which counts (or should count) in such equations, not any quality or ability usually associated with
humanity" (Lynch and Wells 1998, 156). Humanity matters, because humans tend to value other humans more than
other animalsprioritizing human beings is a central paradigm. Arguments that search for justification and
theoretical support for this favoritism by emphasizing matters such as mental capacities are misleading. Lynch and
Wells recognize that it is indeed difficult to offer standard theoretical justification for the bias, but claim that no such
justification is neededin fact, they maintain that moral reasons are meaningless and amoral in this specific
context: "Morally speaking, it is humanity that counts. Any effort at reduction on this point means abandoning
morality itself" (Lynch and Wells 1998, 162). Therefore, we are to favor other humans without further moral
deliberation. Morality in this context is based on the anthropocentric paradigm, and prioritizing moral theory is
argued to amount to amorality. Richard Posner offers a similar viewpoint. According to him, cognitive capacities are
relevant to having rights, but form neither the necessary nor the sufficient criteria. Rather, the necessary criterion is
humanity. No further philosophical justification is needed for this claim. It is "a fact based on beliefs that can change
but not a fact that can be shaken by philosophy." Since common, widely-spread beliefs restrict rights to human
beings, only human beings can have rights. Like Lynch and Wells, Posner admits that preference for humans may be
difficult to justify on the level of moral reason, but maintains that this has no bearing on the issue, for moral reason
is entirely secondary: "Reason doesn't enter" (Posner 2004, 67). We are to follow the anthropocentric paradigm
rather than moral reason. Posner uses 'intuition' to support his view. Here intuition seems to be a manifestation of
the paradigmatic way of thinking (rather than a tool with which to find objective values). According to Posner, the
special value of humans is based on such a strong intuition that no argument or moral [End Page 30] theory can
defeat it. In fact, when the two are in conflict, we are to abandon philosophy rather than this intuition: "I feel no
obligation to defend this reaction... [it] is a moral intuition deeper than any reason that could be given for it and
impervious to any reason that anyone could give against it.... If the moral irrelevance of humanity is what
philosophy teaches, so that we have to choose between philosophy and the intuition that says that membership in
the human species is morally relevant, philosophy will have to go" (Posner 2004, 64-65). Posner is quite open about
his dismissal of the relevance of moral arguments: "Indeed I believe that ethical argument is and should be
powerless against tenacious moral instincts" (Posner 2004, 66-67). Hence, moral reason and arguments are entirely
secondary in relation to anthropocentric paradigms and intuitionin fact, they are to be abandoned if they go
against anthropocentrism. The merit of anthropocentric casuistry is that it reminds us of the relevance of
background beliefs. Giving absolute priority to moral reason risks rendering ethics into a very abstract affairall
that matters are logics and consistency. There is something much more heartfelt than this to ethics. Moral beliefs
are accepted, not just because they are logical, but also because they, quite simply, 'seem right'they seem to
grasp the reality. This is where paradigms play an important role: how moral beliefs seem is often at least partly the
result of background beliefs. However, anthropocentric casuistry also faces severe difficulties. Although the
relevance of background beliefs needs to be recognized, it is problematic to maintain that moral reason and theory
are entirely secondary. Instead of polar opposites (paradigms/theory), ethics needs a more balanced basis in which
both paradigms and theory have their place. One fruitful option is to acknowledge the relevance of paradigms,
while retaining a reflective stance in relation to them. Thus, no paradigm is holier than thou and accepted as given.
Rather, even the most central of our paradigmatic beliefs are reflected upon in the light of a variety of moral 'tools'
The need for reflection becomes clearer when we consider the

obvious hurdle for casuistry: relativism. Blindly following paradigms and related
intuitions can be dangerous indeed. As Peter Singer points out in his response to
Posner, without moral reason, Nazis would have little cause to alter their behavior
(Singer 2004). Following anthropocentric casuistry would mean that those living in
societies governed by racist and sexist [End Page 31] paradigms and xenophobic
intuitions should succumb to the power of these paradigms rather than criticize
them on the basis of moral reason. The danger of relativism is evident particularly in
the cynicism expressed in regards to the possibility of moral change . The only legitimate
(including moral reason).
basis for such change (when it concerns basic background paradigms and beliefs) is to be found from outside moral
reason. Contingency (for instance, coincidental changes in economical or industrial circumstances that affect
cultural beliefs), rather than moral reason, is favored. Thus, Posner maintains that anthropocentric values may alter
if we "have a new morality" (something he argues to be possible in the future). However, the instigation of such a
new morality should not rest on moral arguments: "Philosophy follows moral change; it does not cause it, or even
lead it" (Posner 2004, 68). The very matter that so fundamentally affects us and which is of such elemental
importance to us (ethics) is left hovering inside the palms of blind history, and rendered into a thing upon which
reason and reflection should not bear an impact. Rather paradoxically, here it is precisely the most fundamental
moral beliefs that should rest on contingent factors, while more superficial concerns may be guided by reason. It
could be maintained that, quite contrary to what anthropocentric casuistry argues, abandoning moral reason is a
prime example of abandoning morality. Reducing normativity into descriptive statements concerning prominent
paradigms equals reducing ethics into sociology. This is a careless road, for moral reason is abandoned when it is
most needed. It is also a dangerous road. Although there is much to be said about the relevance and nature of the
naturalistic fallacy, it does present us with an important question here: Why should we assume that what we value
is what we should value? After all, our moral beliefs are often based on mistaken facts (in this case, concerning
matters such as the mental capacities of animals, as belief in the instrumental value of animals may rely on the
premise that animals have little or no cognitive ability) and irrelevant preferences (such as financial considerations
and a taste for beef burgers). This leads to a related issue. Because of the danger of relativism, the advocates of
anthropocentric casuistry may resort to favoring a more theory-orientated approach in intra-human affairs ("racism
is wrong because x"). If this step is taken, it will partly rescue them from the grip of relativism, but reveals another
obvious problem. If the supporters of anthropocentric casuistry prioritize paradigms in the context of non-human
[End Page 32] animals and reason in the context of humans, they assume a meta-ethical difference, the reasons for
which need to be explicated: why is moral reason abandoned precisely in relation to animals? The danger is that
bias toward humans on the meta-ethical level is used to justify bias toward humans on the ethical level, which may
Anthropocentric casuistry does not only sideline

moral reason, it also side-lines facts concerning the animal and (ultimately) the
animal herself. It says very little about animal capacities, interests, welfare, and so
forth. The danger is that the animal remains an empty figure whom can be given
anthropocentric content, even when that content is factually flawed . For instance, Posner
render the argument circular and ad hoc.
argues that the only time to contemplate animal rights is when the "happiness of certain animals is bound up with
our own happiness" (Posner 2004, 63) and goes on to support a claim offered by Richard Rorty, according to which
the aesthetic and sentimental bias towards some animals is completely justified. Hence, even when discussing
"animal rights", what matters are human interests, not the interests of animals. Posner goes so far as to claim that
the argument, according to which there is no moral justification for neglecting suffering, is "a sheer assertion"
(Posner 2004, 65) animal suffering per se does not necessarily carry significance.1 Because of this explicit
blindness toward the animal, there is something intrinsically dishonest about the stance. It makes strong claims
about beings, whom it is unwilling to take into account. It is as if a judge was to declare a sentence without ever
having heard the accused. An ethic concerning animals, which does not give regard to animals themselves, is
arguably structurally flawed. Moreover, the stance seems rather self-obsessed in its willingness to only pay regard
to the humananimals are positioned as empty forms, to which humans can give any content that suits their own
preference. Hence, there is a certain sense of deceitfulness and narcissism about anthropocentric casuistry: it
proclaims to be about animals, but rather only sees the human image, reflected in the mirror of countless selfobsessed paradigms. Also, the plurality of paradigms is not taken sufficiently into account. Anthropocentrism is not
the only basic paradigm of the contemporary society. Especially since the 19th century, non-anthropocentric
understandings of animals have casuistry begins to formally resemble a religion. Certain basic beliefs are accepted
as given and treated as 'the only become more popular in the West, and at times the change in animal imagery has
been quite radical (Kean 1998). Thus, although [End Page 33] anthropocentrism may be the dominant paradigm,
there are also other competing views on the human-animal relation (these include emphasis on empathy,
sentience, animal individuality, and even equality). What might seem obvious and intuitive to Posner may not seem
that way to William the welfarist or Valery the vegan. Because of this, it remains unclear why precisely the
anthropocentric paradigm ought to be favoredon what basis do we pick one paradigm out of many?
Anthropocentric casuistry is not (contrary to what it implies) following the inevitable

route of the 'only paradigm' that is available, but rather it is making a choice in
favor of a specific paradigm, and this choice needs to be brought forward and
explored. Without such exploration, anthropocentric right option,' whilst external
forms of evaluation (such as moral reason) and competing frameworks are rejected .
Of course, one argument could be that what matters is popularity: we ought to follow the paradigm favored by the
popularism may not be in tune even with casuistry. The issue

is not which values have most advocates, but rather which values have widely enough accepted
majority. However, this type of
that they are given social significance. As pro-animal sentiments are becoming increasingly popular, it seems
dubious to overlook them. Many people are affected by intuitions, according to which causing animals unnecessary
harm is wrong, which emphasize animal sentience, and which may even suggest that animals are individuals with
their own moral rights, and it seems counter-casuistic to ignore these intuitions.
Impact work
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature. - Lao Tzu
Genocide

if we

The continuation of the human/non-human divide ensures the

slaughter of populations by providing an ethical loophole to
justify atrocities
Wadiwel, 2K4
(Dinesh Joesph, completing a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney, Animal by Any Other Name? Patterson
and Agamben Discuss Animal (and Human) Life Borderlands E-Journal Vol 3 No. 1,
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/wadiwel_animal.htm)
vilification towards humans that rely

on reference to an animal metaphor. Although this is brief, it nevertheless provides some very direct
examples of how the animal is often evoked in the 'dehumanisation' process, as
"humans become animals" in order for violence to be realized . Indeed Patterson
observes early in the chapter that vilification of humans as animals can be treated an
ominous sign that bloodshed will soon occur, suggesting, as an example that "in the
years leading up to the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman Turks referred to
Armenians as rajah (cattle)" (2002:28). This points to one of the significant, albeit not explicitly stated,
5. In the second chapter, Patterson turns his attention towards forms of
achievements of this work. Through his examples of the way in which humans become animal through violence and vilification,
Patterson sheds light on the fundamental instability of the 'human' itself as a category. This is perhaps best reflected in the example
of "Barry," an attack dog used against prisoners in Treblinka. Patterson observes that its owner "amused himself by spurring Barry to
action with the command "Man, go get that dog!" By "Man" [he]meant his dog Barry, while "dog" referred to the prisoner he
ordered Barry to attack" (2002: 123). The human, no matter how it tries to escape, is caught in an inexorable web with the animal.
Human civility projects itself beyond the ground of its animality, but this same movement is continuously anchored and drawn back
to its point of origin. We find this clearly in Aristotles immortal pronouncement, that Man is by nature a rational animal (Aristotle,
1952b: 1253a), which suggests not only that the human is a better animal (an animal plus something else) but that there is an
indissoluble connection between the human and animal, no matter how great the differences. To my mind this is a curiosity of
religious and philosophical thought within the West. Within this logic the human does not possess a radically different nature to
animal, instead the human exists on a plane of animality. Even when humanity moves to the nether most regions of this plane, it is
What is perhaps most

illustrative of this movement are the examples of sustained and calculated
human violence found in the camp, where the human is thrust abjectly
towards its own animality. In this respect chapters 3, 4 & 5 of Pattersons work can be said to form the horrific
still grounded within animal being, a horizon from which it can scarcely draw away its gaze.6.
but compelling centrepiece of this book. These chapters provide an arresting account of the historical links between the forms of
human violence practiced by Nazi Germany during the middle of the twentieth century and forms of torture and death developed in
the animal slaughterhouse violence. Pattersons technique here is similar to Edmund Russells very impressive
Nature
War and
(Russell, 2001), another work that uses detailed comparisons between the technologies developed to eradicate and
control animals and those used for the same purposes against humans. (Interestingly both accounts critically retell North American
history and call to account the United States role in our last bloody century.)
Environmental Destruction
The impact is extinction through environmental collapse and
the destruction of animals the aff produces a dualist logic
which devalues animals to nothingness which always already
makes them expendable
Ahkin 10prof at Monash University (Melanie, HUMAN CENTRISM, ANIMIST MATERIALISM,
AND THE CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM IN VAL PLUMWOODS CRITICAL ECOLOGICAL
FEMINISM, Emergent Australasian Philosophers, Issue 3, 2010, http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCgQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F
%2Feap.philosophy-australia.com%2Findex.php%2Feap%2Farticle%2Fdownload
%2F27%2F23&ei=xpeT53nEIXY2QWc3qxD&usg=AFQjCNFBSgC4QarceGJ6l2HwwSSITSy7Dw&sig2=AheVDMx2sJ6
G9ck3QpEuUg, DA: 4/30/2012//JLENART)
The five key features of dualism's logic of domination are as follows: Radical
exclusion or hyperseparation involves the denial of continuity between dominant
and marginalised groups, instead stressing extreme difference and creating a polarised relation which denies any possibility of
overlap. Combined with backgrounding- the dominant group's denial of its dependency
on the marginalised group and rendering of the latter as inessential backgroundthis works to justify and naturalise the superior relata's claim to unique importance
and dominance over the radically discontinuous and seemingly inessential inferior
relata. Incorporation or relational definition involves the definition and recognition of
the inferior relata solely in relation to (as excluded from) the superior group ; this
assimilation to the superior relata's identity, needs and ends negates the needs and ends of the inferior relata and results in the latter's inability to impose
Thus, it is subject to instrumentalisation and

objectification: it is further stripped of intrinsic value, ends, and needs by means of
the denial of its subjectivity and intentionality, facilitating its treatment as mere
means to the ends of the dominant group. The formation of the dualised relata in
terms of a moral hierarchy naturalises this instrumentalisation, making it seem a
normal consequence of their differing degrees of moral significance. The final
feature of homogenisation or stereotyping occurs when differences within the subordinated
group are denied, allowing it to be attributed a reductive and stable identity , thus also
promoting the treatment of its constituents as interchangeable and replaceable
resources for the dominant group.10 These five features provide the basis for
hegemonic centrism insofar as they promote certain conceptual and perceptual
distortions of reality which universalise and naturalise the standpoint of the superior
relata as primary or centre, and deny and subordinate the standpoints of
inferiorised others as secondary or derivative . Using standpoint theory analysis, Plumwood's
reconceptualisation of human chauvinist frameworks locates and dissects these
logical characteristics of dualism, and the conceptual and perceptual distortions of
reality common to centric structures, as follows. Radical exclusion is found in the
rationalist emphasis on differences between humans and non-human nature, its
valourisation of a human rationality conceived as exclusionary of nature, and its
minimisation of similarities between the two realms. Homogenisation and stereotyping occur
especially in the rationalist denial of consciousness to nature, and its denial of the
moral constraints or limitations on the dominant group.
diversity of mental characteristics found within its many different constituents,

facilitating a perception of nature as homogeneous and of its members as
interchangeable and replaceable resources. This definition of nature in terms of its
lack of human rationality and consciousness means that its identity remains relative to that
of the dominant human group, and its difference is marked as deficiency, permitting
its inferiorisation. Backgrounding and denial may be observed in the conception of
nature as extraneous and inessential background to the foreground of human
culture, in the human denial of dependency on the natural environment, and denial
of the ethical and political constraints which the unrecognised ends and needs of
non-human nature might otherwise place on human behaviour. These features
together create an ethical discontinuity between humans and non-human nature
which denies nature's value and agency, and thereby promote its
instrumentalisation and exploitation for the benefit of humans .11 This dualistic logic helps
to universalise the human centric standpoint, making invisible and seemingly
inevitable the conceptual and perceptual distortions of reality and oppression of
non-human nature it enjoins. The alternative standpoints and perspectives of
members of the inferiorised class of nature are denied legitimacy and subordinated
to that of the class of humans, ultimately becoming invisible once this master standpoint becomes part of the
very structure of thought.12 Such an anthropocentric framework creates a variety of serious
injustices and prudential risks, making it highly ecologically irrational.13 The
hierarchical value prescriptions and epistemic distortions responsible for its biased,
reductive conceptualisation of nature strips the non-human natural realm of noninstrumental value, and impedes the fair and impartial treatment of its members.
Similarly, anthropocentrism creates distributive injustices by restricting ethical
concern to humans, admitting partisan distributive relationships with non-human nature in the forms of commodification and
instrumentalisation. The prudential risks and blindspots created by anthropocentrism are
problematic for nature and humans alike and are of especial concern within our
current context of radical human dependence on an irreplaceable and increasingly
degraded natural environment. These prudential risks are in large part
consequences of the centric structure's promotion of illusory human
disembeddedness, self-enclosure and insensitivity to the significance and survival
needs of non-human nature: The logic of centrism naturalises an illusory order in
which the centre appears to itself to be disembedded, and this is especially
dangerous in contexts where there is real and radical dependency on an Other who
is simultaneously weakened by the application of that logic .14 Within the context of human-nature
relationships, such a logic must inevitably lead to failure, either through the catastrophic
extinction of our natural environment and the consequent collapse of our species, or
more hopefully by the abandonment and transformation of the human centric
framework.15
The impact is the collapse of the planet from

environemental destruction because the ethics of alterity
can never allow does not allow for the presence of things
Benso, Prof. of Philosophy @ Penn State, 2K(Silvia,
The Face of Things, pg. xxxiii-xxxv)
The contemporary environmental discussion has alerted

philosophy to the connection existing between environmental
issues, which the epoch of postmodernity faces with a gravity
unprecedented in the (known) history of the planet, and the
categories of thought through which we, as contemporary subjects,
structure our lives. The modes of relation to things mirror the way
in which we think in general. Environmental challenges are not primarily a matter of science and
technology. Rather, they ask the more fundamentally philosophical questions
of how we live our lives, how we define ourselves, what kind of
values we entertain, what kind of beings we are. Ultimately, the
question they ask is the question of how we think, and more
specifically, of how philosophy thinks and structures the world. To
avoid the environmental catastrophe to which technological
rationality seems to have consigned the age of postmodernity, it
seems therefore necessary to explore, and espouse, ways of
relating to things that do not reduce them to objects, but rather
recognize in them the possibility of their own signification, of their
own difference, of their own alterity. Levinass philosophy provides a forceful response to one side
of Heideggers analogy, offering theoretical instruments to develop a notion of subjectivity which, to be meaningful at all, must be
Levinass ethical thought,

however, arrests itself in front of the pres ence of things, to which no
alterity is recognized, thus occluding the possibility of entering
ethical relations with them. It is with regard to the issue of the otherness of things, referred to as their
respectful of and responsive to the otherness of the other as a human being.
alterity, to mark the difference between various forms of otherness, and especially between human otherness and thingly otherness,
that this essay supplements Levinas.
Timeframe
The US supports programs that allow farmers to slaughter
millions of blackbirds without government remorse if they pose
a problem to the US the alt stops this reckless violence and
over 4 million deaths
CSM 10Christian Science Monitor, American news agency (1/20/10, Bye Bye
Blackbird: USDA acknowledges a hand in one mass bird death, Patrik Jonsson, staff
writer, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2011/0120/Bye-Bye-Blackbird-USDAacknowledges-a-hand-in-one-mass-bird-death, DA: 04-10-2012//JLENART)
It's not the "aflockalyptic" fallout from a secret US weapon lab as some have theorized. But the
government acknowledged Thursday that it had a hand in one of a string of mysterious
mass bird deaths that have spooked residents in Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama,
South Dakota, and Kentucky in the last month . The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) took
responsibility for hundreds of dead starlings that were found on the ground and
frozen in trees in a Yankton, S.D., park on Monday. The USDA's Wildlife Services
Program, which contracts with farmers for bird control, said it used an avicide poison called DRC-1339 to cull a
roost of 5,000 birds that were defecating on a farmer's cattle feed across the state
line in Nebraska. But officials said the agency had nothing to do with large and
dense recent bird kills in Arkansas and Louisiana. Nevertheless, the USDA's role in
the South Dakota bird deaths puts a focus on a little-known government bird-control
program that began in the 1960s under the name of Bye Bye Blackbird, which
eventually became part of the USDA and was housed in the late '60s at a NASA
facility. In 2009, USDA agents euthanized more than 4 million red-winged blackbirds ,
starlings, cowbirds, and grackles, primarily using pesticides that the government says are not harmful
to pets or humans. In addition to the USDA program, a so-called depredation order from the US Fish
and Wildlife Service allows blackbirds, grackles, and starlings to be killed by anyone
who says they pose health risks or cause economic damage . Though a permit is needed in some
instances, the order is largely intended to cut through red tape for farmers, who often
employ private contractors to kill the birds and do not need to report their bird culls
to any authority. "Every winter, there's massive and purposeful kills of these
blackbirds," says Greg Butcher, the bird conservation director at the National Audubon Society. "These guys are
professionals, and they don't want to advertise their work. They like to work fast,
efficiently, and out of sight."
--Root cause
Gratuitous violence
Anthropocentric ordering is the foundation of the war machine
and drives the exclusion of populations based on race,
ethnicity and gender
Kochi, 2K9
(Tarik, Sussex law school, Species war: Law, Violence and Animals, Law Culture and Humanities Oct 5.3)
Grotius and Hobbes are sometimes described as setting out a prudential approach,28 or a natural law of minimal content29 because
in contrast to Aristotelian or Thomastic legal and political theory their attempt to derive the legitimacy of the state and sovereign
order relies less upon a thick conception of the good life and is more focussed upon basic human needs such as survival. In the
context of a response to religious civil war such an approach made sense in that often thick moral and religious conceptions of the
it would be a
mistake to assume that the categories of survival, preservation of life
and bare life are neutral categories. Rather survival, preservation of life and bare life as
expressed by the Westphalian theoretical tradition already contain distinctions of value in
particular, the specific distinction of value between human and non-human
life. Bare life in this sense is not bare but contains within it a distinction of value between the worth of human life placed
good life (for example, those held by competing Christian Confessions) often drove conflict and violence. Yet,
above and beyond the worth of non-human animal life. In this respect bare life within this tradition contains within it a hidden
The foundational moment of the modern juridical

conception of the law of war already contains within it the operation of
species war. The Westphalian tradition puts itself forward as grounding the legitimacy of violence upon the preservation of
life, however its concern for life is already marked by a hierarchy of value in
which non-human animal life is violently used as the raw material for
preserving human life. Grounded upon, but concealing the human-animal
distinction, the Westphalian conception of war makes a double move: it excludes
the killing of animals from its definition of war proper, and, through
rendering dominant the modern juridical definition of war proper the
tradition is able to further institutionalize and normalize a particular
conception of the good life. Following from this original distinction of life-value
realized through the juridical language of war were other forms of human
life whose lives were considered to be of a lesser value under a European, Christian,
secular30 natural law conception of the good life. Underneath this concern with the
preservation of life in general stood veiled preferences over what
particular forms of life (such as racial conceptions of human life) and ways
of living were worthy of preservation, realization and elevation. The business
contracts of early capitalism,31 the power of white males over women and children, and,
especially in the colonial context, the sanctity of European life over nonEuropean and Christian lives over non-Christian heathens and Muslims,
were some of the dominant forms of life preferred for preservation within
the early modern juridical ordering of war.
conception of the good life.
Extinction
The continued separation of human and animal makes the

exploitation and massacre of humanity inevitable. The
alternative is to eliminate the gap which separates the human
and non-human.
Wadiwel, completing a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney, 2K2
(Dinesh Joesph, Cows and Sovereignty: Biopower and Animal Life Borderlands EJournal Vol. 1 # 2
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no2_2002/wadiwel_cows.html)
15. Further,
it is upon consideration of the terrifying reality of the biopolitical

regime in the camp, that one can recognise clearly the insoluble link
between the bare life of humanity and that shared by all animal life as a
whole. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben discusses in detail the Muselmnner (or Muslims), the term given to the walking
dead of the camps, who due to the infliction of continued violence malnutrition, sleep deprivation, extended work, psychological
trauma etc are reduced to a state of fragile indifference to their immediate conditions (Agamben, 1999). The insensibility of this
figure to the world, and his or her disjunction from the social interactions of the prisoners and guards around, is also the process by
which the Muselmnner are apprehended as living beings who have in some way lost their humanity. Agamben states that the
"Muselmann is not only or not so much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and the
inhuman" (Agamben, 1999: 55). It is in this sense that one cannot fully understand the life held within the camp without
The decisive activity

of biopower in our time consists not of life or death, but rather of a
mutable and virtually infinite survival. In every case, it is a matter of
dividing animal life from organic life, the human from the inhuman,
the witness from the Muselmann, conscious life from vegetative life
maintained functional through resuscitation techniques, until a
threshold is reached; an essentially mobile threshold that like the
borders of geo-politics, moves along according to the progress of
scientific and political technologies. Biopowers supreme ambition is
to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living
being and the speaking being, zo and bios, the inhuman and the
human survival (Agamben, 1999: 155-6). In the extreme situation of the camp, the
understanding the possibilities for non-human life, upon which human life itself is wrought:
gap which is assumed to exist between the animal and the human that
between the living being and that between a speaking being, or that which merely has life (zo) and that which also has a cultural or
soon eclipses. It is not surprising, then, that in such situations,

human life takes on the characteristic of that of livestock (people are transported like
political life (bios)
cattle, or humans are forced to live like swine). Livestock represent that which only possess life itself: beings for whom survival
may entail a few short months spent in a cramped, dark, and painful factory feedlot. The life of cattle therefore shares its limit
To the extent that

the political landscape has altered in such a way that questions of politics
involve questions of life for both human and non-human life, and that the
bare life of sovereignty is a life that occupies a space of indistinction
between the human and the non-human, then the following assertion may
be made: the destiny of humanity lies in animal. This assertion is not a hollow and
condition with that of the human, as an empty survival that promises life alone and nothing else. 16.
is an indicator of a significant political

problem of the present. The challenge of contemporary biopolitics is the
challenge of a politics which persistently moves to strike from the political
that which does not relate to life itself, a politics which is intrinsically tied
to the operation of modern sovereignty. And the consequence of this
politic which operates in an exemplary fashion in modern sovereignty
is that humanity is returned to the animal. The erasure of that gap (the
gap through which humanity posited the distance between itself and
animal), finds humanity on level with the non-human which it had
previously condemned to the necessary suffering of the factory farm
enclosure, of the slaughter en masse, or the vivisectors knife. 17. Yet these
observations should not be read as a demand for the reinstatement of the
gap between human and non-human animals. For the gap itself inevitably
returns to the point of its erasure. The reason for this lies in exception,
and the exercise of violence which is intrinsic to sovereignty. The right to
constitute an exception, to exercise a violence which is otherwise forbidden, a process which Benjamin refers to as
an "objective contradiction in the legal situation, but not a logical contradiction in the law" (1996: 240), is also the
decisive point where any gap that is posited between the human and the
non-human animal may be eroded. It is exception which makes it possible
for a seemingly peaceful society of humans to exercise violence on a
massive scale upon non-human animal life. And the gap between the
human and non-human is constituted purely by exception in the belief
that humans are deserving of something more than that of the animal, or
alternatively, that the animal may be subject to that which human life
should never be subjected. Yet in so far as human society actively
constitutes the limit for bare life within factory farms and experimental
laboratories, the life of the non-human animal captured within this sphere
of exception represents the limit possibility for human life . And this human
life may, by the hand of the sovereign, be banished to this same sphere
which non-human life is condemned. The problem remains then, that as
the West tries desperately to reconstitute the space between humanity
and the animal, it inevitably is returned to the animal once again, since
the meeting of the human and the animal can only be postponed, and
never indefinitely. This is perhaps why Emile Zola comments that the "fate of animals is
of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous: it is indissolubly connected with the
fate of men" (qtd. in Wynne-Tyson, 1985: 432). If the destiny of humanity lies in animal,
then the true political challenge of the contemporary era revolves around
the removal of the gap in its entirety.
limited reference to a Darwinian biologism; rather it
--Turns case
Generally awesome card/Biopower

Modern biopolitics is based upon the gap between human and
non-human- a separation which is endemic because of the
saturation of sovereign power in modern politics the end
point of this system is found in the Nazi domination.
Wadiwel, completing a doctorate at the University of Western Sydney, 2K2
(Dinesh Joesph, Cows and Sovereignty: Biopower and Animal Life Borderlands EJournal Vol. 1 # 2
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no2_2002/wadiwel_cows.html)
the emergence of biopolitics signifies a movement away from
the rule by the sword which traditionally characterised sovereign power in
Foucault argues that
the west. The new Sovereign displays a concern towards the fostering of the life of the citizen, even if, in relation to the frequent and
bloody wars in recent human history, this life is secured through mass violence (Foucault, 1998: 137). Foucault suggests that the
modern sovereign does not so much exercise "the ancient right to take life or let live," but is instead synonymous with a "power to
This modern sovereign has sheathed its

sword, and now carefully utilises a set of instruments to regulate the
biological life of the populations within its domain. 2. But how does the
question of life itself relate to the life of the (non-human) animal? The scene
foster life or disallow it to the point of death" (1998: 138).
described in the fragment above could count as a spectacle of modern biopolitics. Certainly, if the quarantined cows were
substituted for humans, then it would be possible to detect with more clarity the politics of this situation, and recognise the relation
non-human animals, are not clearly

eligible for consideration within a discussion of biopolitics , is not due to any essential
poverty in the potential scope of Foucaults term. Rather, the deficiency relates to the tradition of
politics itself, at least in the West, which has, by and large, exempted the
non-human animal from agency as a political being . This tradition may be
traced concretely to Aristotle, and his pronouncement that man distinguishes himself from other animals through
of life (and death) to these politics. That cows, and other
the perfection of his status as a political animal(1952: 446). Thus for Aristotle, Man is not a transcendent being who is unrelated
Upon this
reckoning, the gap between non-human and human animals is the ability
to vocalise principles related to expediency (or rationality) and justice a
gap which, for all intents, defines the meaning of politics itself, at least in
so far as it is perfected by man. For even if there were to be a non-human
animal who, through a vocalisation, could make itself understood, that
being would still lack the ability to comprehend justice, which for Aristotle
characterises man as the political animal par excellence (1952: 446). This
assertion, that there is something essential that separates humans from the rest of the animals, is hardly limited to Aristotle,
and has remained in various forms within Western philosophy ; whether in the belief that
to the animal life; rather, man is defined as an animal with a surplus ability over and above other animal life.
man possesses an immortal soul which animals lack; or that man possesses a sort of exemplary consciousness which other
If it were possible to close our eyes to the gap that we

believe separates ourselves from other animals, then the meaning of
politics itself changes radically. In the modern context, bio-politics is not only the
operation of a range of instruments which direct the attention of power
towards questions of human life, but towards all life, in the broadest
living matter has no access to. 3.
possible sense. This is evident when one considers the role of the modern
sovereign, which not only manages the life of its human subjects, but
turns its attention to the management of all animal and plant life within
its domain. Thus the sovereign determines with the force of law the life
which it protects and makes flourish (certain birds and whales, for example); the life which it
regulates and surveys (for example the dingo and kangaroo populations which are carefully monitored in Australia);
and finally the life which it must resolutely extinguish (the mass slaughter of diseased
cattle in Europe during 2001 as the emblematic example). Yet it is when one considers the
concentrated mechanisms of power that have been developed in relation
to other animals, such as the experimentation upon non-human life within
science and medicine, and the use of non-human life for human food
production, that one may sense the grand scale towards which whole
global industries are devoted to the question of life. Here we find, in large
factory farms, or in high-tech laboratories, all the ingenuity of
contemporary bio-political control, evolved into highly developed
technologies. The key questions which relate to biopolitical life are asked here: How much life? What duration of life?
What is the cost of life? How best to reproduce? What manner of death? The life of cattle (or livestock as they are aptly named) is
The mass slaughter of

diseased cows in 2001 represents the extreme extent of this power: a
power that includes the prerogative exercised by the sovereign, in the
moment of crisis, to darken the skies of Europe with the ashes of the
dead.
vulnerable to a politics of life and death, where the political question returns to life itself.
Borders
The gap between human and animal is the foundation of our
separation from/categorization of the world
Agamben,
(Giorgio,
2K4
We can, then, advance some provisional hypotheses about what makes the representation of the righteous with
The messianic end of history or the

a critical threshold, at which the
difference between animal and human, which is so decisive for our culture,
threatens to vanish. That is to say, the relation between man and animal marks
the boundary of an essential domain, in which historical inquiry must necessarily
confront that fringe of ultrahistory which cannot be reached without making
recourse to first philosophy. It is as if determining the border between human and
animal were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and
theologians, scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental meta physicopolitical operation in which alone something like man can be decided upon and
produced. If animal life and human life could be superimposed perfectly, then
neither man nor animal and, perhaps, not even the divinewould any longer be
thinkable. For this reason, the arrival at posthistory necessarily entails the
reactualization of the prehistoric threshold at which that bor der had been
defined. Paradise calls Eden back into question.
animal heads in the miniature in the Ambrosian so enigmatic.
completion of the divine oikonomia of salvation defines
Domination
The affirmatives fidelity the anthropocentric results in the
objectification of non-humans and entrenches relationships of
domination turning the 1ac
Ahkin 10
(Mlanie works at Monash University, Human Centrism, Animist Materialism, and the Critique of
Rationalism in Val. Plumwoods Critical Ecological Feminism, Emergent Australasian Philosophers,
2010, Issue 3, http://www.eap.philosophy-australia.com/issue_3/EAP3_AHKIN_Human_Centrism.pdf)
Plumwood's pioneering 1979 critique of human chauvinism

within dominant western ethics defines the concept in relation to
class chauvinism, as the substantially differential, discriminatory
and inferior treatment of the class of non-human entities by
members of the class of humans, where this treatment lacks
sufficient justification.2 They contend that insofar as dominant western ethical
systems unjustifiably treat humans as uniquely morally significant;
fail to provide an account of humans' direct, non-instrumental moral obligations to non-humans; and promote
varying degrees of human dominion over non-human nature, these
Richard Sylvan and Val
frameworks sanction differential, discriminatory and inferior treatment of non-humans and are by consequence human chauvinist.3
Plumwood's development of this collaborative critique of human chauvinism in her early 1990's work, and beyond, draws on feminist
analyses of oppression and rationalism as well as insights from liberation theory in order to enrich and expand the analysis of the
human mastery of nature.4 Her critique of the dominant western framework of rationalist reason allows her to draw out the
structural features and logical patterns common to various instantiations of oppression, namely the logic of centrism and its
foundational value dualisms, and also the role of related instrumental egoist models of selfhood. Thus
she is able to
provide a more global critique of oppression than that offered by the earlier analysis of
human chauvinism, involving not just the problems inherent in the human
chauvinist framework's foundational instrumentalist value theory,
but also highlighting the broader conceptual and perceptual
distortions involved in centric structures and dualist logic, and the
injustices and prudential dilemmas they cause in both social and
environmental realms. On Plumwood's analysis, the rationalist conception of the
human self is defined in polarised opposition to concepts such as
materiality, nature, and necessity, and in accordance with those of
reason, consciousness, culture, freedom and transcendence of
nature. Together with an emphasis on instrumental and colonising forms
of reason, this exclusionary conception provides an important
conceptual foundation for the human mastery of nature . Indeed, the
logic of the foundational human/nature and reason/nature dualisms
which underlie this conception of the human self provide much of
the justification and naturalisation for the instrumentalisation of
nature, fostering the assignment of exclusive moral significance to humans based largely on their allegedly unique possession
of the capacity for reason.5 This further emphasises their conceptual hyperseparation from non-human nature and permits the
instrumental valuation and treatment of the sphere of nature. The rationalist tradition also holds feminine attributes to be similarly
radically separate from human virtue (likewise defined principally in terms of reason),
thus creating a master
perspective which subordinates and is alienated from both the

feminine and nature, marrying the concept of reason with power
and domination.6 Given this connection between the subordination of women and that of nature, Plumwood appeals
to androcentrism as a more fully theorised parallel model for the human mastery of nature and accordingly reconceptualises human
Plumwood defines hegemonic centrism

as a primary-secondary pattern of attribution that sets up one
term (the One) as primary or as centre and defines marginal Others
as secondary or derivative in relation to it.7 This logical structure is
founded on that of a value dualism, defined as an exaggerated
dichotomy involving the extreme polarisation of contrasting
conceptual pairs and their formation in terms of a value hierarchy .
Dualised concepts are formed by a relation of power, promoting the
treatment of inferiorised concepts as mere means to the ends of the
superior relata, which seek to differentiate, dominate and control
the inferior relata.8 In Plumwood's terms, "[d]ualisms are not universal features
of human thought, but conceptual responses to and foundations for
social domination".9 The five key features of dualism's logic of
domination are as follows: Radical exclusion or hyperseparation involves the
denial of continuity between dominant and marginalised groups, instead
stressing extreme difference and creating a polarised relation which denies any
possibility of overlap. Combined with backgrounding- the dominant group's denial of its dependency on the
marginalised group and rendering of the latter as inessential background - this works
chauvinism in terms of the logic of hegemonic centrism.
to justify and naturalise the superior relata's claim to unique importance and dominance over the radically discontinuous and
seemingly inessential inferior relata. Incorporation or relational definition involves the definition and recognition of the inferior relata
this assimilation to the superior

relata's identity, needs and ends negates the needs and ends of the inferior
relata and results in the latter's inability to impose moral
constraints or limitations on the dominant group. Thus, it is subject
to instrumentalisation and objectification : it is further stripped of intrinsic value, ends, and
solely in relation to (as excluded from) the superior group;
needs by means of the denial of its subjectivity and intentionality, facilitating its treatment as mere means to the ends of the
dominant group. The formation of the dualised relata in terms of a moral hierarchy naturalises this instrumentalisation,
making it seem a normal consequence of their differing degrees of

moral significance. The final feature of homogenisation or stereotyping occurs when differences
within the subordinated group are denied, allowing it to be
attributed a reductive and stable identity, thus also promoting the
treatment of its constituents as interchangeable and replaceable
resources for the dominant group.
Holocaust/Colonialism
The perpetuation of anthropocentric relations makes the daily
holocaust of the non-human natural while solidifying a
formation of subjectivity that makes colonialism and genocide
inevitable
Kochi and Ordan 2k8
(Tarik @ Queens University and Bar-llan Univ, An Argument for the Global Suicide of Humanity 7.3
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no3_2008/kochiordan_argument.pdf [10/24/11])
events such as the Holocaust are considered as
an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as an example of evil, a moment of hatred,
Within the picture many paint of humanity,
madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of evil given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which
humanity might comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again.
if we take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was

evil, then one must surely include along side it the almost uncountable
numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human history. Hence,
if we are to think of the content of the human heritage, then this must
include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures across
the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased from what the people of
the West generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling
here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of
annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been
throughout human history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so
many of our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride
themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been founded upon colonial
violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin,
1986). Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of race
war that often underlies human social organisation and many of its legal
and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern colonialism thus
presents a key to understanding that events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration
and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any
heritage of humanity . After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by arguments that
However,
indigenous inhabitants were racially inferior and in some instances that they were closer to apes than to humans (Diamond,
Such violence justified by an erroneous view of race is in many ways

merely an extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a
long history of killing and enslavement of non-human species by humans.
Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human violence (via the
mythical notion of differing human races) and interspecies violence, is well expressed in Isaac
Bashevis Singers comment that whereas humans consider themselves the
crown of creation, for animals all people are Nazis and animal life is
an eternal Treblinka (Singer, 1968, p.750).
2006).
Ontology
The only remaining task of our society is the management of
biological life- this last mandate renders humans inaccessible
to Being
Agamben,
(Giorgio,
2K4
Today, at a distance of nearly seventy years, it is clear for anyone who is

there are no longer histor ical tasks that can be taken on
not in absolutely bad faith that

by, or even simply assigned to,
nationstates were no longer capable of taking on historical tasks and that peoples
themselves were bound to disappear. We completely misunderstand the nature of
the great totalitarian experiments of the twentieth cen tury if we see them only as
a carrying out of the nineteenth-cen tury nation-states last great tasks:
nationalism and imperialism. The stakes are now different and much higher, for it
is a question of taking on as a task the very factical existence of peoples, that is,
in the last analysis, their bare life. Seen in this light, the totalitarianisms of the
twentieth century truly constitute the other face of the Hegelo-Kojevian idea of the
end of history: man has now reached his historical telos and, for a humanity that
has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human
societies by means of the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological
life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task. It is likely that the times in
which we live have not emerged from this aporia. Do we not see around and among us men and
peoples who no longer have any essence or identitywho are delivered over, so
to speak, to their inessentiality and their inac tivity {inoperosit}and who grope
everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task,
an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple relinquishment of all historical
tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal or international policing) in the
name of the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in which
natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanitys last historical
taskif indeed it makes sense here to speak of a task. The traditional historical
potentialitiespoetry, religion, philosophywhich from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and
Heideggerian perspectives kept the historico-political destiny of peoples awake, have
long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences,
and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still
seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burdenand the total
managementof biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome,
global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this
process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as
its last, impolitical mandate. It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself
men. It was in some ways already evident starting with the end of the First World War that the European
the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the
clear whether
the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or
animal can be felt as fulfilling . To be sure, such a humanity, from Heideggers perspective, no
longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undis concealed of the animal,
anthropological machine produced by de-ciding every time between man and animal; nor is it
but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and thus
closes itself to its own open ness, forgets its humanitas, and makes being its
specific disinhibitor. The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total
animalization of man.
Our political thought is guided by our relationship to Being

which is formed from our separation from animals (ie our
existing in the openness to the closedness)
Agamben,
(Giorgio,
2K4
The relation between man and animal, between world and environment, seems to evoke that intimate strife (Streit)
between world and earth which, according to Heidegger, is at issue in the work of art. In both cases, there seems to
be present a single paradigm which presses together an openness and a closedness. For similarly at issue in the
work of artin the conflict between world and earthis a dialectic between concealedness and unconcealed-ness,
openness and closedness, which Heidegger in his essay Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes evokes in nearly the same
terms as those of the 192930 course: The stone is worldless. Plant and animal likewise have no world; but they
belong to the veiled throng of an environment in which they hang suspended. The peasant woman, on the other
hand, has a world because she dwells in the open of beings. If in the work the world represents the open, then the
earth names that which essentially closes itself in itself.2 The earth appears only where it is guarded and
preserved as the essentially Undisclosable, which withdraws from every opening and constantly keeps itself
closed.3 In the work of art, this Undisclosable comes to light as such. The work moves the earth itself into the
open of a world and keeps it there.4 To produce the earth means: to bring it into the open as that which closes
itself in itself {In-s-chiudentesi, Sichverschliej?ende}.5 World and earth, openness and closednessthough
opposed in an essential conflictare, however, never separable: The earth is the spontaneous emerging toward
nothing of that which constantly closes itself and thus saves itself. World and earth are essentially different from
one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. 6 It is
not surprising that Heidegger describes this inseparable opposition of world and earth in terms that appear to have
a decidedly political coloration. The reciprocal opposition of world and earth is strife [Streitll. But we would surely all
too easily misunderstand the essence of the strife if we were to confound it with discord and dispute, and thus see
it only as disturbance and destruction. In essential strife, rather, the opponents raise each other into the selfassertion [Selbstbehauptung] of their essence. The self-assertion of essence, however, is never a rigid insistence
upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of the provenance of ones own being... .
The more strife overdoes itself and asserts itself, the more intransigently do the opponents let themselves go into
the intimacy of simple belonging to one another. The earth cannot do without the open of the world if it itself is to
appear as earth in the liberated throng of its closing itself. The world in turn cannot soar away from the earth if, as
the governing breadth and path of every essential historical destiny, it is to ground itself on a resolute foundation.7
It is beyond question that for Heidegger a political paradigm (indeed the political
paradigm par excellence) is at stake in the dialectic between concealedness and
unconcealedness. In the course on Parmenides, the polis is defined precisely by the conflict between
Verborgenheit and Unverborgenheit. The polis is the place, gathered into itself, of the
unconcealedness of beings. If now, however, as the word indicates, a1theia
possesses a conflictual essence, and if this conflictuality appears also in the rela tion of opposition to distortion and oblivion, then in the polis as the essential
place of man there has to hold sway every extreme opposition, and therein every
in-essence, to the unconcealed and to beings, i.e., non-beings in the multiplicity
of their counter-essences.8 The ontological paradigm of truth as the conflict
between concealedness and unconcealedness is, in Heidegger, immediately and
originarily a political paradigm. It is because man essentially occurs in the
openness to a closedness that something like a polis and a politics are possible. If
we now, following the interpretation of the 192930 course that we have been suggesting, restore to the closed, to
the earth, and to aletheia their proper name of animal and simply living being, then the originary political
conflict between unconcealed-ness and concealedness will be, at the same time and to the same degree, that
between the humanity and the animality of man. The animal is the Undisclosable which man keeps and brings to
light as such. But here everything becomes complicated. For if what is proper to humanitas is to remain open to the
closedness of the animal, if what the world brings into the open is precisely and only the earth as what closes itself
in itself, then how must we understand Heideggers reproach of metaphysics, and of the sciences that depend on it,
for their thinking man beginning with his animalita.s and not [thinking] in the direction of his humanitas?9 If
humanity has been obtained only through a suspension of animality and must thus keep itself open to the
closedness of animality, in what sense does Heideggers attempt to grasp the existing essence of man escape the
metaphysical primacy of animalitas?
Gender
The subordination of animals provides the foundation for the
violent institutionalization of sexism
Charles Patterson. 2002. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust. P 12- 13
Karl Jacoby writes that it seems "more than coincidental that the region that yields the first evidence of agriculture,
the Middle East, is the same one that yields the first evidence of slavery." Indeed, in the ancient Near East, he
writes, slavery was "little more than the extension of domestication to humans.''" Most studies of human slavery
have railed to emphasize how the enslavement of animals served as the model and inspiration for the enslavement
sexual
subjugation of women, as practiced in all the known civilizations of
the world, was modeled after the domestication of animals. "The
domestication of women followed the initiation of animal keeping,"
of humans, but there have been notable exceptions.40 Elizabeth Fisher believes that the
she writes, "and it was then that men began to control women's reproductive capacity, enforcing chastity and
it was the vertical, hierarchical positioning

of human master over animal slave that intensified human cruelty
and laid the foundation for human slavery. The violation of animals
expedited the violation of human beings. In taking them in and feeding them, humans
sexual repression."41 Fisher maintains that
first made friends with animals and then killed them. To do so, they had to kill some sensitivity in themselves. When
they began manipulating the reproduction of animals, they were even more personally involved in practices which
The keeping of animals would seem to

have set a model for the enslavement of humans, in particular the
large-scale exploitation of women captives for breeding and labor . 42
led to cruelty, guilt, and subsequent numbness.
--Calculus
Humanism Bad
The affirmatives impact calculus sets aside endless genocides
in order to continue faith in reforming their brand of
humanism. Instead we must think along utopian anti-humanist
calls for species-equality which requires a negation of their
humanism.
Putting aside the old, false assumptions of a teleological account of history, social-environmental revolution is
dependent upon widespread political action which short-circuits and tears apart current legal, political and
economic regimes. This action is itself dependent upon a widespread change in awareness, a revolutionary change
in consciousness, across enough of the populace to spark radical social and political transformation. Thought of in
this sense, however, such a response to environmental destruction is caught by many of the old problems which
have troubled the tradition of revolutionary socialism. Namely, 3 how
might a significant number of

human individuals come to obtain such a radically enlightened perspective or
awareness of human social reality (i.e. a dialectical, utopian anti-humanist
revolutionary consciousnesse) so that they might bring about with minimal
violence the overthrow of the practices and institutions of late capitalism and
colonial-speciesism? Further, how might an individual attain such a radical
perspective when their life, behaviours and attitudes (or their subjectivity itself) are
so moulded and shaped by the individuals immersion within and active selfrealisation through, the networks, systems and habits constitutive of global
capitalism? (Hardt & Negri, 2001). While the demand for social-environmental revolution grows stronger, both
theoretical and practical answers to these pressing questions remain unanswered. Both liberal and social
revolutionary models thus seem to run into the same problems that surround the
notion of progress; each play out a modern discourse of sacrifice in which some
forms of life and modes of living are set aside in favour of the promise of a future
good. Caught between social hopes and political myths, the challenge of responding to
environmental destruction confronts, starkly, the core of a discourse of modernity characterised by reflection,
responsibility and action. Given the increasing pressures upon the human habitat, this modern discourse will either
There is little room for an existence in between: either

the Enlightenment fulfils its potentiality or it shows its hand as the
bearer of impossibility. If the possibilities of the Enlightenment are
to be fulfilled then this can only happen if the old idea of the
progress of the human species, exemplified by Hawkings cosmic colonisation, is
fundamentally rethought and replaced by a new form of selfcomprehension. This self-comprehension would need to negate and
limit the old modern humanism by a radical anti-humanism.
deliver or it will fail.
AT: Genocide framing

The affirmatives impact calculus sets aside endless genocides
in order to continue faith in reforming their brand of
humanism. Instead we must think along utopian anti-humanist
calls for species-equality which requires a negation of their
humanism.
KOCHI & ORDAN 2K8 [tarik and noam, 0queens university and bar llan
Putting aside the old, false assumptions of a teleological account of history, social-environmental revolution is
dependent upon widespread political action which short-circuits and tears apart current legal, political and
economic regimes. This action is itself dependent upon a widespread change in awareness, a revolutionary change
in consciousness, across enough of the populace to spark radical social and political transformation. Thought of in
this sense, however, such a response to environmental destruction is caught by many of the old problems which
have troubled the tradition of revolutionary socialism. Namely, 3 how
might a significant number of

human individuals come to obtain such a radically enlightened perspective or
awareness of human social reality (i.e. a dialectical, utopian anti-humanist
revolutionary consciousnesse) so that they might bring about with minimal
violence the overthrow of the practices and institutions of late capitalism and
colonial-speciesism? Further, how might an individual attain such a radical
perspective when their life, behaviours and attitudes (or their subjectivity itself) are
so moulded and shaped by the individuals immersion within and active selfrealisation through, the networks, systems and habits constitutive of global
capitalism? (Hardt & Negri, 2001). While the demand for social-environmental revolution grows stronger, both
theoretical and practical answers to these pressing questions remain unanswered. Both liberal and social
revolutionary models thus seem to run into the same problems that surround the
notion of progress; each play out a modern discourse of sacrifice in which some
forms of life and modes of living are set aside in favour of the promise of a future
good. Caught between social hopes and political myths, the challenge of responding to
environmental destruction confronts, starkly, the core of a discourse of modernity characterised by reflection,
responsibility and action. Given the increasing pressures upon the human habitat, this modern discourse will either
There is little room for an existence in between: either

the Enlightenment fulfils its potentiality or it shows its hand as the
bearer of impossibility. If the possibilities of the Enlightenment are
to be fulfilled then this can only happen if the old idea of the
progress of the human species, exemplified by Hawkings cosmic colonisation, is
fundamentally rethought and replaced by a new form of selfcomprehension. This self-comprehension would need to negate and
limit the old modern humanism by a radical anti-humanism.
deliver or it will fail.
Alternative Work
What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the Earth crying. - Thich
Nhat Hanh
--Species-Being
1NC
JB
We are all equally reduced to mere specimens of human biology,

mute and uncomprehending of the world in which we are thrown.
Species-being, or humanity as a species, may require this recognition to
move beyond the pseudo-essence of the religion of humanism.
Recognizing that what we call the human is an abstraction that fails to

fully describe what we are, we may come to find a new way of understanding
humanity that recuperates the natural without domination. The bare
life that results from expulsion from the law removes even the
illusion of freedom. Regardless of ones location in production, the
threat of losing even the fiction of citizenship and freedom affects everyone . This
may create new means of organizing resistance across the particular divisions of
the concept of bare life allows us to gesture toward a more
detailed, concrete idea of what species-being may look like. Agamben hints
that in the recognition of this fact, that in our essence we are all
animals, that we are all living dead, might reside the possibility of a kind
society. Furthermore,
of redemption. Rather than the mystical horizon of a future

community, the passage to species-being may be experienced as a
deprivation, a loss of identity. Species-being is not merely a positive
result of the development of history; it is equally the absence of many
of the features of humanity through which we have learned to make
sense of our world. It is an absence of the kind of individuality and atomism that structure our world
under capitalism and underlie liberal democracy, and which continue to inform the tenets of deep ecology. The
development of species-being requires the collapse of the distinction between human and animal in order to change

sort of reconciliation between our human and animal selves, a
breakdown of the distinction between the two both within ourselves
and in nature in general. Bare life would then represent not only
expulsion from the law but the possibility of its overcoming.
Positioned in the zone of indistinction, no longer a subject of the
law but still subjected to it through absence, what we equivocally
call the human in general becomes virtually indistinguishable
the shape of our relationships with the natural world.
from the animal or nature.
But through this expulsion and absence, we may see not only the law
The
structure of the law is revealed as always suspect in the false
division between natural and political life, which are never truly
separable. Though clearly the situation is not yet as dire as Agambens invocation of the Holocaust suggests,
we are all, as citizens, under the threat of the state of exception.
With the decline of the nation as a form of social organization, the
whittling away of civil liberties and, with them, the states promise
of the good life (or the good death) even in the most developed
nations, with the weakening of labor as the bearer of resistance to
exploitation, how are we to envision the future of politics and
society?
but the system of capitalism that shapes it from a position no longer blinded or captivated by its spell.
And, abandonment of the humanist paradigm of survival

means rejecting their efforts towards harm minimization.
Complicity with genocidal violence is inevitable in any world of
the aff or the perm. Only the alternatives dialectical antihumanism can solve.
How might such a standpoint of dialectical, utopian anti-humanism

reconfigure a notion of action which does not simply repeat in
another way the modern humanist infliction of violence, as exemplified by the
plan of Hawking, or fall prey to institutional and systemic complicity in speciesist
violence? While this question goes beyond what it is possible to outline in this paper, we contend that
the thought experiment of global suicide helps to locate this
question the question of modern action itself as residing at the heart of the
modern environmental problem. In a sense perhaps the only way to understand what is at stake in ethical action
which responds to the natural environment is to come to terms with the logical consequences of ethical action itself.
The point operates then not as the end, but as the starting point of
a standpoint which attempts to reconfigure our notions of action,
life-value, and harm. For some, guided by the pressure of moral
conscience or by a practice of harm minimisation, the appropriate
response to historical and contemporary environmental destruction
is that of action guided by abstention. For example, one way of reacting to mundane,
everyday complicity is the attempt to abstain or opt-out of certain aspects of
modern, industrial society: to not eat non-human animals, to invest
ethically, to buy organic produce, to not use cars and buses, to live in an environmentally conscious
commune. Ranging from small personal decisions to the establishment
of parallel economies (think of organic and fair trade products as an attempt to set up a quasiparallel economy), a typical modern form of action is that of a refusal to be
complicit in human practices that are violent and destructive. Again,
however, at a practical level, to what extent are such acts of nonparticipation rendered banal by their complicity in other actions? In a
grand register of violence and harm the individual who abstains from
eating non-human animals but still uses the bus or an airplane or
electricity has only opted out of some harm causing practices and remains
fully complicit with others. One response, however, which bypasses the
problem of complicity and the banality of action is to take the nonparticipation solution to its most extreme level. In this instance, the
only way to truly be non-complicit in the violence of the human heritage
would be to opt-out altogether. Here, then, the modern discourse of
reflection, responsibility and action runs to its logical conclusion

the global suicide of humanity as a free-willed and final solution.
2NC Discourse
We must abandon species-level thinking instead of the
affirmatives strategy of fighting dehumanization with
humanization which is reliant on producing subhuman
others, confining them to slavery, slaughterhouses, camps and
annihilation. Vote negative to affirm the creation of new
discourses of vulnerability based on rejecting speciest logics.
abandon the idea of human rights, the scavenger, dec. 10] JB
That the human/subhuman binary continues to

inhabit so much of western experience raises the question of the
continuing relevance of anthropocentric concepts (such as human
rights and human dignity) for effective theories of justice, policy
and social movements. Instead of fighting dehumanization with
humanization, a better strategy may be to minimize the
human/nonhuman boundary altogether. The human specialness claim is a hierarchical
Time for a new discourse
one and relies on the figure of an Other the subhuman and nonhuman to be intelligible. The latter groups are
beings, by definition, who do not qualify as human and thus are denied the benefits that being human is meant
to compel. More to the point, however ,
a dignity claim staked on species difference,

and reliant on dehumanizing Others to establish the moral worth of
human beings, will always be vulnerable to the subhuman figure it
creates. This figure is easily deployed in inter-human violent
conflict implicating race, gender and cultural identities as we have
seen in the context of military and police camps, contemporary
slavery and slavery-like practices, and the laws of war used in
these situations to promote violence against marginalized human
groups. A new discourse of cultural and legal protections is
required to address violence against vulnerable humans in a manner
that does not privilege humanity or humans, nor permit a subhuman
figure to circulate as the mark of inferior beings on whom the
perpetration of violence is legitimate. We need to find an
alternative discourse to theorize and mobilize around vulnerabilities
for subhuman humans. This move, in addressing violence and vulnerabilities, should be
productive not only for humans made vulnerable by their dehumanization, but nonhumans as well.
2NC Alt Solves Warming

Anthropocentrism shapes our framework of solutions for
warming, species extinction, pollution, and land destruction.
KORTENKAMP 2k [Katherine and Colleen Moore, ecocentrism and
anthropocenrism: moral reasoning about ecological commons dilemmas, journal of
environmental psychology, 21 ,aug] JB
Aldo Leopold, sometimes called the father of environmental ethics, expressed these ideas over 50 years ago in his
revolutionary essay The Land Ethic. Today we have clearly not accomplished the ecological necessity he called
Environmental crises, such as species extinction, global warming,

air and water pollution, and wild land destruction, are some of the most
important problems currently facing our society. How we deal with these problems
largely depends on how we perceive our relationship with the land. Do we
view nature as property for us to use however we wish for our own benefit, or does nature have
intrinsic value, value aside from its usefulness to humans? A half-century after Leopold gave us his land
for.
ethic, just how far and in what ways have our land ethics developed? The purpose of this project is to examine
some issues in how people extend ethics to the natural environment. Environmental ethics was given a central
place in debate among scientists by Hardin (1968) who argued that the human race is faced with the dilemma of
how to prevent overuse and depletion of natural resources when individuals desire to maximize their gains. As
noted by Dawes (1980), many environmental issues can be construed as social dilemmas: a) each individual
receives a higher payo for a socially defecting choice (e.g., having additional children, using all the energy
available, polluting his or her neighbors) than for a socially cooperativ choice, no matter what the other individuals
in the society do, but b) all individuals are better off if all cooperate than if all defect (p. 169). In the present
research we examine moral reasoning about social dilemmas centered on environmental issues. Environmental
ethics is based on the idea that morality ought to be extended to include the relationship between humans and
nature. Although the field has its roots in the early writings of John Muir, Albert Schweitzer, and Aldo Leopold,
environmental ethics only more recently began to gain support in the 1960s with the growing popularity of the
environmental movement. The journal Environmental Ethics was founded in 1979 and is devoted entirely to the
topic. There are a number of different ways to understand an extension of moral consideration to nature (Nash,
1989). For example, is the extension individualistic or holistic? In other words are individual plants and animals
given moral consideration, or is morality only extended to whole species or ecosystems? Another distinction is
whether the extension is rights based or responsibility based; in other words does nature have the right to be
the most important

distinction is whether the moral extension is anthropocentric or
ecocentric because this determines what is the focus of the
environmental ethics - humans or nature.
protected or do humans simply have a responsibility to protect nature? Perhaps
2NC Floating PIK Solvency

The act of policymaking and rejection of its anthropocentric
justification is not exclusive. This indirect strategy solves best
without linking to their offense.
Katz and Oechsli 93 (Eric, Vice President of the International Society for
Environmental Ethics, and Lauren, Biology at Columbia, Environmental Ethics, vol 15
no 1, 1993 Moving beyond Anthropocentrism: Environmental Ethics, Development,
and the Amazon) JB
Can an environmentalist defend a policy of preservation in the Amazon rain forest without violating a basic sense of
the mistake is not the policy of preservation itself, but the

anthropocentric instrumental framework in which it is justified. Environmental policy
decisions should not merely concern the trade-off and comparison of various human
benefits. If environmentalists claim that the Third World must preserve its environment because of the overall
justice? We believe that
benefits for humanity, then decision makers in the Third World can demand justice in the determination of
If
preservationist policies are to be justified without a loss of equity , there are only two
preservation policy: preservationist policies unfairly damage the human interests of the local populations.
possible alternatives: either we in the industrialized world must pay for the benefits we will gain from preservation
we must reject the anthropocentric and instrumental framework for policy

decisions. The first alternative is an empirical political issue, and one about which we are not overly optimistic.
or
The second alternative represents a shift in philosophical world view. We are not providing a direct argument for a
our strategy is indirect. Let

us assume that a theory of normative ethics which includes nonhuman natural
value has been justified. In such a situation, the human community, in addition to its traditional human-centered
nonanthropocentric value system as the basis of environmental policy. Rather,
obligations, would also have moral obligations to nature or to the natural environment in itself. One of these
obligations would involve the urgent necessity for environmental preservation. We would be obligated, for example,
to the Amazon rain forest directly. We would preserve the rain forest, not for the human benefits resulting from this
preservation, but because we have an obligation of preservation to nature and its ecosystems. Our duties would be
From
this perspective, questions of the trade-off and comparison of human benefits, and
questions of justice for specific human populations, do not dominate the discussion .
directed to nature and its inhabitants and environments, not merely to humans and human institutions.
This change of emphasis can be illustrated by an exclusively human example. Consider two businessmen, Smith
and Jones, who are arguing over the proper distribution of the benefits and costs resulting from a prior business
agreement between them. If we just focus on Smith and Jones and the issues concerning them, we will want to look
at the contract, the relevant legal precedents, and the actual results of the deal, before rendering a decision. But
suppose we learn that the agreement involved the planned murder of a third party, Green, and the resulting
distribution of his property. At that point the issues between Smith and Jones cease to be relevant; we no longer
consider who has claims to Greens wallet, overcoat, or BMW to be important. The competing claims become
insignificant in light of the obligations owed to Green. This case is analogous to our view of the moral obligations
owed to the rain forest. As soon as we realize that the rain forest itself is relevant to the conflict of competing
goods, we see that there is not a simple dilemma between Third World development, on the one hand, and
preservation of rain forests, on the other; there is now, in addition, the moral obligation to nature and its
When the nonanthropocentric framework is introduced, it creates a more

complex situation for deliberation and resolution . It complicates the already detailed discussions
ecosystems.
of human trade-offs, high-tech transfers, aid programs, debt for-nature swaps, sustainable development, etc., with a
This complication may appear

counterproductive, but as in the case of Smith, Jones, and Green, it actually serves to simplify
the decision. Just as a concern for Green made the contract dispute between Smith and Jones irrelevant, the
consideration of the moral obligations to nonhuman nature.
obligation to the rain forest makes many of the issues about trade-offs of human goods
irrelevant. 12 It is, of course, unfortunate that this direct obligation to the rain forest can only be met with a cost
in human satisfactionsome human interests will not be fulfilled. Nevertheless, the same
can be said of all ethical decisions , or so Kant teaches us: we are only assuredly moral
when we act against our inclinations. To summarize, the historical forces of
economic imperialism have created a harsh dilemma for environmentalists who
consider nature preservation in the Third World to be necessary. Nevertheless, environmentalists can
escape the dilemma, as exemplified in the debate over the development of the Amazon rain forest, if they
reject the axiological and normative framework of anthropocentric instrumental
rationality. A set of obligations directed to nature in its own right makes
many questions of human benefits and satisfactions irrelevant . The Amazon rain
forest ought to be preserved regardless of the benefits or costs to human beings. Once we move beyond
the confines of human-based instrumental goods, the environmentalist position is
thereby justified, and no policy dilemma is created. This conclusion serves as an
indirect justification of a nonanthropocentric system of normative ethics , avoiding
problems in environmental policy that a human-based ethic cannot. 1 Policy makers and philosophers in the Third
World may not be pleased with our conclusions here. Indeed, Ramachandra Guha has recently criticized the focus
on biocentrism (i.e., nonanthropocentrism) and wilderness preservation that per-vades Western environmentalism.
These Western concerns are at best, irrelevant to, and at worst, destructive of Third World societies. According to
Guha, any justifiable environmental movement must include solutions to problems of equity, economic and
political redistribution. 14 We agree. Thus, as a final note, let us return from the abstract atmospheres of
axiological theory and normative frameworks to the harsh realities of life in the non-industrialized world. If our
argument is sound, then any destructive development of the natural environment in the Third World is a moral
a policy of environmental preservation is a moral requirement. Recognition

of this moral obligation to preserve the natural environment should be the starting
point for any serious discussion of developmental policy .
wrong, and
Alt Global Suicide Imagination

Our alternative is to imagine global suicidethis throws into
question the ideology of humanist value systems.
Kochi and Ordan 8 (Tarik, lecturer in the School of Law, Queen's University,
Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Noam, linguist and translator, conducts research in
Translation Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel, 'An argument for the global suicide
of humanity', Borderlands, December) JB
The version of progress enunciated in Hawking's story of cosmic colonisation presents a

view whereby the solution to the negative consequences of technological action is
to create new forms of technology, new forms of action. New action and innovation solve the
dilemmas and consequences of previous action. Indeed, the very act of moving away, or rather evacuating, an
ecologically devastated Earth is an example at hand. Such an approach involves a moment of reflection--previous
errors and consequences are examined and taken into account and efforts are made to make things better. The
idea of a better future informs reflection, technological innovation and action. However, is the form of reflection
Does his mode of reflection pay enough attention

to the irredeemable moments of destruction, harm, pain and suffering inflicted
historically by human action upon the non-human world? There are, after all, a
variety of negative consequences of human action, moments of destruction,
moments of suffering, which may not be redeemable or ever made better. Conversely
offered by Hawking broad or critical enough?
there are a number of conceptions of the good in which humans do not take centre stage at the expense of others.
What we try to do in this paper is to draw out some of the consequences of reflecting
more broadly upon the negative costs of human activity in the context of
environmental catastrophe. This involves re-thinking a general idea of progress
through the historical and conceptual lenses of speciesism , colonialism, survival and
complicity. Our proposed conclusion is that the only appropriate moral response to a
history of human destructive action is to give up our claims to biological
supremacy and to sacrifice our form of life so as to give an eternal gift to
others. From the outset it is important to make clear that the argument for the global
suicide of humanity is presented as a thought experiment. The purpose of such a
proposal in response to Hawking is to help show how a certain conception of modernity, of
which his approach is representative, is problematic. Taking seriously the idea of
global suicide is one way of throwing into question an ideology or dominant
discourse of modernist-humanist action. [3] By imagining an alternative to the
existing state of affairs, absurd as it may seem to some readers by its nihilistic
and radical 'solution', we wish to open up a ground for a critical discussion of
modernity and its negative impacts on both human and non-human
animals, as well as on the environment. [4] In this respect, by giving voice to the idea of
a human-free world, we attempt to draw attention to some of the asymmetries of
environmental reality and to give cause to question why attempts to build bridges
from the human to the non-human have, so far, been unavailing . Subjects of ethical
discourse One dominant presumption that underlies many modern scientific and political attitudes towards
technology and creative human action is that of 'speciesism', which can itself be called a 'human-centric' view or
attitude. The term 'speciesism', coined by psychologist Richard D. Ryder and later elaborated into a comprehensive
ethics by Peter Singer (1975), refers to the attitude by which humans value their species above both non-human
animals and plant life. Quite typically humans conceive non-human animals and plant life as something which might
simply be used for their benefit. Indeed, this conception can be traced back to, among others, Augustine (1998,
p.33). While many modern, 'enlightened' humans generally abhor racism, believe in the equality of all humans,
condemn slavery and find cannibalism and human sacrifice repugnant, many still think and act in ways that are
profoundly 'speciesist'. Most individuals may not even be conscious that they hold such an attitude, or many would
simply assume that their attitude falls within the 'natural order of things'. Such an attitude thus resides deeply
within modern human ethical customs and rationales and plays a profound role in the way in which humans interact
with their environment. The possibility of the destruction of our habitable environment on earth through global
warming and Hawking's suggestion that we respond by colonising other planets forces us to ask a serious question
about how we value human life in relation to our environment. The use of the term 'colonisation' is significant here
as it draws to mind the recent history of the colonisation of much of the globe by white, European peoples. Such
actions were often justified by valuing European civilisation higher than civilisations of non-white peoples, especially
that of indigenous peoples. For scholars such as Edward Said (1978), however, the practice of colonialism is
intimately bound up with racism. That is, colonisation is often justified, legitimated and driven by a view in which
If we
were to colonise other planets, what form of 'racism' would underlie our actions? What
higher value would we place upon human life, upon the human race, at the
expense of other forms of life which would justify our taking over a new habitat and altering it to
the right to possess territory and govern human life is grounded upon an assumption of racial superiority.
suit our prosperity and desired living conditions? Generally, the animal rights movement responds to the ongoing
colonisation of animal habitats by humans by asking whether the modern Western subject should indeed be the
central focus of its ethical discourse. In saying 'x harms y', animal rights philosophers wish to incorporate in 'y' nonhuman animals. That is, they enlarge the group of subjects to which ethical relations apply. In this sense such
thinking does not greatly depart from any school of modern ethics, but simply extends ethical duties and
obligations to non-human animals. In eco-ethics, on the other hand, the role of the subject and its relation to ethics
is treated a little differently. The less radical environmentalists talk about future human generations so, according to
this approach, 'y' includes a projection into the future to encompass the welfare of hitherto non-existent beings.
Such an approach is prevalent in the Green Party in Germany, whose slogan is "Now. For tomorrow". For others,
such as the 'deep ecology' movement, the subject is expanded so that it may include the environment as a whole.
'life' is not to be understood in "a biologically narrow

sense". Rather he argues that the term 'life' should be used in a comprehensive nontechnical way such that it refers also to things biologists may classify as non-living .
In this instance, according to Naess,
This would include rivers, landscapes, cultures, and ecosystems, all understood as "the living earth" (Naess, 1989,
p.29). From this perspective the statement 'x harms y' renders 'y' somewhat vague. What occurs is not so much a
conflict over the degree of ethical commitment, between "shallow" and "deep ecology" or between "light" and "dark
greens" per se, but rather a broader re-drawing of the content of the subject of Western philosophical discourse and
its re-definition as 'life'. Such a position involves differing metaphysical commitments to the notions of being,
intelligence and moral activity. This blurring and re-defining of the subject of moral discourse can be found in other
ecocentric writings (e.g. Lovelock, 1979; Eckersley, 1992) and in other philosophical approaches. [5] In part our
approach bears some similarity with these 'holistic' approaches in that we share dissatisfaction with the modern,
Western view of the 'subject' as purely human-centric. Further, we share some of their criticism of bourgeois green
lifestyles. However, our approach is to stay partly within the position of the modern, Western human-centric view of
the subject and to question what happens to it in the field of moral action when environmental catastrophe
demands the radical extension of ethical obligations to non-human beings. That is, if we stick with the modern
humanist subject of moral action, and follow seriously the extension of ethical obligations to non-human beings,
then we would suggest that what we find is that the utopian demand of modern humanism turns over into a utopian
anti-humanism, with suicide as its outcome. One way of attempting to re-think the modern subject is thus to throw
the issue of suicide right in at the beginning and acknowledge its position in modern ethical thought. This would be
to recognise that the question of suicide resides at the center of moral thought, already. What survives when
humans no longer exist? There continues to be a debate over the extent to which humans have caused
environmental problems such as global warming (as opposed to natural, cyclical theories of the earth's temperature
change) and over whether phenomena such as global warming can be halted or reversed. Our position is that
regardless of where one stands within these debates it is clear that humans have inflicted degrees of harm upon
non-human animals and the natural environment. And from this point we suggest that it is the operation of
speciesism as colonialism which must be addressed. One approach is of course to adopt the approach taken by
Singer and many within the animal rights movement and remove our species, homo sapiens, from the centre of all
moral discourse. Such an approach would thereby take into account not only human life, but also the lives of other
species, to the extent that the living environment as a whole can come to be considered the proper subject of
morality. We would suggest, however, that this philosophical approach can be taken a number of steps further. If the
standpoint that we have a moral responsibility towards the environment in which all sentient creatures live is to be
taken seriously, then we perhaps have reason to question whether there remains any strong ethical grounds to
justify the further existence of humanity. For example, if one considers the modern scientific practice of
experimenting on animals, both the notions of progress and speciesism are implicitly drawn upon within the moral
reasoning of scientists in their justification of committing violence against nonhuman animals. The typical line of
thinking here is that because animals are valued less than humans they can be sacrificed for the purpose of
expanding scientific knowledge focussed upon improving human life. Certainly some within the scientific
community, such as physiologist Colin Blakemore, contest aspects of this claim and argue that experimentation on
animals is beneficial to both human and nonhuman animals (e.g. Grasson, 2000, p.30). Such claims are
'disingenuous', however, in that they hide the relative distinctions of value that underlie a moral justification for
sacrifice within the practice of experimentation (cf. LaFollette & Shanks, 1997, p.255). If there is a benefit to nonhuman animals this is only incidental, what remains central is a practice of sacrificing the lives of other species for
Rather than reject this common reasoning of modern science we

argue that it should be reconsidered upon the basis of species equality . That is,
modern science needs to ask the question of: 'Who' is the best candidate for
'sacrifice' for the good of the environment and all species concerned ? The moral
response to the violence, suffering and damage humans have inflicted upon this
earth and its inhabitants might then be to argue for the sacrifice of the human
species. The moral act would be the global suicide of humanity.
the benefit of humans.
--Discourse/Haiku
1NC
The natural world has been erased. It identity has been
mediated, programmed and translated into a purely symbolic
world the inhuman has become a symbol without a sign. The
simulacra shapes our reality and has been co-opted to make
violence invisible. We must combat this anthropocentric
violence on a discursive level to reconnect ourselves with the
natural world.
Stibbe, 2012
[Arran, senior lecturer in Humanities and fellow of the Centre for Active Learning at
the University of Gloucestershire,Animals Erased Discourse, Ecology, and
Reconnection with the Natural World, Wesleyan University Press, 2012, pg. 1-2,
Project Muse] JB
Animals are disappearing, vanishing, dying out, not just in

the physical sense of becoming extinct, but in the sense of being erased from our
consciousness. Charles Bergman (2005) illustrates this in his description of ecologists who follow animals
through jungles without ever catching a glimpse of them. Instead, they use a radio antenna to track the
animals movements: The animal with the radio-transmitter disappears as a visible, embodied creature. It
Introduction VANISHING ANIMALS
emerges from its life into ours as a particular frequency on a receiver. While the radio-transmitter allows the animal
to be followed and known in new ways and in new detail, the coded patterns of the beeps on the transmitter
Increasingly, interactions with

animals happen at a remove: animals are mediated by nature programs, books,
magazines, the Internet, or cartoons; framed by the enclosures of zoos and
aquariums; or exposed after death as exhibits in museums . John Berger (1980: 10) goes as
constitute signs of the creatures disappearance. (Bergman 2005: 257)
far as stating that In the last two centuries animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them.
Bergers approach has been criticized in terms of historical detail and its lack of recognition for positive
the historical trajectory

[Berger] outlines of the disappearance of animals and their replacement by signs, and
the manner in which humans 2 introduction and animals are increasingly alienated in
modernity, provides a pessimistic vision with which it is hard to argue. (Burt 2005: 203) When animals
are erased, what we are left with are signs: words, pictures, toys, specimens, beeps
on a radio receiver. Although the signs emerge at first with a connection to real animals, they can take
on a life of their own in a simulated world, becoming what Jean Baudrillard (1994) calls
simulacra copies without an original. For instance, the happy speaking cows who advertise
representations of animals (Burt 2005, Malamud 1998), but Burt does admit that
products made from their own bodies can be thought of as erasing the real animals: Advertisements
representations of speaking
animals who are selling the end products of the

brutal processes they endure in the factory farm system serve . . . a dual
discursive purpose. The first purpose is to sell products, and the second role is . . .
to make the nonhuman animal victims disappear. (Glenn 2004: 72) Baudrillard (1994: 6) places
images on a scale from the most direct representation toward a gradual disappearance of the referent: The image
is the reflection of a profound reality. The image masks and denatures a profound reality. The image masks the
absence of a profound reality. The image has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
While some images, representations, or simulacra may be benign, or even positive, there is a suspicion that
slipping too far into a self-referential symbolic world has
unexpected dangers. Abram

(1996: 267) claims that our organic atonement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse
with our own signs, to the extent that we have become so oblivious to the presence of other animals and the
earth, that our current lifestyles and activities contribute daily to the destruction of whole ecosystems (137).
Abrams claim is one of great importance, since it calls into question the idea that language, rationality, and the
general ability to manipulate symbols form the core of what it means to be human because they are unique to
humans.
Our discourse needs to shift away from the utilization of

nature to one of pure respect. Haikus can function as a
rhetorical stitching of anthropocentric violence justified by
normalized domination and commodification of the in-human
animal.
Stibbe, 2012
Reconnection with the Natural World, Wesleyan University Press, 2012, pg. Chapter
8, Project Muse] JB
This chapter takes a closer look at the discourse of haiku as one based on very different assumptions from both
human
separation from animals and the natural world , and this leads on to a discussion of how
haiku can facilitate reconnection. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram (1996) locates the start of
the ever increasing separation between humans and the rest of nature in the invention of writing systems. No
longer was language something fine-tuned to the community and land in a
particular region, instead it became quite literally disembodied, cut free from the
writer, and able to spread itself to new domains. Traditional stories about the local
animals, plants, rivers, and trees became swamped by writing from different
bioregions and different times. In addition, writing facilitates sparsely linear or analytic thought (Ong
those of destructive discourses and counterdiscourses in the West. The starting point is with the origins of
2002: 40), resulting in analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived
the relationship between

humans and other life-forms is increasingly mediated by language and other media. It is
experience (Ong 2002: 42). In countries where writing is preeminent,
becoming more likely for people to come across animals and plants as they are represented in books, magazines,
advertisements, films, toys, and clip-art than to notice them face-to-face in everyday life. There is growing
awareness, particularly when it comes to the relationship between humans and other animals, of the importance of
linguistic mediation, and the significant effects this can have (Glenn 2004, Schillo 2003,
Dunayer 2001, Scarce 2000, Kheel 1995). From these studies a picture is emerging of a wide range of discourses
that construct relationships with animals in ways that further the separation between humans and the rest of
nature. As discussed earlier, there is the jocular way that animals are used as insults in everyday conversation
(chapters 1 and 2, also Goatly 2006), the more sinister way that animals are objectified and treated as
inconsequential by the discourse of the meat industry (chapters 1 and 2, also Dunayer 2001), and the way that
animals are treated separately from humans as part of the environment by environmentalist discourse (chapter
ecological discourse often treats animals and the ecosystems

they are part of as resources for human use; conservationist discourse
tends to treat animals as mattering only if they belong to a rare
charismatic species; and finally, animal rights discourses represent
animals narrowly as passive victims rather than agents of their own lives
7). In addition,
(chapter 4). Most studies of the discursive representation of nature have focused on discourses that have the
potential to create undesirable relationships between humans and other life-forms relationships of exploitation
that lead not only to the suffering of animals, but also to ecological damage and negative impacts on humans.
While critical awareness of dominant discourses and their potentially damaging

effects is important, the next stage is analysis of alternative discourses that have
the potential to construct more harmonious relationships between humans and the
more-than-human world. Abram (1996), Snyder (2000), and Bate (2000) all agree that if people have lost
touch with the natural world around them, and are engrossed in a symbolic world of writing, then it is through this
symbolic world that people need to be reached initially and encouraged to enter into new relationships with the
more-than-human world. Abram (1996) puts this eloquently, in a writing style consistent with its message: There
can be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of taking
up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is
that of releasing the budded, earthy intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things
themselves to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. (Abram 1996: 273) But how can
writers write language back into the land in ways that contribute to more harmonious relationships between
humans and the other animals, plants, and soil that make up that land? Answering this question requires a journey
beyond mainstream Western discourses such as those of industry, biological science, and even environmentalism or
ecology: a journey to discover new ways of representing the more-than-human world that break free of the
it is important to discover discourses

that overcome the assumption that other animals and plants are objects, human
possessions, individually inconsequential tokens of species, or that their value lies
only in their rarity or short-term utility to humans. There are many places we can look for
assumptions of dominant Western discourses. In particular,
alternative discourses, from English Romantic poets (Bate 2000, Goatly 2000) to traditional cultures around the
world that express a particular intimacy with, and embeddedness in, the natural world. This chapter explores the
discourse of traditional Japanese haiku, analyzing the assumptions it is based on, and the way that it represents
it is
important that a discussion of haiku does not propose that there is an essence of
haiku running through every example. The discourse of haiku analyzed here exists in patterns that
relationships between humans and other forms of life. Although the chapter refers to the discourse of haiku
run through large numbers of haiku, though by no means all. The patterns come about partly through convention,
but also through revolutions caused by great masters, who rejected the style of haiku that came before, gave new
directions to the discourse, and provided key examples that many others emulated. There are therefore a large
number of discourses within the genre of haiku, and what is described here is just one of these. It is, however, one
that can be considered highly significant, both in terms of cultural impact and ecological wisdom. To discover the
patterns that make up the discourse of haiku, a corpus of 148 animals erased several thousand haiku was gathered
from ten anthologies (Addiss, Yamamoto, and Yamamoto 1996, 1992, Aitken 1978, Bowers 1996, Blyth 1995,
Henderson 1958, Higginson 1996, Mackenzie 1957, Miura 1991, Ueda 2003), and one online collection (Lanoue
2006). These haiku are very much classic, coming from the period between 1682 (when Basho revolutionised
haiku with his frog poem), to 1902, the date when the last of the four great masters, Shiki, died. The haiku of
these four masters (Basho, Issa, Buson, and Shiki) form a sizeable part of the corpus because of their profound
The following sections

describe seven aspects of haiku that represent relationships between humans and
the more-than-human world in ways very different from dominant mainstream
discourses in the West. Appreciation of the Ordinary tsukubote / kumo wo ukagau / kaeru
influence, though other poets who follow a similar style are also included.
kana crouching /
peering up at the clouds /
a frog
(Chiyo, in Addiss et al. 1992: 92)
haiku express appreciation

for the ordinary plants, birds, insects, and animals that people interact with in daily life.
Rather than valuing others for their rarity, size, charisma, or usefulness,
Suzuki (1970: 263) describes how Basho wrote haiku on the nazuna herb, a plant that is humble . . . not at all
pretty and charming: yoku mireba / nazuna hana saku / kakine kana when closely inspected / the nazuna is
flowering / by the hedge (in Suzuki 1970: 263) Similarly, in discussing another of Bashos haiku about buckwheat
flowers (below), Ueda (1982: 66) points out that buckwheat
flowers are commonplace in Japan

and not especially beautiful; moreover, buckwheat is the main ingredient of one of the plainest foods,
noodles. haiku and beyond 149 mikazuki ni / chi wa oboro nari / soba no hana
under the crescent moon /

the earth looms hazily /
buckwheat flowers
(in Ueda 1982: 66)
Bashos sense of appreciation for the nazuna and buckwheat flowers is not explicit in these haiku he does not
refer to the beauty of the buckwheat flowers, for instance. However, deep appreciation can be inferred because of
There are so many haiku that describe culturally

appreciated aspects of nature (such as cherry blossoms or fireflies) that the assumption the
subject highlighted by the haiku is to be treated with appreciation is built into the
discourse, a taken-for-granted background assumption that does not need to be
stated. By placing the buckwheat flowers within the same frame as is frequently used for cherry blossoms,
the nature of the discourse of haiku itself.
Basho is implicitly stating that they too are worthy of similar appreciation. Like Basho, Issa writes only about
common, local animals and plants, a fact that can be confirmed by searching through Lanoues (2006) impressive
collection of 7,000 of Issas poems. Within this collection there are no poems about lions, tigers, elephants, or
pandas. Instead, there are haiku about a huge variety of common animals and plants of the kind people in Japan
were likely to come across in their everyday lives. The following list shows some of the animals appearing in Issas
haiku: A butterfly, cuckoo, dog, dragonfly, duck, geese, flea, frog, mouse, mosquito, nightingale, snake, sparrow,
swallow, snail, toad, lice, fly, skylark, sparrow, cat, horsefly, puppy, pigeon, crow, deer, titmouse, earthworms, lark,
cicada, frog, crab, monkey, fox, silkworm, chicken, pheasant, thrush, horse, wren, fawn, nightingale, ant, turtle,
snipe, blowfish, pony, wren, pheasant, winnow, stork, spider, crane, locusts, kitten, cormorant, shrike, rooster.
Despite the large number of animals and plants named in Issas 7,000 haiku, abstract category names above the
species level rarely appear, except in the case of tori (bird) and mushi (insect). So we do not find any instances of
the words 150 animals erased dobuts u (animal), ikimono or seibutsu (living thing), shokubutsu (plant), ueki
(cultivated plant), honyurui (mammal), or hachurui (reptile). This is because haiku record and encourage
encounters with real animals and plants, rather than engage in rational discussion of abstract categories. The focus
on the actual and the everyday is important because it encourages direct encounters with living animals and plants
in natural settings rather than encounters mediated by museums, zoos or linguistic abstractions. Haiku therefore
have the potential to contribute to ecological consciousness tuned to the local environment, where careful
observation of the way things are in nature is combined with a sense of value and appreciation. Despite the brevity
of haiku, the individual animals and plants that are encountered are never described in isolation from their
immediate environment. The linking of the particular animals and plants with their wider context is carried out
through a season word (kigo). Kigo are an essential part of the discourse of haiku, placing each haiku in a particular
season, and thereby allowing the readers imagination to fill in missing details of the surroundings. In the haiku that
started this section, the season word kaeru (frog) represents spring, which is when frogs make themselves most
noticeable through their croaking. Haiku, by their very existence, demonstrate recognition of special worth in the
subjects they describe enough worth to stimulate the poet to carefully craft a poem about them consisting of
exactly seventeen syllables (three lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively). This structure gives poets a
chance to give special emphasis to the plant or animal through dedicating all five syllables of either the first or last
line to their name. Both these positions are important because the first line is the Theme of the haiku and the last
line provides end-focus. For instance: hototogisu / ware mo kiai no / yoki hi nari cuckoo / today Im in good
spirits / too (Issa in Lanoue 2006) In this haiku, the whole first line is the name of a species of bird, hototogisu (a
Japanese cuckoo), which conveniently has five syllables. Where names have haiku and beyond 151 fewer than five
syllables, pivot words (kakekotoba) such as ya or kana are inserted, which add further poetic emphasis. Pivot words
cannot be translated into English, though translators sometimes use the expressions ah! or oh! for example,
suzume-go ya (ah! baby sparrow) or kaeru kana (oh! frog). The addition of a pivot word shows clearly and strongly
that the haiku is dedicated to the plant or animal .
By taking ordinary animals and plants,

and giving them a prime position within a highly appreciated cultural art
form, haiku give the message that they are important for themselves, with
no need for recourse to abstractions such as the intrinsic value of

nature used in the discourse of deep ecology.
2NC Haiku Solvency

The discourse of haiku is critical to change anthropocentric
epistemology at a micro level
Stibbe, 2012
Reconnection with the Natural World, Wesleyan University Press, 2012, pg. , Project
Muse] JB
the discourse of haiku is that, like a Zen koan, it uses language to

encourage the reader to go beyond language , beyond the world of intellectual abstractions, and
Overall, the importance of
reconnect directly with the more-than-human world. The way it does this is to describe actual encounters with
everyday nature, in straight present tense, using a minimal amount of metaphor and abstraction, placing poetic
emphasis on individual animals and plants, representing them as agents of their own lives living
according to their natures, with implicit assumptions of empathy and positive regard built into the discourse. This is
in marked contrast to the discourse of environmentalism, where terms like biotic resources or biomass
appropriation do not refer to anything as specific and imaginable in the world as a frog or a bee. Bate (2000:
283) believes that nature poetry can save the world: If mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the
original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth. But Rigby (2001: 19) counters
this by saying, What are poets for? I too would like to believe that poets can in some measure help us to save the
Earth. However, they will only be able to do so if we are prepared to look up and listen when they urge us to lift our
The discourse of haiku shows a way to encourage readers to lift

their eyes from the page, because the animals and plants that inhabit the haiku also inhabit the local
eyes from the page.
environment of the readers, and the readers are bound to come across them in their everyday lives. When they do,
if the haiku is successful, treat those inhabitants with the careful

observation, empathy, and respect that the poet showed. Ecologically, the discourse
encourages learning from the ways of nature rather than violating them , which,
they may,
according to Capra (1997), is the necessary foundation of a sustainable society. Most importantly, the approach to
nature is haiku and beyond 163 a substitute for, not an addition to, a life spent obsessed by the pseudo-satisfiers of
material possessions.
AT: Linguistics dont matter/You said a no-no word

The affirmative is a discursive not linguistic criticism being
overly concerned with the political correctness of individual
words without first understanding how they operate on a much
larger discursive level in constructing systems of oppression
Stibbe, 2012
Project Muse] JB
celebrating the linguistic and the rational, other aspects of being human (such
as emotions, feelings, embodiment, mortality, or dependence on a physical environment for
continued survival) are marginalized simply because they happen to be shared with other animals. By ignoring
introduction 3 In
ecological embedding and embodiment, humans have managed to develop another unique characteristic: the
ability, single-handedly as a species, to alter the conditions of the planet to make it less hospitable for human life
If we are to create a more humane and sustainable

society, it will be necessary to look once again at animals and celebrate some of the
characteristics that we share. This requires an understanding of the workings of the
symbolic world the mechanisms of erasure and alienation in order to transcend
the symbolic and reconnect with animals and the natural world. Of particular concern for
and the life of countless other species.
this book is the way that language is organized into discourses. Discourses, in the Foucaultian sense, are ways of
discourses are
ways of speaking about the world that encode a particular model of reality . Stuart Hall
speaking and writing that construct or shape the objects being spoken of. In other words,
(1997: 6) describes the concept of discourse as follows: Discourses are ways of referring to or constructing
knowledge . . . a cluster . . . of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of
knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society. The book
investigates a wide range of discourses including those of animal industries, environmentalism, ecology, the animal
rights movement, nature poetry, and Japanese animation. The main argument is that some destructive
discourses represent animals in ways that promote inhumane treatment and

environmental damage, that some counter discourses such as environmentalism
fail to break free of the assumptions of destructive discourses , but that it is possible to
discover radically different alternative discourses that encourage reconnection to animals and nature. Underlying
discourses construct society

along inhumane or unsustainable lines, then 4 introduction it might be possible to
discover and promote discourses that encourage more harmonious relations with
animals and the natural world. Although alternative discourses are still representations, they could
the activity of critical discourse analysis is the hope of change that if
provide an image of a profound reality (in Baudrillards terms) rather than a simulacrum, and encourage
readers to interact more directly with the natural world simply by encouraging them to lift their eyes from the page
discourses have the power to erase animals or

work against the forces of erasure. It is important from the outset to
distinguish discourse analysis from an approach that is narrowly
prescriptive about the specific linguistic forms that people should use
when talking about animals. Smith-Harris (2004: 15), for instance, suggests that if people stopped
and view the world in a new way. In other words,
using the expression euthanizing companion animals and instead talked about killing cats and dogs by lethal
injection because no one wanted them, then it would make it harder to accept violent acts toward animals. She
describes how eating pt sounds refined, whereas eating the swollen liver of a force-fed goose sounds quite
different. Dunayer (2001) similarly recommends avoiding the terms beast, aquarium, and dairy farmer and
replacing them with nonhuman animal, aquaprison, and cow enslaver respectively (188, 191, 194). Other terms
that Dunayer suggests are free-living nonhumans instead of wildlife (189), genocide by hunting for overhunting
The problem with

being prescriptive about individual terms like this, however, is that it provides only
one politically correct way of speaking and closes down options for creatively
redefining the world along new lines. We have already learned, from the area of sexism, that
(190), food-industry captive for farm animal (193) and cattle abuser for cowboy (194).
language campaigns have been made problematic . . . because of . . . ridiculing of any attempts to reform or call
for change (Mills 2003: 90). As Fairclough (2003b: 25) points out, Political correctness and being politically
correct are identifications imposed upon people by their political opponents [providing] a remarkably effective way
of disorientating sections of the left. That is not to say that the negativity surrounding political correctness is
discursive
intervention smacked of the arrogance, self-righteousness and Puritanism of an
ultra-left politics, and [has] caused widespread resentment even among people
basically committed to antiracism, anti-sexism, etc. (25). Any attempt to suggest that the
entirely undeserved, since, as Fairclough goes introduction 5 on to say, some (but only some)
expression swollen liver of a force-fed goose should be used in general discourse instead of pt, or food industry
captive be used instead of farm animal could be met with ridicule, and the larger project of discursive change
summarily dismissed. Mills (2003: 90) concludes that any anti-sexist language campaign . . . has to define itself in
contradistinction to what has been defined as political correctness by the media, and discursive analysis of
The approach of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough

2003a) is particularly effective in moving beyond the limitations of political
correctness. Rather than judging the merit of individual expressions or linguistic
devices in isolation, a discourse approach analyzes the way that linguistic
features cluster together to model the world in particular ways . For
example, animal industry discourses use the pronoun it to refer to animals, use
expressions that represent animals as machines, use the passive to hide the agent
of killing, and use a range of other features that combine together to model a world
where animals are constructed as objects . A political correctness approach would try to ban or
animals may need to do likewise.
proscribe particular expressions or grammatical features such as the use of the passive or the pronoun it when
A discourse approach, on the other hand, would recognize that it is

particular combinations of features that create models of the world . So the use of the
speaking of animals.
pronoun it in industry texts may be part of a discourse that objectifies animals, but the same pronoun could be used
as part of a quite different discourse of empathy and respectful distance, as in the following passage: I stepped out
from a clutch of trees and found myself looking into the face of one of the rare and beautiful bison that exist only on
that island. Our eyes locked. When it snorted, I snorted back; when it lifted its shoulders, I shifted my stance; when I
tossed my head, it tossed its head 6 introduction in reply. I found myself caught in a nonverbal conversation with
this Other. (Abram 1996: 21) Cultures and societies are structured by a range of dominant discourses used in
particular industries, academic disciplines, governments, charities, media, institutions, and everyday life. This book
uses the term destructive discourses for discourses that potentially construct inhumane and ecologically damaging
relationships between humans and animals. Dunayer (2001) analyzes a wide range of discourses including the
discourse of zoos, science, hunting, the meat industry, and aquariums, showing how the language used by these
institutions constructs animals as unfeeling objects ready for human oppression. Since destructive discourses are so
much a part of mainstream ways of thinking and talking about the world, they can go unnoticed and just be treated
Analysis of such discourses can expose and critique the models of

the world that they are based on, and act as a first step toward opening up
alternatives.
as the way things are.
Discourse outweighs
Discourse outweighs key internal link
Stibbe, 2012
Project Muse] JB
Destructive Discourses Animals within a Symbolic World Fairclough (1992b: 2) describes the linguistic turn in
social theory, where toward the end of the twentieth century language began to be accorded a more central role
The role of language in structuring power relations , in particular, has

come under close scrutiny (van Dijk 1997, Fairclough 1989, Hodge and Kress 1993, Fowler 1991). Most of
within social phenomena.
this work on language and power focuses on the role of discourse in oppression and exploitation. For example, the
journal Discourse and Society is dedicated to power, dominance and inequality, and to the role of discourse in their
legitimisation and reproduction in society, for instance in the domains of gender, race, ethnicity, class or world
the role of discourse in the

domination by humans of other species has been almost entirely
neglected in the field of critical discourse analysis. Power is talked about
as if it is a relation between people only; for example, Fairclough (1992b: 64) describes the
way that language contributes to the domination of some people by others (emphasis added). One of the
main reasons that animals tend to be excluded from discussions of language and
power is that they cannot use language to resist how they have been discursively
constructed. Because of the neo-Marxist roots of critical discourse analysis, analysis focuses on hegemony,
religion (van Dijk 2000). However, with rare exceptions,
where oppression of a group is carried out ideologically rather than coercively, through the manufacture of consent
(Fairclough 1992b: 92). In the case of animals, the power is coercive, carried out by a small number of people
The animals do not consent to

their treatment because of an uncritical acceptance of the ideology of the
oppressor, and they cannot be empowered to resist the discourses that oppress
them. However, the coercive power used to oppress animals depends on the consent of the majority of the
involved in organizations that farm 20 animals erased and use animals.
human population, who explicitly or implicitly agree to the way animals are treated every time they buy animal
products. This consent can be withdrawn, as has been demonstrated through boycotts of veal, battery farm eggs,
cosmetics tested on animals, and, by some, all animal products. It is in the manufacturing of consent within the
human population for the oppression and exploitation of animals that language plays a role. Shotter (1993) uses the
term rhetorical-responsive to describe the way that social constructions exist not in the minds of individual people
but within the constant interaction and exchange of information in a society. There is what Kopperud (1993: 20)
calls a pitched battle for the hearts and minds of . . . consumers taking place between the meat industry and
animal rights activists, a struggle that occurs primarily through language and the media. Jones (1997: 73), for
example, found that public opposition to both the use of animals in scientific research and the killing of animals for
The way that animals are

socially constructed influences how they are treated by human society : as Lawrence
fur increased significantly following the high level of media coverage given.
(1994: 182) puts it, cultural constructs determine the fate of animals. These cultural constructs are intimately
bound up with language and discourse. According to Fairclough (1992b: 64), discourse is a practice not just of
representing the world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning. Van Dijk
(1997) considers the link between discourse and society to be through ideology and social cognition. One of the
classic senses of ideology is a mode of thought and practice developed by dominant groups in order to reproduce
and legitimate their domination (25). The primary way that this is accomplished is to present domination as God-
Rather than explicitly encouraging oppression and

exploitation, ideology manifests itself more effectively by being implicit. This is
achieved by destructive discourses 21 basing discourse on assumptions that are treated as if they
given, natural, benign [or] inevitable (25).
were common sense, but which are, in fact, common sense assumptions in the service of sustaining unequal
relations of power (Fairclough 1989: 84).
Discourse = Root Cause

The discursive registers of anthropocentrism diffuse
revolutionary attempts at recognition. Discourse shapes and
controls civil societys consciousness and capacity for
revolution.
Stibbe, 2012
Project Muse] JB
Ideologies, embedded and disseminated through discourse , influence the individual mental
representations of members of a society, which in turn influence their actions. These mental representations are part of what Van
Dijk (1997: 27) calls social cognition, since they are shared among members of a society through participation in and
exposure to discourse. In the end, it is this social cognition that influences which animal products people buy, how the meat industry
treats animals, and whether people actively campaign against the oppression of animals. Animals play many roles in human society,
including the roles of companion, entertainer, food item, and commodity. There are therefore numerous discourses and ideologies
that influence how they are socially constructed. The emphasis in this chapter is on discourses that have a direct impact on the
welfare of large numbers of animals, starting with general discourse but focusing particularly on discourses used in animal product
industries. The data that this chapter examines are based on a corpus collected from a variety of different sources, all of which were
publicly available and therefore potentially influential. The corpus consists of: (a) articles from internal meat industry magazines
such as Poultry and Meat Marketing & Technology (mm&t), (b) articles written by the meat industry for external reading, for
example, justifying farming methods, and (c) professional articles written by interested parties such as veterinarians specializing in
food animals or lawyers involved in the defense of product manufacturers. In addition to the specialist discourses that appear in the
corpus, general discourse is also discussed. The term general discourse is used to mean terms and expressions that are used widely
across a range of discourses in everyday life rather than being associated with particular groups. The data for this come from
personal observation and consultation of general dictionaries, idiom dictionaries, and grammar books. The method used to analyze
the data is a form of critical discourse analysis (cda) (Chilton and Schffner 1997, Van Dijk 1993, Fairclough 1992b), combined 22
animals erased with Potters (1996) theory of fact construction. cda provides an account of the role of language, language use,
discourse or communicative events in the (re)production of dominance and inequality (Van Dijk 1993: 282). It does this by
performing detailed linguistic analysis of discourses to expose the ideologies embedded within them. Chilton and Schffner (1997:
226) provide an explicit methodology for cda, aimed at interpretively linking linguistic details . . . to the strategic political functions
of coercion, resistance, opposition, protest, dissimulation, legitimisation and delegitimisation. The methodology they present
echoes that of Fairclough (1992b, 1989) in focusing on the analysis of linguistic features such as vocabulary, grammar, textual
structures, and punctuation in order to reveal hidden ideological assumptions on which discourse is based. This process of revealing
commonsense assumptions can be important because, as Fairclough (1989: 85) writes, If one becomes aware that a particular
aspect of common sense is sustaining power inequalities at ones own expense, it ceases to be common sense, and may cease to
have the capacity to sustain power inequalities. Clearly, in this case, the commonsense assumptions are sustaining power
inequalities at the expense of animals, but given the ecologically destructive nature of intensive farming and the many ways that
humans depend on other animals for our continuing survival, discourses that condone inhumane or destructive practices toward
animals have an ultimate impact on humans too. The following discussion, based on detailed analysis of the data mentioned above,
is aimed at answering the following question: How does language, from the level of pragmatics and semantics down to syntax and
morphology, influence the way that animals are socially constructed, and hence treated, by human society, in general discourse as
well as the discourse of animal products industries? The answer to this question is necessarily brief but taken up in more detail in
chapter 2 General Discourse Singer (1990/1975: vi) describes the way that the
English language, like other
languages, reflects the prejudices of its users. The example he gives is of the destructive discourses 23
word animal, which, in contrast to its use in scientific discourse, often excludes human beings from its semantic extension. It is quite
usual to talk about animals and people, or to say there are no animals here when there are, in fact, people. This semantic
classification could potentially contribute to oppression by reproducing outgroup social psychology . . . which distances us from, and
Other linguistic mechanisms that distance

us from animal suffering occur at the lexical level: The very words we use conceal
its [meats] origin, we eat beef, not bull . . . and pork, not pig (Singer 1990/1975: 95). We
also wear leather made from hide, not skin, and eat a carcass, not a corpse. As Shapiro
prevents us from seeing, animal suffering (Shapiro 1995: 671).
(1995: 671) points out We do not say please pass the cooked flesh : meat is meat, with quite different connotations from
circumlocutions with the same meaning such as bits of the dead bodies of animals. The shock value of such circumlocutions was
exploited by the bbc news during the bse crisis when reporting the fact that cattle were being fed mashed up cows. Killing, too,
is lexicalized differently for humans and animals: animals are slaughtered, humans are murdered. Interchanging these two: You
murdered my pet hamster is comical, The refugees were slaughtered means they were killed brutally, uncaringly, and immorally.
Animals are not only represented in language as different, but also as inferior, the two
conditions necessary for oppression . Conventional metaphors, which Lakoff and Johnson
(1999, 1980) claim have a strong influence on our everyday thinking, are overwhelmingly negative to animals. For example, a
person might be called a greedy pig, dirty dog, stupid cow, big ape, or ugly bitch or be criticized for acting catty,
crowing over achievements, being chicken, or monkeying around (see Leach 1964; Palmatier 1995). Such terms contain
nouns, adjectives, and verbs that have become polysemous through metaphorical extension in ways negative toward animals.
Idioms that refer to animals also tend to describe negative situations, or contain images of cruelty. There are
various expressions about dogs: sick as a dog, dying like a dog, dogs dinner, its a dogs life, working like a dog, going to
the dogs. And cats: cat on hot bricks, not enough room to swing 24 animals erased a cat, a cat in hells chance, running like
a scalded cat, many ways to skin a cat. And larger animals: flogging a dead horse, the straw that broke the camels back,
talking the hind legs off a donkey. The only positive animal idioms seem to be idioms describing wild birds and insects, for
example: an early bird, in fine feather, feathering your nest, being as free as a bird, happy as a lark, wise as an owl, and
snug as a bug in a rug, chirpy as a cricket, as fit as a flea, the bees knees. There are exceptions to this pattern, but the
pattern is clear: the closer the relation of dominance of a particular species by humans, the more negative the stereotypes
contained in the idioms of general discourse. The ideological positioning of animals extends into syntax as well. When animals die
they change from being objects to substance, count nouns to mass nouns, in a way that humans do not. It is quite possible to say
some chicken, some lamb, or some chicken leg, but some human and some human leg are ungrammatical. Singer
(1990/1975: 95) is surprised that while we disguise the origin of pig meat by calling it pork, we find it easier to face the true nature
of a leg of lamb. However, there is a clear grammatical difference here: we cannot say a leg of person, instead we say a
persons leg. Expressing the lamb example similarly (e.g., Tonight we are going to eat a lambs leg) does not hide the origin in
the same way. Another place where animals change from count nouns to mass nouns is on safari. Whether the participants are
carrying guns or cameras, the way of talking about animals is the same: We saw giraffe, elephant, and lion, instead of We saw
giraffes, elephants, and lions. Using mass nouns instead of count nouns removes the individuality of the animals, with the
ideological assumption that each animal is just a (replaceable) representative of a category. Lawrence (1994: 180) writes, If there
are no differences among members of a group, their value and importance are greatly diminished so that it is easier to dislike them
and to justify their exploitation and destruction. Pronoun use can lead to the kind of us and them division similar to that found
in racist discourse, with us referring to humans and them to animals. Even in the animal rights literature the pronouns we, us,
and our are destructive discourses 25 almost always used exclusively, that is, referring only to humans. Perhaps the strongest
animal rights campaigner of all, Tom Regan (1996: 37), writes, We want and prefer things . . . our enjoyment and suffering . . .
make[s] a difference to the quality of our lives as lived . . . by us as individuals. This appears to be an inclusive use of us, we, and
our, until the next sentence is read: The same is true of . . . animals. The common way of referring to animals as it rather than
him or her can objectify them when used in certain contexts. Objects can be bought, sold, and owned, a lexical set used
routinely in everyday conversation when talking about animals. This reveals the commonsense assumption that animals are
property. It is semantically deviant to talk about someone owning another human, unless the term is used metaphorically, where it
refers to immoral and unfair domination. Spenders (1998) book Man Made Language shows how general discourse, evolving in a
male-oriented society, both reflects and reproduces bias against women. In the same way, it is not surprising to find that general
discourse reflects negative attitudes toward animals. The extent to which this influences people to condone exploitation is uncertain,
but general discourse is reinforced by the discourses of groups that have commercial interests in justifying inhumane and
environmentally damaging ways of treating animals. The Discourse of the Animal Product Industries One type of ideology, as
mentioned above, presents oppression as being Godgiven, natural, benign, [or] inevitable (van Dijk 1997: 25). Oppression of
animals is often justified quite literally as sanctioned by God through the muchquoted verse from Genesis (1:28) where God gives
humans dominion over animals. The animal product industry, however, does not use the discourse of religion. Instead the
discourse of science, among others, is used to make oppression appear natural and inevitable (see Sperling 1988). The discourse of
evolutionary biology is often invoked to equate the intensive farming and slaughter of animals with the behavior of predators in the
26 animals erased wild, representing it as natural. Linguistic devices are used to accomplish this, as can be seen in the article
The Natural Wrongs about Animal Rights and Animal Liberation, by Randall S. Ott, a specialist in the industry-related field of
bovine reproduction. After explicitly declaring that people are animals, Otts (1995) article uses collocations such as the human
animal, and animals other than human beings (102324) to emphasize a semantic classification in which, unlike general
discourse, humans are included in the category animals. He also includes humans in the semantic category of predator: The
natural relationship between predator and prey is congruent with neither an egalitarian nor an animal rights viewpoint. . . .
Predatorprey relationships and a hierarchical utilisation of other beings, alive and dead, is essential to nature. (Ott 1995: 1024) This
treats as common sense the assumption that what applies to the (nonhuman) animal situation of predation is the same as that
which applies to the human situation. However, prototypical members of the category predators are lions and tigers, and humans
are nonprototypical members (see Rosch 1975, 1981). This deliberate inclusion of nonprototypical members (humans) in general
statements about prototypical ones (lions) hides important differences between the situation of the lion hunting its prey (which no
one would argue is unethical) and intensive farming of thousands of animals in cramped conditions. Differences, such as the fact
that lions benefit the gene pool of their prey whereas selective breeding for meat quantity damages it, are conveniently hidden.
Potters (1996: 11215) investigation of fact construction shows how claims to scientific objectivity are used to work up the facticity
of a version. This can be seen in Otts case, where his own claims are presented as biological principles, biological rules, and
scientific knowledge based on biological evidence (102325), while the claims of the animal rights movement are labeled as
beliefs, fantasies, philosophical musings, dogma, the wrong view, and false (102329). Hedges such as might be,
probably, or can be seen destructive discourses 27 as are almost never used in Otts article. Instead the modality throughout
the chapter is one that presents what is being talked about as, to use Potters (1996: 112) words, solid, unproblematic, and quite
separate from the speaker. While the discourse of evolutionary biology presents animal oppression as natural and inevitable,
other discourses use different semantic classifications to make it appear benign: Modern animal housing is well ventilated, warm,
well-lit, clean and scientifically designed. . . . Housing protects animals from predators, disease and bad weather. (Animal Industry
Foundation quoted in Harnack 1996: 130) Here
the semantic extension of predators does not include
human predators, such as the farmer, that the housing offers no protection from. This ontological
gerrymandering (Potter 1996: 186) makes wild animals seem to be the enemy of
domesticated ones, with humans their benevolent protectors . As Garner (1998: 463) points out
Agribusiness interests often disguise the grim realities of factory farming and proclaim their concern for animal welfare. This can
be seen in the language used in the quotation above. The euphemism housing is used in place of cage, and the five positive
qualities of the housing are expressed directly one after another other in a list, a grammatical pattern used by real estate agents
describing a desirable residence. In a list such as this it is easy to sneak in something dubious among the positives without it being
noticed. In this case scientifically designed sounds superficially positive, but the housing is scientifically designed for the profit of
the farmer, not for the comfort of the animals, who would be much happier with a nonscientifically designed natural habitat. Like
many of the properties described by real estate agents, there are alternative, less euphemistic ways of describing the same
accommodation. For example, compare Modern animal housing is . . . well-lit with Crammed into tiny cages with artificial lighting
(Trans-Species Unlimited, quoted in Harnack 1996: 136), and compare well ventilated, warm . . . clean with what 28 animals
erased the poultry industry itself describes as the heat mixed with the ammonia and dust in the houses causes incredible health
problems (Poultry magazine 1997a). Even punctuation is used for ideological ends, as the example from a dairy industry journal
below shows: People concerned about animal welfare . . . may have seen a sensational news story about the abuse of animals or
about factory farms. (Hoards Dairyman 1995: 449) Here the use of quotation marks is intended to try to distance intensive
farming from the image of a factory. While the external discourse of animal industries presents the treatment of animals as
benign, internal discourse has a different ideological objective. Here the aim seems to be to encourage those who work in the
industry to neglect suffering and focus on profit. Fiddes (1991: 200) describes the way that the meat industry regards care for their
animal raw materials as little more than a commercial oncost. An indication of this can be found in the archives of the industry
magazines Poultry and Meat Marketing and Technology (www .meatingplace.com). Within these archives at the time they were
examined, items in the lexical set pain, suffering, hurt(ing) (with reference to animals) were mentioned in 3, 2, and no articles
respectively. On the other hand, items in the lexical set money, financial, profit were mentioned in 224, 101, and 90 articles
respectively. Hidden assumptions that make the suffering of animals appear unimportant can be found in the linguistic devices used
in the discourse of the meat industries. One of these devices is metonymy, which is, according to Lakoff (1987: 77), one of the basic
characteristics of cognition. Examples are as follows (emphasis added): (a) Catching broilers is a backbreaking, dirty and
unpleasant job. (Poultry magazine 1997a) (b) [There is] susceptibility to ascites and flipover . . . in the female breeder (Poultry
magazine 1995) destructive discourses 29 (c) Theres not enough power to stun the beef . . . youd end up cutting its head off while
the beef was still alive. (Slaughterhouse worker interviewed in Eisnitz 1997: 216) (d) Exciting times for beef practitioners (Herrick
1995: 1031) In (a) live birds are named and referred to by a cooking method, in (b) by their function, in (c) cows are referred to by
their dead flesh, and in (d) veterinarians specializing in bovine medicine are called beef practitioners rather than cow
practitioners. All of these ways of referring to animals focus attention away from their individuality and contribute to what Regan
(1996: 35) calls the system that allows us to view animals as our resources. The discourse of resources is frequently used in direct
reference to live animals as well as dead ones. Examples are the word damage instead of injury in the expression bird damage
(Poultry magazine 1997b), product instead of bodies in product is 100 percent cut-up and hand deboned (Poultry magazine
1997b), and destruction and batch in Isolation of salmonella will result in the destruction of the flock . . . [or] slaughter of the
batch (Poultry magazine 1995). The discourse of resources includes metaphors too, from dead metaphors such as livestock to
novel metaphors such as the animals-as-plants metaphor evident in an automatic broiler harvesting machine (Poultry magazine
1997a) and How hogs are handled before stunning and harvesting has plenty to do with the quality of meat (Meat Marketing &
Technology 1995) (emphasis added in each quotation). Since inanimate resources cannot suffer, the discursive constriction of
animals as resources contributes to an ideology that disregards suffering. When events that include suffering are described and
talked about, nominalization is frequently used to hide agency (see Fairclough 1989: 124). An example of this is: Catcher fatigue,
absenteeism and turnover can effect broken bones and bruises that reduce processing yields. (Poultry magazine 1997a) This
sentence describes incidents where animals are injured. But the actual animals are not mentioned at all. This is accomplished
through the nominalizations broken bones (X breaks Ys bones) and bruises (X bruises Y), which allow the 30 animals erased patient,
Y, to be deleted. The agent, X, in this case the catcher, is also deleted, appearing only indirectly as a modifier in the noun phrase
catcher fatigue. And the catcher fatigue forms part of the agent of the verb effect rather than break. This distances
deliberate human action from animal injuries. In addition, the results of the injuries are not mentioned in terms of pain or suffering,
but only in terms of yields. The same pattern can be seen in this sentence: Carcass damage from handling and bird struggle
during the kill does occur in broilers (Poultry magazine 1997b). There are three nominalizations here: damage (X damages Y),
handling (X handles Y), and the kill (X kills Y). These three hide both the agent and the patient, who appears only as a modifier
in the expressions bird damage and bird struggle. In addition, the resultant injuries to what are clearly live, struggling animals
are expressed in terms of damage to the dead carcass. Singer (1990/1975: 50) points out that detachment is made easier by the
use of technical jargon that disguises the real nature of what is going on. This can be seen in the following quote: Perdigos Marau
plant processes 4.95-pound broilers at line speeds of 136 bpm, running 16 hours per day. . . . Perdigo previously used a stunning
method more similar to US standards: 45 mA/bird (60 Hz) for a seven second duration with water bath. However, these stunning
parameters induced pectoral muscle contraction that resulted in blood splash. (Poultry magazine 1997b) Here birds become units in
the mathematically expressed parameters 136 bpm (birds per minute) and 45 mA/bird. And it is these stunning parameters
that are the agent of the verb induced. Thus, responsibility for causing convulsions so strong they cause bleeding is being placed
on parameters rather than on the electrocution itself, or the people instigating it. One final linguistic device that is used to
encourage the disregard of animal suffering is extended metaphor, which, as Johnson (1983) shows, can infludestructive discourses
31 ence reasoning patterns. The following is a famous example of a meat industry metaphor: The breeding sow should be thought of
as, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine (Walls Meat
Company, in Coats 1989: 32) Regarding pigs as machines encourages metaphorical reasoning along the lines of: machines do not
have feelings, so pigs do not have feelings, and valuable machines should be utilized as much as possible, thus pigs should be
utilized as much as possible. The results of this reasoning pattern can be seen in Coatss (1989: 34) description of pig farming: the
sow must produce the maximum number of live piglets in the shortest time. . . . No regard is paid for the distress and suffering
caused by these continual pregnancies. This chapter analyzed a number of materials using the methods of critical discourse
analysis in an investigation of the connection between language, power and the oppression of animals. The ultimate aim of analyses
such as this is, of course, not simply to describe relations of domination and exploitation, but also to challenge them. Faircloughs
(1992b) Discourse and Social Change describes the way that dominant ideologies that reproduce and maintain oppression can be
The animal rights movement, as it

exists today, does provide a discourse that opposes oppression . Animal rights authors frequently
resisted, and social change can come about through opposing discourses.
counter the classifications of general discourse by using terms such as nonhuman animal, otherthan- human animal, and
inclusive terms such as being in If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into
consid32 animals erased eration (Singer 1990/1975: 8). This is the same humans are animals semantic classification used in
biological discourse to argue against animal rights. However, in this case the similarities drawn out are different, focusing on
animals ability to suffer and feel pain in the same way that humans can, rather than predatory aspects. The animal rights
movement is aware of the power of language, and makes deliberate attempts to change language, as the following examples show:
We chose [pets] and most likely bought them in a manner similar to the way in which human slaves were once . . . bought and
sold. . . . Keeping the term pets recognises this hierarchy of ownership. (Belk 1996) The blade is electrically heated and cauterises
the blood vessels as it snips off about one fourth of the beak. The chicken industry characterises this procedure as beak trimming
as if its little more than a manicure. (Marcus 1998: 103, emphasis in original) [When animals are considered to be tools] a certain
callousness towards them becomes apparent. Consider, for instance, Harlow and Suomis mention of their rape rack and the
jocular tone in which they report on the favourite tricks of the female monkeys. (Singer 1990/1975: 50) [About the term road kill]
I do not believe that humans . . . should refer to innocent, defenceless victims . . . in such an insensitive, impersonal way. . . . I
believe that the term road-kill should be stricken from our vocabulary. (Appel 2000: 8) However, these are all focused on individual
words. This chapter has attempted to show that it is not just individual words that contribute to the domination and oppression of
animals. Instead clusters of language features at all levels, from the morphological changes that create the metonymy broiler from
broil, through punctuation, semantic classification schemes, grammatical choices, and pronoun usage, to metaphor are
systematically related to underlying ideologies that contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression. destructive discourses 33
The external discourses of animal product industries contain hidden ideological

assumptions that make animal oppression seem inevitable, natural, and benign.
The internal discourses encourage pain and suffering to be disregarded for the sake of profit. It is not, therefore, just at the level of
words that animal activists can attempt to oppose discourses of oppression, but at the level of discourse. Van Dijk (1993: 253)
describes the way that critical discourse analysts take the perspective of those who suffer most from dominance and inequality. . . .
Their problems are . . . serious problems that affect the wellbeing and lives of many. In terms of the sheer number of sentient
beings suffering, and the impact that intensive farming has on their lives from birth to slaughter, nonhuman animals fit into this
group. This chapter has attempted to show that language is relevant to the oppression of animals, and can be an appropriate area of
research for critical discourse analysis. Chapter 2 applies discourse analysis in greater detail, focusing on the one particular animal.
Race and Identity Work

Humankind's greatest priority is to reintegrate with the natural world. - Jonathon
Porritt
Alt solves
Only the alts challenge of the human animal divide speaks to
the axiological roots of racism. Only the alt is both necessary
and sufficient to solve the proximate causes of racism some of
which the 1AC embraces.
While the intersection of race and gender is often acknowledged in understanding the etiology of justificatory
narratives for war, the presence of species distinctions and the importance of the subhuman are less appreciated.
Yet, the race (and gender) thinking that animates Razacks argument in normalizing violence for detainees (and
others) is also centrally sustained by the subhuman figure. As Charles Patterson notes with respect to multiple
Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as

the master species, our victimization of animals has served as the
model and foundation for our victimization of each other. The study
of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and
slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animas and do
the same to them. Patterson emphasizes how the human/animal hierarchy and
our ideas about animals and animality are foundational for intrahuman hierarchies and the violence they promote. The routine
violence against beings designated subhuman serves as both a
justification and blueprint for violence against humans. For example, in
forms of exploitation:
discussing the specific dynamics of the Nazi camps, Patterson further notes how techniques to make the killing of
detainees resemble the slaughter of animals were deliberately implemented in order to make the killing seem more
palatable and benign. That the detainees were made naked and kept crowded in the gas chambers facilitated their
animalization and, in turn, their death at the hands of other humans who were already culturally familiar and
comfortable with killing animals in this way. Returning to Razacks exposition of race thinking in contemporary
subhuman thinking is foundational to race thinking .

One of her primary arguments is that race thinking, which she defines as the denial of a common
bond of humanity between people of European descent and those
who are not, is a defining feature of the world order today as in
the past. In other words, it is the species thinking that helps to create
the racial demarcation. As Razack notes with respect to the specific
logic infusing the camps, they are not simply contemporary
excesses born of the wests current quest for security, but instead
represent a more ominous, permanent arrangement of who is and is
not a part of the human community. Once placed outside the
human zone by race thinking, the detainees may be handled
lawlessly and thus with violence that is legitimated at all times.
Racialization is not enough and does not complete their Othering
experience. Rather, they must be dehumanized for the larger public
to accept the violence against them and the increasing culture of
camps, one can see how
exception which sustains these human bodily exclusions. Although

nonhumans are not the focus of Razacks work, the centrality of the subhuman to the logic of the
camps and racial and sexual violence contained therein is also
clearly illustrated in her specific examples. In the course of her analysis, to determine
the import of race thinking in enabling violence, Razack quotes a newspaper story that describes the background
mentality of Private Lynndie England, the white female soldier made notorious by images of her holding onto
imprisoned and naked Iraqi men with a leash around their necks. The story itself quotes a resident from Englands
hometown who says the following about the sensibilities of individuals from their town: To the country boys here, if
youre a different nationality, a different race, youre sub-human. Thats the way that girls like Lynndie England are
raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here youre
hunting something. Over there theyre hunting Iraqis. Razack extracts this quote to illustrate how race
Race
has a formative function, to be sure, but it works in conjunction with
overdetermined what went on, but it may also be observed that species overdetermined what went on.
Anthro Turns Race

And, anthropocentric discourse and tropes cause racial
criminalization and stigma faster than it can be recognized.
That means our internal link is triggered at a level which your
solvency mechanism has no risk of capturing by contrast to our
alt which can arguably solve a proximate cause of racism.
Stanford University 2k8 [February 7). Discrimination Against Blacks Linked
To Dehumanization, Study Finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080207163811.htm] JB
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2008) Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared
from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania
State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate
society is more likely to condone

violence against black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability
to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers. Co-author
blacks with apes. In addition, the findings show that
Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is black, said she was shocked by the results,
particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. "This was actually some
of the most depressing work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work
intuitionsyou have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] washow we
were able to pick it up every time." The paper, "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and
Contemporary Consequences," is the result of a series of six previously unpublished studies
conducted by Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State University psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff (the lead author and a former
student of Eberhardt's) and Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and
Berkeley, respectively. The paper is scheduled to appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
which is published by the American Psychological Association. The research took place over six years at Stanford
and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In a series of studies
that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students,
researchers
found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they
were primed with black faces than with white faces. The researchers consistently discovered a
black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. The
connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with
other non-white groups, such as Asians. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that
dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to

justify violence against many oppressed groups. "Despite widespread
opposition to racism, bias remains with us," Eberhardt said. "African

Americans are still dehumanized; we're still associated with apes in this country. That
association can lead people to endorse the beating of black
suspects by police officers, and I think it has lots of other consequences that we have yet to
uncover." Historical background Scientific racism in the United States was graphically promoted in a mid-19thcentury book by Josiah C. Nott and George Robins Gliddon titled Types of Mankind, which used misleading
illustrations to suggest that "Negroes" ranked between "Greeks" and chimpanzees. "When we have a history like
that in this country, I don't know how much of that goes away completely, especially to the extent that we are still
dealing with severe racial inequality, which fuels and maintains those associations in ways that people are
unaware," Eberhardt said. Although such grotesque characterizations of African Americans have largely disappeared
from mainstream U.S. society, Eberhardt noted that science education could be partly responsible for reinforcing
the view that blacks are less evolved than whites. An iconic 1970 illustration, "March of Progress," published in the
Time-Life book Early Man, depicts evolution beginning with a chimpanzee and ending with a white man. "It's a
legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white man," Eberhardt said. "I don't think it's intentional, but
when people learn about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that
people of African descent are closer to apes than people of European descent. When
people think of a civilized person, a white man comes to mind ." Consequences of socially
endorsed violence In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white male undergraduates
with words associated with either apes (such as "monkey," "chimp," "gorilla") or big cats (such as "lion," "tiger,"
"panther"). The latter was used as a control because both images are associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt
said. The subjects then watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several
police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. A mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown
at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a description conveying that, although described
by his family as "a loving husband and father," the suspect had a serious criminal record and may have been high
on drugs at the time of his arrest. The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was. Participants
who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either
ape or big cat words, Eberhardt said. But those
who thought the suspect was black were more

likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat
words. "Taken together, this suggests that implicit knowledge of a Black-ape association
led to marked differences in participants' judgments of Black criminal suspects ," the
researchers write. According to the paper's authors, this link has devastating consequences for African Americans
because it "alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against black
suspects." For example, the paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the
African Americans convicted of capital crimes were about four times more
likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant
language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." "Those who are
implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the
state than those who are not, " the researchers write.
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Deckha 2010
While the intersection of race and gender is often acknowledged in understanding the etiology of justificatory narratives for war, the
presence of species distinctions and the importance of the subhuman are less appreciated. Yet, the race (and gender) thinking that
animates Razacks argument in normalizing violence for detainees (and others) is also centrally sustained by the subhuman figure.
Throughout the history of our

ascent to dominance as the master species, our victimization of
animals has served as the model and foundation for our
victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the
pattern: first, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they
treat other people like animas and do the same to th em. Patterson emphasizes
how the human/animal hierarchy and our ideas about animals and
animality are foundational for intra-human hierarchies and the
violence they promote. The routine violence against beings
designated subhuman serves as both a justification and blueprint
for violence against humans. For example, in discussing the specific dynamics of the Nazi camps,
As Charles Patterson notes with respect to multiple forms of exploitation:
Patterson further notes how techniques to make the killing of detainees resemble the slaughter of animals were deliberately
implemented in order to make the killing seem more palatable and benign. That the detainees were made naked and kept crowded
in the gas chambers facilitated their animalization and, in turn, their death at the hands of other humans who were already
culturally familiar and comfortable with killing animals in this way. Returning to Razacks exposition of race thinking in
subhuman thinking is foundational to race

thinking. One of her primary arguments is that race thinking, which she defines as the denial of a
common bond of humanity between people of European descent and
those who are not, is a defining feature of the world order today
as in the past. In other words, it is the species thinking that helps to
create the racial demarcation. As Razack notes with respect to the
specific logic infusing the camps, they are not simply
contemporary excesses born of the wests current quest for
security, but instead represent a more ominous, permanent
arrangement of who is and is not a part of the human community.
Once placed outside the human zone by race thinking, the
detainees may be handled lawlessly and thus with violence that is
legitimated at all times. Racialization is not enough and does not
contemporary camps, one can see how
exclusions. Although nonhumans are not the focus of Razacks work, the centrality of the subhuman to the logic
of the camps and racial and sexual violence contained therein is

also clearly illustrated in her specific examples. In the course of her analysis, to
determine the import of race thinking in enabling violence, Razack quotes a newspaper story that describes the background
mentality of Private Lynndie England, the white female soldier made notorious by images of her holding onto imprisoned and naked
Iraqi men with a leash around their necks. The story itself quotes a resident from Englands hometown who says the following about
the sensibilities of individuals from their town: To the country boys here, if youre a different nationality, a different race, youre subhuman. Thats the way that girls like Lynndie England are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting
a turkey. Every season here youre hunting something. Over there theyre hunting Iraqis. Razack extracts this quote to illustrate
Race
has a formative function, to be sure, but it works in conjunction with
how race overdetermined what went on, but it may also be observed that species overdetermined what went on.
Wake Early Bird Link Ev

Their focus on liberation requires re-affirmation of a distinction
between human and animal re-entrenches specieism
Kim 09, Claire Kim, UC Irvine political science professor, Slaying the Beast:
Reflections on Race, Culture, and Species, http://aapf.org/wpcontent/uploads/2009/05/kalfou.pdf)
Dyson gives a perfunctory nod to the animal question and then turns to focus on the
issue of true moral significance and urgency: racism. It is as if defending the humanity of Black
people requires reaffirming the animality of animals, their categorical
subordination. Similarly, feminist Sandra Kobin asks why Vick was treated more
harshly than professional athletes who beat their wives and girlfriends , writing: Beat a
woman? Play on; Beat a dog? Youre gone (Kobin 2007). Kobin does not critique dog fighting for its promotion of masculinist
Instead, she
bristles at the idea that dogs might be valued more than women and insists that
women are the victims that really matter. What is troubling about the racial
persecution narrative advanced by Vicks defenders is not that it is wrong per se but
that it subsumes, deflects, and ultimately denies the other moral question
being raised, the animal question. Its response to the interdependency of Blackness
and animalness in the white imagination is not to deconstruct both notions but
rather to vigorously affirm that Blacks are human and therefore deserving of better
treatment than animals. It is a narrative that embraces an ideology of human
supremacy in the name of fighting white supremacy and sees no
contradiction in this position. It is as if Dyson and Kobin are saying that people of
color and women have the most at stake in reinscribing the impassable line
between humans and animals, whereas these groups may in fact have the most at
stake in its erasure. Most humans are unaccustomed to thinking about how their politics reinscribe notions of human
superiority over all other species, but the notion of species-free space is as improbable as that of
race-free space. Categories of difference saturate our thinking, our discourse, our
experience, and our actions.
violence or show any appreciation of the fact that women and animals are both victims of male violence.
Anthro is the root cause of racism the distinction as less than

human psychologically structures all oppression and
discrimination
Singer 02, (Peter Singer is the author of Writings on an Ethical Life, Practical
Ethics; and Rethinking Life arid Death; among many others. Re is currently the Ira
W. De Camp Professor of Bio ethics at Princeton Universitys Center for Human
Values Animal Liberation 2002. Pg. 8-9.)
If a being suffers there cart be no moral justification for refusing to take that
suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of
equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like sufferinginsofar as
rough comparisons can he madeof any other being. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of
experiencing enjoyment or happiness there is nothing to be taken into account. So
the limit of sentience (using the term as a convenient if not strictly accurate shorthand for the capacity to suffer and/or
experience) is the only defensible boundary of concern for the interests of others. To
mark this boundary by some other character tic like intelligence or rationality Would
he to mark it in an arbitrary manner. Why not choose some other characteristic, like
skin color? Racist violate the principle of equ1ity by giving greater weight to the
interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests
and the interests of those of another race . Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of
their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of members of their own species
to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is
identical in each case.
Link ev
foundation of anthropocentrism which will drive the planetary
For Plumwood, these claims extend both to environmental and animal actors, since what she calls 'our [collective] failure to situate
our failure to situate non-humans

ethically, as the plight of non-human species continues to worsen' (2001: 2). 'Hegemonic centrism' thus
accounts not only for environmental racism, but also for those forms of
institutionalised speciesism that continue to be used to rationalise the
exploitation of animal {and animalised human) 'others' in the name of a
'human- and reason-centred culture that is at least a couple of millennia
old' (2001: 8). As Plumwood argues, the western definition of humanity depended - and still depends - on the presence of the
'not-human': the uncivilised, the animal and animalistic. European justification for invasion and
colonisation proceeded from this basis , understanding non-European lands and the people and
dominant forms of human society ecologically [has been] matched by
animals that inhabited them as 'spaces', 'unused, underused or empty* {2003: 53). The very ideology of colonisation is thus one
with the anthropocentrism underlying

Eurocentrism being used to justify those forms of European colonialism that
where anthropocentrism and Enrocentrism are inseparable,
see 'indigenous cultures as "primitive", less rational, and closer to children, animals and nature' (2003: 53). "Within many cultures and not just western ones - anthropocentrism has long been naturalised. The absolute prioritisation of one's own species' interests
over those of the silenced majority is still regarded as being 'only natural'. Ironically, it is precisely through such appeals to nature
animals and the environment are often excluded from the privileged
ranks of the human, rendering them available for exploitation . As Gary Wolfe, citing
Jacques Derrida, puts it: [T]he humanise concept of subjectivity is inseparable from
the discourse and institution of a speciesism which relies on the tacit acceptance that the full
that other
transcendence to the human requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic
economy in which we can engage in a 'noncriminal putting to death', as Derrida phrases it, not only of animals but of humans as
well by marking them as animal. (1998: 39) The effectiveness of this discourse of species is that 'when applied to social others of
it relies upon 'the taking for granted of the systematic,

institutionalized killing of non-human others (39). In other words, in assuming a
natural prioritisation of humans and human interests over those of other
species on earth, we are both generating and repeating the racist
ideologies of imperialism on a planetary scale. In working towards a genuinely post-imperial,
environmentally based conception of community, then, a re-imagining and reconfiguration of the
human place in nature necessitates an interrogation of the category of the
whatever sort,,
human itself and of the ways in which the construction of ourselves

against nature with the hierarchisation of life forms that construction
implies has been and remains complicit in colonialist and racist
exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to the present day . Postcolonial
studies has come to understand environmental issues not only as central to the projects of European conquest and global
domination, but also as inherent in the ideologies of imperialism and racism on which those projects historically - and persistently depend. Nor only were other people often regarded as part of nature - and thus treated instrumentally as animals but also they
were forced or co-opted over time into western views of the environment, thereby rendering cultural and environmental restitution
difficult if not impossible to achieve. Once invasion and settlement had been accomplished, or at least once administrative
structures had been set up, the environmental impacts of western attitudes to human being-in-the-world were facilitated or
reinforced by the deliberate (or accidental) transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout the European empires, instigating
Despite the recent advances of

postcolonial studies more particularly, have yet
to resituate the species boundary and environmental concerns at the
pertinent than it is today. After all, postcolonialism's concerns with conquest, colonisation, racism and sexism,
widespread ecosystem change under conspicuously unequal power regimes.3
eco/environmental criticism, English studies in general, and
along with its investments in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and the relations between native and invader societies and
cultures, are also the central concerns of animal and environmental studies. Moreover, as the American environmental historian
it is in the myriad relationships between material

practices and ideas - especially in cross-cultural contexts - that day-to-day planetary life is
lived and futures are governed : practices and ideas that are inseparable
from issues of representation - as will be made clear throughout this book.
Donald Wotstcr acknowledges,
AT: Affirmative
If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship
to nature--even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe--has to
change. - Janine M. Benyus
AT: Perm
Perm links more: it attempts to direct criticism towards politics
conducted in the name of a life which excludes bare life in
favor of the voice of the citizen, the politically qualified. This
excludes bare life and establishes a realm beyond of the
markers of the political in which to conduct genocidal
violence against exceptional beings.
JB
The rise of environmentalism, deep ecology, and animal rights can be seen as effects of this inability of law, or the
Natural objects reappear within

the political realm not as political actors but as markers of bare life.
Sovereignty, in seeking to establish a political life separate from the
state of nature, produces both political life as the life proper to the
citizen (the good life) and bare life, which occupies a space in between bios and zo,
evacuated of meaning. The state of nature is not separate from political life
but a state that exists alongside political life, as a necessary
corollary of its existence. Political life is alienation from an imagined
state of nature that we cannot access as human beings because it
appears only in shadow form as bare life. The state of exception is
that which defines which lives lack value, which lives can be killed
without being either murdered or sacrificed. Agambens examples of the inextricable
Law, to distance the natural world as a state outside itself.
link between political and bare life focus on the limit cases of humanity rather than the ideal, providing an analysis
of precisely the cases that prove problematic in Ferrys liberal humanism. The exception, as that which proves the
rule, cannot be avoided. It is necessary to look to the figure of the refugee, the body of the overcomatose or the
severely mentally impaired, and, under the Third Reich, the life of the Jew to see how the law fails in the task Ferry
These cases demonstrate the zone of indistinction that

Agamben elaborates as the zone of life that does not deserve to
live. The refugee demonstrates the necessity of a link between nation and subject; refugees are no
longer citizens and, as such, lack a claim to political rights: In the
system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable
rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality
at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights
belonging to citizens of a state.[15] Confronted with the figure of the
refugee, human rights are faced with their hidden ground in
national origin, where, as Agamben notes, the key term is birth:
men are born free, invoking the natural codes from which law was
to separate us. This freedom is, in actuality, a function of citizenship
sets for it.
and incorporation in the nation-state rather than a fact of being

human: citizenship names the new status of life as origin and
ground of sovereignty and, therefore, literally identifies les membres du
souverain, the members of the sovereign.[16] This makes the link
between that which is proper to the nation and that which is proper
to the citizen the determinant of the zone of sacred life: those who
do not fulfill the role of the citizen are no longer guaranteed
protection or participation in political life, their so-called human
rights void in the absence of national identity. The refugee or
refugees as a group have a claim only to bare life, to being kept
alive, but have no political voice with which to demand the rights of
the citizen. Agamben, while noting the same trend toward politicizing natural life that concerns Ferry,
demonstrates that this politicization is already contained within the structure of politics itself. This
corresponds to the position of animals in human society: the
exemplar of the limit case, they have always existed in the state of
exception that founds the political. There is thus a connection
between the plight of the refugee and that of the animal: neither
participates directly in the political, though both are absolutely
subject to political decisions in which they have no voice. The
establishment of a realm outside the political, where lives have no
value and thus may be killed, is marked by the difference between
the human and the animal.
Perm links more: holding out for reform is worse because it

disavows the unethical violence in their political paradigm.
Only the alt solves.
The banality of action hits against a central problem of social-political action within late modernity. In one sense, the
ethical demand to respond to historical and present environmental destruction opens onto a difficulty within the
relationship between moral intention and autonomy. While an individual might be autonomous in respect of moral
conscience, their fundamental interconnection with and interdependence upon social, political and economic
it is
not only the modern humanist figures such as Hawking who perpetuate
present violence and present dreams of colonial speciesist violence
in the future. It is also those who might reject this violence but
whose lives and actions are caught up in a certain complicity for this
violence. From a variety of political standpoints, it would seem that the issue of modern, autonomous action
orders strips them of the power to make and act upon truly autonomous decisions. From this perspective
runs into difficulties of systematic and institutional complicity. Certainly both individuals and groups are expected to
giving up
autonomy (in the sense of autonomy as sovereignty) is typically
done in exchange for the hope or promise of at some point having
some degree of control or influence (i.e. via the electoral system)
over government policy. The price of this hope or promise, however, is
continued complicity in government-sanctioned social, political and
economic actions that temporarily (or in the worst case, eternally)
lie beyond the individuals choice and control. The answer to the
questions of whether such complicity might ever be institutionally
overcome, and the problems of human violence against non-human
species and ongoing environmental destruction effectively dealt with, often depends upon
whether one believes that the liberal hope or promise is, either
valid and worthwhile, or false and a sham. [8]
give up a degree of autonomy in a modern liberal-democratic context. In this instance,
AT: Survival Isnt War

Anthropocentrism and the species war is not a question of
survival because it involves the distinction between an
imagined ideal, good life to create an abject category of life
without value, able to be killed without committing murder in
the eyes of the law that is not survival
culture, and the humanities, 353-359] JB
One response to the comments so far might be to reject the notion of species war and counterclaim that what is going on in the relationship between humans and animals is not war
as such but merely a struggle for biological survival between
species. It might be argued by some that the correct concept for this case is not war but survival. Viewed
through such a lens the violence carried out by humans against non-human animals is understood as similar to the
killing that takes place between different animal species as they rely upon the eating of each other for food and the
violence some species use to ward competitors and predators away from their territory. In this sense what would
really be going on here between humans and non-humans is merely the playing-out of behaviors linked to biological
need the biological imperative which appears to be programmed into life and issues the command: though shalt
survive! Such an account is somewhat compelling and it has sat at the basis of a Western narrative which for a long
time has attempted to justify violence used by humans against non-human animals. However, the account can only
ever be a part of the story and not its whole if we accept the notion that humans possess certain capacities for
even
given the human biological demand for survival, with regard to our
treatment of animals, humans are able to make a range of choices
about how we ought to behave. In this respect a distinction drawn by Aristotle,16
Thomas Hobbes17 and more recently by Giorgio Agamben,18 between mere life or bare life and a life
which is bound up with some form of normative content of the good is relevant here. The former
reflection15 that allow us to make decisions about how we behave in relation to particular ends. So
can be thought as something like the pure demand for survival sometimes even in circumstances of the survival
of life that we might view as not worth living. The latter contains value judgments about the quality, ethos and
consequences of the life which is lived. The distinction between bare life and the good life is a legal-political distinction. It has, at least since Aristotle, resided at the foundation of Western legal and political theory. The law which
holds together and governs the political community is posited with the view of not merely sustaining the bare needs
the distinction
between bare life and the good life already contains within it a prior
distinction, one which arises when the survival of humans is
distinguished from and affirmed against the survival of non-human
animals. At the basis of the distinction between bare life and the good life, and hence, at the basis of law,
resides the human-animal distinction a determination of value that the human
form of life is good and that it is worth more or better than the lives
of non-human animals. There is a certain Nietzschean sense of the term good which can be drawn
upon informatively here. My argument is that what occurs prior to the racial and
aristocratic senses of the term good suggested by Nietzsche19 as residing
of life, but of establishing and realizing some form of the good life. However,
is more deeply, an elevated sense of lifeworth that humans in the West have historically ascribed to
themselves over and above the life-worth of non-human animals.
Following this, when the meaning of the term war is explained by legal
and political theorists with reference to either the concepts of
survival or the good life, the linguistic and conceptual use of the
genealogically with the concept of the good life,
term war already contains within it a value-laden human-animal

distinction and the primary violence of species war. Survival and the biological
imperative (survive!) may be seen as components of a concept of war broadly defined.20 For non-human animals
the killing and violence that takes place between them (and with respect to their eating of plant life) may be viewed
not as species war but merely as action driven by the biological imperative. However, for humans the acts of killing
and violence directed at non-human animals can be understood as species war. While such violence and killing
may be thought to be driven, in part, by the biological imperative, these acts also take place within the context of
normative judgments made with respect to a particular notion of the good often drawing upon a cosmic hierarchy of
life-value established by religious theories of creation or scientific theories of evolution.
AT: Try or Die

They say try or die, its actually die to try - theres no
uniqueness for any of their survival good claims. We have
already argued above why the domination and eternal
suffering of animals is inevitable in a world of the affirmatives
ethic. These spieciest genocides create mass extinctions in
nonhuman populations and inevitably cause human extinction
that means there is only a risk that you should vote for our
ethical rejection of their human survival ethic.
WHITTY 2K7 [animal extinction, Julia, 30 apr,
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/animal-extinction--the-greatest-threatto-mankind-397939.html] JB
species continually disappear at a background

extinction rate estimated at about one species per million per year,
Scientists recognise that
with new species replacing the lost in a sustainable fashion. Occasional mass extinctions convulse this orderly
norm, followed by excruciatingly slow recoveries as new species emerge from the remaining gene-pool, until the
five
great extinction events have reshaped earth in cataclysmic ways in
the past 439 million years, each one wiping out between 50 and 95
per cent of the life of the day, including the dominant life forms; the
most recent event killing off the non-avian dinosaurs. Speciations followed,
but an analysis published in Nature showed that it takes 10 million years before
biological diversity even begins to approach what existed before a
die-off. Today we're living through the sixth great extinction, sometimes
world is once again repopulated by a different catalogue of flora and fauna. From what we understand so far,
known as the Holocene extinction event. We carried its seeds with us 50,000 years ago as we migrated beyond
Africa with Stone Age blades, darts, and harpoons, entering pristine Ice Age ecosystems and changing them forever
by wiping out at least some of the unique megafauna of the times, including, perhaps, the sabre-toothed cats and
woolly mammoths. When the ice retreated, we terminated the long and biologically rich epoch sometimes called
as
harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to
what's under way today. Throughout the 20th century the causes of
extinction - habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural monocultures, human-borne invasive species,
human-induced climate-change - increased exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is
nothing short of explosive. The World Conservation Union's Red List - a database measuring the
global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species tells a haunting tale of unchecked, unaddressed, and accelerating
biocide. When we hear of extinction, most of us think of the plight of the rhino, tiger, panda or blue whale. But
these sad sagas are only small pieces of the extinction puzzle. The overall numbers are terrifying . Of the
the Edenic period with assaults from our newest weapons: hoes, scythes, cattle, goats, and pigs. But,
40,168 species that the 10,000 scientists in the World Conservation

Union have assessed, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one
in three amphibians, one in three conifers and other gymnosperms
are at risk of extinction. The peril faced by other classes of organisms is less thoroughly analysed,
but fully 40 per cent of the examined species of planet earth are in danger, including perhaps 51 per cent of
based
on the last century's recorded extinctions - the current rate of
extinction is 100 times the background rate. But the eminent
Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson, and other scientists, estimate that
the true rate is more like 1,000 to 10,000 times the background
rate. The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no
scientist believes that the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species
already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species
on earth, with 10 million as the median guess. Bracketed between
best- and worst-case scenarios, then, somewhere between 2.7 and
270 species are erased from existence every day. Including today.
We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been
- and will never be - known to us. In a staggering forecast, Wilson
predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of
all plant and animal species by 2100. You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the
American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass
extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious
environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass
extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside
science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after
reptiles, 52 per cent of insects, and 73 per cent of flowering plants. By the most conservative measure -
examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of
catastrophe", we have only slowly recognised and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour.
AT: Nuclear War kills the Biosphere

Even full detonation of all nuclear arsenals would not destroy
the biosphere.
Wang 2k9 [brian, a long time futurist (he won second place in the Honeywell
University Futurist contest, Member of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
taskforce. Advisor to the Nanoethics Group. Director of Research for the Lifeboat
Foundation, http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/nuclear-war-effects-andbattlestar.html] JB
Expending the current level or even the highest nuclear arsenals

that we have ever had would do nothing to the long term survival of
the biosphere based on radiation and fallout. The world is too big. The
stuff settles out and the most dangerous stuff has a short life. The long
life stuff is long lived because it is giving off low energy level of
radiation. That is why the long term debate about nuclear war is
about altering the climate or ozone in a lasting way. Plenty of

atmospheric big nuclear tests have been done and the biosphere
can take it. Killing a biosphere with nukes would take lot more
nukes and radiation would not be the main and lasting problem ever
after 2000 years.
And, nuclear war will be on par with previous mass extinctions

radiation only risks rapid mutation enabling evolution for
populations who survive.
Phillips 2k1 [alan, peace magazine, v17, n1,p13, nuclear winter revisited,
http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v17n1p13.htm] JB
nuclear winter would be an ecological disaster of the same

sort of magnitude as the major extinctions of species that have
occurred in the past, the most famous one being 65 million years ago at the Cretaceous extinction. Of all
the species living at the time, about half became extinct. The theory
is that a large meteor made a great crater in the Gulf of Mexico, putting a
Altogether,
trillion tons of rock debris into the atmosphere. That is a thousand times
as much rock as is predicted for a nuclear war, but the soot from fires
blocks sunlight more effectively than rock debris. In
nuclear winter there would

also be radioactive contamination giving worldwide background radiation doses many times larger than has ever happened during
The radiation would notably worsen things for existing species, though it might,
by increasing mutations, allow quicker evolution of new species (perhaps mainly
insects and grasses) that could tolerate the post-war conditions. (I should
the three billion years of evolution.
there is no way the radioactivity from a nuclear war would

destroy "all life on earth." People must stop saying that. There will
be evolution after a war, but it may not include us).3. even if they
win that it does kill the biosphere, they have conceeded the bare
life portions of our criticism. the paradigm of survival of the species
abandons the form of bare life. this is an unethical arrangement of
the political which makes the domination, genocide, and continual
suffering for forms of life deemed unqualified. thats both pieces of
1nc kochi and ordan evidence and all the impact work above.
just mention that
Framework
Scholars can use the debate site as a space for the practice of
post humanities as an operative displacement of
anthropocentrism inherent to the 1AC.
DOMANSKA 2K10 [ewa, adam mickiewicz university, poznon Poland, Stanford,
beyond anthropocentrism in historical sciences] JB
scholars are not connected by methods or

problems on which they focus their intellectual efforts, primarily because those
problems are directly or indirectly related to controlling the life and death
(biopolitics, necropolitics) of humans, on the one hand, and
protecting life on earth, on the other. Protecting life is a
paternalistic project and we have to be very aware of its results.
Some scholars would call it enlightened anthropocentrism
insomuch as it takes under consideration nature and nonhumans
and presupposes that our ethical care for nature and nonhumans
comes from our care of and responsibility to humans. This idea would be
It seems that in contemporary intellectual practice
theories but by the
rejected by scholars working in the paradigm of deep ecology or the Gaia theory, who claim that nature or the
earth will take care of itself. 14 Also, we should not forget that life (and the survival of species) is not necessarily
the highest value for everybody. 15 Obviously, during the process of evolution, some specia become extinct
the survival
paradigm is not by any means an unquestionable absolute .
and new ones appear and we should not desperately seek to preserve them. So,
Historians
themselves also express their awareness of this problem while asking: How often do we consider the unwelcome
earth could survive just fine without

humans (indeed it would no doubt flourish in our absence), without ants the entire
foundation would crumble? 16 Keeping in mind the limitations of the survival paradigm, let us
make the following assumption: the challenge for todays research is not so much in asking new
but ineluctable ecological fact that, while life on
questions and proposing new theories or methods of analysis, which would spring from current research trends in
to place the research itself in the context of the emerging

paradigm of nonanthropocentric knowledge, or posthumanities. Andrew Pickering
called this strategy a posthumanist displacement of our interpretative
frameworks. 17 Of course, the point is not to eliminate the human being from our studies (of the past)
but as I mentioned above to displace the human subject
from the centre of
historical, archaeological and anthropological studies.
humanities, but
Rejection of the political is the only solution.

Best 4 [Steven, professor of philosophy at Texas El Paso, From Earth Day to
accessed: 7/27/11] JB
If humanity is to survive and flourish in its precarious journey into the future, it
needs a new moral compass because anthropocentrism has failed us dramatically.
Albert Schweitzer observed that the problem with ethics so far is that they have been
limited to a human-to-human consideration. In place of the alienated and predatory
sensibility of Western life, Schweitzer proposed a new code an ethic of reverence for
life. This entails a universal ethic of compassion and respect that
includes all humanity, embraces non-human species, and extends to the
entire earth. We need a Declaration of Interdependence to replace our outmoded Declaration of
Independence. The demand to cease exploiting animals and the earth is one and the
same; we cannot change in one area without changing in the othe r. Animal rights and
environmental ethics are the logical next stages in human moral evolution and the
next necessary steps in the human journey to enlightenment and wholeness. Sadly, on
Earth Day, as on every other day, the human species continues to invade and damage the planet. As I write, I
receive a report from Traffic, a British-based wildlife monitoring group, saying that because of deforestation and
trading in its body parts, the Sumatran tiger, Indonesia's last tiger sub-species, is on the brink of extinction. In
addition, I read that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed two tropical birds, the Mariana mallard and the
Guam broadbill, from its endangered species list not because they are safe but because they became extinct. In
some way we cannot possibly grasp, the entire earth is trying to adjust to their inalterable absence. According to
the clich, Every day is Earth Day. Truth be told, every day is Human Growth Day. On April 22, the media might
turn away from Michael Jackson or Bushs terror war for a thirty second fluff piece on the state of the planet, and
Like the evil-doer who sins

all week and then atones on Sunday, human beings plunder the planet all year long
and stop for a moment of guilt and expiation. We congratulate ourselves for honoring Earth Day,
some individuals might pause for a moment to think about their environment.
when in fact the very concept would be incoherent in an ecological society. In honor of Earth Day it is appropriate to
Where industries, the state, and toxic nihilists

of every stripe want those who care about the environment to bear stigmas such as
kook, wacko, un-American, and even terrorist, being an environmentalist
must become a badge of honor. To be an environmentalist is to realize that one is not only a citizen of
human society, one also is a citizen of the earth, an eco-citizen. Our community includes not only our
society with other human beings on a national and international scale, but also our
relations to the entire living earth, to the biocommunity. We need to act like we are
citizens and not conquering invaders. We have not only a negative duty to avoid
doing harm to the earth as much as possible, but also a positive duty to help nature
regenerate.
ask: what does it mean to be an environmentalist?
AT: Cede the Political

Only a radical form of politics can regain the political from
transnational companies and political technophiles.
Best 6 (Steven, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas El Paso,
Revolutionary Environmentalism: An Emerging New Struggle for Total Liberation
2006) JB
given an endless and uncritical airing by

mainstream corporate media, masks the fact that we live in an unprecedented era of social
and ecological crisis. Predatory transnational corporations such as ExxonMobil and Maxxam are
pillaging the planet, destroying ecosystems, pushing species into extinction, and annihilating indigenous peoples and
George W. Bushs feel-good talk of progress and democracy,
traditional ways of life. War, globalization, and destruction of peoples, species, and ecosystems march in lockstep:
militarization supports the worldwide imposition of the "free market" system , and its
growth and profit imperatives thrive though the exploitation of humans, animals, and the earth (see
Kovel 2002; Tokar 1997; Bannon and Collier 2003). Against the mindless optimism of technophiles, the
denials of skeptics, and complacency of the general public, we depart from the
premise that there is a global environmental crisis which is the most urgent issue
facing us today. If humanity does not address ecological problems immediately and
with radical measures that target causes not symptoms, severe, world-altering consequences will
play out over a long-term period and will plague future generations . Signs of major stress of
the worlds eco-systems are everywhere, from shrinking forests and depleted fisheries to vanishing wilderness and global climate
change. Ours is an era of global warming, rainforest destruction, species extinction, and chronic resource shortages that provoke
wars and conflicts such as in Iraq. While five great extinction crises have already transpired on this planet, the last one occurring 65
million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs, we are now living amidst the sixth extinction crisis, this time caused by human not
natural causes. Human populations have always devastated their environment and thereby their societies, but they have never
intervened in the planets ecosystem to the extent they have altered climate. We now confront the end of nature where no natural
force, no breeze or ripple of water, has not been affected by the human presence (McKribben 2006). This is especially true with
nanotechnology and biotechnology. Rather than confronting this crisis and scaling back human presence and aggravating actions,
humans are making it worse. Human population rates continue to swell, as awakening giants such as India and China move toward
western consumer lifestyles, exchanging rice bowls for burgers and bicycles for SUVs. The human presence on this planet is like a
meteor plummeting to the earth, but it has already struck and the reverberations are rippling everywhere. Despite the proliferating
amount of solid, internationally assembled scientific data supporting the reality of global climate change and ecological crisis, there
are still so-called environmental skeptics, realists, and optimists who deny the problems, often compiling or citing data paid for
Inhofe has declared global warming to be a myth that is damaging to

He and others revile environmentalists as alarmists, extremists, and
eco-terrorists who threaten the American way of life . There is a direct and profound relationship
by ExxonMobil. Senator James
the US economy.
between global capitalism and ecological destruction. The capitalist economy lives or dies on constant growth, accumulation, and
The environmental crisis is inseparable from the social crisis,

whereby centuries ago a market economy disengaged from society and ruled over it
with its alien and destructive imperatives. The crisis in ecology is ultimately a crisis in democracy, as
consumption of resources.
transnational corporations arise and thrive through the destruction of popular sovereignty. The western environment movement has
now, but we are nonetheless losing ground in the battle to

preserve species, ecosystems, and wilderness (Dowie 1995; Speth 2004). Increasingly, calls for
moderation, compromise, and the slow march through institutions can be
seen as treacherous and grotesquely inadequate. In the midst of predatory
global capitalism and biological meltdown, reasonableness and moderation
seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as extreme and radical
actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate. As eco-primitivist Derrick Jensen observes,
We must eliminate false hopes, which blind us to real possibilities . The
advanced its cause for over three decades
current world system is inherently destructive and unsustainable; if it cannot be reformed,

it must be transcended through revolution at all levelseconomic, political, legal, cultural,
technological, and, most fundamentally, conceptual. The struggles and changes must be as deep,
varied, and far-reaching as the root of the problems.
Radical environmental movements are more effective at

creating change than legislative reform our evidence is
comparative.
Best 6 (Steven, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas El Paso,
Revolutionary Environmentalism: An Emerging New Struggle for Total Liberation
2006) JB
politics as usual just wont cut it anymore.

We will always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of
struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities. The defense of the earth requires immediate
and decisive: logging roads need to be blocked, driftnets need to be cut, and cages need to be emptied. But these are
defensive actions, and in addition to these tactics, radical movements and alliances must be built from the
perspective total liberation. A new revolutionary politics will build on the achievements
of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate radical green, feminist, and
Revolutionary environmentalism is based on the realization that
indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human standpoints in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and
Radical politics must reverse the growing power of the state,

mass media, and corporations to promote egalitarianism and participatory
democratization at all levels of society political, cultural, and economic. It must dismantle all
asymmetrical power relations and structures of hierarchy, including that of humans
over animals and the earth. Radical politics is impossible without the revitalization
of citizenship and the re-politicization of life, which begins with forms of education,
communication, culture, and art that anger, awaken, inspire, and empower people
toward action and change.
its omnicidal grow-or-die logic.
The political is already cededthe alternative is the last hope

for radical change in the face of environmental destruction.
Best 4 (Steven, professor of philosophy at Texas El Paso, From Earth Day to
accessed: 7/27/11) JB
Homo sapiens have embarked on an insane, destructive, and unsustainable path of existence .
The human species is

driving off a cliff at 100 miles an hour without brakes, and yet people live is if the most urgent issue of
the day is Janet Jacksons wardrobe malfunction or who will win American Idol. There is much talk about national security but
nothing is said about the basis of all security environmental security. Problems like global warming,
desertification, and food and water shortages will wreak havoc throughout the
planet. As Homeland Security turns ever-more fascist, environmentalists are vilified as eco-terrorists
and legal forms of activism are criminalized under the Patriot Act. While Ashcroft prosecutes activists
working to help the planet, corporate eco-terrorists continue to pillage and plunder.
Meanwhile, Americans, who make up less than 5% of the worlds population,
consume 30% of its resources and produce 25% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
Whatever forces striving to save the environment are doing, it is not to ward off corporate and state Pac-men greedily devouring the
National environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club are tepid,

compromise-based, reform-oriented bureaucracies unable to challenge
corporate and state power, and grass-roots forces are not great enough in
force and numbers. We are in the midst of a major ecological crisis that stems from
a social crisis rooted in corporate power and erosion of democracy . In Greek, the word crisis
planet.
means decision, suggesting that humanity, currently poised at a critical crossroads in its evolution, has crucial decisions and choices
Human identity, values, ethics, worldviews, and mode

of social organization need major rethinking and reconstruction . In Chinese, crisis means both
calamity and opportunity. In a diseased individual, cancer often provides the catalyst for personal growth. As a diseased
species, human beings can perish, survive in dystopian futures prefigured by films
like Mad Max and Waterworld, or seize their opportunity to learn from egregious
errors and rise to far higher levels of social and moral evolution. The Human Plague The crisis
to make concerning its existence on the planet.
in human existence is dramatically reflected in the 1996 film, Independence Day. The movie is about hostile aliens with no respect
for life; they come to earth to kill its peoples, devour its natural resources, and then move onto other planets in a mad quest to find
more fuel for their mega-machines and growth-oriented culture. The film is a veiled projection of our own destructive habits onto
monstrous beings from another world.
We are the aliens; we are the parasites who live off the
death of other life forms; we are the captains of the mega-machines that are
sustainable only through violence and ecological destruction . We do to the animals
and the earth what the aliens do to human life -- the only difference is, we have no other planet to move
on to, and no superheroes to save us. We are trapped in a Dawn of the Dead living nightmare
where armies of hideous corpses, people thought long dead and buried, walk again
with a will to destroy us. The dead represent all the waste, pollution, and ecological
debts accrued to our growth culture that we thought we could walk away from
unscathed and never again face. But we are waking up to the fact that the dead
are storming our neighborhoods, crashing through our doors and windows, and hellbent on devouring us. In his article entitled A Plague of Human Proportions, Mark Lynas frames the crisis this way:
Within the earth's biosphere, a single species has come to dominate virtually all living systems. For the past two centuries this
species has been reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an infectious plague envelops its host. Three hundred thousand new
population of bodies now exceeds by a hundred

times the biomass of any large animal species that has ever existed on land since
the beginning of geological time. The species is us. Now numbering more than six billion souls, the human
individuals are added to its numbers every day. Its
population has doubled since 1950. Nothing like this has happened before in the earth's history. Even the dinosaurs, which
Thus, a single
biological type has wreaked havoc on the estimated ten million other species in
habiting the planet. Lynas suggests that because Homo sapiens dominates the planet today as dinosaurs did one hundred
dominated for tens of millions of years, were thinly spread compared to the hairless primate Homo sapiens.
million years ago, We are entering a new geological era: the Anthropocene. According to a March 2004 Earth Policy Institute
report, Humans
have transformed nearly half of the planet's ice-free land areas, with
serious effects on the rest of nature Each year the earth's forest cover shrinks by 16 million hectares (40
million acres), with most of the loss occurring in tropical forests, where levels of biodiversity are high A recent study of 173
species of mammals from around the world showed that their collective geographical ranges have been halved over the past several
decades, signifying a loss of breeding and foraging area. While insipid ideologues like Tibor Machan still publish books such as
Putting Humans First: Why we are Natures Favorite (2004),
it is more accurate to see Homo sapiens as

the invasive species and agent of mass extinction par excellence -- not natures
favorite but rather natures bete noir.
AT: Extinction Outweighs

This is a moral side constraintextinction is irrelevant in
impact comparison because the universe will have value
without humanity. Natural life derives its own ontological value
human interaction only risks its destruction.
Lee 99 (Keekok, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University, The Natural
and the Artefactual, 1999) JB
We should not delude ourselves that the humanization of nature will stop at biotic
nature or indeed be confined only to planet Earth. Other planets in our solar system,
too, may eventually be humanized; given the technological possibility of doing so,
the temptation to do so appears difficult to resist on the part of those always on the
lookout for new challenges and new excitement . To resist the ontological elimination
of nature as 'the Other,' environmental philosophy must not merely be earthbound
but, also, astronomically bounded (at least to the extent of our own solar system). We should bear in mind that
while there may be little pristine nature left on Earth, this does not mean that
nature is not pristine elsewhere in other planets. We should also be mindful that
while other planets may not have life on them, this does not necessarily render
them only of instrumental value to us. Above all, we should, therefore, bear in mind that nature,
whether pristine or less than fully pristine, biotic or abiotic, is ontologically
independent and autonomous of humankind--natural forms and natural processes
are capable of undertaking their own .trajectories of existence . We should also remind ourselves
that we are the controllers of our science and our technology, and not allow the products of our intellectual labor to dictate to us
what we do to nature itself without pause or reflection. However, it is not the plea of this book that humankind should never
transform the natural to become the artefactual, or to deny that artefacticity is not a matter of differing degrees or levels, as such
in systematically transforming the

natural to become the artefactual through our science and our technology, we are
at the same time systematically engaged in ontological simplification. Ontological
impoverishment in this context is wrong primarily because we have so far failed to
recognize that nature embodies its own fundamental ontological value. In other words, it
is not true, as modernity alleges, that nature is devoid of all value and that values
are simply humanly conferred or are the projections of human emotions or attitudes
upon nature. Admittedly, it takes our unique type of human consciousness to recognize that nature possesses ontological
value; however, from this it would be fallacious to conclude that human consciousness is at
once the source of all values, or even the sole locus of axiologically-grounded
intrinsic values. But most important of all, human con sciousness does not generate
the primary ontological value of independence in nature; nature's forms and
processes embodying this value exist whether humankind is around or not.
claims would be silly and indefensible. Rather its remit is to argue that
AT: Alt Hurts Humans

Humans are only excluded from nature by choicethe ethic of
the alternative recognizes the multiplicity of centers of value
in nature.
Marina 9 (Daniel, Sdertrns hgskola | Institutionen fr Kultur och
Kommunikation, Anthropocentrism and Androcentrism An Ecofeminist
Connection http://www.projectsparadise.com/anthropocentrism-androcentrism/) JB
anthropocentrism is open to
criticism. I shall focus on those that Val Plumwood adduces. According to her
anthropocentrism is basically a framework of beliefs and perceptions that
Finally, I would like to summarize some of the reasons why
generates a myriad of illusions. Nature is perceived as discontinuous from the human realm, as subordinate, as
Anthropocentrism
disregards natures complexity, her uniqueness as a life-sustaining
whole, and the plurality of legitimate centres with genuine interests
and needs that it comprises. Humans are perceived as discontinuous
from the natural realm, as essentially rational, and are reduced to
being masters and conquerors. Humans, as physical and biological
beings, can, of course, be allowed to remain within nature. What
inessential, as a denied and disorderly Other, as passive, and so on.
anthropocentrism especially consigns to an area outside and above nature is that part of the human self that is
Human identity is in such a way

construed in opposition to the natural, the physical, the biological,
and the animal, including those human traits associated with
animality, that the authentically human includes also the desire to
exclude and distance from the nonhuman. This conception of the
human self as separate from, or if anything accidentally related
to, nature together with the conception of the nonhuman as inferior
and antagonistic renders humanity a legitimate oppressor and
nature a means to human ends. Anthropocentrism disregards
humanitys vital dependence on nature, the essential character of
genuine human traits such as the emotions and the body, as well as
other attitudes towards nature than that to master and conquer it.
considered authentically human, i.e. rationality and freedom.
They have it backwardshuman centered politics destroys the

natural otherthe alt solves.
Marina 9 (Daniel, Sdertrns hgskola | Institutionen fr Kultur och
Kommunikation, Anthropocentrism and Androcentrism An Ecofeminist
Connection http://www.projectsparadise.com/anthropocentrism-androcentrism/) JB
in this case humanity, is situated at

the centre of something. There are numerous settings in which humans can be claimed to occupy
the centre. For example, an anthropocentric cosmology would claim that
humanity occupies the physical centre of the universe.31 In
environmental philosophy the terms are mainly applied to morality.
These three terms suggest a spatial image. Something,
Here I shall analyze the ways in which humans are said to occupy the privileged spot of that specific universe. The
starting point shall be Val Plumwoods liberation model of anthropocentrism. I am beginning with Plumwood
because she offers a detailed account of what centrism and anthropocentrism is. Plumwood defines centrism as a
The
role of this structure is to generate a Centre and the Periphery, an
oppressor and the oppressed, a Centre and the Other. The shared features are:
1. Radical exclusion: Those in the centre are represented as radically
separated from and superior to the Other. The Centre is represented as
free from the features of an inferiorized Other, and the Other as
lacking the defining features of the Centre. Differences are exaggerated to the point
structure that is common to and underlies different forms of oppression, like colonialism, racism, and sexism.
of preventing or hindering any sense of connection or continuity, to the point that identification and sympathy are
Homogenization: Those on the periphery are represented

as alike and replaceable. Similarities are exaggerated and
differences are disregarded within that group. The Other is not an
individual but is related to as a member of a class of
interchangeable items.33 Differences are only acknowledged when they affect or are deemed
relevant to the desires and well-being of those in the centre. 3. Denial: The Other is represented
as inessential. Those in the centre deny their own dependency on
those on the periphery. 4. Incorporation: Those in the centre do not admit the autonomy of the
Other. The Other is represented as a function of the qualities of the
Centre. The Other either lacks or is the negation of those qualities that characterize those in the centre, being
cancelled.32 2.
these qualities at the same time the most cherished and esteemed socially and culturally. 5. Instrumentalism:
Those in the centre deny the Other its independent agency. Those
on the periphery are represented as lacking, for instance, ends of
its own. The Centre can consequently impose its own ends upon them without any conflict. The Other
becomes a means or a resource the Centre can make use of to
satisfy its own needs, and is accordingly valued for the usefulness
the Centre can find in it. A second reason for beginning with Plumwood is that all the iniquitous
senses of anthropocentrism that I have come across in the literature can, I think, be identified as either
In
this sense he speaks of anthropocentric ecophilosophy as one that
instrumentalism or denial. Warwick Foxs passive sense of anthropocentrism would be an example of denial.
focuses on social issues only, on interhuman affairs and problems. For

these environmentalists the nonhuman world retains its traditional status as
the background against which the significant action human action
takes place.34 According to them the environmental crisis would
then be solved within that human sphere by ensuring the well-being
of humanity. There would be no need to deal with the way humanity relates to nature. The other senses
would be examples of either instrumentalism or of outcomes of instrumentalism: Andrew Dobsons strong
anthropocentrism (The injustice and unfairness involved in the instrumental use of the non-human world35); the
account Robert Sessions gives of how deep ecology describes the anthropocentric attitude ((1) Nonhuman nature
has no value in itself, (2) humans (and/or God, if theistic) create what value there is, and (3) humans have the right
(some would say the obligation) to do as they please with and in the nonhuman world as long as they do not harm
other humans interests36); Tim Haywards account of the ethical criticism of anthropocentrism (The mistake of
giving exclusive or arbitrarily preferential consideration to human interests as opposed to the interests of other
beings37); Andrew Dobsons description of what environmentalists consider a basic cause of ecological
degradation and a potential cause of disaster (Concern for ourselves at the expense of concern for the non-human
aggressive sense of anthropocentrism, according

to which anthropocentrism is the overt discrimination against the
nonhuman world.
world38); and Warwick Foxs
AT: Bostrom Humans First

Your impact claims are produced in order to sustain human
supremacy in ethical calculations about survival.
BOSTROM 2K2 [Nick, PhD and Professor at Oxford, March, 2002
www.transhumanist.com/volume9/risks.html] JB
The US and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. But would an all-out nuclear war really
exterminate humankind? Note that: (i) For there to be an existential risk it suffices that we cant be sure that it
wouldnt. (ii) The climatic effects of a large nuclear war are not well known (there is the possibility of a nuclear
winter). (iii) Future arms races between other nations cannot be ruled out and these could lead to even greater
arsenals than those present at the height of the Cold War. The worlds supply of plutonium has been increasing
steadily to about two thousand tons, some ten times as much as remains tied up in warheads ([9], p. 26). (iv)
Even if some humans survive the short-term effects of a nuclear

war, it could lead to the collapse of civilization. A human race living
under stone-age conditions may or may not be more resilient to
extinction than other animal species.
And, Bostrums analysis of an existential risk explicitly hold

simulated human minds of greater value than originally
evolved creatures
BOSTROM 2K2 [Nick, PhD and Professor at Oxford, March, 2002
www.transhumanist.com/volume9/risks.html] JB
the hypothesis that we are living in a computer

simulation should be given a significant probability [27]. The basic idea behind
A case can be made that
this so-called Simulation argument is that vast amounts of computing power may become available in the future
(see e.g. [28,29]), and that it could be used, among other things, to run large numbers of fine-grained simulations
all
minds like ours are simulated minds, and that we should therefore
assign a significant probability to being such computer-emulated
minds rather than the (subjectively indistinguishable) minds of
originally evolved creatures. And if we are, we suffer the risk that
the simulation may be shut down at any time. A decision to
terminate our simulation may be prompted by our actions or by
exogenous factors.
of past human civilizations. Under some not-too-implausible assumptions, the result can be that almost
AT: Death Bad

Turn: willingness to sacrifice the form of the human gives the
gift of life to all other life forms.
While we are not interested in the discussion of the method of the global suicide of humanity per se, one method
that would be the least violent is that of humans choosing to no longer reproduce. [10] The case at point here is
the global suicide of humanity would be a moral act; it would

take humanity out of the equation of life on this earth and remake
the calculation for the benefit of everything nonhuman. While suicide in
that
certain forms of religious thinking is normally condemned as something which is selfish and inflicts harm upon loved
global suicide
would involve the taking of responsibility for the destructive actions
of the human species. By eradicating ourselves we end the long
process of inflicting harm upon other species and offer a human-free
world. If there is a form of divine intelligence then surely the human act of global suicide will be seen for what it
ones, the global suicide of humanity would be the highest act of altruism. That is,
is: a profound moral gesture aimed at redeeming humanity. Such an act is an offer of sacrifice to pay for past
Through the death of our species we will

give the gift of life to others
wrongs that would usher in a new future.
****OOO
1NCs + 2NC Tricks
1ncEnd of the World K

Its try or diethe world already endedtheir ethics makes
it impossible to perceive impacts outside of human significance
and enables the true eco-catastrophe
Hyperobjects are what have brought about the end of the world . Clearly, planet
Earth has not exploded. But the concept world is no longer operational, and
hyperobjects are what brought about its demise. The idea of the end of the world is
very active in environmentalism. Yet I argue that this idea is not effective, since, to
all intents and purposes, the being that we are to supposed to feel anxiety
about and care for is gone. This does not mean that there is no hope for
ecological politics and ethics, Far from it. Indeed, as I shall argue, the strongly held
belief that the world is about to end "unless we act now" is paradoxically one of the
most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological
coexistence here on Earth. The strategy of this book, then, is to awaken us from
the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth)
depends on it.
The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about
the date on which the world ended. Convenience is not readily associated with
historiography, nor indeed with geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily
clear. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that
commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth's crustnamely, the inception of
humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. Since for something to
happen it often needs to happen twice, the world also ended in 1945, in Trinity, New
Mexico, where the Manhattan Project tested the Gadget, the first of the atom
bombs, and later that year when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki (Figure 2). These events mark the logarithmic increase in the actions
of humans as a geophysical force.12 They are of "world-historical" importance for
humansand indeed for any life-form within range of the fallout demarcating a
geological period, the largest-scale terrestrial era. I put "world-historical" in
quotation marks because it is indeed the fate of the concept world that is at issue.
For what comes into view for humans at this moment is precisely the end of the
world, brought about by the encroachment of hyperobjects, one of which is
assuredly Earth itself, and its geological cycles demand a geophilosophy that
doesn't think simply in terms of human events and human significance.
Our argument is a prior question to any warming debatetheir

apocalypse-driven ecology makes coexistence impossible
You are walking out of the supermarket. As you approach your car, a stranger calls
out, "Hey! Funny weather today!" With a due sense of caution--is she a global
warming denier or not?you reply yes. There is a slight hesitation. Is it because she
is thinking of saying something about global warming? In any case, the hesitation
induced you to think of it. Congratulations: you are living proof that you have
entered the time of hyperobjects. Why? You can no longer have a routine
conversation about the weather with a stranger. The presence of global warming
looms into the conversation like a shadow, introducing strange gaps. Or global
warming is spoken oreither way the reality is strange.
A hyperobject has ruined the weather conversation, which functions as part of a
neutral screen that enables us to have a human drama in the foreground .
In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no
foreground. It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and
foregrounds. World is a fragile aesthetic effect around whose corners we are
beginning to see. True planetary awareness is the creeping realization not
that "We Are the World," but that we aren't.
Why? Because world and its cognatesenvironment, Natureare ironically more
objectified than the kinds of "object" I am talking about in this study. World is more
or less a container in which objectified things float or stand. It doesn't matter very
much whether the movie within the context of world is an old-fashioned Aristotelian
movie decorated with accidents; or whether the movie is a more avant-garde
Deleuzian one of flows and intensities. World as the background of events is an
objectification of a hyperobject: the biosphere, climate, evolution, capitalism (yes,
perhaps economic relations compose hyperobjects). So when climate starts to rain
on our head, we have no idea what is happening. It is easy to practice denial in such
a cognitive space: to set up, for example, " debates" in which different "sides on
global warming are presented. This taking of "sides" correlates all meaning
and agency to the human realm, while in reality it isn't a question of sides, but
of real entities and human reactions to them. Environmentalism seems to be talking
about something that can't be seen or touched. So in turn environmentalism ups the
ante and preaches the coming apocalypse. This constant attempt to shock and
dismay inspires even more defiance on the opposite side of the "debate."
Both sides are fixated on world, just as both sides of the atheism debate are
currently fixated on a vorhanden ("present at hand"), objectively present God. As
irritating for New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins to hear that atheism is just
another form of belief, it nevertheless isor, at any rate, it holds exactly the same
belief about belief as fundamentalisms. Belief is a token, a mental object that you
grip as hard as possible, like your wallet or car keys. In exactly the same way, it is
armoring for environmentalists to talk about ecology without Nature. The argument
is heard as nihilism or postmodernism. But really it is environmentalism that is
nihilist and postmodernist, just as fundamentalisms belief about belief marks it as a
form of ontotheological nihilism. The ultimate environmentalist argument would be
to drop the concepts Nature and world, to cease identifying with them , to
swear allegiance to coexistence with nonhumans without a world, without sonic
nihilistic Noah's Ark.
In any weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at
some point. Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation
like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an This failure of the normal rhetorical
routine, these remnants of shattered conversation lying around like broken
hammers (they must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and
deeper ontological shift in human awareness. And in turn, this is a symptom of a
profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little
rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac, these upgrades are not
necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of philosophers and other humanities
scholars to attune ourselves to the upgrading process and lo help explain it.
What is the upgrading process? In a word, the notion that we are living in a world
one that we can call Natureno longer applies in any meaningful sense, except as
nostalgia or in the temporarily useful local language of pleas and petitions. We don't
want a certain species to be farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature
to convince a legislative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and
create nostalgic visions of hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have been
going on now since the Industrial Revolution began to take effect.
As a consequence of that revolution, however, something far bigger and more
threatening is now looming on our horizonlooming so as to abolish our horizon,
or any horizon. Global warming has performed a radical shift in the status of the
weather. Why? Because the world as suchnot just a specific idea of world but
world in its entiretyhas evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had
it in the first place.
Embrace the end of the world instead of fighting itit shatters

the myth of human mastery and makes a new ethical
ecological coexistence possible
There are many reasons why, even if world were a valid concept altogether, it
shouldn't be used as the basis for ethics. Consider only this: witch ducking stools
constitute a world just as much as hammers. There was a wonderful world of witch
ducking in the Middle Ages in which witches were "discovered" by drowning them,
strapped to an apparatus that submerged them in the local stream: if the supposed
witch didn't drown, she was a witchand should thus be burned at the stake. Witch
ducking stools constituted a world for their users in every meaningful wise, There is
a world of Nazi regalia. Just because the Nazis had a world, doesn't mean we should
preserve it. So the argument that "It's good because it constitutes a world" is flimsy
at best. The reason not to interfere with the environment because interfering with
someone's or some-thing's world is nowhere near a good enough reason. It might
even have pernicious consequences. World and worlding are a dangerously weak
link in the series of late-Heideggerian concepts. It is as if humans are both their
world and their idea of world (including the idea that they ever had a world) at one
and the same time, a disorienting fact. In this historical moment, working to
transcend our notion of world is important. Like a mannerist painting that
stretches the rules of classicism to a breaking point, global warming has stretched
our world to breaking point. Human beings lack a world for a very good reason:
because no entity at all has a world, or as Harman puts it, "There is no such thing as
horizon. The 'world' as the significant totality of what is the case is strictly
unimaginable, and for a good reason: it doesn't exist.
What is left if we aren't the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained
a soulthe entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and
greater urgency. Three cheers for the so-called end of the world, then, since
this moment is the beginning of history, the end in the human dream that reality is
significant for them alone. We now have the prospect of forging new alliances
between humans and non-humans alike, now that we have stepped out of the
cocoon of world.
1ncWarming K
Their attempt to preserve life on Earth backfires and
produces ecological oppressionembrace coexistence as the
alternativeit produces ecological awareness that solves the
aff
Morton 13 Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University
(Timothy, Hyperobjects, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, pg.124132)
Parfits assault on utilitarian self-interest takes us to the point at which we realize
that we are not separate from our world. Humans must learn to care for fatal
substances that will outlast them and their descendants beyond any meaningful
limit of self-interest. What we need is an ethics of the other, an ethics based on the
proximity of the stranger. The decision in the 1990s, rapidly overturned, to squirrel
plutonium away into knives and forks and other domestic objects appears
monstrous, and so would any attempt to work it into something convenient.
Hyperobjects insist that we care for them in the open. Out of sight, out of mind is
strictly untenable. There is no away to throw plutonium in. We are stuck with it, in
the same way as we are stuck with our biological bodies. Plutonium finds itself in
the position of the neighbor in Abrahamic religionsthat awkward condition of
being alien and intimate at the very same time. The enormity of very large finitude
hollows out my decisions from the inside. Now every time I so much as change a
confounded light bulb, I have to think about global warming. It is the end of the
world, because I can see past the lip of the horizon of human worlding. Global
warming reaches into my world and forces me to use LEDs instead of bulbs with
filaments. This aspect of the Heideggerian legacy begins to teeter under the weight
of the hyperobject. The normative defense of worlds looks wrongheaded.39 The
ethical and political choices become much clearer and less divisive if we begin to
think of pollution and global warming and radiation as effects of hyperobjects rather
than as flows or processes that can be managed. These flows are often eventually
shunted into some less powerful groups backyard. The Native American tribe must
deal with the radioactive waste. The African American family must deal with the
toxic chemical runoff. The Nigerian village must deal with the oil slick. Rob Nixon
calls this the slow violence of ecological oppression.40 It is helpful to think of global
warming as something like an ultra slow motion nuclear bomb. The incremental
effects are almost invisible, until an island disappears underwater. Poor people
who include most of us on Earth at this pointperceive the ecological emergency
not as degrading an aesthetic picture such as world but as an accumulation of
violence that nibbles at them directly. Without a world, there are simply a number of
unique beings (farmers, dogs, irises, pencils, LEDs, and so on) to whom I owe an
obligation through the simple fact that existence is coexistence. I dont have to run
through my worlding checklist to ensure that the nonhuman in question counts as
something I could care for. If you answered mostly (A), then you have a world. If
you answered mostly (B), then you are poor in world (German, weltarm). If you
answered mostly (C), then you have no world whatsoever. What remains without a
world is intimacy. Levinas touches on it in his ethics of alterity, although he is
incorrect to make this otherness as vague as the rustling of blank existence, the
there is (il y a).41 The other is fully here, before I am, as Levinas argues. But the
other has paws and sharp surfaces, the other is decorated with leaves, the other
shines with starlight. Kafka writes:
At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does
seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of
thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is
not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star,
and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod
on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand
upright as if on two legs.42
The idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.43 Kafkas Odradek
resembles the hyperobject in this respect. Indeed we have let him into our home
somehow, like mercury and microwaves, like the ultraviolet rays of the sun. Odradek
is what confronts us at the end of the world, not with a shout but with a breathless
voice like the rustling of fallen leaves.44 Things appear in their disturbing
weakness and lameness, technical terms describing the human attunement to
hyperobjects that I have begun to elucidate. Without a world, there is no Nature.
Without a world, there is no life. What exists outside the charmed circles of Nature
and life is a charnel ground, a place of life and death, of death-in-life and life-indeath, an undead place of zombies, viroids, junk DNA, ghosts, silicates, cyanide,
radiation, demonic forces, and pollution. My resistance to ecological awareness is a
resistance to the charnel ground. It is the calling of the shaman to enter the charnel
ground and to try to stay there, to pitch a tent there and live there, for as long as
possible. Since there are no charnel grounds to speak of in the West, the best
analogy, used by some Tibetan Buddhists (from whom the image derives), is the
emergency room of a busy hospital. People are dying everywhere. There is blood
and noise, equipment rushing around, screams. When the charm of world is
dispelled, we find ourselves in the emergency room of ecological coexistence. In the
charnel ground, worlds can never take root. Charnel grounds are too vivid for that.
Any soft focusing begins to look like violence. Haunting a charnel ground is a much
better analogy for ecological coexistence than inhabiting a world. There is
something immensely soothing about charnel grounds. It is what is soothing about
Buddhisms First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. Traditionally, Buddhism
recognizes three types of suffering. There is the pain of pain, as when you hit your
thumb with a hammer, and then you close your whole hand in the door as you rush
into the car to get to the doctors because of your thumb. Then there is the pain of
alteration, in which you experience first pleasure, then pain when pleasure
evaporates. Then there is all-pervasive pain, which Chgyam Trungpa beautifully
describes as a fundament al creepy quality akin to Heideggers description of
Angst.45 It is this quality that comes close to the notion of world. All-pervasive pain
has to do with the fixation and confusion that constitute the Six Realms of Exis-
tence (traditionally, animals, humans, gods, jealous gods, hungry ghosts, and hell).
In paintings of the Wheel of Life, the Six Realms are held in the jaws of Yama, the
Lord of Death. It is this outermost perspective of the jaws of death that provides an
entry point into the charnel ground. To a Buddhist, ecophenomenological arguments
that base ethics on our embeddedness in a lifeworld begin to look like a perverse
aestheticization, celebrations of confusion and suffering for confusions and
sufferings sake. It doesnt really matter what is on the TV (murder, addiction, fear,
lust). Each realm of existence is just a TV show taking up space in the wider space
of the charnel ground of reality, the desert of the real.46 Trebbe Johnson and
others have established the practice of Global Earth Exchanges, actions of finding,
then giving something beautiful in a wounded place, such as a toxic dump or a
nuclear power facility.47 Or consider Buddhist practitioners of tonglen: sending and
taking, a meditation practice in which one breathes out compassion for the other,
while breathing in her or his suffering. Tonglen is now used in the context of polluted
places. Con- sider Chd, the esoteric ritual of visualizing cutting oneself up as a
feast for the demons, another practice that has been taken on with reference to
ecological catastrophes. Or consider the activities of Zen priests at the Rocky Flats
nuclear bomb trigger factory, such as walking meditation
Our actions build up a karmic pattern that looks from a reified distance like a realm
such as hell or heaven. But beyond the violence that we do, its the distance that
reifies the pattern into a world picture that needs to be shattered. Whether its
Hobbiton, or the jungles of Avatar, or the National Parks and conservation areas
over yonder on the hither side of the screen (though possibly behind the windshield
of an SUV), or the fields and irrigation channels on the hither side of the wilderness
its all a world picture. Im not saying we need to uproot the treesIm saying that
we need to smash the aestheticization: in case of ecological emergency, break
glass. Our increasing knowledge of global warming ends all kinds of ideas, but it
creates other ones. The essence of these new ideas is the notion of coexistence
that is after all what ecology profoundly means. We coexist with human lifeforms,
nonhuman lifeforms, and non-lifeforms, on the insides of a series of gigantic entities
with whom we also coexist: the ecosystem, biosphere, climate, planet, Solar
System. A multiple series of nested Russian dolls. Whales within whales within
whales. Consider the hypothetical planet Tyche, far out in the Oort Cloud beyond
Pluto. We cant see it directly but we can detect evidence of its possible existence.
Planets are hyperobjects in most senses. They have Gaussian geometry and
measurable spacetime distortion because they are so massive. They affect
everything that exists on and in them. Theyre everywhere and nowhere up close
(viscosity). (Point to Earth right nowyou have a number of options of where to
point.) They are really old and really huge compared with humans. And theres
something disturbing about the existence of a planet that far away, perhaps not
even of our solar system originally, yet close enough to be uncanny (a very large
finitude). And its unseen except for its hypothetical influence on objects such as
comets: The awful shadow of some unseen power, in Shelleys words. Tyche is a
good name. It means contingency in Greek, so its the speculative realism planet
par excellence. (Luck and chance are rather tame alternative translations. Tyche
is what happens to you in a tragedy if your name is Oedipus.) And for now, what
could be more obviously withdrawn? The historic moment at which hyperobjects

become visible by humans has arrived. This visibility changes everything. Humans
enter a new age of sincerity, which contains an intrinsic irony that is beyond the
aestheticized, slightly plastic irony of the postmodern age. What do I mean? This is
a momentous era, at which we achieve what has sometimes been called ecological
awareness. Ecological awareness is a detailed and increasing sense, in science and
outside of it, of the innumerable inter- relationships among lifeforms and between
life and non-life. Now this awareness has some very strange properties. First of all,
the awareness ends the idea that we are living in an environment! This is so bizarre
that we should dwell on it a little. What it means is that the more we know about the
interconnection, the more it becomes impossible to posit some entity existing
beyond or behind the interrelated beings. When we look for the environment, what
we find are discrete lifeforms, non-life, and their relationships. But no matter how
hard we look, we wont find a container in which they all fit; in particular we wont
find an umbrella that unifies them, such as world, environment, ecosystem, or even,
astonishingly, Earth. What we discover instead is an open-ended mesh that consists
of grass, iron ore, Popsicles, sunlight, the galaxy Sagittarius, and mushroom spores.
Earth exists, no doubt, but not as some special enormous bowl that contains all the
ecological objects. Earth is one object coexisting with mice, sugar, elephants, and
Turin. Of course there are many scenarios in which if Earth ceased to exist, Turin and
mice would be in trouble. But if the mice were shot into space aboard a friendly
extraterrestrial freighter, Earth wouldnt be the cause of their death. Even Turin
might be rebuilt, brick by brick, on some other world. Suddenly we discover the
second astonishing thing. Mice are surely mice no matter what we call them. But
mice remain mice as long as they survive to pass on their genomeits what neoDarwinism calls satisficing. Satisficing is a performative standard for existing. And
there is no mouse-flavored DNA. There isnt even any DNA-flavored DNAits a
palimpsest of mutations, viral code insertions, and so on. There isnt even any lifeflavored life. DNA requires ribosomes and ribosomes require DNA, so to break the
vicious cycle, there must have been an RNA world of RNA attached to a nonorganic
replicator, such as a silicate crystal. So there is a mousethis is not a nominalist
nor is it an idealist argument. But the mouse is a non-mouse, or what I call a
strange stranger.48 Even more weirdly: this is why the mouse is real. The fact that
wherever we look, we cant find a mouse, is the very reason why she exists! Now we
can say this about everything in the universe. But one of the most obvious things
we can say this about is a hyperobject. Hyperobjects are so huge and so longlasting, compared with humans, that they obviously seem both vivid and slightly
unreal, for exactly the same reasons. Hyperobjects such as global warming and
nuclear radiation surround us, not some abstract entity such as Nature or
environment or world. Our reality has become more real, in the sense of more vivid
and intense, and yet it has also become less knowable as some one-sided, facile
thingagain, for exactly the same reasons. In Berkeley, California, in early 2011,
radiation levels in water spiked 181 times higher than normal because of the Sendai
reactor meltdowns. We know this. We know we are bathed in alpha, beta, and
gamma rays emanating from the dust particles that now span the globe. These
particles coexist with us. They are not part of some enormous bowl called Nature;
they are beings like us, strange strangers. Should we stop drinking water? Should
we stop drinking cows milk because cows eat grass, which drinks rainwater? The
more we know, the harder it is to make a one-sided decision about anything. As we
enter the time of hyperobjects, Nature disappears and all the modern certainties
that seemed to accompany it. What remains is a vastly more complex situation that
is uncanny and intimate at the same time. There is no exit from this situation. Thus
the time of hyperobjects is a time of sincerity: a time in which it is impossible to
achieve a final distance toward the world. But for this very reason, it is also a time
of irony. We realize that nonhuman entities exist that are incomparably more vast
and powerful than we are, and that our reality is caught in them. What things are
and how they seem, and how we know them, is full of gaps, yet vividly real. Real
entities contain time and space, exhibiting nonlocal effects and other interobjective
phenomena, writing us into their histories. Astonishingly, then, the mesh of
interconnection is secondary to the strange stranger. The mesh is an emergent
property of the things that coexist, and not the other way around. For the modernist
mind, accustomed to systems and structures, this is an astounding, shocking
discovery. The more maps we make, the more real things tear through them.
Nonhuman entities emerge through our mapping, then they destroy them.
Coexistence is in our face: it is our face. We are made of nonhuman and nonsentient
and nonliving entities. Its not a cozy situation: its a spooky, uncanny situation. We
find ourselves in what robotics and CGI designers call the uncanny valley (Figure
14). Its a commonly known phenomenon in CGI design that if you build figures that
look too much like humans, you are at risk of crossing a threshold and falling into
the uncanny valley (Plate 2). In the uncanny valley, beings are strangely familiar
and familiarly strange. The valley seems to explain racism quit well, because the
dehumanization suffered by victims of racism makes them more uncanny to the
racist than, say, a dog or a faceless robot. Hitler was very fond of his dog Blondi and
yet dehumanized Jews and others. Thats the trouble with some kinds of
environmentalist language: they skip blithely over the uncanny valley to shake
hands with beings on the other side. But, as Im going to argue, there is only
another side if you are holding on to some fictional idea of humanness, an idea that
ecological awareness actually refutes. The uncanny valley, in other words, is only a
valley if you already have some quite racist assumptions about lifeforms. With
ecological awareness there is no healthy person on the other side of the valley.
Everything in your world starts to slip into the uncanny
Figure 14. Masahiro Moris diagram of the uncanny valley. Intimacy implies the
grotesque. Since ecological awareness consists in a greater intimacy with a greater
number of beings than modernity is capable of thinking, humans must pass through
the uncanny valley as they begin to engage these beings. For reasons given in the
book, this valley might be infinite in extent, a valley, whose sides are infinite and
slick. Its more like an uncanny charnel ground, an ER full of living and dying and
dead and newly born people, some of whom are humans, some of whom arent,
some of whom are living, some of whom arent. Everything in your world starts to
slip into this charnel ground situation, including your world.
1ncBryant
The 1AC presents the world as a blank slate fit for human
inscription. This view of the world allows for a correlationist
ideology that rejects the world of entities for the world of
humans first.
Bryant 12
(Levi, professor of philosophy at Collins College,,

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/worries-about-ooo-and-politics/)
2) Correlationism and its Discontents: For me, at least ,
the desire to overcome correlationism does

not arise out of some pure speculative desire to get at the things themselves, but
because I believe that correlationism has noxious political consequences that
cultivate an attitude destructive to effective political practice or engagement . As Stacy
Alaimo, who is not an OOO theorist but who is very close to my onticology in many respects puts it, Matter, the
vast stuff of the world and of ourselves, has been subdivided into manageable
bits or flattened into a blank slate for human inscription. The environment has
been drained of its blood, its lively creatures, its interactions and relations in short,
all that is recognizable as nature in order that it become a mere empty space, an
uncontested ground, for human development. (Bodily Natures, 1 2) Correlationism
trains us to see all other material things as alienated images of ourselves in a
mirror. The question always becomes what are things for us?, and the thesis is
that matter is merely a brute passive stuff awaiting our inscriptions. In other words,
the basic gesture that become dominant in cultural theory beginning around the
60s was to show that what we take to be objects are really our own significations
that we fail to recognize as our own. A critical analysis modeled on Marxs theory of commodity
fetishism but diverging quite significantly from hismaterialism thus came to consist in revealing how these
significations come from us, rather than from the things themselves. Now, as I have said, both here and elsewhere, I
all entities translate other entities in

particular ways and this is no less true of humans. However, the problem with this
style of analysis is that it renders invisible the differences contributed by nonhuman
objects to social assemblages. We come to think that it is just significations that
structure social assemblages and that if we want to change social assemblages all
we have to do is critique and debunk significations or ideologies. Clearly critiquing
and debunking ideologies is a part of changing social assemblages, but it is not the
only part. And because correlationism functions as a theoretical axiom where we
dont even recognize the existence of this other part say rice because it treats the
only real difference as signifying difference, we find ourselves surprised when weve
adequately critiqued and debunked signifying systems and the social system
doesnt change. Perhaps this would clue us into the possibility that perhaps there are other actors involved in
these social assemblages, holding people in place in particular ways. The problem is that correlationism
tends to render non-signifying differences in social assemblages invisible because it
begins from the axiom that nonhuman things are just blank slates awaiting our
inscription. Anyone whos ever gardened knows that this cant possibly be true. The
diacritical nature of how I signify tomato will not make my tomatoes grow any
better. No, to grow tomatoes I have to navigate soil conditions, sunlight and heat
have no desire to abandon this form of analysis. As I argue,
the gangs of roving rabbits that populate my back

yard, insects, worms, water, etc. I am enmeshed in an entire network of actors that
contribute to whether or not the tomatoes will grow and, more importantly, I must
constantly attend to these nonhuman actors. The point here is not, as Berry suggests, to
diminish human political interventions and promote a troubling conservatism, but to
expand the sites of political intervention as well as our possibilities of acting . We
cannot effectively act and change things if we dont know how the assemblages
within which we are enmeshed are put together, what actors are present in those
assemblages, and how we might intervene on these actors to change our social
possibilities. Correlationism tends to draw our attention to only one type of actor
the signifier and while this is a real actor it is not the only one.
(which are quite substantial here in Texas),
Correlationism puts humans before objects and animals creating a

anthropocentric mindset that allows for hierarchal differences.
Bryant 11 Levi, Professor of Philosophy at Collin College [Democracy of Objects

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:5/--democracy-of-objects?
rgn=div1;view=fulltext]
correlationism we thus discover the root of contemporary theory's suspicion of

both objects and realism. Realism must necessarily be anathema to all variants of
correlationism by virtue of the fact that it claims knowledge of beings independent
of the correlation between thinking and being. All realisms are committed to the thesis that it is
With
possible to know something of beings independent of their being-for-thought, yet this is precisely what is
precluded by the correlationist gesture. Here it is important to be precise. Correlationism is not the thesis of
subjective idealisms whereby esse est percipi or where to be is to be perceived. Subjective and absolute idealism
The correlationist need not be committed to the

thesis that there is no being apart from thought. Indeed, most correlationists are
committed to the thesis that there is something other than thought. Kant, for
example, held that in addition to phenomena (beings for-us) things-in-themselves
exist. The correlationist merely argues that we have no access to these beings that
are apart from thought and can therefore only speak of being as it is for-us. And
here we find the categorical dividing line between realisms and anti-realisms or
correlationisms: for the anti-realist or correlationist, claims about beings are never
claims about beings-in-themselves or beings apart from us, but are always and only
claims about beings as they manifest themselves to us. For the realist, by contrast,
claims about objects really are claims about objects and not objects as they are forus or only in relation to us. As a consequence, it becomes clear that, for the
correlationist, objects take on the status of fictions. Because objects can no longer be equated
are only two variations of correlationism.
with things-in-themselves, because objects are only ever objects for-us and never things as they are independent
of us, objects become phenomena or are reduced to actual or possible manifestations to us. Philosophy now shifts
from being a debate about the nature of things-in-themselves or substance, to a debate about the mechanisms by
which phenomena are produced or structured. Is it mind that structures phenomena? Language? Power?
Intentionality? Embodied experience? Such are but a handful of the options that have been entertained by
At the heart of correlationism it is thus clear that there is a

profound anthropocentrism, for where it is held that being can never be thought in
its existence apart from thought, it becomes clear that any claims about being
ultimately harbor the implicit colophon that claims about being are claims about
contemporary theory.
being for humans. Moreover, despite declarations of anti-humanism on the part of

both Heidegger and the structuralists and post-structuralists, it is clear that these
anti-humanisms bring us no closer to realism. For, to put it crudely, what the anti-humanisms
object to is not the correlationist thesis of a necessary relation between being and
thought such that the two can never be thought apart from one another, but rather
the manner in which humanisms situate the primordial correlation in the minds of
individual knowers. Thus, for example, structuralist and post-structuralist anti-humanisms emphasize the
autonomy and independence of language and social relations. Here the argument runs that it is not sovereign
subjects that are calling the shots, but rather language and/or social relations. What the structuralist and poststructuralist anti-humanists wish to examine is the manner in which language and social relations are
determinative of the actions of individuals and how, if Althusser is to be followed, the individual itself is an effect
of these more primordial agencies. It now follows that these impersonal and anonymous agencies are the condition
for manifestation, not individual human minds. World, the story goes, is not a construction of the mind of human
individuals or transcendental subjectivity, but of impersonal and anonymous social structures.
Anthropocentric ontological assumptions enable the worst

forms of slavery, oppression and genocide imaginable through
denying interconnected subjectivities.
Katz 97 (Eric Katz, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Science,
Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. 97
["Nature's Healing Power, the Holocaust, and the environmental crisis." Judaism,
Wintr. 1997. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0411/is_n1_ v46/ai_19353459/pg
_1?tag=artBody;col1])
the primary goal of the Enlightenment project of the scientific
understanding of the natural world is to control, manipulate, and modify natural
processes for the increased satisfaction of human interests .(12) Humans want to live in a world
As I have argued elsewhere,
that is comfortable - or at least, a world that is not hostile to human happiness and survival. This purpose is easy to understand
when we view technological and industrial projects that use nature as a resource for economic development - but the irony is that
the same purpose, human control, motivates much of environmentalist policy and practice.
Consider briefly those
popular examples of an enlightened environmental policy: pollution control and abatement, the
clean-up of hazardous waste sites, habitat and species preservation, saving the rainforest, and the reduction of greenhouse gases.
these policies are based on the beneficial consequences that will result for
human beings and human society . Although natural entities, such as endangered species and individual animals
All of
and plants, will also be helped by environmentalist practices, we, the human community, are the chief beneficiary of our policies.
we generally only preserve those natural habitats and species that provide us
with some direct good - whether it be economic, aesthetic, or spiritual. What ties together environmental policies such
Indeed,
as these is their thoroughgoing anthropocentrism - human interests, satisfaction, goods, and happiness are the central goals of
This anthropocentrism is, of course, not surprising. Humanity is

in the business of creating and maximizing human good. Anthropocentrism as a
world view quite easily leads to the practices of domination, even when such
domination is not articulated. In the formation of environmental policy, nature is seen as a nonhuman "other" to be
public policy and human action.
controlled, manipulated, modified, or destroyed in the pursuit of human good. As a nonhuman other, nature can be understood as
merely a resource for the development of human interests; as a nonhuman other, nature has no valid interests or good of its own.
Even the practice of ecological restoration, in which degraded ecosystems are restored to a semblance of their original states, is
permeated with this anthropocentric ideology. Natural ecosystems that have been harmed by human activity are restored to a state
that is more pleasing to the current human population. A marsh that had been landfilled is reflooded to restore wetland acreage;
strip-mined hills are replanted to create flowering meadows; acres of farmland are subjected to a controlled burn and a replanting
with wildflowers and shrubs to recreate the oak savanna of pre-European America. We humans thus achieve two simultaneous goals:
we relieve our guilt for the earlier destruction of natural systems, and we demonstrate our power - the power of science and
technology - over the natural world.(13) But the domination of nonhuman nature is not the only result of an anthropocentric
worldview - the ideology of anthropocentric domination also extends to the oppression of other human beings, conceived as a
philosophical "other," as nonhuman or as subhuman. As C. S. Lewis wrote fifty years ago in The Abolition of Man, "what we call
The
reason that this exercise of power is justifiable is that the subordinate people are
not considered human beings: "they are not men at all; they are artefacts."(14) Anthropocentrism
does not convert into a thoroughgoing humanism, wherein all humans are treated
as equally worthwhile. Historically, the idea of human slavery has been justified
from the time of the ancient Greeks onward by designating the slave class as less
than human. In this century, the evaluation of other people as subhuman finds its clearest expression in the Nazi propaganda
concerning the Jews, but we also find its echoes in the ethnic civil war in the former Yugoslavia. From the starting point
of anthropocentrism, domination and oppression are easily justified. The oppressed
class - be it a specific race or religious group, or even animals or natural entities - is simply denied admittance
to the elite center of value-laden beings.(15) From within anthropocentrism, only
humans have value and only human interests and goods need to be pursued . But who or
what counts as a human is a question that cannot be answered from within
anthropocentrism - and the answer to this question will determine the extent of the practice
of domination. Thus the ideas of anthropocentrism and domination tie together a
study of the Holocaust, the current environmental crisis, and the Jewish conception
of the proper relationship to Nature. Schwartz reminds us that the danger in Judaism's desacralization of Nature
is that it may lead to the destruction of Nature.(16) Genocide and ecocide are similar in that we
conceive of our victims as less than human, as outside the primary circle of value.
man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument."
The alternative is a flat ontology where all entities have equal

ethical value. Rather than centering human subjectivity
everything equally exists.
Bryant 10 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, Flat Ontology,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/flat-ontology-2/)
For DeLanda, then,
flat ontology signifies an ontology in which there is only one ontological

type: individuals. Thus for DeLanda the relationship between species and organism is not a relationship between the
universal or essence that is eternal and unchanging and the particular or the organism as an instance of the species. Rather, both
species are not eternal essences or

forms defining what is common to all particulars of that species, if they exist in
space and time, then this is because species, as conceived by biology are not types
but rather are really existing reproductive populations located in a particular
geography at a particular point in time. For DeLanda, then, being is composed entirely of individuals. While I
species and organisms are individuals that are situated in time and space. If
find much that is commendable in DeLandas ontology, where the sorts of entities that populate being are concerned, Im a bit more
circumspect. At present Im not ready to throw in with DeLanda and the thesis that there are only individuals. I am agnostic on the
question of whether universals exist, and my intuitions strongly lean in the Platonic direction of treating numbers as real objects in
their own right that have being independent of human minds. If this is the case, if numbers are real, then I have a difficult time
seeing how they can be treated as individuals in the sense that DeLanda intends and, moreover, I do not think that the genetic
concerns that preoccupy DeLanda are relevant to questions of number, i.e., a genetic account of how numbers come to be if, in
the
framework of onticology, flat ontology doesnt signify that only individuals exist,
what does it signify? On the one hand, it signifies the trivial thesis that all things
that are are objects. Objects differ amongst one another having their own unique
properties and qualities (e.g. numbers have a different structure than organisms, obviously) but they are no
fact, they do come to be and are not eternal objects does not get at what numbers are. Consequently, if, within
less objects for this reason. On the other hand, and more fundamentally, flat
ontology is designed to stave off strategies of what Harman refers to as ways of
undermining and overmining objects. In short, a flat ontology is an ontology that
refuses to undermine or overmine objects. What, then, does it mean to undermine or overmine objects. Of
the two strategies, the concept of undermining is the easiest to get. Undermining is that operation by which
the thinker attempts to dissolve the object in something deeper of which the object
is said to be an unreal effect. Consequently, the minimal operation of undermining lies in 1) the assertion of a
fundamental strata of reality that constitutes the really real, and 2) the dissolution of the object in and through that stratum.
Lucretius is a prime example of an underminer. When Lucretius compares atoms to the alphabet and objects and states-of-affairs to
words and sentences, what he is claiming is that atoms are the really real and that objects composed of atoms are bare
epiphenomena that do not really have being in their own right (this is somewhat unfair to Lucretius as he does nod here and there to
emergent properties that result only from relations among atoms). Likewise, when Plato distinguishes between the forms and
appearances, he reveals a strategy of undermining. All the entities and states-of-affairs we see in the world around us are, under
one reading of Plato, mere copies of the forms that lack genuine and full being in their own right. When Badiou claims that being qua
being is pure multiplicity without one, he is an underminer, treating structured situations as mere ephemera that are not true
realities in their own right. Consequently, one claim of the flat ontology advocated by onticology is a vigorous rejection of this sort of
reductivism. To be sure, the mereological considerations borne out of OOO dictate that objects are composed of other objects, or
that a rock also contains atomic particles and perhaps even strings, but the being of each and every object is irreducible in its own
right. While it is certainly true that rocks are made up of atoms, the atoms are not more real than the rock and the rock is not less
real than the atoms or atomic particles. This is the weird mereology of OOO, so forcefully developed by Harman and presenting a
real challenge and alternative to the infinite multiplicities of Badiou, that undermines our traditional understanding of part-whole
relations. The atoms are objects in their own right. The rock is an object in its own right. The being of the rock is not shorthand for
Within the
framework of onticology, the proper being of an object is its virtual endo-relational
structure and that endo-relational structure is not a property of the parts that
compose the object, but rather belongs to the object itself. The parts of my body, for
example, are constantly changing (cells die, cells are produced) but my proper
being as an object or substance, my virtual endo-relational structure, remains the
same. The flatness of flat ontology is thus first and foremost the refusal to treat one
strata of reality as the really real over and against all others. It doesnt forbid or
reject talking about interesting correlations among objects such as the relation
between atoms and a rock or a person and the neuronal web of the brain, but it
does hold that this is a relation between objects, not a relation between appearance
on the one hand and reality on the other hand. In this respect, flat ontology
endorses Latours thesis that nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to
anything else (Irreductions, 1.1.1).
collection of atoms. There is a link between these objects but it is a link between distinct objects.
Our orientation towards objects decenters the privileged

position of the Subject via transforming the subject into object
- this move is key to politics.
Bryant 11
[Levi, Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, Democracy of Objects
It will be noted that when objects are placed in the marked space of distinction, the sub-distinction does not
subjects and culture are

not excluded, but rather are treated as particular types of objects. Additionally, it now
becomes possible to indicate nonhuman objects without treating them as vehicles
for human contents. As a consequence, this operation is not a simple inversion of
the culturalist schema. It is not a call to pay attention to objects rather than
contract what can be indicated, but rather expands what can be indicated. Here
subjects or to treat subjects as what are opposed to objects, rather than treating objects as being opposed to
subjects. Rather, just as objects were reduced to representations when the subject or
culture occupied the marked space of distinction, just as objects were effectively
transformed into the subject and content, the placement of objects in the marked
space of distinction within the framework of ontology transforms the subject into
one object among many others, undermining its privileged, central, or foundational
place within philosophy and ontology. Subjects are objects among objects, rather
than constant points of reference related to all other objects. As a consequence, we
get the beginnings of what anti-humanism and post-humanism ought to be , insofar as
these theoretical orientations are no longer the thesis that the world is constructed through anonymous and
we get a variety of nonhuman

actors unleashed in the world as autonomous actors in their own right, irreducible to
representations and freed from any constant reference to the human where they are
reduced to our representations. Thus, rather than thinking being in terms of two
incommensurable worlds, nature and culture, we instead get various collectives of
objects. As Latour has compellingly argued, within the Modernist schema that drives both
epistemological realism and epistemological anti-realism, the world is bifurcated
into two distinct domains: culture and nature. [3] The domain of the subject and
culture is treated as the world of freedom, meaning, signs, representations,
language, power, and so on. The domain of nature is treated as being composed of
matter governed by mechanistic causality. Implicit within forms of theory and
philosophy that work with this bifurcated model is the axiom that the two worlds are
to be kept entirely separate, such that there is to be no inmixing of their distinct
properties. Thus, for example, a good deal of cultural theory only refers to objects as
vehicles for signs or representations, ignoring any non-semiotic or nonrepresentational differences nonhuman objects might contribute to collectives.
impersonal social forces as opposed to an individual subject. Rather,
Society is only to have social properties, and never any sorts of qualities that pertain to the nonhuman world. It is
the culturalist and modernist form of distinction is disastrous for social

and political analysis and sound epistemology. Insofar as the form of distinction implicit in
the culturalist mode of distinction indicates content and relegates nonhuman objects to the
unmarked space of the distinction, all sorts of factors become invisible that are
pertinent to why collectives involving humans take the form they do. Signifiers,
meanings, signs, discourses, norms, and narratives are made to do all the heavy
lifting to explain why social organization takes the form it does . While there can be no doubt
that all of these agencies play a significant role in the formation of collectives involving humans, this mode of
distinction leads us to ignore the role of the nonhuman and asignifying in the form
of technologies, weather patterns, resources, diseases, animals, natural disasters,
the presence or absence of roads, the availability of water, animals, microbes, the
presence or absence of electricity and high speed internet connections, modes of
transportation, and so on. All of these things and many more besides play a crucial
role in bringing humans together in particular ways and do so through contributing
differences that while coming to be imbricated with signifying agencies, nonetheless
are asignifying. An activist political theory that places all its apples in the basket of
content is doomed to frustration insofar as it will continuously wonder why its critiques
of ideology fail to produce their desired or intended social change. Moreover, in an age
where we are faced with the looming threat of monumental climate change, it is
irresponsible to draw our distinctions in such a way as to exclude nonhuman actors .
my view that
Peak Nature 2nc

THE APOCALPYSE IS NOWnow and forever. We cant separate
future impacts from now, the world as anything but immanent
is an anachronism, depends on reproducing the aesthetics of
transcendent Nature that enable fascist tunnelvision
policymaking and uselessly violent chasing after climate
change.
Morton 12 Timothy, Prof of Lit and the Environment in the English Dept @ UCDavis. Peak Nature, 11 January 2012. Adbusters.
<https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/98/peak-nature.html>
When Neo touches a mirror in The Matrix it adheres to his hand, instantly changing
from reflective surface to viscous substance. The very thing that we use to reflect
becomes an object in its own right, liquid and dark like oil in the dim light of the room in which Neo has taken the red pill. The usual reading of
this scene is that Neos reality is dissolving. If we stay on the level of the sticky, oily mirror, however, we obtain an equally powerful reading. Its
not reality that dissolves, but the subject, the very capacity to mirror things, to be
separate from the world like someone looking at a reflection in a mirror
removed from it by an ontological sheet of reflective glass. The sticky mirror demonstrates the truth of what
phenomenology calls ingenuousness or sincerity (Im thinking here of the work of Ortega y Gasset, Levinas and Graham Harman). Objects are what they
are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there it is, impossible
to shake off. In the midst of irony, there you are, being ironic. Even mirrors are what they are, no matter what
they reflect. In its ingenuous sincerity, reality envelops us like a film of oil. The mirror becomes a substance, an object. Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity, just
as Neo discovers that the mirror no longer distances his image from him in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to him. The beautiful reversibility of
the oily, melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming
age, precisely because of hyperobjects: the simultaneous dissolution of reality and
the overwhelming presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The Greeks
called it miasma, the way blood-guilt sticks to you. Why objects, why now? The philosopher Graham Harman writes that, because they withdraw irreducibly, you cant even get closer to
anxiety is a symptom of the emergence of

hyperobjects. When you approach them, more and more objects emerge. Its like being in a
dream written by Zeno. This strange paradox becomes clearer as we enter the age of ecological crisis
Has it started yet? How far in are we? is the question on all our lips, precisely
because we are in it, precisely because it has started. Its November 2010. You are waiting at a bus stop.
objects. This becomes clearer as we enter the ecological crisis How far in are we? This
Someone else ambles up. Nice weather, isnt it? she asks. You pause for a moment. You wonder whether she is only saying that to distract you from the latest news about global
warming. You decide she isnt. Yes, you say. But your reply holds something back the awareness that for you its not a particularly nice day because youre concerned that the heat
and the moisture have to do with global warming. This holding back may or may not be reflected in your tone. Mind you, she says. Oh, here it comes, you think. Funny weather last
after 9/11 objects to which we

may have paid attention an X-Acto knife, some white powder suddenly gained a
terrible significance, so in an age of global warming the weather that nice neutral backdrop that you can talk
about with a stranger, in that nice neutral backdrop-y way we might call phatic (after Roman Jakobson) has taken on a menacing air. In any
weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at some point.
Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an
ellipsis. This failure of the normal rhetorical routine, these remnants of shattered conversation lying around like broken hammers
(they must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and deeper ontological shift in
human awareness. Which in turn is a symptom of a profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little rainbow circle goes around
week, wasnt it? I blame global warming. We all have conversations that are more or less like that now. Just as
and around on a Mac knows, these upgrades are not necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of humanists such as ourselves to attune ourselves to the upgrading process and to
the notion that we are living in a world one that for instance we can call
no longer exists in any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or in the temporarily useful
local language of pleas and petitions. We dont want a certain species to be
farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature to convince a
legislative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and create nostalgic visions of Hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These
syndromes have been going on now since as long as the Industrial Revolution began
to take effect. As a consequence of that revolution, however, something far bigger and more threatening, is now looming on our horizonlooming so as to abolish our
horizon, or any horizon, in fact. Global warming, the consequence of runaway fossil fuel burning (as we all
know ad nauseam), has performed a radical shift in the status of the weather . Why? Because the
world as such not just a certain idea of world but world in its entiretyhas evaporated. Or rather, we are realizing
help explain it. What is the upgrading process? In a word,
Nature
that we never had it in the first place. We could explain this in terms of the good old-fashioned Aristotelian view of substance and accident. Im sure you are familiar with the idea that
for Aristotle, a realist, there are substances that happen to have various qualities or accidents that are not intrinsic to their substantiality. In section Epsilon 2 of the Metaphysics Aristotle
outlines the differences between substances and accidents. What climate change has done is shift the weather from accidental to substantial. Heres Aristotle: Suppose, for instance,
that in the season of the Cynosure [the dog days of summer] arctic cold were to prevail, this we would regard as an accident, whereas, if there were a sweltering heatwave, we would
violent changes are exactly what

global warming predicts. So every accident of the weather becomes a potential
symptom of a substance, global warming. So all of a sudden this wet stuff falling on my head
is a mere feature of some much more sinister phenomenon that I cant see with
my naked human eyes. I need terabytes of RAM and extreme processing speed to model it in real time (they were just able to do this in spring 2008).
not. And this is because the latter, unlike the former, is always or for the most part the case. But these sorts of
There is an even spookier problem with Aristotles arctic summer. If those arctic summers continue in any way, and if we can model them as symptoms of global warming, it is the case
that there never was a genuine, meaningful (for us humans) sweltering summer, just a long period of sweltering that seemed real because it kept on repeating for say two or three
Global warming, in other words, plays a very mean trick. It reveals that what we took to be a reliable
world was actually just a habitual pattern a collusion between forces such as
sunshine and moisture and us humans expecting such things at certain regular
intervals and giving them names, such as dog days. We took weather to be real. But in an age of global
warming we see it as an accident, a simulation of something darker, more
withdrawnclimate. As Harman argues, world is always presence-at-handa mere caricature of
some real object. What Ben Franklin and others in the Romantic period discovered was not really weather, but rather a toy version of this real object, a toy that
ironically started to unlock the door to the real thing. Strange weather patterns and carbon emissions caused scientists to start
monitoring things that at first only appeared locally significant. Thats the old school definition of climate:
theres the climate in Peru, the climate on Long Island, but climate in general, climate as the totality of derivatives of weather
events in much the same way as inertia is a derivative of velocity climate as
such is a beast newly recognized via the collaboration of weather, scientists, satellites, government agencies, and so on. This beast includes the sun,
since its infrared heat from the sun that is trapped by the greenhouse effect of gases such as
CO2. So global warming is a colossal entity that includes entities that exist way
beyond Earths atmosphere and yet it affects us intimately, right here and now.
Global warming is a prime example of what I am calling a hyperobject, an object that is massively
distributed in space-time and that radically transforms our ideas of what an object
is. It covers the entire surface of Earth and most of the effects extend up to 500
years into the future. Remember what life was like in 1510? You are walking on top
of lifeforms. Your car drove here on lifeforms. The iron in Earths crust is distributed bacterial excrement. The oxygen in our lungs is
bacterial out-gassing. Oil is the result of some dark secret collusion between rocks
and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at
oil youre looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost
impossible to hold in mind. And they are intricately bound up with lifeforms. The spooky thing
is, we discover global warming precisely when its already here. It is like realizing that
for some time you had been conducting your business in the expanding sphere of a
slow motion nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts away.
All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the end of the world are, from
millennia.
this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing
doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the
very real object that has intruded into ecological, social and psychic
space. If there is no backgroundno neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but a very visible, highly monitored, publicly debated climatethen there is no foreground.
Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of dragging weather phenomena into the
foreground as part of our awareness of global warming has been the gradual
realization that there is no foreground! The idea that we are embedded in a
phenomenological lifeworld, for instance, tucked up like little hobbits in the safety of our burrow, has been exposed as a
fiction. The specialness we granted ourselves as unravelers of cosmic
meaning (Heideggerian Dasein for instance) falls apart since there is no meaningfulness possible in a
world without a foreground-background distinction. Worlds need horizons and
horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds. When we can see everywhere, when I can Google Earth the fish in
my moms pond in her garden in London, the worldas a significant, bounded, horizoning entitydisappears. We have no world
because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery for us, as backdrops, have
dissolved. World turns out to be an aesthetic effect based on a kind of blurriness and aesthetic distance. This blurriness derives from an entitys ignorance concerning
objects. Only in ignorance can objects act like blank screens for the projection of meaning. Red sky at night, shepherds delight is a charming old saw that evokes days when shepherds
The sun goes down, the sun comes upof

course now we know it doesnt, so Galileo and Copernicus tore big holes in that
particular notion of world. Likewise, as soon as humans know about climate, weather becomes a flimsy,
superficial appearance that is a mere local representation of some much larger
phenomenon that is strictly invisible. You cant see or smell climate. Given our brains processing power, we cant even
really think about it all that concretely. You could say then that we still live in a world, only massively upgraded. True, but now world means
significantly less than it used toit doesnt mean significant for humans or even
significant for conscious entities. A simple experiment demonstrates plainly that world is an aesthetic phenomenon. I call it The Lord of the
lived in worlds, worlds bounded by horizons on which things occurred such as red sunsets.
Rings vs. The Ball Popper test. For this experiment you will need a copy of the second part of Peter Jacksons The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You will also require a Playskool Busy Ball
Popper, made by Hasbro. Now play the scene that I consider to be the absolute nadir of horror, when Frodo, captured by Faramir, is staggering around the bombed-out city Osgiliath
when a Nazgul (a Ringwraith) attacks on a fell beast, a terrifying winged dragon-like creature. Switch on the ball popper. You will notice the inane tunes that the popper plays instantly
The idea of world depends upon all kinds of mood lighting and mood
music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridiculous
meaninglessness. Its the job of serious Wagnerian worlding to erase the trace of this meaninglessness. Jacksons trilogy surely is Wagnerian, a total work of art
or Gesamkunstwerk in which elves, dwarves and men have their own languages, their own tools, their own
architecture this is done to fascist excess as if they were different sports teams. But its easy to
recover the trace of meaninglessness from this seamless world absurdly easy, as the toy experiment proves.
undermine the coherence of Peter Jacksons narrative world.
Stupid Kids Toy 5, Wagnerian Tolkien Movie Nil. What can we learn from this? World, a key concept in ecophenomenology, is an illusion. And objects for sure have a hidden weirdness.
Colorado, residents
objected to the building of a solar array in a park in 2008 because it didnt look natural.
Objections to wind farms are similar not because of the risk to birds, but because they spoil the view. A
2008 plan to put a wind farm near a remote Scottish island was, well, scotched,
because residents of the island complained that their view would be destroyed. This
is truly a case of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology , and a good argument for why ecology must be without
Nature. How come a wind turbine is less beautiful than an oil pipeline? How come it
spoils the view any more than pipes and roads?
In effect, the Stupid Kids Toy translated the movie, clashing with it and altering it in its own limited and unique way. In Lakewood,
WEVE REACHED PEAK NATURENature is no longer the relief

against which Society plays outGlobal Warming has
destroyed the possibility of returning to pre-warming times
Its hyperobjectivity implicates all objects and all time periods
since the Industrial Revolution
Morton 12 Timothy, Prof of Lit and the Environment in the English Dept @ UCDavis. Peak Nature, 11 January 2012. Adbusters.
<https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/98/peak-nature.html>
Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production.
Either its exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: its basically featureless, abstract,
gray. It has nothing to do with nematode worms and orangutans, organic chemicals in comets and rock strata.
You can scour the Earth from mountaintop to Marianas Trench. You will never find Nature. Thats why I put it in
capitals. I want the reader to see that its an empty category looking for something to fill it. Gray
goo. Capitalism did away with feudal and pre-feudal myths such as the divine hierarchy between classes of people. In so doing, however, it
substituted one heck of a giant myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that
preexists the capitalist labor process. Martin Heidegger has the best term for it:
standing reserve, Bestand. Bestand means stuff, as in the old ad from the 1990s, Drink Pepsi: Get
Stuff. There is an ontology implicit in capitalist production, then, that is strictly materialism as defined by
Aristotle. Funnily enough, however, this materialism is not fascinated with material objects in all their
manifold specificity. Its just stuff. This viewpoint is the basis of Aristotles problem with materialism. Have you ever seen or
handled matter? Have you ever held a piece of stuff? Sure, Ive seen lots of objects: Santa
Claus in a department store, snowflakes and photographs of atoms. But have I ever seen matter or stuff as such? Aristotle
says its a bit like searching through a zoo to find the animal rather than the various
species such as monkeys and mynah birds. Marx says exactly the same thing regarding capital. The
expanded form [of the commodity] passes into the general form when some
commodity is excluded, exempted from the collection of commodities, and thus appears
as the general equivalent of all commodities, as the immediate embodiment of
Commodity as such, as if, by the side of all real animals, there existed the Animal, the individual
incarnation of the entire animal kingdom or as if, to use an example from commercial capitalism, by the side of all
real spices, there existed the Spice. As Nature goes, so goes matter. The two most progressive physical theories of our age, ecology and quantum theory,
Bestand is stockpiling. Gallon after gallon of oil

waiting to be tapped. Row upon row of big box houses waiting to be inhabited. Terabyte after terabyte of
memory waiting to be filled. Stockpiling is the art of the zeugma the yoking of things you hear in phrases such as wave upon
wave or bumper to bumper. Stockpiling is the dominant mode of social existence. Giant parking
lots empty of cars, huge tables in restaurants across which you cant hold hands, vast empty lawns.
Nature is stockpiling. Range upon range of mountains, receding into the distance. The Rocky Flats nuclear bomb
trigger factory was sited precisely to evoke this kind of mountainous stockpile. The
eerie strangeness of this fact confronts us with the ways in which we still believe
that Nature is over there that it exists apart from technology, apart from
history. Far from it. Nature is the stockpile of stockpiles. So again, I ask, what exactly are
we sustaining when we talk about sustainability? An intrinsically out of control
system that sucks in gray goo at one end and pushes out gray value at the other. Its
Natural goo, Natural value. Result? Mountain ranges of inertia, piling higher every year, while humans
need have nothing to do with it. What is bestand?
boil away in the agony of uncertainty. Just take a look at Manufactured Landscapes: the ocean of
telephone dials, dials as far as the eye can see, somewhere in China. A real ocean it lies there at this very
moment. Societies embody philosophies. Actually, what we have in modernity is much, much worse than just
instrumentality. Here we must depart from Heidegger. Whats worse is the location of essence in
some beyond, away from any specific existence. To this extent, capitalism is itself Heideggerian!
Whether we call it scientism, deconstruction, relationism or just good old-fashioned Platonic forms, there is no essence in what
exists. Either the beyond is itself nonexistent (deconstruction, nihilism), or its some kind of real
away from here. The problem, then, is not essentialism but this very notion of a beyond. Think of what Tony Hayward
said. He said that the Gulf of Mexico was a huge ocean, and that the spill was tiny by comparison. Nature would absorb the industrial accident. I dont
want to quibble about the relative size of ocean and spill, as if an even larger spill would somehow have gotten it into Haywards thick head that it was bad
news. I simply want to point out the metaphysics involved in Haywards assertion, which we could call capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is
capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But dont worry. The
beyond will take care of it. Meanwhile, despite Nature, despite gray goo, real things writhe and smack into
one another. Some leap out because industry malfunctions, or functions only too well.
Oil bursts out of its ancient sinkhole and floods the Gulf of Mexico. Gamma rays shoot out of
plutonium for 24,000 years. Hurricanes congeal out of massive storm systems, fed by the heat from
the burning of fossil fuels. The ocean of telephone dials grows ever larger. Paradoxically, capitalism has
unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling
splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of
existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived,
threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body. Modern life presents us with a choice: 1) The
essence of things is elsewhere (in the deep structure of capital, the unconscious, Being). 2) There is no essence. (At present I believe that the restriction
of rightness and coolness to this choice is one reason why planet Earth is in big trouble right now. And I believe that the choice resembles a choice
There is an essence, and its right here, in the

object resplendent with its sensual qualities yet withdrawn. And thats why I believe we
are entering a new era of academic work, where the point will not be to one-up each other by appealing
to the trace of the givenness of the openness of the clearing of the lighting of the
being of the pencil. Thinking past meta mode will at least bring us up to speed
with the weirdness of things, a weirdness that evolution, ecology, relativity and quantum theory all speak about. This
weirdness resides on the side of objects themselves, not our interpretation of
them. When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the
waste away into some ontologically alien realm . Ecology is now beginning to
tell us of something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in
which there is no away. Marx was partly wrong, then, when in The Communist Manifesto he claimed that in capitalism all that is
solid melts into air. He didnt see how a kind of hypersolidity oozes back into the emptied out space of
capitalism, a hypersolidity I call here hyperobjects. This oozing real comes back
and can no longer be ignored, so that even when the spill is supposedly gone and
forgotten, there, look! There it is, mile upon mile of strands of oil just below the
surface, square mile upon square mile of ooze floating at the bottom of the ocean. The cosmic U-bend is no more. It cant be gone
and forgotteneven ABC News knows that now. When I hear the word sustainability I reach for
my sunscreen.
between grayish brown and brownish gray). Thats why I believe in a third choice: 3)
Links
Animals
We can never understand the animal , Only the realization
of their strangeness can challenge anthropocentrism
from May 24-June 1, 2014. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/apus/Doc?
id=10496853&ppg=41..page 41-42//NotJacob
Saying Humans are animals could get you in trouble. So could saying Humans
are not animals, for different reasons. The word animal shows how humans
develop intolerances to strangeness and to the stranger. According to prevailing
ideologies, we must become, or be thought of as, like animals (biocentrism), or
they should become, or be thought of as, like us (anthropocentrism). Neither choice
is satisfactory. There is no way to maintain the strangeness of things. Equating
humans with animals seems right. But animals are often shorthand for tools or
objects of instrumental reasonthe equation doesnt sound so clever when you put
it that way. Humans are like animals, but animals are not animals, as we are
beginning to see. We should instead explore the paradoxes and fissures of identity
within human and animal. Instead of animal, I use strange stranger. This
stranger isnt just strange. She, or he, or it can we tell? how?is strangely
strange. Their strangeness itself is strange. 72 We can never absolutely figure them
out. If we could, then all we would have is a ready-made box to put them in, and we
would just be looking at the box, not at the strange strangers. They are intrinsically
strange. Do we know for sure whether they are sentient or not? Do we know
whether they are alive or not? Their strangeness is part of who they are. 73 After all,
they might be us. And what could be stranger than what is familiar? As anyone who
has a long-term partner can attest, the strangest person is the one you wake up
with every morning. Far from gradually erasing strangeness, intimacy heightens it.
The more we know them, the stranger they become. Intimacy itself is strange. As
the passenger side-view mirror on your car reads, Objects in mirror are closer than
they appear. We ignore the mesh because were so familiar with it. 74 Our
familiarity forms the basis of the threatening intimacy that we too often push to the
backs of our minds. Imagine living in a world of triangular creatures. A triangular
scientist discovers creatures without angles. These smooth strangers would be
strange only insofar as we dont usually encounter them in our world. But we can
imagine such a creature. And if one ever showed up, it would be a familiar
strangerwe would have anticipated its existence. We would need some time, of
course, to get to know its smoothness. But this process would be fi nite. The strange
stranger, conversely, is something or someone whose existence we cannot
anticipate. Even when strange strangers showed up, even if they lived with us for a
thousand years, we might never know them fully and we would never know
whether we had exhausted our getting-to-know process. We wouldnt know what we
did not know about themthese aspects would be unknown unknowns, in the
inimitable phrasing of the U.S. secretary of defense who in 2003 promoted a
disastrous war. 75 They might be living with us right now. They might, indeed, be
us. That is what is so strange about them. We can never tell.
Apocalypse
Waiting for apocalypse to come is the problemwe control tryor-die
The spooky thing is, we discover global warming precisely when its already here. It
is like realizing that for some time you had been conducting your business in the
expanding sphere of a slow-motion nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for
amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts
away. All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the end of the world are,
from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing
doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very
real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space. As we shall
see, the hyperobject spells doom now, not at some future date. (Doom will assume
a special technical meaning in this study in the Hypocrisies section.) If there is no
backgroundno neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but rather a very visible,
highly monitored, publicly debated climate then there is no foreground.
Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of dragging weather
phenomena into the foreground as part of our awareness of global warming has
been the gradual realization that there is no foreground! The idea that we are
embedded in a phenomenological lifeworld, tucked up like little hobbits into the
safety of our burrow, has been exposed as a fiction. The specialness we granted
ourselves as unravelers of cosmic meaning, exemplified in the uniqueness of
Heideggerian Dasein, falls apart since there is no meaningfulness possible in a
world without a foregroundbackground distinction. Worlds need horizons and
horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds. When we can see everywhere
(when I can use Google Earth to see the fish in my moms pond in her garden in
London), the worldas a significant, bounded, horizoning entitydisappears. We
have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery have
dissolved.5
Cap Bad/Marx
Capitalism is reactive, not proacitiveit cant form the basis of
our K of hyperobjects
(Timothy, Hyperobjects, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, pg.20-21)
The towering-through (Heidegger) of the hyperobject into the misty
transcendentalism of modernity interrupts the supposed progress that thinking
has been making toward assimilating the entire universe to a late capitalismfriendly version of Macbeth, in which (in the phrase Marx quotes) all that is solid
melts into air.29 For at the very point at which the melting into air occurs, we catch
the first glimpses of the all- too-solid iceberg within the mist. For reasons I give in
the second part of this book, I doubt gravely whether capitalism is entirely up for
the job of processing hyperobjects. I have argued elsewhere that since the raw
machinery of capitalism is reactive rather than proactive, it might contain a flaw
that makes it unable to address the ecological emergency fully.30 Capitalism builds
on existing objects such as raw materials (whatever comes in at the factory door).
The retroactive style of capitalism is reflected in the ideology of the consumer
and its demands that capital then meets. The ship of modernity is equipped
with powerful lasers and nuclear weapons. But these very devices set off chain
reactions that generate yet more hyperobjects that thrust themselves between us
and the extrapolated, predicted future. Science itself becomes the emergency break
that brings the adventure of modernity to a shuddering halt. But this halt is not in
front of the iceberg. The halting is (an aspect of) the iceberg. The fury of the
engines is precisely how they cease to function, seized up by the ice that is already
inside them. The future, a time after the end of the world, has arrived too early.
Civilization
The Nature Civilization Dichtomomy is the basis of human
superiority claims
University, Ecology Without Nature, p. 100-101
The question of animals-sometimes I wonder whether it is the question-radically
disrupts any idea of a single, independent, solid environment. 67 Each animal,
perhaps, has its own environment, as German scientists such as Jacob von Uexkiill
wanted to establish in the early twentieth century, which profoundly influenced
Heidegger.68 Even if this is not true ( if it were, it would multiply the problem of "
the " environment exponentially), the idea of " our" environment becomes
especially tricky when it starts to slither, swim, and lurch toward us. The beings
known as animals hover at the corner of the separation of inside and outside
generated by the idea of world as a self-contained system. Strangely enough,
thinking in terms of "world" often excludes animals- beings who actually live there.
For Edmund Husserl, animals are like deaf people, " abnormal."69 For Heidegger,
animals lack of a sense of world (Welta1'111). 7 Or, more precisely, their sense of
world is this lack. 7J In contrast, some ecological thinking wants to forget about the
differences between humans and other animals, real or imagined, as soon as
possible. This inverted speciesism celebrates " the more than human world" (Abram
) . For Percy Shelley, animals lose their cruelty just as humans begin to live a more
pacifist existence. In his vegetarian ecotopia they end up " sport[ing] around
[man's] dwelling " ( The Daemon of the World, 2 .444 ) . For Rilke or Levertov, postRomantic poets keen to establish an environmental poetics, animals have an access
to the " open" that is denied to humans, either entirely or as a result of bad training.
72 It all depends how up close and personal you want to get. Levinas strove to
exclude animals from his idea of contact with the " face " of the other as the basis of
ethics. But he was haunted by the face of a dog who had looked at him, perhaps
with kindness, in a Nazi prison camp,?3 For Tolkien, dwarves, elves, hobbits, and
talking eagles are welcome others, but swarthy " southern" or "eastern" men are
not,?4 Some of those who refused to evacuate New Orleans in the wake of hurricane
Katrina did so because they were not allowed to take their pets and would not
abandon them. This may be a matter of moral feeling rather than stub born
primitivism.The Nazis ferociously opposed animal cruelty but thought nothing of
exterminating threatening human others. Animals bring up the ways in which
humans develop intolerances to strangeness and to the stranger. We must become
like animals (ecocentrism), or vice versa (anthropocentrism) . We are back with the
quantum state we discovered in Chapter 1. There is no way of maintaining the
strangeness of things without coming down on one side or the other. What of the
arrival ( "human" or " animal" or other) your worldview was not expecting ? Iuse the
word arrival in the sense D errida means when he speaks of a "pure hospitality" as
one that " opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor
invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival,
nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other " ; "without at least the
thought of this pure and unconditional hospitality . . . we would not even have the
idea of the other, of the alterity of the other, that is, of someone who enters into our
lives without having been invited. We would not even have the idea of love or of
'living together' (vivre ensemble) with the other in a way that is not a part of some
totality or 'ensemble. ' " 75 This genuinely " other other " appears to be held up at
the border of the world as nestling horizon. Just as ambient poetics undermines the
environmentalism that uses it to esta blish itself, so strangers undermine the very
Umwelt that uses them to esta blish its boundaries. Far from healing the rift
between humans and others, thinking since the Romantic period keeps opening it
up in all sorts of ways. This is despite the fact that radical linguistic theory of the
age posited language as deriving from animal cries,76 Onomatopoeia is ecomimesis
in miniature. Despite the recent attempt to categorize the bonobo chimpanzee as a
species of HomoJ a seemingly endless series of hominids and humanoids stands
between humans and animals. And no one has yet categorized humans as a species
of Pan paniscus.If we knew what to do with animals and their kin, we could take a
break from the painful exertions of consciousness. We could shout "We are the world
! " and it would be true. Of course, we would not be able to watch ourselves on
video as we dissolved into oneness with the stranger. And so ecological writing
keeps beating itself against the glass of the other, like a fly. The constant dinging of
the impact-in which the strange other, as soon as it enters into proximity, becomes
an inert or threatening thing-indicates a loss of irony. The only way to remain close
to the strangers without killing them (turning them into yourself or into an
inanimate o bject) is to maintain a sense of irony. If irony and movement are not
part of environmentalism, strangers are in danger of disappearing, exclusion,
ostracism, or worse. Schlegel determined that irony was democratic. All truth claims
are fragmentary, and the more you know, the more you realize that your own
perspective is shot through with fragmentariness, negativity, and hesitation. You
start to tolerate other ways of life,?7 But is toleration enough, as Derrida asked? You
might end up not with a sense of the other as other, but with a sense of sheer " I," a
blank space or blackhole, transcending all possible positions-a state o f " quiescence
and feebleness-which does not like to act or to touch anything for fear of
surrendering its inward harmony . . . the source of morbid saintliness and yearning."
78 This is Hegel's view of the " beautiful soul," as we shall see, and it has much to
tell us about environmentalism. When it becomes a way of being, irony ironically
ceases to be irony. Instead of establishing an aestheticized distance toward
everything, irony must forge intimate relationships with strangers. We will be
grappling with this intimacy in Chapter 3 . For now, let us continue to steer
ourselves through different possible forms of environmental immersion.
Climate Change
The use of the term climate change leads to widespread
denialism and prevents understanding the true hyperobject
warming
The end of the world is correlated with the Anthropocene, its global warming and
subsequent drastic climate change, whose precise scope remains uncertain while its
reality is verified beyond question. Throughout Hyperobjects I shall be calling it
global warming and not climate change. Why? Whatever the scientific and social
reasons for the predominance of the term climate change over global warming for
naming this particular hyperobject, the effect in social and political discourse is
plain enough. There has been a decrease in appropriate levels of concern. Indeed,
denialism is able to claim that using the term climate change is merely the
rebranding of a fabrication, nay evidence of this fabrication in flagrante delicto. On
the terrain of media and the sociopolitical realm, the phrase climate change has
been such a failure that one is tempted to see the term itself as a kind of denial, a
reaction to the radical trauma of unprecedented global warming. That the terms are
presented as choices rather than as a package is a symptom of this failure, since
logically it is correct to say climate change as a result of global warming, where
climate change is just a compression of a more detailed phrase, a metonymy. If
this is not the case, then climate change as a substitute for global warming is like
cultural change as a substitute for Renaissance, or change in living conditions
as a substitute for Holocaust. Climate change as substitute enables cynical reason
(both right wing and left) to say that the climate has always been changing, which
to my ears sounds like using people have always been killing one another as a
fatuous reason not to control the sale of machine guns. What we desperately need
is an appropriate level of shock and anxiety concerning a specific ecological trauma
indeed, the ecological trauma of our age, the very thing that defines the
Anthropocene as such. This is why I shall be sticking with the phrase global warming
in this book.
Human inputs may be involved in climate change, but this

focus on the human is precisely how corporations co-opt status
quo environmental discourse. Climate change is a hyper object
that cannot be grasped entirely through local manifestations,
which means it is always withdraw from direct human
awareness. Instead of attempting to transform the climate
change, we must theorize climate change as a hyper object
and how we must adapt to its existence.
Coffield in 11. Kris Coffield is an independent political theory scholar from
Hawaii and legislative director for the IMUAlliance. "The Climate of Object-Oriented
Poetics," 06/08/11. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?
q=cache:SXbkB6DvqA0J:fracturedpolitics.com/2011/06/18/object-orientedpoetics.aspx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
One of the central theses of climate science is that accelerated global warming is
primarily anthropogenic, or human induced. According to experts, temperature
escalations are linked to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that are, in
turn, caused by human activities, including fossil fuel combustion, aerosol usage,
cement manufacturing, ozone depletion, and deforestation. With the exception of
anti-intellectual climate change deniers and politicians pandering for publicity (often
an interchangeable crowd), this narrative has gained consensus, both in the sense
of being hailed as empirically accurate by the greater scientific community and
consensually affirmed at the everyday level, where millions of people practice ecofriendly lifestyles, from driving hybrid cars to installing photovoltaic panels in their
homes. Eco-friendliness is good for the preservation of the planet. More and more,
however, the discourses within which environmental protections are debated are
suborned to neoliberal imperatives, to the exploitative, if industrious, logic of capital
accumulation. Cap-and-trade may be the example par excellence, a policy
promoted as putatively "green" that incentivizes pollution control through the
creation of an emissions market, where large polluters increase their legal emissions
capacity by purchasing carbon credits from smaller firms, in what amounts to a
carbon pricing scheme. Originally proposed as a vehicle for regulating sustainable
development, this scheme is, nonetheless, depoliticizing in its insistence on
subjectivities molded on imminent catastrophe, incapable of resisting the
capitalization of alternative futures as the purchase of eco-salvation is tied to the
purchasing power of corporations monopolizing the technologies necessary for
sustainability. In other words, energy suppliersfor example, British Petroleum
seek hegemonic control not just of alternative energy products, but the discourses
informing a population's decision to employ such products , thereby ensuring that
'futures' remain a market mechanism, not an unfolding of new political
potentialities. For international relations theorist Julian Reid, this entails a transition
from predicating development on accounts of environmental 'security' to those of
'resilience', defined by Carl Folke, science director for the Stockholm Resilience
Centre, as "the capacity to buffer change, learn, and develop as a framework for
understanding how to sustain and enhance adaptive capacity in a complex world of
rapid transformations." Reid states: The resilient subject is a subject which must
permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world. Not a subject which can
conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility. But a
subject which accepts the disastrousness of the world it lives in as a condition for
partaking of that world and and which accepts the necessity of the injunction to
change itself in correspondence with the threats and dangers now presupposed as
endemic (Reid, The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject of Resilience, 2010).
If sustainability strategies are said to be expressions of neoliberal governance's own
ability to adapt to critique (in this case, from environmentalists and naturecultures), then the terms of eco-criticism must be concurrently viewed as already
appropriated by neoliberal regimes, rendering them impotent. So, what to do?
Decentering humans from their privileged position in eco-critical debate might be a
good, if not obvious, place to start. Ironically, reification of human relations lies
at the heart of mainstream conservationism , as well as its political opponents,
with the former emphasizing mankind's role in causing ecological damage and the
latter contending that human freedom is endangered by preservationist efforts to
curb capital excess. Any wonder that the conversation led back to monetization and
trading schemes, idols of the most informationalized and normative economic
system yet enacted? In recent years, shedding one's skin has been made
theoretically palatable by the evolution of object-oriented ontology, a philosophy
that puts all objectshuman and inhuman, animate and inanimateon an
immanent, equal plane of being. Objects are no longer instrumentalized, nor are
they held to be exhaustively representable through human knowledge and
discursive constructs. According to object-oriented anthrodecentrism, human
perception is not the lone cosmological constant through which reality is mediated,
but rather one being, albeit sophisticatedly conscious, among a multiplicity of
singularities. Moreover, objects cannot be defined relationally and, instead,
'withdraw' from one another, retaining an untranslatable essence no matter the
context in which they are situated (untranslatable because, as Graham Harman, one
of the movement's founders, argues, any relation is an act of translation, and acts
of translation involve converting reality into something other than the thing-initself). Put differently, object-oriented ontology rejects Kantian and post-Kantian
anti-realism, which, according to onticologist Levi Bryant, treats the world "as being
given in advance and as resulting from the agency of human structuring activity,"
marginalizing examination of object networks by regarding objects as implements
for the facilitation of human agencythrough cognition, politics, language, etc.
that contribute nothing of any real significance (pun intended), and, consequently,
reducing philosophy to a "transcendental anthropology that seeks to investigate the
manner in which cognition forms or produces objects." Confused? Consider the
following poem, my first attempt at OOO-specific verse: I, Object I object to not
being objectified to being humanized as if my thingitude fell entirely between the
lifelines traversing your mind. I reject being confined inside the qualifications
claimed to define my nature by the sharp, piercing eye of the knowing blind. I
reflect your accidental refrain withdrawing into my core, while perturbing the
common terrain of our inexhaustible relation. I protect my saturnine difference

from becoming a machinic cog in infectious ethics factories that rebrand bland
fabric as desire. I, object, uncategorizable, unified, beyond an infinite loop, one
oak in the forest, irreducible to burnt ash or a smoldering memory. Sometimes it's
simpler to read things aesthetically. Back to the Earth. As already indicated, an
anti-realist climatological stance literally centers on humans, focusing on the
protection of human beings, environmentally or monetarily. A typical
environmentalist discourse repudiates the ecological recklessness of human activity
where a typical corporatist discourse bemoans industrial disenfranchisement, but
the color is the same. In extending the thought of Julian Reid, one can interpret the
ability of the prevailing political system of the world's dominant polluters,
neoliberalism, to arrest critique as a product and progenitor of anthropocentrism , a
project through which agonistic forms of life are homogenized into homo sapien
relations. Additionally, it is only within the boundaries of such a project that the
essentialization and mobilization of species life can occur, allowing for the
perpetuation of a permanent state of emergency and warfare waged in the name of
safeguarding monolithic populations. Object-oriented theory injects a caesura into
anthropocentric experiments, leveling the ontological playing field, emancipating
climate change from the realm of pure human experience. Climate change is,
then, theorized as an entity of its own accord, mereologically independent
of the cars, gases, and, of course, humans, that factor in its compositionan
example of what eco-theorist Timothy Morton calls 'hyperobjects', or objects that
are so vastly partitioned spatiotemporally that they cannot be completely revealed
through local manifestations. According to Bryant, hyperobjects are produced by the
material traces of practices, in this case human initiated, that take on a life
of their own, though it should be noted that hyperobjects, too, withdraw from
other objects, including those objects whose material traces feed the hyperobject.
Climate change, hence, escapes human awareness, which focuses on the
localization of climate as weather, an impossibility falsified by the valorization of
weather forecasts during the evening news, which make one feel as though the
totality of climate change is graspable in the always already mediated immediate
moment. Thus, the problem posed by climate change is not one of reconfiguring
human security writ large, but, conversely, probing the lives of material traces,
particularly those emerging from and evading one's own practical intentions.
Consumerism
Creating ethical consumer practices within the system create
an interpassive approach that just reifies romantic
consumerism.6
University, Ecology Without Nature 116-117)
Theory always had a harder bite than this . To be a consumerist is not simply to be
caught in the stuff-your-face logic of capitalism, but to have the potential to resist
and challenge it. One could use one's refusal to consume certain things in certain
ways as modes of critiquing modern society. Without doubt, there are those green
Romantic consumerists who have gone so far as to not consider themselves
consumerists at all. A deep ecologist such as Julia Butterfly Hill will surely protest
that she is not a consumerist, and activists in the Earth First! group would be
shocked to find that their tactics derive from consumerism. When Adbusters, the
American fashion magazine for the tortured anti-consumerist, proclaims itself a
journal of "the mental environment," it is promising something beyond
consumerism. But this promise typifies the paradox of the Romantic avant-garde. If
we could j ust get the aesthetic form right, we could crack reality, open it up, and
change it. With its brilliant parodies of advertising spectacle, the Adbusters
approach is simply greener-than-thou consumerism, outconsumerism- ing other
consumerists . Surely this is why deep ecology names itself in opposition to "
shallow ecology." Those shallow ecologists are j ust day trippers, from the deep
point of view One available consumerist role is the refusal exemplified by the
abstainer, the boycotter. This role reflects upon the idea of what it means to be a
consumer altogether. The sugar boycott and vegetarianism in the Romantic period
typify a style we would now recognize as ecological. 136 The same forms confront
today's "green " consumers as confronted the earlier Romantic consumers. Will
buying organic food re-ally save the planet ? Romantic consumerism at once
broadened and narrowed the idea of choice. The sense that we have a " choice,"
giving rise to utopian desires, indicates social deadlock as well as possibility. There
is nothing intrinsically wrong with avant-garde consumerist forms. Like art, they
embody what Adorno-a great Romantic in his engagement with Hegel-describes as a
negative knowledge of reality. 137 This negativity is negative not in the sense of "
bad," but in terms of a dialectical moment of negation. Romantic consumerism
embodies what has been negated, left out, excluded, or elided. It shows j ust how
far one would need to go to really change things . Boycotting and protesting are
ironical, reflexive forms of consumerism. By refusing to buy certain products, by
questioning oppressive social forms such as corporations or globalization, they point
toward possibilities of changing the current state of affairs, without actually
changing it. They are a cry of the heart in a heartless world, a spanner in the works
(Dave Foreman's term for green direct action is " monkeywrenching " ) . 138 They
thus have not only a practical, but also a religious aspect. Many religious
practitioners are involved in environmental movements: nuns who hammered on
Colorado's nuclear missile silos, the " Church of Deep Ecology " in Minneapolis. The
nuns did not change the missiles into flowers, but they did draw attention to these
weapons of mass destruction lurking almost literally in people's backyards.
Coral Reefs Link

Cities and Coral Reefs function the same as a subset of
systems in a larger world of hierarchiestheir externalization
is incorrect
Bryant 12 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/socialecology-and-entropy/)
There is no reason this form of analysis should be restricted to assemblages of nonhuman organic beings such as
The difference between a city and a coral reef is a difference in degree, not
a difference in kind. In a city there are various niches through which people carve
out lives and devise strategies for living. There are relations of dependency between
various organisms ranging from the way in which people depend on one another, to
the existence of institutions, governments, businesses, corporations, and so on.
There are hierarchies between different species where some are more dominant,
some are more influential, than others. There are feedback loops between these
various organisms, where various beings depend on others and where people and
institutions become constrained by the various interactions and feedback relations
that organize the assemblage. Above all, there are flows of energy that undergo
continuous transformation, beginning with the sun, then plants and animals, then
the various ways in which these are converted into calories for people. And there
are, of course, all of the energies these assemblages produce through natural
sources like goal, oil, natural gas, thermal springs, sunlight, and so on.
coral reefs.
D&G
D&G perpetuate the worst parts of human mastery
If " new and improved" versions of continuity between inside and outside, such as
nuance, are suspect in their attempt to smooth over the quantum difference that
the re-mark establishes, then magical forms of differentiation-for example, ones
that are miraculously "nonhierarchical" or " nonlinear "-are out of bounds too. These
forms, such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's idea of the "rhizome," are also
poststructuralist fantasies that seek to do away with the strange, bumpy divisions
between things. " Rhizomes," so the story goes, are better than hierarchical " trees "
of information, because they do not discriminate between different levels of
importance.78 A rhizome is a sprout of a plant such as a potato, which grows, when
compared with plants that must deal with gravity, in a seemingly indiscriminate
manner, sometimes putting out a new fruit, sometimes carrying on growing. This
image has become very popular in fashionable sound art circles, in part because of
the popularization of Deleuze and Guattari in techno music by DJ Spooky (the author
of a "rhizomic " study, Rhythm Science) , and others such as David Toop, an
ambient composer and writer of books on ambient music and sound art.?9 The
compositional technique of bricolage or pastiche, a collage of snatches and sam
pIes of music, lends itself to the idea that this music does not depend upon
normative hierarchies such as beginning/end, backgroundlforeground, high/low, and
so forth. The nouveau roman of the 1 960s ( RobbeGrillet) took this principle down
to the very level of the syntax of the individual sentence, whose subject would
change alarmingly somewhere in the middle. The snobbery of contemporary music
criticism and fashion readily corrects the idea that a real disruption of norms has
taken place. Some rhizomes are more rhizomic than others. If the function of
rhizome is to j oin and therefore to differentiate, then how can it do it in a " better
way" than a binary play of difference, without collapsing difference into identity ? If
sound b grows " rhizomically " out of sound a, then is it the same sound, or a
different sound ? If I am retrofitting my car, tacking on found pieces here and there
and ignoring the factory specifications, does it stop being the same car at some
point ? If it is now a " different" car, then in what consists the rhizomic thread
connecting the "two " cars ? If it is the " same " car, then surely there is no point in
talking about a connection, rhizomic or not, between two things, since only one
thing exists . If I have somehow produced a " quasi-car " that exists " between " the
original car and an entirely different one, then this car will suffer from the same
problems-is it different or the same ?If we try to avoid the idea of hierarchy
( between inside and outside, say), with the language of rhizome, we will be left
with the same conundrum, dressed up in chic language, as the one we confronted
earlier. Moreover, there is an aesthetic politics of the rhizome, which promotes
rhizome for rhizome's sake. Ro Thinking that you are doing something new by
mixing different sounds together from different sources, or inventing new ways of
mimicking real or imaginary sounds, is the very form of modern music production,
and has been so at least since the emergence of capitalist demands for fresh
product. Rhizomic writing, visual art, architecture, and multimedia all suffer the
same ironic fate.Scholarship in auditory cultural studies, which studies the history of
sonic environments, has tended to see sound along a continuum, even as a circle
(or " 0 factor" ) that traces a smooth transition from "primal cries " through speech
to music, then to ambient sound and back again to cries. II I But the quantum
character of the re-mark assures that there is no genuine continuum and that the
transition from one sound to the next will be very bumpy. The bumps themselves
are formed by all kinds of ideological and philosophical processes.None of this is to
claim that inside and outside " really" exist. In fact, understanding the re-mark
means radically questioning the genuine existence of these categories, far more
than clinging to an aesthetic amalgam of the two, especially a " new and improved "
version, s uch as ambience. Ambience suggests that there is a special kind of noisesound, or sound-noise; a noise that is also a sound, a sound that is also a noise.
Somehow, however, we can still tell the difference between the two. Somewhere
that is both inside and outside suffers from this wish to have it both ways .
Somewhere that is neither inside nor outside is strictly inconceivable. Believing that
such a place exists is sheer nihilism.
Discourse 1st
The affirmatives view of ontology and the world is wrong
their politics treat them as textual objects, full of signifiers,
narratives, and discourses this creates a focus on how human
subjects relate to the world and makes objects invisible.
Bryant 12
(Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/rsi-discursivitycritique-and-politics/)

So in response to a previous post, a lot of folks gave me grief about the following passage: I do think, however,
that OOO can problematize our current political thought and open new avenues of political engagement and
cultural studies is dominated by a focus on the

discursive. We hear endless talk about signs, signifiers, positions or
positionality, narratives, discourses, ideology, etc. Basically we see the
world as a fetishized text to be decoded and debunked. None of this should, of course, be
abandoned, but I do think were encountering its limitations. In the few years Ive been writing on these issues,
Ive been surprised to discover just how hard it is to get people to sense that there is a nondiscursive power of things; a form of power that is not about signs,
ideology (as text), beliefs, positions, narratives, and so on. Its as if
these things arent on the radar for most social and political theorists. I
theorization. As it stands,
get the sense that the reason for this has something to do with what Heidegger diagnosed in his analysis of the
when the ready-to-hand is working it becomes

invisible. We dont notice it. It recedes into the background. Us academics live in worlds that
ready-to-hand. Heidegger argues that
work pretty well as far as material infrastructure goes. We are, for the most part, in a world where things work:
food is available, electricity and water function, we have shelter, etc. As a consequence, all this disappears from
view and we instead focus on cultural texts because often this is a place where things arent working. In
response to these remarks, I was told that 1) of course no one has the naive belief that everything is text (what
a relief! of course, the question is whether this belief registers itself in theoretical practice), and 2) that, in fact,
theorists
that dont fit this mold, and perpetually refer to many of these theorists in my own work. Theorists
these things are all the rage in the world of theory. Im well aware that there is a tradition of
that come to mind are figures such as Haraway, Stengers, Latour, Kittler, Ong, McLuhan, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane
Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Kevin Sharpe, Jennifer Andersen et al, Cathy Davidson, Braudel, DeLanda,
have
been rather marginal in the academy; especially philosophy. In discussing these things, Im not
Pickering, etc. They exist. The point is not that they dont exist, but that these forms of theory, I think,
making some claim to being absolutely original or to be originating something full cloth. Im more than happy to
play some small role in bringing attention to these things; things that I believe to be neglected. I think, for
example, that the new materialist feminists predate OOO/SR by 5-10 years, have many points of overlap with
OOO, and have not nearly gotten the attention that they deserve. I think Latour and Stengers are almost
entirely invisible in the world of philosophy conferences and departments; and I think that there are systematic
reasons for this pertaining to the history of continental theory coming out of German idealism, the linguistic
turn, and phenomenology. In German idealism you get a focus on spirit and the transcendental structure of
In the linguistic turn, you get a focus on how signifiers and signs
inform our relation to reality (for example, Lacans famous observation
that the difference between the mens room and ladys room results
from the signifier in The Agency of the Letter, and Barthes claim that
language is a primary modeling system in The Fashion System). In phenomenology you get a focus
mind.
on the lived experience of the cogito, Dasein, or lived body and how it constitutes (Husserls language, not
In each instance we get a focus on the

differences that humans are contributing, with a relative indifference to
the differences that non-humans contribute. Material entities, as Alaimo
mine) the objects of its intentions. read on!
observes in Bodily Natures, are treated as blank screens for human

intentions, language, concepts, signs. The metaphor of the screen is here important, for a
screen is that which contains no difference of its own beyond being a smooth and white surface, and is therefore
susceptible to whatever we might wish to project upon it with a camera.
This has been
the dominant mode of theorizing that Ive encountered in the last decade in my discipline of
philosophy (and I have a fair background in rhetoric and literary theory as well). Phenomenology and the
linguistic turn, I think, are the dominant positions represented at SPEP, for example, the main professional
conference for continental philosophy (though thankfully things are beginning to change). When it is said that
something is dominant, the claim is not that nothing different from it exists, but merely that a certain style of
theorizing enjoys hegemony among that population. In media studies, I think, the situation is better. I think its
better in geography as well. It depends on what population of theorists were looking at (a point entailed,
incidentally, by my thesis that signifiers are material entities that must travel throughout populations).
Economy
The 1AC ignores the fact that the subsystems cannot control
one another. We must rethink the meshes that hold the
systems together.
Bryant 11(Levi R. Bryant, professor of philosophy at Collins College, The Democracy of Objects, Open
Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)
One important consequence that follows from the operational closure of substances is that this closure renders unilateral control of
one substance by another substance impossible. As Luhmann puts it, An important structural consequence that inevitably results
from the construction of self-referential systems deserves particular mention. This is abandoning the idea of unilateral control. There
may be hierarchies, asymmetries, or differences in influence, but no part of the system can control others without itself being
subject to control. Under such circumstances it is possible [...] that any control must be exercised in anticipation of counter-
each
subsystem of a system is itself founded on an operationally closed, self-referential
system/environment distinction, one subsystem of the social system cannot control
another subsystem of the social system. For example, the political subsystem
cannot control the economic subsystem because each subsystem relates to its own
environment in its own unique way as a function of its peculiar organization. The economic subsystem of
control.184 In this context, Luhmann is speaking of subsystems of a system and how they relate to one another. Because
the social system, for example, encounters perturbations from the political subsystem of the social system in terms of economics.
What holds for subsystems within a larger system holds equally and even more so
for relations between different systems or substances. Each substance interacts
with other substances in terms of its own peculiar organization. As a consequence,
there can be no unilateral transfer of actions from one system to another system ,
such that the content or nature of the initiating system or substance's action is
maintained as identical. As we will see in the next chapter, this requires us to
rethink relations of constraint between substances in what Timothy Morton has
called meshes or networks of substances.
Environment
Their Environmental Rhetoric that forecloses the ability to
deconstruct nature and Perpetuates the Ecological culture that
sets nature as a pristine objects outside of human interaction
Reality Writing
From wilderness wrting to apocalypticism, environmental discourse wants to go
beyond intellectuality to a realm of instantly compelling facts. Empiricism is the
name of the thinking that tries to be nothinking. 157 Empiricism assumes that facts
speak for themselves, that things come with a built-in bar code of truthfulness.
Some satisfying, almost physical beep will guarantee that we are on the right track.
This beep is the clicking sound of Dr. johnson's boot kicking the stone in refutation
of Berkeley's idealism ( " I refute it thus " }.158 There is something of this factical
brutalism in environmental rhetoric. A clicking sound is not a refutation. This
dangerous misapprehension about the relationship between mind and world has
recently met with attention from within neo-Kantian philosophy.159 The " Myth of
the Given" is that the space of factical things can put a stop to thinking, while it is
evident that "there must be a standing willingness to refashion concepts and
conceptions [of things outside thought] if this is what reflection demands." 160 The
beep or click of empirical immediacy has a yearning quality, a feel of "if only." Since
the click is only a click, the impression of a reverberation, it suffers from the poetics
of ambience, which remains inconsistent with the goal of ecomimesis . The
aggression of kicking a stone philosophically carries within it its own impotence. It is
the same with environmental culture, which has inherited the discourse of
sentimental empiricism from the proto-ecological language of the eighteenth
century, such as vegetarianism. The more in-your-face the aesthetic gesture gets,
the more distant it becomes . Nature writing is Romantic insofar as it tries to "get
back to nature," and knows that this possibility is forever excl uded. "As soon as the
artifact wants to prompt the illusion of the natural, it founders." 161 Adorno puts it
well, though in fact his claim that nature poetry is now anachronistic needs
strengthening. It was always anachronistic: To day immediacy of aesthetic
comportment is exclusively an immediate relationship to the universally mediated.
Th at today any walk in the wo ods, unless ela borate plans have been made to seek
out the most remote forests, is accompanied by the sound of jet engines overhead
not only destroys the actuality of nature as, for instance, an obj ect of poetic
celebration. It affects the mimetic imp ulse. Nature poetry is anachronistic not only
as a subject: Its tr uth content has vanished. This may help clarify the anorganic
aspect of Beckett's as well as Celan's poetry. It yearns neither for na ture nor for
industry; it is precisely the integration of the latter that leads to po etization, which
was already a dimension of impressionism, and contributes its part to making peace
with an unpeaceful world. Art, as an anticipatory form of reason, is no longer able-if
it ever was-to embody pristine nature or the industry that has scorched it; the
impossibility of both is probably the hidden law of aesthetic nonrepresentationalism.
The images of the postindustrial world are those of a corpse; they wa nt to avert
atomic war by banning it, just as forty years ago surrealism sought to save Paris
through the image of cows grazing in the streets, the same cows after which the
people of bombed-out Berlin rebaptized Kurfiirstenda111111 as Kuda111111 . 1 62
The ambient sound of jet engines "destroys the actuality of nature as ... an object of
poetic celebration." Nature writing often excludes this negative ambience. When it
does include it, it distinguishes it from the pos itive ambient of rustling trees or
quiet ripples on a lake. It goes without saying that modernity is full of these sounds ,
both large and small. Jack Gladney becomes obsessed with the crackling of plastic
inhis refrigerator, in Don DeLillo's appropriately named Wh ite Noise.16 3 Once
heard, never forgotten. The "bad " ambience ha unts the "good " one. Even a vast
mountain forest shrinks in the memory of the cars and roads we used to reach it. If
em beddedness in the world is a good in itself, what if this world were, in the words
of the Devil in Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's film Bedazzled, full of "Wimpy Burgers
... concrete runways, motorways, aircraft ... plastic flowers ... supersonic bangs " ?
164 Nature writing tries to be "immediate "-to do without the processes of language
and the artful construction of illusions. It wants to maintain the impre ssion of
directne ss. But this can only be a supreme illusion, ironically, in a world in which
one can find Coke cans in Antarctica. The immediacy that nature writing values is
itself as reified as a Coke can. Nature writing partly militates against ecology rather
than for it. By setting up nature as an object "over there "-a pristine wilderness
beyond all trace of human contact-it re-establishes the very separation it seeks to
abolish. We could address this problem by considering the role of subj ectivity in
nature writing. What kinds of subj ect position does nature writing evoke ? Instead
of looking at the trees, look at the person who looks at the trees. In sitcoms, canned
laughter relieves the audience of the obligation of laughing . Nature writing relieves
us of the obligation to encounter nonidentity, sometimes called "nature," the "morethan-human," the "nonh um an." Like a daytime chat show, its mode is one of
avoidance rather than escapism. The aesthetic, artful, contrived qu ality of writing is
downplayed. Nature writing seems to be a sheer rendering of the real, just as
"reality TV" appears to be real (and we all know very well that it is not). Nature
writing is a kind of "reality writing " (and we all know very well that it is not). There
is something similar to this in Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Art "relieves" us of the
"power of sensuousness " by remaining within a sensuous realm: professional
grievers at funerals relieve one of one's inner state. Hegel carries on by criticizing
an inj unction to merge with nature: "we may often hear those favourite phrases
about man's duty being to remain in oneness with nature, but such oneness in
abstraction is simply and solely coarseness." 165The daytime chat show is designed
for the person sitting at home. Does nature writing have a similar target? Even
when someone appears on a chat show, there is a certain pretense involved.
Someone sitting on a sofa on the other side of the television greets people, who
also come and sit on the sofa for a while. Distancing, the "couch potato " syndrome,
appears to be on both sides of the television screen. The same goes for nature
writing. The narrator struggles within nature, and yet all the while views him- or
herself from a contemplative distance. Heidegger was not actually a peasant living
in the Black Forest. A white male nature writer in the wilderness may be "going
native" to some extent, but he is also usefully distancing this wilderness, even from
himself, even in his own act of narration.
Ecocriticism on the level of ecomines is key to challenge aesthetical difference

society has created for nature.
Morton 7( Timothy, Prof of Englisj @ Rive. Ecology without nature,, Its a book
find it , 134-135)
All this is in the name of noticing that we are subj ect to air pollution, which is the
subj ect of the chapter in which this piece of ecomimesis appears: parturient
montes, nascitur ridiculus muse The less logically convincing ecomimesis is, the
more convincing it is aesthetically: there is no reason for this proliferation of
sentences about scat. But nature as totality is paradoxically a " decentered," "
organic," "not-all " set that is made of contingent, nontotalizable parts. The list of
contingent perceptions, we must recall, is for someone. " As I write " : the narrator
becomes an Aeolian harp, a conduit. The narrator is plugged directly into the world,
receiving its reality like paper receiving ink: ecorhapsody. This condition is more like
being a worker in a factory (or a machine in one ) than it is like being an artisan or a
boss. The worker receives an unfinished, fragmentary product and does what he or
she can to complete it. Given the division of labor, he or she is a temporary stage in
the onward flow of commodity parts and a necessary tool in the m achine that
creates value. Abram, however, also marshals the realm of leisure. The reference
point is the Romantic consumerist. The sense of freedom and autonomy marked by
the birth of the consumerist in the Romantic period works even better with trees
than with commodities. They are the objective correlative of inutility, of free time,
which has a utopian edge . The narrator luxuriates in the ability to look up from
one's work, as the gesture of describing what's outside and around " as I write "
enacts. The breathless excitement of the passage, taken as an extended metaphor
for a statement like "I've got legs! I can see ! " is in direct proportion to the
alienation and commodification that gave rise to such a Romantic outpouring in the
first place. Only a very privileged person would make such a big deal out of having
eyes and ears, of being a ble to walk, read, write. There are hints that nature is best
accessed by the able-bodied, or at least, those with sharp, undistracted organs of
perception. The ultimate riposte to Heidegger in the Black Forest is that no selfrespecting peasant would talk like that. 1 8? To be ignorant is one thing; to be selfstupefying is quite another: "The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only
here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the
peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all,
or is even aware of them. She stands and walks in them. That is how shoes actually
serve." 1 88 Heidegger himself surpasses Abram, in his positing of place as
question, as in question. Althoughthe way he puts it, as we shall see, resem bles
entranced wondering rather than biting critique, Abram provides mere positivity, a
series of exclamations as brittle as they are hyperbolic. In the case of the Iraq War,
the em bedded reporter is really a version of the couch potato conveniently lodged
inside the television screen. In Abram the narrator establishes the appropriate
aesthetic distance for the reader, even in the midst, and even in the very inscription
of, intense, close-up detail. Ecomimesis aims to rupture the aesthetic distance, to
break down the subject-obj ect dualism, to convince us that we belong to this world.
But the end result is to reinforce the aesthetic distance, the very dimension in which
the subject-object dualism persists. Since de-distancing has been reified, distance
returns even more strongly, in surround-sound, with panoramic intensity. The
strange, interactive passivity (Zizek calls it " interpassivity" ) is reminiscent of what
Freud says about masochism. Masochism is the looping of enjoyment through an
other. An environment is being evoked, j ust as, for Freud, the masochistic fantasy is
that " a child is being beaten."189 Ecomimesis works very hard at immersing the
subj ect in the object, only to sit back and contemplate its handiwork. It reproduces
with a vengeance the Cartesian opposition between res cogitans and res extensa.
This very dualism is the bugbear of eco-phenomenological rhapsody, 1 90 including
its locus classicus, Heidegger's description of the " aroundnes s " of being in the
world (Umwelt). 1 91 Phenon:enology claims to surpass Descartes, if only
rhetorically, in evoking a world or an intersubjective field. But in many ways it offers
a sense of what Cartesianism "feels like." It thus falls into the dilemma of Pascal
and, later, of phenomenology in general. This is a stupendous problem for
environmental thinking and art, whether it is kitsch or avant-garde. In the next
chapter we will delve more deeply into this strange turn of events. It turns out that
D escartes, of all people, does ecomimesis.
Epistemology
In our world there is distrust of the category of objects,
ontology, and realism because the world is seen as
epistemology over ontology which ignores the possibility of
objects to change the political sphere.
Our historical moment is characterized by a general distrust, even disdain, for the
category of objects, ontology, and above all any variant of realism. Moreover, it is
characterized by a primacy of epistemology over ontology. While it is indeed true that
Heidegger, in Being and Time, attempted to resurrect ontology, this only took place through a profound
Ontology would no longer be the investigation

of being qua being in all its variety and diversity regardless of whether humans
exist, but rather would instead become an interrogation of Dasein's or human
being's access to being. Ontology would become an investigation of being-forDasein, rather than an investigation of being as such. In conjunction with this
transformation of ontology from an investigation of being as such into an
investigation of being-for-humans, we have also everywhere witnessed a push to
dissolve objects or primary substances in the acid of experience, intentionality,
power, language, normativity, signs, events, relations, or processes . To defend the
existence of objects is, within the framework of this line of thought, the height of
navet for objects are held to be nothing more than surface-effects of something
more fundamental such as the signifier, signs, power or activities of the mind. With
transformation of the very meaning of ontology.8
Hume, for example, it is argued that objects are really nothing more than bundles of impressions or sensations
linked together by associations and habits in the mind.
Here there is no deeper fact of objects

existing beyond these impressions and habits. Likewise, Lacan will tell us that the universe is the
flower of rhetoric9, treating the beings that populate the world as an effect of the signifier.
Feminism
The quest for emancipating bodies as subjects is caught up in
the pitfalls of subjectivity to be subject is to always already
be subjected to power. We have to radically re-orient our
ontological location toward the being of objects themselves: a
thing like you and me.
Steyerl in 10.
Hito Steyerl, PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; Hito teaches
at the University of the Arts in Berlin; she is an object-oriented artist, filmmaker,
and writer.A Thing Like You and Me, April 2010. E-Flux Journal #15 04/2010.
(http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-thing-like-you-and-me/)
In 1977, the short decade of the New Left violently comes to an end. Militant groups
such as the Red Army Faction have descended into political sectarianism. Gratuitous
violence, macho posing, pithy slogans, and an embarrassing cult of personality have
come to dominate the scene. Yet it is not 1977 that sees the myth of the leftist hero
come crumbling down. The figure has on the contrary already lost all credibility,
beyond rehabilitationeven if this will only become clear much later. In 1977, the
punk band The Stranglers delivers a crystal clear analysis of the situation by stating
the obvious: heroism is over. Trotsky, Lenin, and Shakespeare are dead. In 1977, as
leftists flock to the funerals of RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and
Jan Carl Raspe, The Stranglers album cover delivers its own giant wreath of red
carnations and declares: NO MORE HEROES. Any more. 2. But, also in 1977, David
Bowie releases his single Heroes. He sings about a new brand of hero, just in time
for the neoliberal revolution. The hero is deadlong live the hero! Yet Bowies hero
is no longer a subject, but an object: a thing, an image, a splendid fetisha
commodity soaked with desire, resurrected from beyond the squalor of its own
demise. Just look at a 1977 video of the song to see why: the clip shows Bowie
singing to himself from three simultaneous angles, with layering techniques tripling
his image; not only has Bowies hero been cloned, he has above all become an
image that can be reproduced, multiplied, and copied, a riff that travels effortlessly
through commercials for almost anything, a fetish that packages Bowies glamorous
and unfazed postgender look as product.1 Bowies hero is no longer a larger-thanlife human being carrying out exemplary and sensational exploits, and he is not
even an icon, but a shiny product endowed with posthuman beauty: an image and
nothing but an image.2 This heros immortality no longer originates in the strength
to survive all possible ordeals, but from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and
reincarnated. Destruction will alter its form and appearance, yet its substance
will be untouched. The immortality of the thing is its finitude, not its eternity. 3.
What happens to identification at this point? Who can we identify with? Of course,
identification is always with an image. But ask anybody whether theyd actually like
to be a JPEG file. And this is precisely my point: if identification is to go anywhere, it
has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as
representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead
becomes participation.3 I will come back to this point later. But first of all: why
should anybody want to become this thingan objectin the first place? Elisabeth
Lebovici once made this clear to me in a brilliant remark.4 Traditionally,
emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject.
Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or
of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy,
sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad. But, as we
all know, being a subject can be tricky. The subject is always already subjected.
Though the position of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather
one of being subjected to power relations. Nevertheless, generations of feminists
including myselfhave strived to get rid of patriarchal objectification in order to
become subjects. The feminist movement, until quite recently (and for a number of
reasons), worked towards claiming autonomy and full subjecthood. But as the
struggle to become a subject became mired in its own contradictions, a different
possibility emerged. How about siding with the object for a change? Why not affirm
it? Why not be a thing? An object without a subject? A thing among other
things? A thing that feels, as Mario Perniola seductively phrased it: To give
oneself as a thing that feels and to take a thing that feels is the new experience that
asserts itself today on contemporary feeling, a radical and extreme experience that
has its cornerstone in the encounter between philosophy and sexuality . . . It would
seem that things and the senses are no longer in conflict with one another but have
struck an alliance thanks to which the most detached abstraction and the most
unrestrained excitement are almost inseparable and are often indistinguishable.5 A
desire to become this thingin this case an imageis the upshot of the struggle
over representation. Senses and things, abstraction and excitement, speculation
and power, desire and matter actually converge within images. The struggle over
representation, however, was based on a sharp split between these levels: here
thingthere image. Here Ithere it. Here subjectthere object. The senses here
dumb matter over there. Slightly paranoid assumptions concerning authenticity
came into the equation as well. Did the public imageof women or other groups, for
exampleactually correspond to reality? Was it stereotyped? Misrepresented? Thus
one got tangled in a whole web of presuppositions, the most problematic of which
being, of course, that an authentic image exists in the first place. A campaign
was thus unleashed to find a more accurate form of representation, but without
questioning its own, quite realist, paradigm. But what if the truth is neither in the
represented nor in the representation? What if the truth is in its material
configuration? What if the medium is really a message? Or actuallyin its
corporate media versiona barrage of commodified intensities? To participate in an
imagerather than merely identify with itcould perhaps abolish this relation. This
would mean participating in the material of the image as well as in the desires and
forces it accumulates. How about acknowledging that this image is not some
ideological misconception, but a thing simultaneously couched in affect and
availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by our wishes and
fearsa perfect embodiment of its own conditions of existence? As such, the image
isto use yet another phrase of Walter Benjaminswithout expression.6 It doesnt
represent reality. It is a fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like any
othera thing like you and me. This shift in perspective has far-reaching
consequences. There might still be an internal and inaccessible trauma that
constitutes subjectivity. But trauma is also the contemporary opium of the
massesan apparently private property that simultaneously invites and resists
foreclosure. And the economy of this trauma constitutes the remnant of the
independent subject. But then if we are to acknowledge that subjectivity is
no longer a privileged site for emancipation, we might as well just face it
and get on with it.
Our flat ontology liberates us as objects-in-ourselves, free

from the enslavement as commodity and abject being. Objects
encapsulate the compression of social forces that must be
released to be even understood as organizing history in the
first place.
Steyerl in 10.
Hito Steyerl, PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; Hito teaches
at the University of the Arts in Berlin; she is an object-oriented artist, filmmaker,
and writer.A Thing Like You and Me, April 2010. E-Flux Journal #15 04/2010.
(http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-thing-like-you-and-me/)
So, whats the point of becoming a thing or an image? Why should one accept
alienation, bruises, and objectification? In writing about the surrealists, Walter
Benjamin emphasizes the liberating force within things.9 In the commodity fetish,
material drives intersect with affect and desire, and Benjamin fantasizes about
igniting these compressed forces, to awaken the slumbering collective from
the dream-filled sleep of capitalist production to tap into these forces.10 He
also thinks that things could speak to one another through these forces.11
Benjamins idea of participationa partly subversive take on early twentiethcentury primitivismclaims that it is possible to join in this symphony of matter. For
him, modest and even abject objects are hieroglyphs in whose dark prism social
relations lay congealed and in fragments. They are understood as nodes, in which
the tensions of a historical moment materialize in a flash of awareness or twist
grotesquely into the commodity fetish. In this perspective, a thing is never just an
object, but a fossil in which a constellation of forces are petrified. Things are never
just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces,
hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged. While this opinion borders on
magical thought, according to which things are invested with supernatural powers,
it is also a classical materialist take. Because the commodity, too, is understood not
as a simple object, but a condensation of social forces.12 From a slightly different
perspective, members of the Soviet avant-garde also tried to develop alternative

relations to things. In his text Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing, Boris
Arvatov claims that the object should be liberated from the enslavement of
its status as capitalist commodity.13 Things should no longer remain passive,
uncreative, and dead, but should be free to participate actively in the
transformation of everyday reality.14 By imagining an object that is differently
animated from the commodity fetish . . . Arvatov attempts to return a kind of social
agency to the fetish.15 In a similar vein, Aleksandr Rodchenko calls on things to
become comrades and equals. By releasing the energy stored in them, things
become coworkers, potentially friends, even lovers.16 Where images are
concerned, this potential agency has already been explored to some extent.17 To
participate in the image as thing means to participate in its potential agencyan
agency that is not necessarily beneficial, as it can be used for every imaginable
purpose. It is vigorous and sometimes even viral. And it will never be full and
glorious, as images are bruised and damaged, just as everything else within history.
History, as Benjamin told us, is a pile of rubble. Only we are not staring at it any
longer from the point of view of Benjamins shell-shocked angel. We are not the
angel. We are the rubble. We are this pile of scrap. Still from Bruce LaBruce,
Raspberry Reich, 2004. 5. The revolution is my boyfriend! Bruce LaBruce,
Raspberry Reich We have unexpectedly arrived at quite an interesting idea of the
object and objectivity. Activating the thing means perhaps to create an objective
not as a fact, but as the task of unfreezing the forces congealed within the trash of
history. Objectivity thus becomes a lens, one that recreates us as things mutually
acting upon one another. From this objective perspective, the idea of
emancipation opens up somewhat differently. Bruce LaBruces queer porn film
Raspberry Reich shows us how by presenting a completely different view on 1977.
In it, the former heroes of the Red Army Faction have been reincarnated as gay porn
actors who enjoy being each others playthings. They masturbate on pixelated
photocopied wall-size images of Baader and Che. But the point is not to be found in
the gayness or pornness of the film, and certainly not in its so-called
transgressivity. The point is that the actors do not identify with heroes, but rip
their images. They become bruised images: sixth-generation copies of dodgy leftist
pinups. This bunch looks much worse than David Bowie, but is much more desirable
for it. Because they love the pixel, not the hero. The hero is dead. Long live the
thing.
General Links
The 1AC's way of thinking distorts society by focusing on
norms, ideologies, and texts while excluding the idea that
objects are the entities that hold it all together.
Bryant 12 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/hominidecology/)
The problem is that this way of proceeding entirely distorts our understanding of
society. We speak as if the glue that holds people together were only beliefs,
ideologies, norms, texts, language, signs, etc. Yet as Latour argues in texts like Pandoras Hope,
societies wouldnt hold together for a single moment were it just these things that
held them together. Groups are also held together (and separated) by rivers,
mountains, various plants and animals (cf. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel), roads,
telephone lines, waste and sewage systems, mediums of communication, microbes,
parks, oceans, climate regularities, etc. The problem with the modernist framework
is that it renders these things largely invisible, and also renders the organizing and
separating power or gravity they exercise invisible. For example, you seldom hear an
analysis in the social sciences but especially in the humanities of how the layout of
roads alone in a particular city bring certain people together and keeps certain
people elsewhere. Instead, those working in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School (and primarily
Horkheimer and Adorno), post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Baudrillard), structuralism (Althusser, Levi-
tend to treat the social world as merely a text to be

deciphered and power as residing in texts alone. Althusserians can insist that ideologies are
material, yet strangely they only ever seem to focus on ideologies imbedded in
speech, laws, texts, ignoring the other material things generally nonhuman that
exert power and that organize lives in particular ways.
Strauss), and psychoanalysis (Zizek),
Heidegger
Heideggers conception of place locks in a static notion of Being
and and Reifies Technological thought
Instead of running away from Heidegger, left scholarship should encounter him all
the more rigorously in seeking to demystify place, in the name of a politics and
poetics of place . We must put the idea of place into question; hence an ecological
criticism that resists the idea that there is a solid metaphysical bedrock (Nature or
Life, for instance ) beneath which thinking cannot or should not delve. In the rush to
embrace an expanded view, the plangent, intense rhetoric of localism, the form of
ecological thinking that seems most opposed to glo balization and most resistant to
modern and postmodern decenterings and deconstructions, must not be allowed to
fall into the hands of reactionaries. Ins tead, the central fixations upon which
localism bases its claims must be examined. A left ecology must "get" even further
"into " place than bioregionalism and other Romantic 10calisms.81 Only then can
progressive ecocriticism establish a firm basis for exploring environmental justice
issues such as environmental racism, co lonialism, and imperialism. This basis is a
strong theoretical approach. If we restrict our examination to the citation of
ecological "content"-listing what is included and excluded in the thematics of the
(literary) text-we hand over aesthetic form, the aesthetic dimension and even
theory itself, to the reactionary wing of ecological criticism. The aesthetic, and in a
wider sense perception, must form part of the foundation of a thoroughly
transnational ecological criticism. If we do not undertake their task, virulent codings
of place will keep rearing their ugly heads. Place need not be a thing. It is with the
idea of thing that Heidegger's meditation on the work of art as a special place
begins. Heidegger tries to de-reify the idea of the thing. The work of art tells us
something about the nature of the thing. It is an opening, a "place " where
phenomena become available to us; a sense of the "thingliness" of things covered
over or denied in the notion of the thing as formed matter (ahumble things gather
together the entire environment, the social and natural place, of the peasant
woman. Heidegger's description opens the shoes to the "earth " (the things that are
not worked on by or with human hands), and to the "world" (the historical/cultural
dimension in which the shoes are used and gain significance). Similarly, the Greek
temple, a product of the "world " of Greek cultural/historical proj ects, opens the
space it inhabits such that we perceive the " earth," the stoniness of the stone, the "
breadth" of the sky.82 In another essay, it is the bridge that makes possible the
riverbank as a specific place.s3 Poetry is place, for Heidegger. In some deep sense,
it actually saves the earthsets it "free into its own presencing." s4 Heidegger turns
the shoes inside out to reveal the environment in which they come to exist. But
why, anachronism aside, did he choose a dirty pair of peasant shoes rather than,
say, something like a box-fresh pair of sneakers made in a sweatshop and worn in
the projects ? The environmentalness of the shoes is a function of modern capitalist
society despite Heidegger's best efforts to disguise this fact2. There is an
ideological flavor to the substance of Heidegger's description. It is a form of

Romanticism: countering the displacements of modernity with the politics and
poetics of place. The gesture is always aware of its futility. It is a cry of the heart in a
heartless world, a declaration that if we j ust think hard enough, the poisoned rain
of modern life will come to a halt. Meyer Shapiro's argument that these are a city
dweller's shoes undermines the lyrical heft of the passage, which does appear tied
to a heavy investment in the primitive and the feudal. But even on Heidegger's own
terms, the shoes are distinctly modern, in their very primitivism.85 derivation,
claims Heidegger, from the status of eq uipment), or the thing as a perceptual
manifold of substance and accidence. Heidegger's reading of the peas ant shoes
poetically renders the way in which these Romantic environmentalism is a flavor of
modern consumerist ideology. It is thoroughly urban, even when it is born in the
countryside. The poet who told us how to wander lonely as a cloud also told us for
the first time what it felt like to be lonely in a crowd. Wordsworth's descriptions of
London are among the most " environmental" of his entire oeuvre.86 So Heidegger
tries to re-establish the idea of place. He goes so far as to state that we could not
have space without place: the sureness of place enables us to glimpse the openness
of space itself.S? Heidegger finds an answer to the question of place . This is ironic,
since his idea of place is one of the most open and seemingly nonreified ones we
could imagine. Indeed, for Heidegger, place is the very opposite of closing or
closure. Place is the aperture of Being.ss Heidegger, however, closes the very idea
of openness. Place becomes a component of fascist ideology. The shoes are not
randomly chosen. Heidegger could have used a pho- Imagining Ecology without
Nature . 1 73 tograph of a dam, but the peasant shoes are the ideological fantasy
obj ect of a certain regressive strain in nationalism. Urban modernity and
postmodernity are already included even in pastoral/idyllic evocations of place, both
inside and outside the artwork. Edward Thomas 's "Adlestrop," which allows us to
reflect upon the ambient sounds of the English countryside, is enabled by a train j
ourney. When the " express train " stops " unwontedly" at the eponymous station,
when, in other words, the "world " of the train ( in Heidegger's language ) is
interrupted, the passengers are able to sense the earth. The express train
necessarily traverses the space between cities. Notice the first wrinkle in the
Heideggerian view. The earth actually interrupts the world-Heidegger's term is " j
ut"-so that the more world we have, the more earth j uts through; thus giving rise to
the problem of the ambiguous role of technology. S9 Cities are present in the
negative, even in this little Edwardian poem about an overlooked place. Art
simultaneously opens up the earth and carves out a world in that earth. Heidegger
tends secretly to side with technology rather than Being, despite his stated
intentions. In fact, we could parody his view by declaring the obvious truth that the
environment (earth) has become more present precisely because humans have
been carving it up and destroying it so effectively. What remains of earth, on this
view, is really a ghostly resonance in the artwork itself. Perhaps all the
environmental art being produced both in high art and in kitsch (from experimental
noise music to Debussy for relaxation), is actually a symptom of the loss of the
existing environment as noncultural, nonhistorical earth. Heidegger, the philosopher
engrossed in deep ecological assaults on modern times, turns out to work for the
other side. As Avital Ronell brilliantly demonstrated, the Heideggerian call of
conscience, that which reminds us of our earthbound mission, is imagined as an alltootechnological telephone call.90
Our Alternative is Dark Ecology Only a challenge of our aesthetic conception of
nature can rupture our understanding of the Natural world as inherently separate
to our world.
Morton 7 ( Timothy, Prof of Englisj @ Rive. Ecology without nature, , Its a book
find it , 194-196)
Ecocritique must carefully distinguish the necessity of helping the other(s) fulfill
their drive from the reactionary "right to life " and also from Leopold's conservative
" land ethic" : "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and
beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." lsl Integrity,
sta bility, and beauty are all aesthetic criteria. The presence of " beauty" in the trio
only serves to divert attention from the organicism of integrity and stability.
Leopold's " community" hesitates between an image of a group of conscious beings
and an animated version of ambience. Essays such as " Thinking Like a Mountain "
prepare for it.1S2 Leopold was well aware that he was constrained to argue for
environmentalism in aesthetic terms.1S3 His argument is precisely Kantian: " The
outstanding characteristic of perception is that it entails no consumption and no
dilution of any resource." 154 This perception of wild nature is therefore
consumerism without consumption, the pure form of consumerism. In the Romantic
period, art already interrogated the idea of organicism that came close to a politics
of the drive, as an ultimate form of ecological politics. Frankenstein is an ecological
novel precisely not because it compels us to care for a preexisting notion of nature,
but because it questions the very idea of nature. Far from standing in for irreducible
particularity-and hence ironically generalizing that very particularity-the creature
represents alienated generality. In the sense that his existence subtends our
personhood, he figures forth an essentialist view of nature. But insofar as this
nature is abj ect and its stitches are showing, this " essence " includes arbitrariness
and supplementarity. The creature is made out of any body, anybody. Frankenstein's
creature is not even an other because he cannot return our gaze or act as blank
screen. He is a horrific abject that speaks beautiful Enlightenment prose, a piece of
butcher's meat with blinking eyes. This artificial object bleeds and speaks
plangently of vegetarianism and compassion, while committing murders and
blaming them on his environment-people. As Franco Moretti and Chris Baldick have
argued, throughout the nineteenth century the creature was viewed as the workingclass, creation of the bourgeoisie. He is also an object of homophobic fascination:
Frankenstein's pursuit of him indicates a burning desire.lss Criticism has, in addition,
found in the creature the inconsistent object of racist fantasy.l s6 The creature
wants precisely not t o be left alone, like a wilderness, but to have someone stay
true to his own desire, to build him a mate so he can leave in peace, reproducing his
drive. Does he point the way toward a posthuman ecology, or toward a humanity to
come ? I often think that the trouble with posthumanism is that we have not yet
achieved humanity, and that humanity and posthumanity have no time for what
Derrida calls the animal that therefore I am. Caring for the creature would
acknowledge the monstrosity at the heart of the idea of nature. It would involve a
fetishist ethics-in the normative view, a kind of decadence-that would deform the
eroticized objectification (what we call "nature :' ) that is the mode of ecologically
destructive enjoyment. This is what Adorno sees as the dissolution of the
destructive idea of "progress " by paradoxically decadent ethical acts, giving the
example of extreme forms of justice in animal rights. There is beauty in the
beautiful soul: " The ideal of complete, liferenouncing distance from purpose, even if
narrow-minded and willfully obstinate, [is] the reverse image of the false
purposiveness of industry, in which everything is for something else."ls7
Frankenstein is a bout how social conditions are not yet established for such "
twisted " ethical forms to take place. Frankenstein's creature is the distorted,
ambient category of the environment pulled around to the " front" of the reader's
view, the " answer of the real" whose very form embodies a terrible split: the horrific
ugliness of alienated social cruelty, and the painful eloquence of enlightened
reflection. There would be no need for beautiful souls without such ugly objects. If a
poisoned rainforest could speak, it would sound like Frankenstein's creature.
Ecocritique must attend to such auguries of innocence. The augury of Frankenstein
is the reverse of deep ecology. The task becomes to love the disgusting, inert, and
meaningless. Ecological politics must constantly and ruthlessly reframe our view of
the ecological: what was " outside" yesterday will be " inside " today. We identify
with the monstrous thing. We ourselves are "tackily" made of bits and pieces of
stuff. The most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their artificiality, rather
than seeking to prove their naturalness and authenticity. Deep ecology ironically
does not respect the natural world as actual contingent beings, but as standing in
for an idea of the natural. Deep ecology goes to extremes on this point, insisting
that humans are a viral supplement to an organic whole. Dark ecology, by contrast,
is a perverse, melancholy ethics that refuses to digest the obj ect into an ideal form.
In a brilliantly contorted sentence, a miniature masterpiece of dialectics, Adorno
describes genuine progress: "Progress means: humanity emerges from its
spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by
becoming aware of its own indigeno usness to nature and by halting the mastery
over nature through which nature continues its mastery." 1 5R In its refusal to
produce an idea of nature as a way of being, dark ecology is one of the aspects of
this "halting," generating not the relaxing ambient sounds of ecomimesis, but the
screeching of the emergency brake. Dark ecology, if it were ever to have been
practiced, would have enjoined us to love the replicant as replicant and not as
potential full subject: appreciating what in us is most obj ectified, the "thousand
thousand slimy things." This is the truly ecological-ethical act. In this respect, dark
ecology diverges from those Romanticisms that follow a Hegelian dialectic, the story
of the reconciliation of the self to the other, who turns out to be the self in
disguise.159 It gets over the dilemma of the beautiful soul, not by turning the other
into the self, but perversely, by leaving things the way they are. In order to be itself,
forgiveness would not expect the frog to turn into a prince as soon as we kissed it.
To forgive, then, would be a fundamentally ecological act, an act that redefined
ecology in excess of all its established concepts, an act of radically being-with the
other. And being-here, being literally on this earth (D a-sein), would entail a need for
forgiveness, an equally radical assumption that whatever is there is our

responsibility, and ultimately, "our fault." 16o Loving the thing as thing, not as a
person in disguise, assumes two forms. First, we have the ethical choice as perverse
leap: choosing to identify with the replicant, on condition that we pres erve the
artificiality of the other and do not try to naturalize or collapse otherness. Second,
we have the spontaneous continuity of fascination in the claustrophobic
environment: "I blessed [the monstrous other] unaware " (Coleridge, The Ancient
Mariner 4.285). What could be more claustrophobic than a re alm, however vast,
from which there is no exit from your state of mind? This is the ocean in The Ancient
Mariner, part 4. Surely this is where we are now-however huge the earth is, its
toxicity makes it very claustrophobic. As long as there really is no exit and we can't
achieve a sadistic/aesthetic distance, the pho bic fascination turns into kindness,
the continuous attention that awareness keeps placing on the object. These two
moments are the ethical inverse of environmental art. Putting a frame around
nothing (minimalism) corresponds to the second form of ethical act, since we're just
"letting whatever occur in .4the fr am e"-and the frame becomes cl austrophobic
precisely because what is outside it is now included. Exhibiting a fr ameless
formless thing corresponds to -the first ethical choice . We are compelled to identify
with the object, and can't quite maintain the appropriate aestheticizing distance .
Dark ecology holds open the space of what used to be called the aesthetic, until
something better comes along. Ironically, what is most problematic about
ecomimesis-the idiotic "extension" of writing going on and on-is in this respect its
saving grace, an inconsistency that ena bles us to take it out of the frame called
Nature . This inconsistency with its ideological content is why it can be orientalist, or
artificial, as well as "natural."
For an AFF Modern economic structures have drastically affected the environment.
Yet they have had an equally damaging effect on thinking itself. I dont mean that
before now we thought ecologically and properly. The ecological thought in its full
richness and depth was unavailable to nonmodern humans. Even now, on the brink
over the brink, indeed of climate catastrophe, were only just capable of
glimpsing its magnitude and profundity. The modern age compels us to think big, in
the words of the first chapter. Any thinking that avoids this totality is part of the
problem. So we have to face it. Something about modern life has prevented us from
thinking totality as big as we could. Now we cant help but think it. Totality looms
like a giant skyscraper shadow into the flimsiest thought 5 about, say, todays
weather. We may need to think bigger than totality itself, if totality means
something closed, something we can be sure of, something that remains the same.
It might be harder to imagine four and a half billion years than abstract eternity. It
might be harder to imagine evolution than to imagine abstract infinity. Its a little
humiliating. This concrete infinity directly confronts us in the actuality of life on
Earth. Facing it is one of the profound tasks to which the ecological thought
summons us. Weve gotten it wrong so farthats the truth of climate disruption
and mass extinction. I dont advocate a return to premodern thinking. The
ecological thought is modern. The paradox is that the modern eralets say it
began around the late eighteenth centuryimpeded its own access to the
ecological thought, even though the ecological thought will have been one of its
lasting legacies. As far as ecology goes, modernity spent the last two and a half
centuries tilting at windmills. The ghost of Nature, a brand new entity dressed up
like a relic from a past age, haunted the modernity in which it was born. 11 This
ghostly Nature inhibited the growth of the ecological thought. Only now, when
contemporary capitalism and consumerism cover the entire Earth and reach deeply
into its life forms, is it possible, ironically and at last, to let go of this nonexistent
ghost. Exorcise is good for you, and human beings are past the point at which
Nature is a help. Our continued survival, and therefore the survival of the planet
were now dominating beyond all doubt, depends on our thinking past Nature.
Modern thinkers had taken it for granted that the ghost of Nature, rattling its chains,
would remind them of a time without industry, a time without technology, as if we
had never used flint or wheat. But in looking at the ghost of Nature, modern humans
were looking in a mirror. In Nature, they saw the reflected, inverted image of their
own age and the grass is always greener on the other side. Nature was always
over yonder, alien and alienated. 12 Just like a reflection, we can never actually
reach it and touch it and belong to it. Nature was an ideal image, a self-contained
form suspended afar, shimmering and naked behind glass like an expensive
painting. In the idea of pristine wilderness, we can make out the mirror image of
private property: Keep off the Grass, Do Not Touch, Not for Sale. Nature was a
special kind of private property, without an 6 owner, exhibited in a specially
constructed art gallery. The gallery was Nature itself, revealed through visual
technology in the eighteenth century as picturesquelooking like a picture. 13
The new and improved version is art without an object, just an aura: the glow of
value. 14 Nature isnt what it claims to be. While were on the subject of Nature and
new and improved upgrades, this book makes a rigorous distinction between
environmentalism and ecology. By the time you finish, you may feel that there are
good reasons for advocating not just ecology without nature but also ecology
without environmentalism.
In Lakewood, Colorado, residents objected to the construction of a solar array in a

park in 2008, because it didnt look natural. 24 Objections to wind farms are
similarmade not because of the risk to birds but because they spoil the view. A
because residents complained that their view would be destroyed. This is truly a
case of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology and a good argument for why
ecology must be without Nature. Why is a wind turbine less beautiful than an oil
pipe? Why does it spoil the view any more than pipes and roads? You could see
turbines as environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind; some environmental
sculptures sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a slightly frightening size
and magnificence. One could easily read them as embodying the aesthetics of the
sublime (rather than the beautiful). But its an ethical sublime that says, We
humans choose not to use carbona choice visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps
its this very visibility of choice that makes wind farms disturbing: visible choice,
rather than secret pipes, running under an apparently undisturbed landscape
Taken at their trivial and ideological worst, the humanities is hamstrung by

factoids, quasior pseudofacts that havent been well thought out, while the
sciences are held in the sway of unconscious opinions. Humanities and sciences
hold broken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, pieces that might not fit together. Like William
Blake Im suspicious of fitting & fitted. 32 The ecological thought must interrogate
both the attitude of science, its detached authoritarian coldness; and the nihilistic,
baselessly anthropocentric arguments in the humanities as well as humanist
refusals to see the big picture, often justified by self-limiting arguments against
totalizationtalk about shooting yourself in the foot. 33 The ecological thought is
about warmth and strangeness, infi nity and proximity, tantalizing thereness and
head-popping, wordless openness. The ecological thought is intrinsically open, so it
doesnt really matter where you begin. There are good reasons for trusting the
biases and specialties that I bring to this task. Studying art is important, because art
sometimes gives voice to what is unspeakable elsewhere, either temporarily one
day we will fi nd the words or intrinsicallywords are impossible. Since the
ecological thought is so new and so open, and therefore so difficult, we should
expect art to show us some of the way. The ecological thought supplies good
reasons to study culture and philosophy. Ecology is a matter of human experience.
Humanities research can ask questions 13 that science should address, questions
that scientists may not have asked yet. For its part, science is about being able to
admit that youre wrong. This means that if we want to live in a science-based
society, we will have to live in the shadow of the possibility of wrongness. A
questioning attitude needs to become habitual. Philosophy and critical theory in the
humanities can help. Some people, including left humanities scholars who should
know better, either think that scientists should be left to get on with their work, or
even when they dont, the net effect of their beliefs is that science is untouched. 34
We have a responsibility to examine, participate in, support, and criticize scientific
experiments: to that end, this book shall propose some. For example, are
nonhumans capable of aesthetic contemplation? Can they enjoy art? Fascinating
research projects, to say the least, are beginning find out whether the beings we
call animals are capable of this. If they were, it would be essential to find out
whether this contemplation was an advanced cognitive state or a simple one, if not
the simplest. Is our capacity to enjoy art one of those things that makes us uniquely
human (along with hands, tools, laughter, and dancing, all of which have been
discovered in nonhumans)? Or do we share this capacity with nonhuman beings?
These questions get to the heart of some of our cultural and political assumptions
regarding nonhuman beings. While its deeply informed by critical theory, this book
wont be talking very explicitly about theory. Why? Not because I want to dumb
down the argument. I do this because people who arent members of the in crowd of
specialists familiar with the language of theory (and the kinds of things that are cool
to say with it) badly need to read this book. Otherwise the ecological thought
separates theory haves from have-nots. Humanities scholars have some very good
and important ideas, if only they would let others read them. We simply cant leave
environmentalism to the antiintellectualists. If youre interested, this book does
engage with theory in the notes. Or you can read my essays, perhaps starting with
Queer Ecology in PMLA, and also Ecology without Nature. 35 I wont be doing a lot
of green close reading either. You can find some examples, based on the view this
book lays out, by following this note. 14 Current ecological scholarship in the
humanities is divided between ecocriticism, environmental justice criticism, science
studies ethnography and anthropological investigations of non-Western
environmental perception; and there is a growing body of philosophical and
theoretically oriented work. The humanities are where we reflect on culture, politics,
and science. If they mean anything at all in this age of scientism, the humanities
must do serious reflection. While we address the current ecological crisis, we should
regard this moment as a precious, if perilous, opportunity to think some difficult
thoughts about what ecology is. Ecological science has to model ecosystems on
different scales in order to see things properly: its not enough to section off a small
square of reality and just examine that. 37 This is very suggestive for aesthetic and
political thinking. Chapter 1, Thinking Big, argues that for the ecological thought
to lift off, it must escape some terms in which it has been trapped. Terms such as
the local, the organic, and the particular have been good for environmentalist social
policy. These ideas provide at least a pocket of resistance to globalization. But what
about global warming? Doesnt that make a global response necessary? How about
the fact that were witnessing the Sixth Mass Extinction Event? Ecological thinking
risks being caught in the language of smallness and restriction. I use Milton to kick
off the discussion, because he offers us one of the most immense viewpoints of all:
that of space itself. Seeing the Earth from space is the beginning of ecological
thinking. The fi rst aeronauts, balloon pilots, immediately saw Earth as an alien
world. 38 Seeing yourself from another point of view is the beginning of ethics and
politics.
Leftist Movments
Leftist movements are all discourse and no action. Movements
think about the theories are going to act but never attack the
arteries of the hyperobjects they critique.
Bryant 12
(Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction?,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/mckenzie-wark-how-do-you-occupy-an-abstraction/) <this evidence has been modified and
we dont endorse gendered language>
Here Im also
inclined to say that we need to be clear about system references in our political theorizing
and action. We think a lot about the content of our political theorizing and positions, but I dont think
we think a lot about how our political theories are supposed to actually act in the world. As a result,
much contemporary leftist political theory ends up in a performative contradiction. It claims, following Marx, that
its aim is not to represent the world but to change it, yet it never escapes the burrows of academic journals, conferences, and presses to actually do so. Like the RatMans obsessional
neurosis where his actions in returning the glasses were actually designed to fail,
there seems to be a built in tendency in these forms of theorization to unconsciously organize their
own failure. And here I cant resist suggesting that this comes as no surprise given that, in Lacanian
terms, the left is the position of the hysteric and as such has a desire for an unsatisfied desire. In
such circumstances the worst thing consists in getting what you want. We on the left need to traverse
our fantasy so as to avoid this sterile and self-defeating repetition; and this entails shifting from the
position of political critique (hysterical protest), to political construction actually envisioning and building
alternatives. So whats the issue with system-reference? The great autopoietic sociological systems theorist, Niklas Luhmann,
makes this point nicely. For Luhmann, there are intra-systemic references and inter-systemic references. Intrasystemic references refer to processes that are strictly for the sake of reproducing or maintaining the
system in question. Take the example of a cell. A cell, for-itself, is not for anything beyond itself. The
processes that take place within the cell are simply for continuing the existence of the cell across time.
While the cell might certainly emit various chemicals and hormones as a result of these processes,
from its own intra-systemic perspective, it is not for the sake of affecting these other cells with those
hormones. Theyre simply by-products. Capitalism or economy is similar. Capitalists talk a good game
about benefiting the rest of the world through the technologies they produce, the medicines they
create (though usually its government and universities that invent these medicines), the jobs they create, etc., but really the sole
aim of any corporation is identical to that of a cell: to endure through time or reproduce itself through
the production of capital. This production of capital is not for anything and does not refer to anything
outside itself. These operations of capital production are intra-systemic. By contrast, inter-systemic operations would refer to
something outside the system and its auto-reproduction. They would be for something else. Luhmann
argues that every autopoietic system has this sort of intra-systemic dimension. Autopoietic systems
are, above all, organized around maintaining themselves or enduring. This raises serious questions
about academic political theory. Academia is an autopoietic system. As an autopoietic system, it aims
to endure, reproduce itself, etc. It must engage in operations or procedures from moment to moment to do so. These operations consist in the
production of students that eventually become scholars or professors, the writing of articles, the giving of conferences, the production of books and classes, etc. All of
these are operations through which the academic system maintains itself across time. The horrifying consequence of this is that the reasons we might give for why we
do what we do might (and often) have little to do with whats actually taking place in system continuance. We say that our articles are designed to demolish capital,
inequality, sexism, homophobia, climate disaster, etc., but if we look at how this system actually functions we suspect that the references here are only intra-systemic,
that they are only addressing the choir or other academics, that they are only about maintaining that system, and that they never proliferate through the broader world.
Indeed, our very style is often a big fuck you to the rest of the world as it requires expert knowledge to be comprehended, thereby insuring that it can have no impact
on broader collectives to produce change. Seen in this light, it becomes clear that our talk about changing the world is a sort of alibi, a sort of rationalization, for a
very different set of operations that are taking place. Just as the capitalist says hes trying to benefit the world, the academic tries to say hes trying to change the
world when all hes really doing is maintaining a particular operationally closed autopoietic system. How to break this closure is a key question for any truly engaged
political theory. And part of breaking that closure will entail eating some humble pie. Adam Kotsko wrote a wonderful and hilarious post on the absurdities of some
political theorizing and its self-importance today. Weve failed horribly with university politics and defending the humanities, yet in our holier-than-thou attitudes we
call for a direct move to communism. Perhaps we need to reflect a bit on ourselves and our strategies and what political theory should be about. Setting all this aside,
I think theres a danger in Warks claims about abstraction (though I think hes asking the right sort of question). The danger in treating hyperobjects like capitalism as
being everywhere and nowhere is that our ability to act becomes paralyzed. As
a materialist, Im committed to the thesis that

everything is ultimately material and requires some sort of material embodiment. If thats true, it
follows that there are points of purchase on every object, even where that object is a hyperobject. This
is why, given the current form that power takes or the age of hyperobjects, I believe that forms of
theory such as new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory are more
important than ever (clearly the Whiteheadians are out as they see everything as internally related, as an organism, and therefore have no way of
theorizing change and political engagement; theyre quasi-Hegelian, justifying even the discord in the world as a part of gods selection and harmonization of
intensities). The
important thing to remember is that hyperobjects like capitalism are unable to function
without a material base. They require highways, shipping routes, trains and railroads, fiber optic
cables for communication, and a host of other things besides. Without what Shannon Mattern calls infrastructure, its
impossible for this particular hyperobject exists. Every hyperobject requires its arteries. Information, markets, trade,
require the paths along which they travel and capitalism as we know it today would not be possible
without its paths. The problem with so much political theory today is that it focuses on the
semiosphere in the form of ideologies, discourses, narratives, laws, etc., ignoring the arteries required
for the semiosphere to exercise its power. For example, we get OWS standing in front of Wall Street protesting engaging in a speech act
yet one wonders if speech is an adequate way of addressing the sort of system we exist in. Returning to systems theory, is the system of capital based on individual
decisions of bankers and CEOs, or does the system itself have its own cognition, its own mode of action, that theyre ineluctably trapped in? Isnt there a sort of
humanist prejudice embodied in this form of political engagement? It has value in that it might create larger collectives of people to fight these intelligent aliens that
live amongst us (markets, corporations, etc), but it doesnt address these aliens themselves because it doesnt even acknowledge their existence. What we need is a
OOO, new materialism, and actor-network theory

are often criticized for being apolitical by people who are fascinated with political declarations, who
are obsessed with showing that your papers are in order, that youve chosen the right team, and that
see critique and protest as the real mode of political engagement. But it is not clear what difference
these theorists are making and how they are escaping intra-systemic self-reference and autoreproduction. But the message of these orientations is to the things themselves!, to the
assemblages themselves! Quit your macho blather about where you stand, and actually map power
and how it exercises itself! And part of this re-orientation of politics, if it exists, consists in rendering
deconstruction far more concrete. Deconstruction would no longer show merely the leaks in any
system and its diacritical oppositions, it would go to the things themselves. What does that mean? It
means that deconstruction would practice onto-cartography or identify the arteries by which capitalism
perpetuates itself and find ways to block them. You want to topple the 1% and get their attention?
Dont stand in front of Wall Street and bitch [yell] at bankers and brokers, occupy a highway. Hack a
satellite and shut down communications. Block a port. Erase data banks, etc. Block the arteries;
block the paths that this hyperobject requires to sustain itself. This is the only way you will tilt the
hands of power and create bargaining power with government organs of capital and corporations. You
have to hit them where they live, in their arteries. Did anyone ever change their diet without being told
that they would die? Your critique is an important and indispensable step, but if you really wish to
produce change you need to find ways to create heart attacks and aneurysms. Short of that, your
activity is just masturbation. But this requires coming to discern where the arteries are and doing a
little less critique of cultural artifacts and ideologies. Yet choose your targets carefully. The problem with the
Seattle protests was that they chose idiotic targets and simply acted on impotent rage. A window is not an artery. It doesnt organize a
flow of communication and capital. Its the arteries that you need to locate. I guess this post will get
Homeland Security after me.
politics adequate to hyperobjects, and that is above all a politics that targets arteries.
Local Harms
Their Environmental rhetoric forecloses the possibility of an
understanding of nature as a fluid mesh. Only this realization
can create an ethic on Co-Existence
The mesh consists of infinite connections and infinitesimal differences. Few would
argue that a single evolutionary change isnt minute. 29 Scale is infinite in both
directions: infinite in size and infinite in detail. And each being in the mesh interacts
with others. The mesh isnt static. 30 We cant rigidly specify anything as irrelevant.
If there is no background and therefore no foreground, then where are we? We
orient ourselves according to backgrounds against which we stand out. There is a
word for a state without a foregroundbackground distinction: madness. The
ecological crisis makes us aware of how interdependent everything is. This has
resulted in a creepy sensation that there is literally no world anymore. We have
gained Google Earth but lost the world. World means a location, a background
against which our actions become significant. But in a situation in which everything
is potentially significant, were lost. Its the same situation the schizophrenic finds
herself in. She is unable to distinguish between information (foreground) and noise
(background). 31 So she hears voices coming from the radiator, yet hears speech as
meaningless burbling. Everything seems threateningly meaningful, but she cant pin
down what the meaning is. 31 The more we become aware of the dangers of
ecological instability extinctions, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, starvation
the more we find ourselves lacking a reference point. When we think big we
discover a hole in our psychological universe. There is no way of measuring
anything anymore, since there is nowhere outside this universe from which to take
an impartial measurement. Strangely, thinking big doesnt mean that we put
everything in a big box. Thinking big means that the box melts into nothing in our
hands. Were losing the very ground under our feet. In philosophical language,
were not just losing ontological levels of meaningfulness. Were losing the ontic,
the actual physical level we trusted for so long. Imagine all the air we breathe
becoming unbreathable. There will be no more environmental poetry because we
will all be dead. Some ecological language appears to delight in this, even
sadistically, by imagining what the world would be like without us. Some deep
ecological writing anticipates a day when humans are obliterated like a toxic virus
or vermin. Other texts imagine the day after tomorrow. 32 Its hard to be here
right now. There is some relief in picturing ourselves dead. I fi nd this more than
disturbing. Awareness of the mesh doesnt bring out the best in people. There is a
horrible bliss in becoming aware of what H. P. Lovecraft calls the fact that one is no
longer a definite being distinguished from other beings. 33 Its important not to
panic and, strange to say, overreact to the tear in the real. If it has always been
there, its not so bad, is it? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++ It gets worse, because were losing the ground under our feet at the exact
same time as were figuring out just how dependent upon that very ground we are.
We fi nd ourselves pinned to the void. Schizophrenia is a defense, a desperate
attempt to restore a sense of solidity and consistency. Its highly likely that some
environmental rhetoric is delusive in this way. By reasserting a lost harmony with a
lost lifeworld, this rhetoric tries desperately to paper over the crack. The paper itself
betrays the crack. Thinking big involves facing the meaninglessness and
disorienting openness of the ecological thought. 34 Interconnectedness isnt snug
and cozy. There is intimacy, as we shall see, but not predictable, warm fuzziness.
Do we fill the hole in the world with holism and Heidegger? Or do we go all the way
into the hole? Perhaps its a benign hole: through it we might 32 glimpse the
Universe. Many environmental writers tell us to connect. 35 The issue is more
about regrouping: reestablishing some functioning fantasy that will do for now, to
preserve our sanity. Yet this is radically impossible, because of the total nature of
the catastrophe and the fact that there is no script for it (we are still here, and so
on). Its like waking up: it becomes impossible to go back to sleep and dream in
good faith. The ecological disaster is like being in a cinema when suddenly the
movie itself melts. Then the screen melts. Then the cinema itself melts. Or you
realize your chair is crawling with maggots. You cant just change the movie.
Fantasizing at all becomes dubious. Denying the problem, like the Bush
administration of 20012008, amplifies the danger. And more subtle forms of denial
exist. Wishing the problem away by doing ones bitI use wartime rhetoric
deliberatelyis also avoiding the void. In the Second World War, British people
hoarded tin cans to be made into aircraft and weapons. Whether or not the
government really manufactured these products as a result, repetitive, compulsive
activity kept horror at bay. Helpful as they are, recycling and other forms of
individual and local action could also become ways of fending off the scope of the
crisis and the vastness and depth of interconnectedness. These responses fit
contemporary capitalist life. Being tidy and efficient is a good idea, but it isnt the
meaning of existence. As Barack Obama memorably told his campaign staff in Fall
2008, we cant solve global warming because I fing changed light bulbs in my
house. Its because of something collective. 36
Mapping
The status quo cartography excludes the spatio-temporal
importance of objects by looking only at the context of
containment.
Bryant 10
(Levi, professor of philosophy at Collins College,

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/spatio-temporal-cartographies/#more-4059 October 4, 2010)
space and time are based on the

idea of real relation. In order to claim that there is a spatio-temporal relation between objects there must be
a real relation between objects, such that the one object has the capacity to perturb or irritate
the other object. These relations can be unilateral as in the case of the temporal
relation between Whitehead and Shaviro, where Whitehead can perturb Shaviro, yet where Shaviro is unable to
perturb Whitehead; or they can be bilateral as in the case between Graham and I where
we perturb one another. What we cannot assume , under this hypothesis, is that all objects
belong to the same space and time. Rather, we get topologies of space of time , some
It is clear that the intuition Im drawing on in these hypotheses about
of which are discontinuous with one another. When space-time is thought in this way we get a very different
cartography (hopefully Im not offending

tends to think space and time in terms of
containment space and containment time, based on relations of adjacency . We see
such a model of space in the map above where space is thought as adjacent
relations between geographical bodies. Under the topological model of space-time
Im proposing, spatio-temporal relations would instead be diagrammed in terms of
real relations among objects. In such a diagram, for example, Graham in Cairo would be presented as
conception of cartography that is topological in character. Traditional
any geographers here who dont accept such notions)
more proximal to me than Eugene in the office next door. Likewise, there would be a temporal diagram of
speculative realist thought defining their temporal relations to prior thinkers both remote in the order of
cartographies of
various objects that capture these real relations in the order of space and time in a
single diagram. Increasingly my thought on these matters is influenced by geographers such as Stuart Elden,
containment time and close. Perhaps we could even render four-dimensional topological
J.P. Jones, and Keith Woodward (cf. especially Jones and Woodward, Situating Flatness in Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, 32(2)).
Oil
Oil is an exorbitant energy source; it constitutes the only
model of death and the only way out of life. How lives and
politics are shaped is determined by their affordability in a
petropolitical landscape. Openness to the any exterior modes
of existence are confined by oils affordable horizon.
Negarestani 10
(Reza, Iranian Philosopher and Writer, Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss Our
Sun, 2010, 4.)

According to the energetic models of psychology (Freud, Reich, Ferenczi, et al.) the organic system by virtue of its
conservative and economical nature seeks to fixate upon the first exorbitant source of energy that it directly
encounters. This source of energy must surpass the lifespan of the organic system and issue forth a problematic
Consumption of this exorbitant

energy, therefore, becomes a problem for the organism. For the organism,
consequently, modes or courses of life are in fact solutions found and developed by
the organism to confront the problem of consumption. In other words, ideas of how to
live are reduced to solutions to afford the exorbitant energy. The more diverse the
solutions of the organism become, the easier the organism can maneuver between
different courses of life and the firmer the organism is fettered to its exorbitant
source of energy. This growing dependency on the exorbitant source of energy
through the ever-increasing shackles of life singularizes the exorbitant source of
energy as the only model of dissipation for the organism i.e. the only model of
death and the only way out. Accordingly, the exorbitant energy instigates and imposes plurality in
amount of energy that exceeds the capacity of the organic system.
modes of life but only in accordance with the conservative and economical nature of the organism. The plurality of
life is enforced at the expense of monism in death. And it is the monism in death as a mode of inflection upon the
outside (or what is exterior to the organism) that rigidly restricts the image of exteriority associated with the
cosmic abyss and in doing so forestalls a radical change in life and its ventures. The organism tends to die, or more
accurately, tends to open to the exterior horizon by means of the same energetic models and channels from which
the organism tends to use the same

energetic model for its death or openness to that which is exterior to it as
the model that it has previously used for conserving energy and living. This
recurring energetic model is fundamentally established by the source of the
exorbitant energy and thereby, implements both the traumatizing effects of
excessive energy and the inherent limitations of the source of energy which itself is
another interiorized horizon enveloped against its abyssal cosmic backdrop. Thereit conservatively secures its vital economy. To put it simply,
fore, although life can manifest itself plurally as opportunities for diversification and complexification brought about
death or binding exteriority is

only possible in one and only one way. This way is both qualitatively and
quantitatively restricted in that it strictly corresponds to the fundamental limitations
of the exterior source of energy and how these limitations are increased in the
conservative economy of the organism. Any image of exteriority that the exorbitant
source of energy promises or creates for the organism will remain within the
confines and limits of that source of energy itself.
by different economical ways for conservation of the exorbitant energy,
Post Humanism
Post humanism relies upon a flawed notion of the Human
Subject . This prior understanding locks in humanism and
domination of nature.
id=10496853&ppg=41..page , 113-117 ? //NotJacob
Posthumanism (a current trend in the humanities) too glibly combines (i) a
deconstruction of humanness and animal-ness, and life formness_into sets of
machine-like, algorithmic processes and (2) decidedly nonreductionist, holistic,
quasi-mystical systems theory.sl In effect, posthumanism asserts, There is a
nonself5> and There is a non-nature. The ecological thought reserves a special
place for the subjectthe mind, the person, even the soul. Posthumanism seems
suspiciously keen to delete the paradigm of humanness like a bad draft; yet
Humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human.,S2 Even
worse is the Skinnerian behaviorism that says Good riddance to man.This is
turning rednctionism into a religion. It probably would be nice actually to have
achieved something like humanness in the first place. "What if being human is the
encounter with the strange stranger in other words, at a certain limit, an
encounter with the inhuman?54 Isnt this the very posthumanism for which some
are yearning? Human beingness is already fissured from within.55 Is the ecological
thought an antihumanist or even antihuman thought? Post-humanism and deep
ecology make strange bedfellowsthe first believes in non-nature, the second in
Naturebut they might find common cause on this two legs bad, four legs better.
Even though the ecological thought appears at first glance to have things ia
common with posthumanism, it ends up seeping through posthuman ideological
barriers. Finding out \^-hat all this means might imply more than installing a
minimally functioning, though ultimately papery, ideological fantasy between
ourselves and the void: though of course we should confront this. void, it would also
be helpful if we could know why to get up in the morning. So what we do as
humanists isnt just about providing better PR for science. Along with figuring out
what implications science has for society and so on, we should be in the business of
asking scientists to do things for us. Humanists should create Web sites listing
experiments they want done. My top suggestion would be exploring the question uIs
consciousness intentional?w Negative results would provide a pretty good reason
not to hurt life forms. If we could show that consciousness wasnt some lofty bonus
prize for being elaborately wired but a default mode that came bundled with the
software, then worms are conscious in every meaningful sense. A worm could
become a Buddha, as a worm (paging Lowly). Are we sure nonhumans don't have a
sense of aIw? Are we sure that we do?56 One possible conclusion to be drawn from
the difficulties of AI theory is that human brains are utoo weak*1 2 3 4 5 6 to
understand themselves.57 In weakness is solidarity with strangers. Humanists
forging ahead with the ecological thought should step up and suggest experiments,
based on varied, complexradical, and interestingly divergent ideas. And scientists
should at least take a look. Here are some this book has proposed 1. Can animals
enjoy art? 2. Can animals self-reflect? Can humans self-reflect? Is self-reflection
important regarding suffering? 3. What is awareness? Is it a higherless frequent)
or lower(more frequent) cognitive capacity? 4. Did Neanderthals have
imagination? Do we? Does it matter? 5. Does AI suffer? Can bacteria suffer? What
are the allowed limits for suffering? 6. Is consciousness intentional? 7- Are thinking
and perceiving discrete? To get ahead of the curve enough to ask sensible
questions, humanists must get over both atomism (especially the sort that thinks of
atoms as hard little ping pong balls) and holism (especially the sort maintaining that
\\4ioles are different from their parts). This means rejecting, or putting on serious
hold, most theories of Nature and post-Nature. Human-ists must play the irritating
Columbo-style guy at the back of the room, the one who asks the unanswerable
question. The profound implications of ecological theory present obstacles to their
full acceptance. Materialism suggests that if the mind is reducible to the brain, then
the brain is capable of being explained in terms of its physical causes its
environment.58 Cognitive abilities thus evolved like fingers or lungs. Your mind is
an assemblage of duplicated and reduplicated processes that evolved unevenly.
There may be no unified model for brain and mind. For instance, the human brain
appears to be a kluge, a good-enongh assemblage of different gadgets from
different life forms.59 Classical models of minds are transparent but may not work
or arc highly arbitrary, while injectionest models (advocated here) work, but they
arent transparent.60 This may be because of something to do with the mind itself.
The mind may not have hardwired rules for parsing reality. In order to understand
the mind, we may have to make one first. There might be lessw to consciousness
than we suppose. AI theory tends to set the bar really high for poor computer
programs. If I had to access a sense of self every time I did anything, my mind
might freeze, or I might wind up in a mental hospital. You might not need a good
picture of the world somewhere inside your head, or even a picture at all, to walk or
play games or even think. Why is this relevant to the ecological thought? Cognitive
science claims that cognition is about the mind's interaction with its world.
Cognizing is fundamentally environmental. You wouldnt need to do it if you werent
in an environment:. (This is almost tautological: you wouldnt exist at all if you didn't
have an environment.) Jakob von Uexkiill was onto this with extraordinary
hypotheses concerning the worlds (Umwelten) of animals such as ticks.61 Yet as
seen in Chapter i, the world is less than us rather than greater than. Forget holism,
orgamcism, and Heidegger, who maintains that human beings have a world, unlike
the other poor saps who live here. what a relief. This is excellent for the ecological
thought, because it means enigma mystification. It also implies that the distinctly
(and disturbingly) Germanic type of environmental language, sounding suspiciously
like an anti-' Semitic peasant during the Crusades, has been barking up the wrong
tree. And in every sense that matters, living beings (and DNA, for that matter) have
a world just not much of one.
Race
Do not deal in abstractions thinking of Whiteness or racism
as a social force that merely exists traps politics in the world
of signification.
Bryant 13
(Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, Onto-cartography: Marx and Abstraction. Jan 10 2013.
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/onto-cartography-marx-and-abstraction/)
First rule of onto-cartography, dont track in abstractions (society,

capitalism, patriarchy, racism, environment). Second rule of onto-cartography: DONT
traffic in abstractions! To this, a very close and old friend responded asking, but isnt the concrete an
abstraction as well? Good question, so heres the response. Thats certainly an abstract way of responding!
The idea is to suspend our assumptions about why and wherefore things are
organized as they are, pausing instead to trace networks, relations between
things, to discern how theyre linked up, how theyre organized, and so
on. Rather than *beginning* with the premise that x organizes y, we should
instead look at how things are actually linked and interact. Latours _Reassembling
the Social_ is indispensable reading on this. His thesis is that these big terms do more to
*obscure* than explain. I disagree with Latour on a number of his conclusions (I think he too
hastily rejects Marx not Marxism, for example but think hes making an important point. As Laruelle might
the problem with these big master-signifiers (society, patriarchy,

capitalism, racism, environment) is that they seem to be saying
something without really saying anything. Here its worthwhile to think of Hegels
argue,
analysis of formal ground in the Science of Logic. When we think in terms of formal ground
we appear to be giving the ground of something, when weve really

replaced the thing to be explained with a *synonym*. You ask why does the earth
move about the sun? The maitre responds because of gravity! (formal ground). You ask what is
Youve replaced
what is to be explained with a different set of words, that are
nonetheless saying *exactly* the same thing (A = A).
gravity? The maitre responds things falling and orbiting about other entities!
This link independently turns the case imagining racism as an

object is a better political method.
Reid 12
(Alex, buffalo u, http://www.alex-reid.net/2012/09/what-is-and-what-should-never-be.html)
I think that's it. The issue in the conversation I was tracking above seems to be over whether or not
"racism," which would certainly be an object in OOO terms, can overdetermine (or "overmine" in Harman's
terminology) other objects, in this case, a shooting. In OOO terms, and here I am probably thinking more of
Latour, it is certainly possible for one object to overwhelm another: a flame can burn up a piece of cotton is
one of Harman's common examples. So is it possible for a person to be so overcome with racial hatred that it
racism alone does

not get someone shot. Obviously a gun is also required, at minimum. In addition, there are
many other objects involved in a given situation that lead to the shooting which
drives him to shoot someone? I would say it is absolutely possible. However,
might shed light on why the shooting happened at that particular instant rather than a minute before or a
these other objects necessarily take away from the role of racism in the
event, though they might provide us with a more nuanced understanding of how
racism functioned in this particular case. Such an investigation shouldn't be taken as a
moral judgment about racism, though its results might provide better tactics for
confronting racism. On the other hand, the simple declaration that some
spectral ideological force called racism swept down and caused a
shooting doesn't really tell us anything useful at all. It just reasserts what
one may already believe to be true. In the end, I don't think it is useful for anyone to assert
day before or later. None of
a subject-oriented ontology. Isn't it necessary to be able to claim that racism is real beyond our subjective
Are we simply prescribing that racism exists? Instead, I

would want to claim that racism is a real object with a real history, even
though its reality withdraws from me. I know that I can only get some partial encounter
with that real object; I can only know it in a limited way. But at the same time, I know that it
is ontologically possible to destroy it, like the flame burning up the cotton. To me, the
best way to do that would be to try to figure out how it really works.
representations of it?
Pretending that only ideologies and signifiers structure social

relations is wrong and it creates political failures this
correlationist criticism cannot change anything
Bryant 12
(Levi, professor of philosophy at Collins College, Worries about OOO and Politics,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/worries-about-ooo-and-politics/)//[AC]
2) Correlationism and its Discontents: For me, at least, the desire to overcome correlationism does not arise
out of some pure speculative desire to get at the things themselves, but because I believe that
correlationism has noxious political consequences that cultivate

an attitude destructive to effective political practice or engagement. As
Stacy Alaimo, who is not an OOO theorist but who is very close to my onticology in many respects puts it,
Matter, the vast stuff of the world and of ourselves, has been subdivided into manageable bits or
flattened into a blank slate for human inscription.
The environment has been drained of its blood, its lively
creatures, its interactions and relations in short, all that is
recognizable as nature in order that it become a mere empty
space, an uncontested ground, for human development. (Bodily
Natures, 1 2) Correlationism trains us to see all other material things
as alienated images of ourselves in a mirror. The question always
becomes what are things for us?, and the thesis is that matter is merely a
brute passive stuff awaiting our inscriptions. In other words, the basic gesture that become dominant in cultural
theory beginning around the 60s was to show that what we take to be objects are really our own significations
that we fail to recognize as our own. A critical analysis modeled on Marxs theory of commodity fetishism but
diverging quite significantly from his materialism thus came to consist in revealing how these significations
come from us, rather than from the things themselves. Now, as I have said, both here and elsewhere, I have no
desire to abandon this form of analysis. As I argue, all entities translate other entities in particular ways and this
this style of analysis is that it renders

invisible the differences contributed by nonhuman objects to
is no less true of humans. However, the problem with
social assemblages. We come to think that it is just significations

that structure social assemblages and that if we want to change
social assemblages all we have to do is critique and debunk
significations or ideologies. Clearly critiquing and debunking ideologies is a part of changing social
assemblages, but it is not the only part. And because correlationism functions as a theoretical axiom
where we dont even recognize the existence of this other part say rice because it treats the only
real difference as signifying difference, we find ourselves surprised when weve
adequately critiqued and debunked signifying systems and the social
system doesnt change. Perhaps this would clue us into the possibility that perhaps there
are other actors involved in these social assemblages, holding people in
place in particular ways. The problem is that correlationism tends to render nonsignifying differences in social assemblages invisible because it
begins from the axiom that nonhuman things are just blank slates
awaiting our inscription. Anyone whos ever gardened knows that this cant
possibly be true. The diacritical nature of how I signify tomato will not make my tomatoes grow
any better. No, to grow tomatoes I have to navigate soil conditions, sunlight and heat (which are quite
substantial here in Texas), the gangs of roving rabbits that populate my back yard, insects, worms, water, etc. I
am enmeshed in an entire network of actors that contribute to whether or not the tomatoes will grow and, more
importantly, I must constantly attend to these nonhuman actors. The point here is not, as Berry
suggests, to diminish human political interventions and promote a troubling conservatism, but
to expand the sites of political intervention as well as our

possibilities of acting. We cannot effectively act and change
things if we dont know how the assemblages within which we are enmeshed are
put together, what actors are present in those assemblages, and how we might intervene on these
actors to change our social possibilities. Correlationism tends to draw our
attention to only one type of actor the signifier and while this is
a real actor it is not the only one.
Renewable Energy
Renewable energy doesnt destroy the aesthetics of Nature
but enhances it.
Objections to wind farms and solar arrays are often based on arguments that they
spoil the view.7 The aesthetics of Nature truly impedes ecology, and a good
argument for why ecology must be without Nature. How come a wind turbine is less
beautiful than an oil pipe? How come it spoils the view any more than pipes and
roads? You could see turbines as environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind;
some environmental sculptures sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a
slightly frightening size and magnificence. One could easily read them as
embodying the aesthetics of the sublime (rather than the beautiful). But its an
ethical sublime, one that says, We humans choose not to use carbona choice
visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps its this very visibility of choice that makes
wind farms disturbing: visible choice, rather than secret pipes, running under an
apparently undisturbed landscape (a word for a painting, not actual trees and
water). As a poster in the office of Mulder in the television series The X-Files says,
The Truth Is Out There. Ideology is not just in your head. Its in the shape of a
Coke bottle. Its in the way some things appear naturalrolling hills and greenery
as if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred, and moreover, as if
agriculture was Nature. The landscape look of agriculture is the original
greenwashing. Objectors to wind farms are not saying Save the environment!
but Leave our dreams undisturbed! World is an aesthetic construct that depends
on things like underground oil and gas pipes. A profound political act would be to
choose another aesthetic construct, one that doesnt require smoothness and
distance and coolness. World is by no means doing what it should to help ecological criticism. Indeed, the more data we have, the less it signifies a coherent
world.
Science
Onticology doesn't reject science but the idea that entities
explored by science are rejected or excluded.
Bryant 11
(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011,
http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)
From the naturalists, by contrast, object-oriented ontologists are accused of treating a variety of psychic and
cultural entities as real entities, ignoring the truth that the only real reality is the material and physical world.
Put crudely, the naturalist accuses object-oriented ontology of treating as real what is merely an illusion or
derivative. To the ears of the naturalist, object-oriented ontology thus looks like a form of archculturalism insofar
as it treats entities like nations, groups, chairs, films, and so on as genuinely real entities. To make matters worse,
the naturalist is appalled by the object-oriented thesis that these entities are irreducible to the physical,
material, or natural domain. This ends up getting translated into the thesis that object-oriented ontology rejects
the point is
the same. The aim is not to exclude or reject the entities explored by the hard
sciences, but to refuse a hierarchical conception of being where these entities are
treated as the really real beings and all the others are treated as derivative
illusions or mere effects. Here, again, the aim is not to limit inquiry, but to expand the domain
of what can be investigated. With the naturalists, objectoriented ontology agrees that the culturalists or
neurology, biology,
chemistry, physics and a host of other hard sciences.
However, once again,
social constructivists have illicitly reduced nonhuman beings to cultural constructs. With the social
constructivists or culturalists, however, object-oriented ontology refuses to treat social and cultural entities as
mere effects of the material and physical. Rather, object-oriented ontology argues that these entities are
genuinely real entities in their own right. What object-oriented ontology thus objects to is the reductivism of
many naturalist approaches.
Sustainability
The myth of sustainability is a metaphysical construction that
abstracts human ecology from any coherent ontological
framework. This reintrenches the problems of technological
politics, making environmental destruction inevitable.
Irwin 2008 (Ruth, Lecturer Phil. @ Univ. Auckland [New Zealand], "Heidegger,
Politics and Climate Change: Risking it All," Pp. 180-81)
The global awareness of environmental issues has escalated steeply , since I began to
write this book. It is wonderful to see awareness of the problem in the eyes of everybody we meet, even if the
The danger is that blind faith in technology combined with

the discourse of 'sustainability' will sap all this good will, and direct it in ways that
may have some short-term compensations, but will do nothing to reconsider the
alienation of human beings from our natural ecology. Sustainability has taken on
the mantra of market, efficiency, and economic development. It now enframes all
aspects of planetary existence (humanity and nature) in a metaphysical synthesis.
Economics, and more recently, sustainability, has been promoted beyond its competency, to
a metaphysical status that explains all aspects of our world-view . We need not do away
entirely with economics to redress this problem, but it does need reconceptualizing and
repositioning as a minor field of surface transactions rather than a reiteration of
Idealist conceptual mastery over nature that permeates our entire world-view.
Exponential economic growth cannot be satisfactorily 'decoupled' from resource
depletion and pollution. It is inextricably linked to consumerism. Exponential growth
is a direct factor in producing the anthropogenic green-house gases that are
contributing to climate change. Exponential economic growth is a key factor in modern
politics. It is justified by the right and the left, by the market and the Keynesian Settlement. While the bulk of
'solutions' remain hard to achieve.
surplus value gets siphoned off towards the owners of production, a reliable 2 or 3 percent of 'surplus' goods gets
redistributed among the workers, and this superficial improvement inhibits them from revolting against the
alienation of modern capitalism (Keynes, 1936). The discourse of unfairness as redistribution and equality
caught hold of Marxists and liberals alive and they missed the more profound point made by Marx about the
alienation of 'Species Being' from nature (Marx, 1887). It is the alienation that is causing the crisis of climate
change. Furthermore, Keynes institutionalization of low inflation (legislated by the Reserve Bank Act) makes
exponential economic growth fundamental to the continued stability and structure of late capitalism. Exponential
growth was not a problem when a couple hundred more bushels of corn were consumed from one year to the next.
But it is an inescapable problem when the factor of exponential consumption has grown to millions of barrels of oil
The mode of politics that is normative now is based on a complex and

very long-standing history of philosophical ideas. Those ideas tend towards
Idealism, reifying truth and ontology, or Being, to an abstract realm beyond time
and space and separating the individual subject from the objects in their
environment (Irwin, 2002). The result has been a tendency to see all things as objects.
Idealism sets up items in the environment as flawed examples of universal
categories and a reified form of 'pure' Idealist calculus (but not all forms of mathematics) has
deepened, statistical and positivist science has become more and more variable to
understand everything as aspects of a fixed metaphysical whole, that all serve the
purpose of potential resource in the unfolding machinery of production and
consumption.
more per year.
Technology
The affirmative seeks a technological fix to worldly problems
this creates an artificial binary between the machine and the
human that traps us into purely calculative modes of thought
Introna 10 Professor of Organization, Technology and Ethics at Lancaster
University
(Lucas, The Measure of a Man and the Ethos of Hospitality: Towards an Ethical Dwelling with Technology, AI and
Society Vol 25 no 1, pg 93-102)
When referring to an ethics of technology or an ethics of the artificial, I am referring to it in two very distinct
the values and interests built into the very

materiality of the technologies we draw uponinscribed in their flesh as it were
(Winner 1980). In drawing upon the possibilities presented by these technologies, we
become wittingly or unwittingly enrolled into particular scripts and programmes of
action (in the actor network theory sense of the word). These scripts and programmes make
certain things possible and others not, include certain interests and others not (for
ways. In the first, more traditional sense, I mean
example the increased use of ATM may have lead to the closure of bank branches which exactly excludes those that
the ethics of machines is

very important and is in desperate need of our attention (an example of this type of work is
can not use ATMs, such as physically disabled people). In this sense of use,
the paper by Introna and Nissenbaum (2000) on search engines and the work of Brey (2000) as proposed in his
disclosive ethics). However, this paper is not primarily concerned with this sense of technological ethics. It is rather
with the question of the moral and ethical significance of technological

artefacts in their technological being, i.e. the question of the weight of our moral
responsibility towards technological artefacts as artificial beings . In order to develop and
concerned
structure the discussion, I will draw on a particular episode of Star Trek (2003) titled: The measure of a man. 1 In
this episode, the ethical significance, and therefore subsequent rights, of the android Data becomes contested. This
case studyif I may call it thatwill give us some indication of how the problem of ethical significance of the
artificial can become apparent and considered. In discussing this case, I will argue that its approach to the issue, as
well as the work of Levinas, is essentially anthropocentricultimately the measure of ethical significance is the
measure of a [hu]man. I will argue, with Heidegger (1977a), that it will ultimately fail to provide us with an
adequate way to consider the ethical significance of the artificial. I will then proceed to suggest, with the help of
Derrida, a more radical interpretation of Levinas as a possible way forward towards an ethics (or rather ethos) of
hospitalityan ethical dwelling with the artificial other that so pervade our everyday being in the world. 2
Commander Data and the measure of a [hu]man Those familiar with Star Trek will know that Commander Data is a
highly sophisticated android designed by Doctor Noonien Soong. Dr Soong created only one Data in his lifetime.
Lieutenant Commander Data is now one of the officers on the USS Enterprise, which is part of the Federations
Starfleet. The acclaimed robotics expert Commander Maddox has been authorised by Star Fleets Admiral
Nakamura to remove Data from the USS Enterprise for study, with the intention to refit and replicate him. Maddox
intends to download Datas brain into a computer for analysis, and then reload a copy back into a refitted and
upgraded Data. Due to certain technical complexities, the procedure is risky and he could not guarantee the end
result. Data objects to the procedure by claiming that the end result would not be him. He suggests that there is
an ineffable quality to memory that [would not] survive the shutdown of [my] core. As such he is concerned about
the continuity of his identity, for him it would be like dying and waking up as somebody else. After considering a
number of options, Data decide to resign as officer of the Starfleet in order to prevent the possibility of being
disassembled. Commander Maddox responds by arguing that Data does not have the freedom to resign since he is
a machine and as such the property of the Starfleeta view shared by Admiral Nakamura. He argues that they
would [not] permit the computer on the Enterprise to refuse a refit, why should Data be accorded such a right?
The matter is referred to Captain Phillipa Louvois of the understaffed local Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) office for
a decision. After considering the legal position, she issues her own summary ruling that Data is not a sentient being
but mere machine, and therefore, as property of the Federation, lacks the legal right either to refuse Maddoxs refit
or to resign from the Starfleet. The USS Enterprises Commanding Officer, Captain Picard, immediately challenges
her decision. Due to resource constraints of the JAG office, an impromptu hearing is arranged by Captain Phillipa
Louvois where Captain Picard will defend Data and Commander Riker, the direct subordinate of Captain Picard, will
represent the Starfleet view that Data is a machine and as such cannot resign or refuse the refit. Commander Riker
is profoundly disturbed at being placed in this position as his relationship with Data leaves him in no doubt as to the
status of his colleague and trusted friend. However, if he refuses Captain Louvois ruling will stand, thus, he agrees.
The court case starts with Commander Riker outlining the case for the Starfleet, i.e. that Data is a machine and as
such cannot resign or refuse the refit RIKER Your honor, there is only one issue in this case and one relevant piece
of evidence. I call Lieutenant Commander Data. Data seats himself in the witness chair, and places his hand on the
scanner. COMPUTER VOICE Verify, Lieutenant Commander Data. Current assignment, USS Enterprise. Starfleet
Command Decoration for RIKER Your honor, well stipulate to all of this. PICARD (leaping to his feet) Objection,
your honor, I want it read. All of it. PHILLIPA Sustained. COMPUTER VOICE (resuming) Gallantry, Medal of Honor
with clusters, Legion of Honor, the Star Cross. RIKER Commander Data, what are you? DATA (looking to Picard for
guidance, Picard nods to him to answer) An android. RIKER Which is? DATA Websters Twenty-Third Century
Dictionary, Fifth Edition, defines Android as an automaton made to resemble a human being. RIKER (musing) An
automaton. Made. Made by whom? DATA Sir? RIKER Who built you, Data? DATA Doctor Noonien Soong. RIKER And
he was? DATA The foremost authority in cybernetics. RIKER More basic than that. What was he? DATA (puzzled, but
groping for the right answer; he says questioningly) A human? *** [He removed Datas hand after a demonstration
of Datas strength] *** RIKER (continuing) Data is a physical representation of a dream, an idea conceived of by the
mind of a man. His purpose? To serve human needs and interests. He is a collection of neural nets and heuristic
algorithms. His responses are dictated by an elaborate software program written by a man. The hardware (slapping
the hand [of Data] against his palm) was built by a man. [Riker has been preambulating around the courtroom, each
step bringing him closer to Data. He is now at his side, and without warning he leans down, presses the switch, and
turns him off. Data collapses like a broken toy]. RIKER (continuing) And this [hu]man has turned him off. Pinocchio is
broken, the strings are cut. Riker lays the hand down next to Data. Shocked silence fills the room. Picards reaction
shock and certainty that he cannot win. PICARD I request a recess. PHILLIPA Granted. Riker who, as he walks to
his chair, is in agony. A single tear runs down his cheek. He has destroyed a friend. Rikers argument is simple and
clear. Data is an artificial machine, made by a [hu]man for serving the purposes of man, as such he is subjected to
mans choicehe can be switched off. As a machine, he has no intrinsic value or significance other than his value to
those who made him, his owners. Since they wish to replicate and upgrade him they are free to do so. There is of
course an interesting contradiction in the proceeding, as hinted by Picard, in that Data has previously been awarded
the Command Decoration for Gallantry, and medals of honour for services rendered. Presumably such distinctions
have not been awarded to the computer on the Enterprise. In his defence, Captain Picard realises that he cannot
deny the obvious, i.e. that Data is a machine, once made by a man. He opens his defence: PICARD (making his
opening statement) Commander Riker has dramatically demonstrated to this court that Lieutenant Commander
We too are machines, just machines

of a different type. Commander Riker has continually reminded us that Data was built by a human. We do not
Data is a machine. Do we deny that? No. But how is this relevant?
deny that fact. But again how is it relevant? Does construction imply ownership? Children are created from the
We have a chance in this hearing to

severely limit the boundaries of freedom. And I think we better be pretty damn
careful before we take so arrogant a step. Picard argues that it is plausible for us to think of
ourselves as machines. It is not whether we are or not machines. It is rather the status we
attribute to the machine when interacting with it. If we award a machine medals are
we not implicitly according the machine a sort of autonomy that would make it
meaningless to award the medals to his designer or to a chair? Presumably if we award it
building blocks of their parents DNA. Are they property?
medals we will also hold it, rather than the designer, accountable in the event of a mistake or inappropriate
behaviour. Picard proceeds with his defence with Commander Maddox on the stand. Maddox suggested that Data is
a machine because he is not sentient. He defines sentience as having intelligence, self-awareness and
consciousness. He reluctantly agreed that Data seems to conform to at least the first two of these. Nevertheless, he
insists that Picard is sentient and Data not. Picard proceeds: PICARD But you admire him? MADDOX Oh yes, its an
outstanding PICARD (interrupting) Piece of engineering and programming. Yes, youve said that. Youve devoted
your life to the study of cybernetics in general? PICARD And Data in particular? MADDOX Yes. PICARD And now
youre proposing to dismantle him. MADDOX So I can rebuild him and construct more! PICARD How many more?
MADDOX Hundreds, thousands. Theres no limit. PICARD And do what with them? MADDOX Use them. PICARD How?
MADDOX As effective units on Federation ships. As replacements for humans in dangerous situations. So much is
closed to us because of our fragility. But they PICARD (interrupting; he picks up an object and throws it down a
disposal chute) Are expendable. MADDOX It sounds harsh but to some extent, yes. PICARD Are you expendable,
Commander Maddox? Never mind. A single Data is a curiosity, a wonder, but a thousand Datas, doesnt that
become a new race? And arent we going to be judged as a species about how we treat these creations? If theyre
expendable, disposable, arent we? What is Data? MADDOX What? I dont understand. PICARD What is he?
MADDOX (angry now and hostile) A machine! PICARD Is he? Are you sure? MADDOX Yes! PICARD But hes met two
of your three criteria for sentience, and we havent addressed the third. So we might find him meeting your third
criterion, and then what is he? MADDOX (driven to his limit) I dont know. I dont know! PICARD He doesnt know. (to
Phillipa) Do you? Thats the decision youre facing. Your honor, a courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away the
egos, the selfish desires, the half-truths, until were left with the pure producta truthfor all time. Sooner or later
its going to happen. This [hu]man or others like him are going to succeed in replicating Data. And then we have to
decidewhat are they? And how will we treat these creations of our genius? The decision you reach here today
stretches far beyond this android and this courtroom. It will reveal the kind of a people we are. And what (points to
Data) they are going to be. Do you condemn them to slavery? Starfleet was founded to seek out new life.
(indicating Data) Well, there he sits, your honor, waiting on our decision. You have a chance to make law. Well, lets
make a good one. Let us be wise. PHILLIPA This case touches on metaphysics, and thats the province of
philosophers and poets. Not confused jurists who dont have the answers. But sometimes we have to make a stab in
the dark, and speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Absolutely. Is he our property? No The courtroom erupts in
joy. It seems to me that there are at least three distinct steps in Picards argument for us to consider. Firstly, he
argues that the whole court case is meaningless since the Federation has already confirmed Datas status as more
than a mere machine since they have placed him in a role of responsibility and have allocated him certain duties
in which they expected him to be accountable. They have also judged him to be doing these duties exceedingly well
by awarding him medals. Therefore, all their past interaction with Data already suggests a status that this case now
attempts to deny. His second step is to suggest that Data is not a machine but a person since he conforms to all the
criteria of sentience suggested by Maddox: intelligence, self-awareness and consciousness. He gains agreement
that Data is intelligent and self-aware, both of which suggests consciousness. Although he cannot prove it, the court
(and in particular Maddox) can equally not prove that he, Picard, possesses all of these, except by some form of
intuition. Such intuition would suggest that it is evident to any human being that they possess these capacities and
therefore other human beings should also. However, this intuition would not tell us anything about androids such as
Data. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine that we could construct a Turing type test for sentience, and that it
seems entirely feasible that Data could succeed in passing such a test (based on the evidence of Datas behaviour
in the Star Trek series). However, the most important point in his defence, for my argument, is that he takes the
measure of ethical significance to be the measure of a [hu]man, i.e. machines are ethically significant if they are
like us, sentient beings. It would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine a world in which the androids
were the majority and they would decide that, besides sentience, having a reuseable body is the ultimate measure
of ethical significance. Such a suggestion points the intimate link between ethics and politics. I will return to this
matter in the next section. The final step in his defence, which draws on the first two, is that ultimately we are
going to be judged as a species about how we treat these creations of ours; and if they are expendable,
disposable, arent we? This is an interesting step and captures the essence of Heideggers argument against
western metaphysics which is humanistic and in which everything is valued in human terms and subsequently
everything (also humanity) is robbed of its worth: [I]t is important finally to realise that precisely through the
characterisation of something as a value what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment
a thing is
in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity
takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a
subjectivizing. It does no let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be validsolely as the
objects of its doing (Heidegger 1977a, p. 228, emphasis mine). In this regard, neither Riker nor Picard escape
this anthropocentric valuing. Riker argues that machines are instruments of [hu]man, at its
disposal. They should be valued in terms of their value for us. However, in the
sociotechnical assemblages of contemporary world, it is increasingly difficult to
draw a clear boundary between them and us. If they are merely for us, then we
all are a for us. As Heidegger (1977b) argues in his essay The Question Concerning Technology, in such a
of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for mans estimation. But what
world we all become standing reserve (at the disposal of the network). Picards humanistic defence invokes a
if
Heidegger is right then even where valuing is positive it is always subjectivising.
Thus, neither of these positions escape the technological world view in which the
world is rendered present as a for us (Gestell/enframed in Heideggers terminology). As
enframed beings not only the artificial but also [hu]man becomes mere standing
reserve within which other possibilities for being are concealed . Not only this. In framing
hierarchy of values in which Data becomes valued because he is like us (sentient beings). However,
beings (and itself) in its own terms the very concealing of other possibilities for being itself becomes concealed.
Instead of creating value systems in our own self-image, the absolute otherness of every Other should be the only
We need an ethics of the artificial that is

beyond the self-identical of human beings. Such an ethics beyond anthropocentric
metaphysics need as its ground, not a system for comparison, but rather a
moral imperative, so argues Levinas and Derrida.
recognition of the impossibility of any comparisonevery comparison is already

violent in its attempt to render equal what could never be equa l (Levinas 1991[1974]). How
might we encounter the other, ethically, in its otherness? This is what I will no turn to.
Tool
The 1AC uses ______ as a tool which withdrawals the object
from having interactions with other entities because it is just
seen as a tool.
Richmond 10 (Scott, Asst Prof - Film & Media Studies Department of English @ Wayne State University
Thought, Untethered. A review essay Postmodern Culture 21.1 project muse]
For Heidegger (the received Heidegger, anyway), any analysis of the world must take into account readiness-to-hand, presentness-
Readiness-to-hand does not

name a special relation humans have to tools, but rather the available or disposable
aspect of any object with respect to any other object . In "The Theory of Objects," he develops this
at-hand, as well as their correlation. For Harman, this position is crassly anthropocentric.
analysis with the example of a bridge: Walking across a bridge, I am adrift in a world of equipment: the girders and pylons that
support me, the durable power of concrete beneath my feet, the dense unyielding grain of the topsoil in which the bridge is rooted.
What looks at first like the simple and trivial act of walking is actually embedded in the most intricate web of tool-pieces, tiny
implanted devices watching over our activity, sustaining or resisting our efforts like transparent ghosts or gels. (TSR 24) For
the toolany given objectis enmeshed in a set of total relations (i.e. the world).
Meanwhile, each object is visible only very partially from any given perspective. "The
Harman,
bridge has a completely different reality for every entity it encounters: it is utterly distinct for the seagull, the idle walker, and those
who may be driving across it toward a game or a funeral" (TSR 25). The word utterly here is doing a great deal of work: the claim is
that the relation between the seagull and the bridge is of a radically different, wholly unrelated, kind than the relation between the
idle walker and the bridge. This allows Harman to claim that "there is an absolute gulf between Heidegger's readiness-to-hand and
No matter how it manifests itself, the bridge (or any other object)
itself is always infinitely withdrawn. Any relation a walker, a seagull, or a driver in a
car may have to it always radically misses what the bridge is, in itself. And any
relation, in any modality, we may have with a tool, whether it be practical or
contemplative, aesthetic or empirical, also always radically misses the object. Harman's
presence-at-hand" (TSR 26).
object-orientation entails a concern with the "unchecked fury" of the withdrawn essence of objects (TSR 26). Doing justice to the
affirming that we never reach any object as it is in

itself. But crucially, neither does any other object: objects are withdrawn from each
other as radically as they are from us. The relation (or non-relation) between bolts and pylons is of exactly the
object itself means affirming such fury, and also
same kind as between humans and the bridge: "all relations are on the same footing" (TSR 202). What's refreshing about Harman is
his insistence that bolts and pylons deserve as much or more attention from philosophers as the typical objects of philosophy:
language, knowledge, mind, etc.
Use Value
The Affirmative presents the world in terms of usefulness to us
beings are only valuable in their world if they provide
humans with advancement this frame of existence creates
the world as a standing reserve and is the legitimizing factors
for all genocides we need a new ontology that recognizes the
value of all forms of being.
Introna 9 (Lucas, Professor of Organization, Technology and Ethics at Lancaster University, Ethics and the
Speaking of Things, Theory, Culture & Society 2009 vol 26 no 4, 25-46)
In the ethics of hybrids our ethical relationship with things is determined beforehand
by us, it is anthropocentric. In this encounter with things we have already chosen, or presumed, the framework of
values that will count in determining moral significance. In this ethics, things are always and already things-for-us
objects for our use, in our terms, for our purposes. They are always inscribed with our intentionality they carry it
in their flesh, as it were. The defining measure of the ethics of hybrids is the human being the meaning of the
Latin root of man is measure. Indeed our concern for things is what they might do to us humans, as was suggested
above. Our concern is not our instrumental use of them, the violence of our inscriptions in/on them, but that such
As things-for-us, or objects as we will refer to them, they

have no moral significance as such. In the value hierarchy of the modern ethical
mind they are very far down the value line. What could be less morally significant than an
inanimate object? Their moral significance is only a derivative of the way they may
circulate the network as inscriptions for utility or enrolment. For example, they may
become valuable if they can be sold in a market where they are valued, as is the
case with works of art. The magnitude and diversity of our projects are mirrored in
the magnitude and diversity of the objects that surround us. As things-for-us they
are at our disposal if they fail to be useful, or when our projects drift or shift, we
dump them. Images of endless scrap heaps at the edges of our cities abound.
Objects are made/inscribed, used and finally dumped. We can dispose of them
because we author-ized them in the first place. Increasingly we design them in such
a way that we can dispose of them as effortlessly as possible. Ideally, their demise
must be as invisible as possible. Their entire moral claim on our conscience is
naught, it seems. One can legitimately ask why should we concern ourselves with
things in a world where the ethical landscape is already overcrowded with grave
and pressing matters such as untold human suffering, disappearing bio-diversity
and ozone layers to name but a few. It is our argument that our moral indifference
to so many supposedly significant beings (humans, animals, nature, etc.) starts with the idea
that there are some beings that are less significant or not significant at all. More
scripts may ultimately harm us.
originally it starts with a metaphysics that has as its centre the ultimate measure us human beings a
metaphysics which has been at the heart of Western philosophy ever since Plato (Heidegger, 1977a). Thus, when
we start our moral ordering we tend to value more highly things like us (sentient, organic/natural, alive, etc.) and
less highly, or not at all, things most alien to us (non-sentient, synthetic/artificial, inanimate, etc.). It is our
argument that one of the reasons why this anthropocentric ethics of things fails is because it assumes that we can,
both in principle and in practice, draw a definitive boundary between the objects (them) and us. Social studies of
science and technology have thrown severe doubt on such a possibility.
If it is increasingly difficult to
draw the boundary between our objects and us, and if in this entangled network of
humans and non-humans objects lack moral significance from the start, then it is
rather a small step to take for an ethics to emerge in which all things human and
non-human alike circulate as objects: things-for-the-purposes-of the network. In
ordering society as assemblages of humans and objects we ultimately also become
ordered as a for-the-purposes-of. Thus, the irony of an anthropocentric ethics of
things is that ultimately we also become objects in programmes and scripts, at the
disposal of a higher logic (capital, state, community, environment, etc.). In the network, others and our
objects objectify us. For example, I cannot get my money out from the bank machine because I forgot my PIN
number. Until I identify myself in its terms (as a five digit number) I am of no significance to it. Equally, if I cannot
prove my identity by presenting inscribed objects (passport, drivers licence) I cannot get a new PIN number. In
Heideggers (1977b) words we have all become standing reserve, on stand by for the purposes of the network
enframed (Gestell) by the calculative logic of our way of being. Enframed in a global network that has as its logic to
control, manipulate and dominate: Enframing is the gathering together which belongs to that setting-upon which
challenges [hu]man and puts him in position to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve
(Heidegger, 1977a: 305). The value hierarchy presumed in an anthropocentric ethics is in fact a dynamic network of
The fate of our objects becomes our fate. In

the ethics of hybrids we are also already objects indeed everything is already
object. Instead of a hierarchy of values we find a complete nihilism in which
everything is leveled out, everything is potentially equally valuable/valueless ; a
values and interests there never was a hierarchy.
nihilistic network in which the highest values devaluate themselves (Nietzsche, 1967: 9). If this is so, then we
would argue that we should not extend our moral consideration to other things, such as inanimate objects in a
similar manner that we have done for animals and other living things, in environmental ethics for example. In other
words we should not simply extend the reach of what is considered morally significant to include more things.
Rather, we should abandon all systems of moral valuing and admit, with Heidegger, that in the
characterisation of something as a value what is so valued is robbed of its worth

and admit that what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object,
particularly when objectivity takes the form of value, furthermore, that every
valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivising (Heidegger, 1977a: 228). We
must abandon ethics for a clearing beyond ethics to let beings be in their own
terms. We must admit that any attempt at humanistic moral ordering be it
egocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric (Goodpaster, 1978; Singer, 1975) or even ecocentric
(Leopold, 1966; Naess, 1995) will fail. Any ethics based on us will eventually turn everything into our image, pure
will to power (Heidegger, 1977a, 1977b). As Lingis (1994: 9) suggests: The man-made species we are, which
produces its own nature in an environment it produces, finds nothing within itself that is alien to itself, opaque and
impervious to its own understanding (emphasis added). Instead of creating value systems in our own image, the
absolute otherness of every other should be the only moral imperative. We need an ethics of things that is beyond
the self-identical-ness of human beings. Such an ethics beyond metaphysics needs as its ground not a system for
comparison, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of any comparison every comparison is already violent in
its attempt to render equal what could never be equal (Levinas, 1991 [1974]). How might we encounter the other in
its otherness? Levinas (1991 [1974], 1996, 1999) has argued for the radical singularity of our fellow human beings.
But what about all other others? In the next section we will argue that Heidegger, especially as presented in the
work of Harman (2002, 2005), might provide us with some hints towards the overcoming of ethics, towards an ethos
of letting-be of all beings.
Warming
The current system of social interaction of power/no-power
precludes the ability to solve back for things like warming
because we cannot see the effects on the world and the
changes needed to the regimes of attraction.
Bryant 11
(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College, The Democracy of Objects, Open
Humanities Press, 2011, http://openhumanitiespress.org/Bryant_2011_The
%20Democracy%20of%20Objects.pdf)
The political system, in its turn, finds itself entangled with the regimes
of attraction governing the lives of psychic
The code according to which the political system

functions is that of power/no-power. In concrete terms, this code revolves around questions and
issues of re-election. Many of the changes required to mitigate the effects of climate
change would prove to be a significant hardship on lives of citizens, as it would
require major changes in the regimes of attraction upon which they rely for their
existence. This is especially the case in countries with developing economies where many are just trying to
find a way to feed their families from day to day. While many might be abstractly supportive of
taking action to mitigate the coming climate crisis , when concrete proposals are made, many of
systems as well as the economic
system.
the suggested changes are deeply unpopular because these things would significantly impact how people live
their lives (imagine how Americans would respond to being told to cut down on their meat consumption!) and
might lead to the loss of jobs. This, in turn, translates into whether or not politicians get votes and get re-elected.
As a consequence, it is likely that a Faustian bargain is made where the politician

who is ecologically aware tells himself that at least he is making incremental
change. Nonetheless, it seems that a lot could be done by more heavily
regulating the shipping industry, encouraging the trucking industry, for example,
to switch over to alternative fuels, giving large tax breaks to families and
individuals that drive hybrid cars, use solar panels, increase their energy
efficiency, making the use of school buses and trains a patriotic action for high
school students, and providing government subsidies to developing countries that
provide and develop environmentally friendly industries for their citizens, and so
on. However, here the political system encounters another entanglement with industry and business that makes
such actions less than appealing from a political perspective. These changes all imply major economic hardship
for a variety of businesses and industries that make massive amounts of money from their practices. In the
United States at least, the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened
the gates for corporations to use unlimited funds for political purposes. This entails that every U.S. politician
must now think twice before proposing policy changes as they Chapter 5: Regimes of Attraction, Parts, and
Structure 241 now face massive advertising campaignsalways conducted behind front groups implying that
they're the work of average Americans and grass root activiststargeting the possibility of the politician's re
The point of this rather pessimistic analysis of resonance within social

systems with respect to issues of climate change is to underline the manner in
which the constraints and selections governing openness to the environment
always involve risk. Within our current social system, the distinctions governing
resonance between the various social subsystems, psychic systems, and the
broader environment have generated a quagmire that renders responsiveness to
climate change very difficult. The forms of resonance that do exist, in their turn,
election.
create the very real possibility that these social systems will themselves collapse
as a result of changes in their environments that abolish sources of perturbation
upon which they depend. As climate change and population growth intensifies, it is very likely that
there will be famines as a result of changes in the climate that destroy farming and water resources. This will
generate a variety of social crises that will reverberate throughout all the different
social subsystems.
Whiteness
Thinking of Whiteness or racism as a social force that merely
exists traps politics in the world of signification.
Bryant 13
(Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, Onto-cartography: Marx and Abstraction. Jan 10 2013.
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/onto-cartography-marx-and-abstraction/)
First rule of onto-cartography, dont track in abstractions (society,

capitalism, patriarchy, racism, environment). Second rule of onto-cartography: DONT
traffic in abstractions! To this, a very close and old friend responded asking, but isnt the concrete an
abstraction as well? Good question, so heres the response. Thats certainly an abstract way of responding!
The idea is to suspend our assumptions about why and wherefore things are
organized as they are, pausing instead to trace networks, relations between
things, to discern how theyre linked up, how theyre organized, and so
on. Rather than *beginning* with the premise that x organizes y, we should
instead look at how things are actually linked and interact. Latours _Reassembling
the Social_ is indispensable reading on this. His thesis is that these big terms do more to
*obscure* than explain. I disagree with Latour on a number of his conclusions (I think he too
hastily rejects Marx not Marxism, for example but think hes making an important point. As Laruelle might
the problem with these big master-signifiers (society, patriarchy,

capitalism, racism, environment) is that they seem to be saying
something without really saying anything. Here its worthwhile to think of Hegels
argue,
analysis of formal ground in the Science of Logic. When we think in terms of formal ground
we appear to be giving the ground of something, when weve really

replaced the thing to be explained with a *synonym*. You ask why does the earth
move about the sun? The maitre responds because of gravity! (formal ground). You ask what is
Youve replaced
what is to be explained with a different set of words, that are
nonetheless saying *exactly* the same thing (A = A).
gravity? The maitre responds things falling and orbiting about other entities!
This link independently turns the case imagining racism as an

object is a better political method. Object investigation allows
us to confront the racism and break it down ontologically.
Reid 12
(Alex, buffalo u, http://www.alex-reid.net/2012/09/what-is-and-what-should-never-be.html)
I think that's it. The issue in the conversation I was tracking above seems to be over whether or not
"racism," which would certainly be an object in OOO terms, can overdetermine (or "overmine" in Harman's
terminology) other objects, in this case, a shooting. In OOO terms, and here I am probably thinking more of
Latour, it is certainly possible for one object to overwhelm another: a flame can burn up a piece of cotton is
one of Harman's common examples. So is it possible for a person to be so overcome with racial hatred that it
racism alone does

not get someone shot. Obviously a gun is also required, at minimum. In addition, there are
many other objects involved in a given situation that lead to the shooting which
drives him to shoot someone? I would say it is absolutely possible. However,
might shed light on why the shooting happened at that particular instant rather than a minute before or a
these other objects necessarily take away from the role of racism in the
event, though they might provide us with a more nuanced understanding of how
racism functioned in this particular case. Such an investigation shouldn't be taken as a
moral judgment about racism, though its results might provide better tactics for
confronting racism. On the other hand, the simple declaration that some
spectral ideological force called racism swept down and caused a
shooting doesn't really tell us anything useful at all. It just reasserts what
one may already believe to be true. In the end, I don't think it is useful for anyone to assert
day before or later. None of
a subject-oriented ontology. Isn't it necessary to be able to claim that racism is real beyond our subjective
Are we simply prescribing that racism exists? Instead, I

would want to claim that racism is a real object with a real history, even
though its reality withdraws from me. I know that I can only get some partial encounter
with that real object; I can only know it in a limited way. But at the same time, I know that it
is ontologically possible to destroy it, like the flame burning up the cotton. To me, the
best way to do that would be to try to figure out how it really works.
representations of it?
Wind
The rejection of wind farms is founded upon the social create
of nature.
id=10496853&ppg=41..page , 9//Not Jacob
In Lakewood, Colorado, residents objected to the construction of a solar array in a

park in 2008, because it didnt look natural. 24 Objections to wind farms are
similarmade not because of the risk to birds but because they spoil the view. A
because residents complained that their view would be destroyed. This is truly a
case of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology and a good argument for why
ecology must be without Nature. Why is a wind turbine less beautiful than an oil
pipe? Why does it spoil the view any more than pipes and roads? You could see
turbines as environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind; some environmental
sculptures sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a slightly frightening size
and magnificence. One could easily read them as embodying the aesthetics of the
sublime (rather than the beautiful). But its an ethical sublime that says, We
humans choose not to use carbona choice visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps
its this very visibility of choice that makes wind farms disturbing: visible choice,
rather than secret pipes, running under an apparently undisturbed landscape
Wilderness
Natures Totality haunts our understanding of the world.
Fantasies of nature as a pristine wilderness is nothing but an
ethereal art gallery that locks in modernitys control of our
understanding
id=10496853&ppg=41..page , 4-5//NotJacob
Modern economic structures have drastically affected the environment. Yet they
have had an equally damaging effect on thinking itself. I dont mean that before
now we thought ecologically and properly. The ecological thought in its full richness
and depth was unavailable to nonmodern humans. Even now, on the brink over
the brink, indeed of climate catastrophe, were only just capable of glimpsing its
magnitude and profundity. The modern age compels us to think big, in the words of
the first chapter. Any thinking that avoids this totality is part of the problem. So
we have to face it. Something about modern life has prevented us from thinking
totality as big as we could. Now we cant help but think it. Totality looms like a
giant skyscraper shadow into the flimsiest thought 5 about, say, todays weather.
We may need to think bigger than totality itself, if totality means something closed,
something we can be sure of, something that remains the same. It might be harder
to imagine four and a half billion years than abstract eternity. It might be harder to
imagine evolution than to imagine abstract infinity. Its a little humiliating. This
concrete infinity directly confronts us in the actuality of life on Earth. Facing it is
one of the profound tasks to which the ecological thought summons us. Weve
gotten it wrong so farthats the truth of climate disruption and mass extinction. I
dont advocate a return to premodern thinking. The ecological thought is modern.
The paradox is that the modern eralets say it began around the late eighteenth
centuryimpeded its own access to the ecological thought, even though the
ecological thought will have been one of its lasting legacies. As far as ecology goes,
modernity spent the last two and a half centuries tilting at windmills. The ghost of
Nature, a brand new entity dressed up like a relic from a past age, haunted the
modernity in which it was born. 11 This ghostly Nature inhibited the growth of the
ecological thought. Only now, when contemporary capitalism and consumerism
cover the entire Earth and reach deeply into its life forms, is it possible, ironically
and at last, to let go of this nonexistent ghost. Exorcise is good for you, and human
beings are past the point at which Nature is a help. Our continued survival, and
therefore the survival of the planet were now dominating beyond all doubt,
depends on our thinking past Nature. Modern thinkers had taken it for granted that
the ghost of Nature, rattling its chains, would remind them of a time without
industry, a time without technology, as if we had never used flint or wheat. But in
looking at the ghost of Nature, modern humans were looking in a mirror. In Nature,
they saw the reflected, inverted image of their own age and the grass is always
greener on the other side. Nature was always over yonder, alien and alienated. 12
Just like a reflection, we can never actually reach it and touch it and belong to it.
Nature was an ideal image, a self-contained form suspended afar, shimmering and
naked behind glass like an expensive painting. In the idea of pristine wilderness, we
can make out the mirror image of private property: Keep off the Grass, Do Not
Touch, Not for Sale. Nature was a special kind of private property, without an
owner, exhibited in a specially constructed art gallery. The gallery was Nature itself,
revealed through visual technology in the eighteenth century as picturesque
looking like a picture. 13 The new and improved version is art without an object,
just an aura: the glow of value. 14 Nature isnt what it claims to be. While were on
the subject of Nature and new and improved upgrades, this book makes a
rigorous distinction between environmentalism and ecology. By the time you finish,
you may feel that there are good reasons for advocating not just ecology without
nature but also ecology without environmentalism.
Impact
Turns Case
Correlationist exceptionalism is the root cause of all violence
and ecological destructionwe must recognize the ontology of
the object to understand the world
Bryant, 12
(Levi Bryant is Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. and#34;The Stakes of SR/NFM/OOO/Onticology: Whos
Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?and#34;http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/the-stakes-ofsrnfmoooonticology-whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolves/)
By SR I mean speculative realism, by NFM new materialist feminism, and the rest. I get the sense that people
miss the whole point of the debate between the anti-realists and the new realists and materialists. There seems to
be some impression that this is a debate between whether science is right or whether the social constructivists are
right. And believe me, I sympathize with the social constructivists and wish to preserve their discoveries. I fully
the way the term nature is

mobilized in oppressive ideological discourses, having seen the devastation of the
ecosystem, the ravages of global capitalism, the atomic bomb, DDT, and a number
of other things, people would be suspicious of the term real. But defending
science against social constructivism has never insofar as I understand it been
the point of the new materialists and realists. I dont wish to put words in the names of others so
understand that having encountered discourses like eugenics, having seen
take this as a testament of how other theorists have influenced me but for me the point has always been the
recognition of the role that nonhumans play in the world. The point has never been to show that sciences show us
what is really real , and that the social constructivisms are full of shit. How would that both I and the new
materialist feminists advocate an ontological constructivism where construction and contingency appear at all
levels of being? I believe things are constructed at all levels of being, regardless of whether or not humans exist.
I think the
point has always been to show that humans are not little sovereigns that produce all
of being though clearly we make our contributions but that we ourselves are
partially products of other beings and are incredibly dependent on all sorts of
nonhuman beings in order to sustain ourselves at all. The point has been to show
that we could not be what we are without things like forests, coral reefs, algae,
cows, sheep, grass, microbes, electro-magnetic fields, moons, etc, etc., etc., etc.,
etc., and that we impact the greater world as well. The point was to show that
theres not a strict boundary between nature and culture, but that we are both
affected and enabled by the nonhuman world and that we affect that world. The
point was to show that these lawns cant be drawn but artificially. The point was to
show that nonhumans matter, that we arent gods. and that were bound up in
these things. The point was ecology. People sometimes suggest that claiming that beings like sharks
That makes it pretty difficult to defend the existence of something like essence. read on! No,
and tardigrades are real is somehow the foundation of capitalistic violence and exploitation. To me the truth seems
to be exactly the reverse. If I treat other beings as nothing but the product or effect of signifiers, lived intentionality,
social constructs, concepts, perceptions, etc., I have reduced these other things to me, because I have said that
they are nothing more than my constructs. If, by contrast, I recognize that these other things are real, I recognize
that they are not just my reflections, then I also recognize that they are autonomous entities in their own right, that
they arent just passive matters awaiting inscription, that they are characterized by alterity, then I also recognize
that they have claims of their own, that they are not just stuff of my own for use, that they make claims even if
they dont make claims like us and that we must attend to these claims.
It is humanism (human
exceptionalism, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiological idealism, linguistic idealism,

etc.) that provides the grounds for violence and exploitation by seeing all beings as a
reflection of human being and by seeing all being as passive matter for our
exploitation, not posthumanism that recognizes the reality of other beings, their
independence, and what they contribute to us in terms of our formation and

agency. Some see this as a horrible hobbling of humans that would propose that we should prefer the bubonic
plague to humans and that we should prefer the appetite of lions to children. But that was never the point. The
point is to recognize how we are dependent for our agency and existence on broader networks of entities, that we
arent little gods legislating everything in our image, and that if we wish to do well we better attend to these things.
The stakes are not to defend science over culture, but to reconceptualize the very nature of ourselves, nature, our
duties and obligations. As Adorno argued, the height of violence is to reduce alterity to the concept or human. That
is very much the spirit of whats unfolding with the new materialisms and realisms.
Anthro
KOCHI & ORDAN 2K8 [tarik and noam, queens university and bar llan university, an argument for the global
suicide of humanity, vol 7. no. 4., bourderlands e-journal]
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are considered as an exception, an
aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as an example of evil, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf.
the differing accounts of evil given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity
comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again.
However, if we take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was evil , then one must
surely include along side it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human
this must include the

annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures across the globe and the
manner in which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased
from what the people of the West generally consider to be the content of a human
heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane
history. Hence, if we are to think of the content of the human heritage, then
acts of annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed the
history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of our legal institutions and forms of
ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been
founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986).
Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of race war that often underlies human social
organisation and many of its legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern
colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration and
exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage of humanity. After all, all too often
the European colonisation of the globe was justified by arguments that indigenous
inhabitants were racially inferior and in some instances that they were closer to
apes than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view of
race is in many ways merely an extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism
involving a long history of killing and enslavement of non-human species by
humans. Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human violence (via
the mythical notion of differing human races) and interspecies violence, is well
themselves the crown of creation, for animals all people are Nazis and animal
life is an eternal Treblinka (Singer, 1968, p.750).
Ethics
Life itself is constituted by non-life. Humanity is just as
beautiful as RNA as atoms as energy. The distinction is
arbitrary to the universe.
How much more is this the case with an object that leaves its alpha, beta, and
gamma particle traces in your flesh, traces that alter your DNA for decades. This
cannot be dismissed as merely a mental experience (though it is still an aesthetic
one, in the strict sense that aesthetics has to do with the way one object impinges
on another one), and similarly, we shouldnt dismiss Wordsworths experience as
merely mental. As we shall see in the section Interobjectivity, this is far from a
trivial matter of mere sensation, but has to do with causality as such. The parallax
effect that spooks the young Wordsworth is far more true to something real than he
supposed. In a sense, we can expect human egos to be pock- marked with the
traces of hyperobjects. We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in
about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans
do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth. It is clear that DNA has sometimes
learned to cope with hyperobjects. Extremophiles such as the bacterium
Deinococcus radiodurans suggest the possibility that life and its building blocks
(amino acids) arose in conditions that would seem inhospitable to most
contemporary lifeforms: on comets, on the surface of ancient Mars, in hot deep
rocks, deep within ice, or in boiling undersea vents. Deinococcus radioduransis a
startling record of abandoned object cathexes, encounters with extremes of
heat, pressure, and radiation, and with genotoxic chemicals and dehy- dration. It is
a poem about hyperobjects. For this reason, the bacterium is now being engineered
to cope with human-made hyperobjects such as mercury spills. What interests me
here is not so much an answer to the question of exactly how lifeforms arose, but
the fact that lifeforms themselves are poems about nonlife, in particular highly
dangerous entities that could destroy life. Freud argued that the death drive was
precisely the attempt to ward off death, to bind stimulation. I have argued that the
death drive predates life as such, literally rather than merely figuratively as some
psychoanalytic philosophers hold. RNA and the silicate replicators that it attached to
in the preliving RNA World were molecules that were profoundly out of balance,
resembling the liar paradox: This sentence is false. Replication is just the attempt
of such a molecule to solve the paradox inscribed within it, and thus to cancel out
the disequilibrium, somewhat in the way that water finds its own level.51 Yet the
very attempt to find a solutionto erase the stain of itself from existenceis what
results in its continued existence as a copy of itself. In trying to cancel itself out, the
replicator becomes beautifully defended against its environment. Our existence is
due to more than a little bit of death, the head- long rush toward equilibrium.
Hierarchies/Difference
Nature only exists within our own perceptions -CONCEPTION
This conception of a pristine nature is intertwined with
authoritarian ideologies and allows for hierarchizing of
identities
University, Ecology Without Nature, 14-18
One of the ideas inhibiting genuinely ecological politics, ethics, philosophy, and art
is the idea of nature itself. Nature, a transcendental term in a material mask, stands
at the end of a potentially infinite series of other terms that collapse into it,
otherwise known as a metonymic list: fish, grass, mountain air, chimpanzees, love,
soda water, freedom of choice, heterosexuality, free markets . . . Nature. A
metonymic series becomes a metaphor. Writing conj ures this notoriously slippery
term, useful to ideologies of all kinds in its very slipperiness, in its refusal to
maintain any consistency.21 But consistency is what nature is all about, on another
level. Saying that something is unnatural is saying that it does not conform to a
norm, so " normal" that it is built into the very fabric of things as they are. So
"nature " occupies at least three places in symbolic language. First, it is a mere
empty placeholder for a host of other concepts. Second, it has the force of law, a
norm against which deviation is measured. Third, " nature " is a Pandora's box, a
word that encapsulates a potentially infinite series of disparate fantasy objects. It is
this third sense-nature as fantasy-that this book most fully engages. A " discipline "
of diving into the Rorschach blobs of others' enj oyment that we commonly call
poems seems a highly appropriate way of beginning to engage with how "nature "
compels feelings and beliefs . Nature wavers in between the divine and the
material. Far from being something " natural" itself, nature hovers over things like a
ghost. It slides over the infinite list of things that evoke it. Nature is thus not unlike
"the subject," a being who searches through the entire universe for its reflection,
only t o find none. I f it is j ust another word for supreme authority, then why not j
ust call it God ? But if this God is nothing outside the material world, then why not j
ust call it matter? This was the political dilemma in which Spinoza, and the deists of
eighteenth-century Europe, found themselves.22 Being an " out" atheist was very
dangerous in the eighteenth century, as evidenced by the cryptic remarks of Hume
and the increasingly cautious approach of Percy Shelley, who had been expelled
from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism. God often appeared on the side
of royal authority, and the rising bourgeoisie and associated revolutionary classes
wanted another way of being authoritative. " Ecology without nature " means in part
that we try to confront some of the intense notions which nature smudges.
Ecological writing is fascinated with the idea of something that exists in between
polarized terms such as God and matter, this and that, subject and obj ect. I find
John Locke's critique of the idea of ether to be helpful here. Locke's critique
appeared toward the beginning of the modern construction of space as an empty

set of point coordinates.2 3 Numerous holes in materialist, atomist theories were
filled by something elemental. Newton's gravity worked because of an ambient
ether that transmitted the properties of heavy bodies instantaneously, in an analogy
for (or as an aspect of) the love of an omnipresent God.2 4 If ether is a kind of
"ambient fluid" that surrounds all particles, existing " in between " them, then what
surrounds the particles of ambient fluid themselves?25 If nature is sandwiched
between terms such as God and matter, what medium keeps the things that are
natural sandwiched together? Nature appears to be both lettuce and mayonnaise.
Ecological writing shuffles subject and object back and forth so that we may think
they have dissolved into each other, though what we usually end up with is a blur
this book calls ambience.Later in the modern period, the idea of the nation-state
emerged as a way of going beyond the authority of the monarch. The nation all to o
often depends upon the very same list that evokes the idea of nature. Nature and
nation are very closely intertwined. I show how ecocritique could examine the ways
in which nature does not necessarily take us outside society, but actually forms the
bedrock of nationalist enjoyment. Nature, practically a synonym for evil in the
Middle Ages, was considered the basis of social good by the Romantic period.
According to numerous writers such as Rousseau, the framers of the social contract
start out in a state of nature. The fact that this state is not much different from the "
concrete j ungle " of actual historical circumstance has not escaped attention. In the
Enlightenment, nature became a way of establishing racial and sexual identity, and
science became the privileged way of demonstrating it. The normal was set up as
different from the pathological along the coordinates of the natural and the
unnatural.26 Nature, by then a scientific term, put a stop to argument or rational
inquiry: "Well, it's j ust in my nature." He is ideological, you are prej udiced, but my
ideas are natural. A metaphorical use of Thomas Malthus in the work of Charles D
arwin, for example, naturalized, and continues to naturalize, the workings of the "
invisible hand" of the free market and the " survival of the fittest"-which is always
taken to mean the competitive war of all (owners ) against all (workers ) . Malthus
used nature to argue against the continuation of early modern welfare, in a
document produced for the government of his age. Sadly, this very thinking is now
being used to push down the poor yet further, in the battle of the supposedly
ecologically minded against "population growth" (and immigration) . Nature,
achieved obliquely through turning metonymy into metaphor, becomes an oblique
way of talking about politics. What is presented as straightforward, " unmarked,"
beyond contestation, is warped.One of the basic problems with nature is that it
could be considered either as a substance, as a squishy thing in itself, or as
essence, as an abstract principle that transcends the material realm and even the
realm of representation. Edmund Burke considers substance as the stuff of nature in
his writing on the sublime.27 This " substantialism" asserts that there is at least one
actually existing thing that embodies a sublime quality (vastness, terror,
magnificence) . Substantialism tends to promote a monarchist or authoritarian view
that there is an external thing to which the subj ect should bow. Essentialism, on the
other hand, has its champion in Immanuel Kant. The sublime thing can never be
represented, and indeed, in certain religions, says Kant, there is a prohibition
against trying (Judaisn1, Islam ) . This essentialism turns out to be politically
liberating, on the side of revolutionary republicanism.28 On the whole, nature

writing, and its precursors and family members, mostly in phenomenological and/or
Romantic writing, has tended to favor a substantialist view of nature-it is palpable
and there-despite the explicit politics of the author. Further work in ecocritique
should delineate a republican, nonsubstantialist countertradition running through
writers such as Milton and Shelley, for whom nature did not stand in for an authority
for which you sacrifice your autonomy and reason.Ecological forms of subjectivity
inevitably involve ideas and decisions about group identity and behavior.
Subjectivity is not simply an individual, and certainly not j ust an individualist,
phenomenon. It is a collective one. Environmental writing is a way of registering the
feeling of being surrounded by others, or more abstractly, by an otherness,
something that is not the self. Although it may displace the actual social collective
and choose to write about surrounding mountains instead, such displacements
always say something about the kinds of collective life that ecological writing is
envisaging. Fredric Jameson outlines the necessity for criticism to work on ideas of
collectivity:Anyone who evokes the ultimate value of the community or the
collectivity from a left perspective must face three problems: 1) how to distinguish
this position ra dically from communitarianism; 2) how to differentiate the collective
project from fascism or nazism; 3) how to relate the social and the economic levelthat is, how to use the Marxist analysis of capitalism to demonstrate the unvia bility
of social solutions within that system. As for collective identities, in a historical
moment in which individual personal identity has been unmasked as a decentered
locus of multiple subj ect positions, surely it is not too much to ask tha t something
analogous be conceptualized on the collective leve1.29 The idea of the environment
is more or less a way of considering groups and collectives-humans surrounded by
nature, or in continuity with other beings such as animals and plants. It is about
being-with. As Latour has recently pointed out, however, the actual situation is far
more drastically collective than that. All kinds of beings, from toxic waste to sea
snails, are clamoring for our scientific, political, and artistic attention, and have
become part of political life-to the detriment of monolithic conceptions of Nature.:10
To write about ecology is to write about society, and not simply in the weak sense
that our ideas of ecology are soci?.! constructions. Historical conditions have
abolished an extrasocial nature to which theories of society can appeal, while at the
same time making the beings that fell under this heading impinge ever more
urgently upon society. Different images of the environment suit different kinds of
society. Substantialist images of a palpable, distinct "nature " embodied in at least
one actually existing phenomenon (a particular species, a particular figure)
generate authoritarian forms of collective organization. The deep ecological view of
nature as a tangible entity tends this way. Essentialist ideas of a nature that cannot
be rendered as an image have supported more egalitarian forms. It would be very
helpful if ecocritique simply observed that there were other kinds of models for
nature . For instance, the repu blican (sm all "r" ) poetics derived from writers such
as Milton and the neglected history of radical environmentalism in the English
Revolution convey iconoclastic figures of the environment that transcend discrete
forms of representationY Other political forms prohibit graven images of nature. In
contrast to the touchy-feely organicism derived from Burkean ideologies of class
and tradition, we could think the environment in a more open, rational and
differently sensuous manner. The study of iconoclastic representations of space and

world recovers fresh wa ys of thinking and creating. Demonstrating that there are,
at least, different sorts of fantasy im ages of the natural would refresh
environmental thinking. But ecocritique does not stop there.
Modernity
Flat ontology allows us to overcome the dualism of Modernity
by viewing all entities as objects to reveal themselves
Bryant 11
(Professor of Philosophy at Collin College 2011 Levi Democracy of Objects http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:4/-democracy-of-objects?rgn=div1;view=fulltext)
Rather than
treating objects as entities opposed to a subject, I treat all entities, including
subjects, as objects. Moreover, in order to overcome the dual world hypothesis of
Modernity, I argue that it is necessary to staunchly defend the autonomy of objects
or substances, refusing any reduction of objects to their relations, whether these
relations be relations to humans or other objects . In my view, the root of the Modernist schema
From the foregoing it can be gathered that the ontology I am proposing is rather peculiar.
arises from relationism. If we are to escape the aporia that beset the Modernist schema this, above all, requires us
to overcome relationism or the thesis that objects are constituted by their relations. Accordingly, following the
Harman's object-oriented philosophy, I argue that objects

are withdrawn from all relation. The consequences of this strange thesis are, I believe, profound. On
the one hand, in arguing that objects are withdrawn from their relations, we are able
to preserve the autonomy and irreducibility of substance, thereby sidestepping the
endless, and at this point rather stale, debate between the epistemological realists
and anti-realists. On the other hand, where the anti-realists have obsessively focused on a
single gap between humans and objects, endlessly revolving around the manner in
which objects are inaccessible to representation, object-oriented philosophy allows
us to pluralize this gap, treating it not as a unique or privileged peculiarity of
humans, but as true of all relations between objects whether they involve humans
or not. In short, the difference between humans and other objects is not a difference in kind, but a difference in
ground-breaking work of Graham
degree. Put differently, all objects translate one another. Translation is not unique to how the mind relates to the
world. And as a consequence of this, no object has direct access to any other object. Onticology and objectoriented philosophy thus find themselves in a strange position with respect to speculative realism. Speculative
realism is a loosely affiliated philosophical movement that arose out of a Goldsmith's College conference organized
by Alberto Toscano in 2007. While the participants at this eventRay Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham
Harman, and Quentin Meillassouxshare vastly different philosophical positions, they are all united in defending a
variant of realism and in rejecting anti-realism or what they call correlationism. With the other speculative
realists, onticology and object-oriented philosophy defend a realist ontology that refuses to treat objects as
constructions or mere correlates of mind, subject, culture, or language. However, with the anti-realists ,
onticology and object-oriented philosophy argue that objects have no direct access
to one another and that each object translates other objects with which it enters
into non-relational relations. Object-oriented philosophy and onticology thus reject
the epistemological realism of other realist philosophies, taking leave of the project
of policing representations and demystifying critique. The difference is that where the antirealists focus on a single gap between humans and objects , object-oriented philosophy and
onticology treat this gap as a ubiquitous feature of all beings. One of the great
strengths of object-oriented philosophy and onticology is thus, I believe, that it can
integrate a number of the findings of anti-realist philosophy, and continental social
and political theory, without falling into the deadlocks that currently plague antirealist strains of thought.
Ontology First
Ontology comes before epistemology
Bryant 09
(Levi R. Bryant, prof of phil @ Collin College The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology, 2009,
http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf)
Consequently, prior to even posing questions of knowledge, of how we can know, whether we can know, and what
we can know, the would-be knower is already situated among differences. Here we encounter one reason that the
Ontic Principle is formulated as it is. Situated among differences, we must say that there are (es gibt, il y a)
differences. However, this thereness is indifferent to human existence. It is not a thereness for us, but a thereness
of being. The incipient knower would like to know something of these differences. She would like to know which
differences in the object make a difference, what ordered relations there are between differences of differing
objects, and so on. It is this thereness of difference that first provokes wonder and inquiry into beings. Noting
that differences come-to-be and pass-away, the incipient knower wishes to know something of this coming-to-be
and passing-away and whether or not there are any enduring differences. Thus, far from difference having a status
posterior to questions of knowledge, the thereness of difference is given and is what first provokes inquiry and
Paradoxically it therefore follows that epistemology cannot be

first philosophy. Insofar as the question of knowledge presupposes a preepistemological comprehension of difference, the question of knowledge always
comes second in relation to the metaphysical or ontological priority of difference .
As such, there can be no question of securing the grounds of knowledge in
advance or prior to an actual engagement with difference. Every epistemology or
critical orientation favors its particular differences that it strives to guarantee, and
these differences are always pre-epistemological or of a metaphysical sort. Thus, for
questions of knowledge.
example, Kant does not first engage in a critical reflection on the nature and limits of our faculties and then proceed
to ground physics and mathematics, but rather first begins with the truth of physics and mathematics and then
proceeds to determine how the structure of our faculties renders this knowledge possible. As I will attempt to show
further on, difference requires no grounding from mind.
Onticology comes before discourse.

Bryant 11
By way of a second point, while both onticology and iek argue that objects are split, the two do so for radically
different reasons. For iek, objects are split between their appearance and the void of their place of Chapter 3:
Virtual Proper Being 131 inscription in the symbolic. As a consequence of this divide between placeholder and
place, objects can never be identical to themselves. Insofar as objects are split between their appearance and the
void of their place of inscription, objects are effects of the symbolic or the signifier. Here iek directly follows
Lacan, for as Lacan remarks in Encore, [t]he universe is a flower of rhetoric.143 The claim that the universe is a
flower of rhetoric is the claim that the universe is an effect or product of rhetoric. The universe, for Lacan, is that
which blooms out of language and speech. And indeed, earlier we find Lacan remarking that, [t]here isn't the
slightest prediscursive reality, for the very fine reason that what constitutes a collectivitywhat I called men,
women, and childrenmeans nothing qua prediscursive reality. Men, women, and children are but signifiers.144
Presumably Lacan would claim the same thing of flowers, zebras, subatomic particles, burritos, stars and all other
The thesis that objects are an effect of the signifier, the symbolic, or
language is a variant of what I call the hegemonic fallacy. Put crudely, in political
theory a hegemonic relation is a social, ideological, cultural, or economic
dominance exerted over all other members of the social field. For example,
Christianity and, in particular, evangelical Christianity, has a hegemonic influence
on United States politics in comparison to other religious beliefs or the absence of
religious belief altogether. Onticology shifts the concept of hegemony from the
entities.
domain of political theory to the domain of ontology and might be fruitfully

compared to the concept of ontotheology. Within the framework of onticology, the
hegemonic fallacy occurs whenever one type of entity is treated as the ground or
explanans of all other entities. In treating language or the signifier as the ground
of being or the universe as an effect of the signifier, this is precisely what takes place in
iek and Lacan. Beings are hegemonized under the signifier or language, just as they
are hegemonized under mind in Kant . Lurking in the background of iek's argument is, I suspect, a
variant of the epistemic fallacy and actualism as discussed in the first chapter. Just as Locke rejected the
coherence of the concept of substance on the grounds that we are not given any access to substance in
the grounds for rejecting anything like prediscursive reality would lie in
the fact that we can only speak about prediscursive reality through signifiers or
language and that, no matter how hard we strive to escape language, we only
produce more signifiers. Here language is the actuality that is given and we are
invited to think of all being in terms of the epistemological or how beings are given
to us through language. However, as we saw in the first chapter, this argument only follows if
it is possible to transform properly ontological questions into epistemological
questions. The reasoning through which we arrive at the existence of objects is
found not in our access to objects through language or consciousness, but rather
through a reflection on what the world must be like for our practices to be
intelligible. And indeed, it is difficult to see how language could ever have the
power to divide or parcel in the way suggested by the linguistic idealists were it
not for the fact that the world is itself structured and differentiated. Absent a world
that is structured and differentiated, the surface of the world, as a sort of formless
flux, would be too slippery, too smooth, for the signifier to structure at all.
consciousness,
Alt
Alt Solves
Onticology solves for the humans first viewpoint.
The foregoing chapters and sections lead to the conclusion that being is flat. The flatness of being is embodied in
two fundamental claims. First, in light of our exploration of the interior of objects in chapter four, it becomes clear
that ontologically the bland human-world gap or relationship possesses no metaphysical priority. As Harman puts
it, object-oriented
philosophy holds that the relation of humans to pollen, oxygen,

eagles, or windmills is no different in kind from the interaction of these objects
with each other.290 Second, onticology and object-oriented philosophy establish
what might be called a heteroverse or pluriverse, where entities at all levels of
scale, whether natural or cultural, physical or artificial, material or semiotic are on
equal ontological footing. As Ian Bogost puts it, all beings equally exist, yet they do not exist
equally.291 Onticology and object-oriented philosophy therefore democratizes being,
asserting not one primary gap between subjects and objects, humans and world,
mind and reality, but rather an infinity of gaps or vacuums between objects
regardless of whether humans are involved. Likewise, onticology and object-oriented
philosophy democratize being by defending a plurality of types of objects, ranging
from the semiotic to the natural. Rather than treating one type of object such as
quantum particles as the really real upon which all else is grounded and to which
all else ultimately reduces, flat ontology advocates a pluralism of types of objects
at all levels of scale that are irreducible to one another. In other words, objects of different
types and at different levels of scale are what Aristotle referred to as genuine primary substances. As Harman has
philosophy, for the last two hundred or so years, has been obsessed
with a single gap between the human and the world, treating this gap as
metaphysically privileged or special, unlike all other relations with objects . Within
the framework of onticology and object-oriented philosophy, however, the humanobject gap possesses no privileged status, but is one among many gaps populating
a heteroverse. As Harman remarks, [w]hen the things withdraw from presence into their dark subterranean
compellingly argued,
reality, they distance themselves not only from human beings, but from each other as well. If the human
perception of a house or tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never become present,
the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops.292 From this Harman concludes
that, contrary
to the dominant assumption of philosophy since Kant, the true chasm

in ontology lies not between humans and world, but between objects and
relations.293 Far from the gap between humans and objects constituting a unique
form of relation, withdrawal is a perfectly ubiquitous relation within being
characteristic of all relations between objects. All objects are strange strangers
with respect to one another regardless of whether or not humans are involved in
these relations. Moreover, all objects are strange strangers with respect to
themselves.
Alt Solves/ Floating PIK

Onticology has opened a vast new domain for thinking that
allows us to solve for (_______)
Bryant 11
the level of object-oriented and onticological mereology, we cannot work from

the premise that location in time and space is sufficient to individuate an object,
nor that objects exist only at a particular scale such as the mid-range objects that
tend to populate the world of our daily existence. Rather, entities exist at a range of
different scales, from the unimaginably small to the unimaginably large, each
characterized by their own duration and spatiality. Here a tremendous amount of work remains
to be done in thinking these spatial and temporal structures. In my view, onticology and objectoriented philosophy have opened a vast and rich domain for thinking these
strange structures of space and time. What is important, however, is the
recognition that the substantiality of objects lies not in their parts, but in their
structure or organization, and that objects are not brute clods that merely sit
there, contemplating their self-perfection like Aristotle's 244 Levi R. Bryant Unmoved
Mover, but that they are dynamic and evolving as a consequence of their own
internal dynamics and interfaces with their environment .
At
Alt Solves Mapping

OOO allows us to find the weak points in the maps we create of
spatio-temporalities and fix those holes to create a better form
of connectivity.
Bryant 10
(Levi, professor of philosophy at Collins College,

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/spatio-temporal-cartographies/#more-4059 October 4, 2010)
One central problem presented by contemporary capitalism is not that capitalism totalizes the social field, reaching
into all its corners, crevices, and nooks, but rather that all sorts of entities, by virtue of the operational closure of
entities and the topological space-times that constitute existence, are completely outside of these spaces, invisible
to these space-times, without any relation to these space-times. Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that the the
problem is that these other entities and topological space-times resides in the fact that these entities are not
included in capitalism. Rather, I am arguing that the problem is that these other entities are excluded from a spacetime in which participation in the social order is foreclosed altogether. Like Eugene in the office next to me, the
voices of these other entities (human
and nonhuman alike, animate and inanimate alike ) is

foreclosed from participation in these spaces. Who are these foreclosed entities? They are
entities such as wage laborers, teachers whose voices are increasingly cut out of
discussions surrounding educational reform that are clearly driven by market
models and profit, animals, inanimate natural entities such as minerals and various
resources, etc. Thus, for example, uneven geographical development would refer to
topological spatio-temporal relations structuring the economic order . An objectoriented cartography would assist us in the development of maps allowing us to
discern the weak points in particular spatio-temporalities, those nodes that would
assist in the unraveling of the rest of a particular fragment of space-time, and in
devising strategies in which the foreclosed could generate connectivity in such a
way as to modify these fragments of space-time as a whole. Nor are these spatiotemporal relations restricted to the human world. For example, within this framework
there would be very little relationship, as developmental systems theorists such as
Griffiths like to note, between the moon and bacteria. For all intents and purposes, bacteria live
in an environment free of gravity. As a consequence, we would say that bacteria and the moon
belong to very different spatio-temporal fragments, or rather that topologically the
relation between these entities is very remote .
Alt Solves Racism/Sexism/Capitalism/Anthro

Turning our attention to objects animals and post human
allows for a new forms of living with that allow for welcoming
and generosity towards others.
Bryant 12
(Levi, prof of philosophy @ Collin College, Flat Ontology/Flat Ethics,

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/flat-ontologyflat-ethics/)
I think that Eileen Joy, in a comment over at Alex Reids Digital Digs, best articulates what the aims of an object-oriented ethics (OOE) might look like.
turning ones attention to animals, objects,

post/humanism and so on is precisely about thickening our capacity to imagine more
capacious forms of living with; it is precisely about developing more radical forms of
welcoming and generosity to others, who include humans as well as trees, rocks, dogs,
cornfields, ant colonies, pvc pipes, and sewer drains; it is precisely about amplifying the
ability of our brains to pick up more communication signals from more persons (who might be a
human or a cloud or a cave) whose movements, affects, and thoughts are trying to tell us something about
our interconnectedness and co-implicated interdependence with absolutely everything (or perhaps
even about a certain implicit alienation between everything in the world, which is nevertheless useful to understand better: take your pick); it is
precisely about working toward a more capacious vision of what we mean by well-being,
when we decide to attend to the well-being of humans and other persons (who might be economic markets
or the weather or trash or homeless cats) who are always enmeshed with each other in various vibrant
networks, assemblages, meshes, cascades, systems, what have you. And just for me likely,
just for me it is also about love, with love defined, not as something that goes in one
direction from one person to another person or object (carrying with it various demands and expectations and self-centered
desires), but rather, as a type of collective labor that works at creating fields for persons and
objects to emerge into view that otherwise would remain hidden (and perhaps also remain abjectified), and which
Responding to one of his recent posts, she writes: For me personally,
persons and objects could then be allowed the breathing/living room to unfold in various self-directed ways, even if thats not what you could have predicted in
advance nor supposedly what you want it to do (in other words: ethics as a form of attention that is directed toward the for-itself propulsions of other persons
work in post/humanism, and in OOO, is attentive to the world,

which includes and does not exile (or gleefully kill off) the human (although it certainly asks
that we expand our angles of vision beyond just the human-centered ones); it is both political
and ethical; and it is interested in what I would even call the tender attention to and care of
things, human and inhuman (I think that the work of Bennett, Bogost, Morton, Harman, Steven Shaviro, Jeffrey Cohen, Stacy Alaimo, Julian
and objects, human and inhuman). So, for me,
Yates, Myra Hird, Freya Matthews, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Levi Bryant, and many, many others who *never* get cited in these discussions,
exemplifies this
tender attention to and care of all of the items of the world. Any enlargement of our
capacity to think about the agential, signaling, and other capacities of as many
items/objects/persons, etc. of this world represents, in my mind, an enlargement, and not a
shrinking, of our ethical attention. Its asking for a richer, thicker ontology, which gives is
more to be responsible for (after all, thats partly where the specialness of humans comes in), but also: more to enjoy. It
seems to me that the sort of ethico-political vision that Joy here proposes has two faces. On
the one hand, there is that face directed towards our contatus, our endeavor to persist in our
being and flourish. Recognizing our interconnection with nonhumanthings and our impact on
nonhuman things is not simply some hippy-dippy thesis that were one with the universe.
especially the women working in materialism, science/gender studies, queer ecology, environmental humanities, etc.) especially
No. It is a matter of self-interest. Its the recognition that 1) we are dependent on this
ecosystem to flourish, 2) that these relations upon which we are dependent are fragile and can
be broken, and 3) that these things can also exercise oppressive power over us, undermining
our ability to flourish or live well. As Spinoza saw, we always act with other bodies. Some of these bodies enhance our power of acting,
while others diminish it. By and large, ethical thought has been blind to our relations with nonhumans, focusing only on questions of how we should treat and
Today, more than ever, our collective

survival depends on broadening the domain of what counts as sites of political and ethical
concern, and that means taking into account our relationship to nonhumans.
live with other humans. Yet this completely obscures our real ethical circumstances or conditions.
Alt Solves Thought

Onticology allows us to integrate strains of thought from other
theories and political thoughts to solve for the deadlocks in
thought.
Bryant 11
(Professor of Philosophy at Collin College 2011 Levi Democracy of Objects http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:4/-democracy-of-objects?rgn=div1;view=fulltext)
Rather than
treating objects as entities opposed to a subject, I treat all entities, including
subjects, as objects. Moreover, in order to overcome the dual world hypothesis of
Modernity, I argue that it is necessary to staunchly defend the autonomy of objects
or substances, refusing any reduction of objects to their relations, whether these
relations be relations to humans or other objects . In my view, the root of the Modernist schema
From the foregoing it can be gathered that the ontology I am proposing is rather peculiar.
arises from relationism. If we are to escape the aporia that beset the Modernist schema this, above all, requires us
to overcome relationism or the thesis that objects are constituted by their relations. Accordingly, following the
Harman's object-oriented philosophy, I argue that objects

are withdrawn from all relation. The consequences of this strange thesis are, I believe, profound. On
the one hand, in arguing that objects are withdrawn from their relations, we are able
to preserve the autonomy and irreducibility of substance, thereby sidestepping the
endless, and at this point rather stale, debate between the epistemological realists
and anti-realists. On the other hand, where the anti-realists have obsessively focused on a
single gap between humans and objects, endlessly revolving around the manner in
which objects are inaccessible to representation, object-oriented philosophy allows
us to pluralize this gap, treating it not as a unique or privileged peculiarity of
humans, but as true of all relations between objects whether they involve humans
or not. In short, the difference between humans and other objects is not a difference in kind, but a difference in
ground-breaking work of Graham
degree. Put differently, all objects translate one another. Translation is not unique to how the mind relates to the
world. And as a consequence of this, no object has direct access to any other object. Onticology and objectoriented philosophy thus find themselves in a strange position with respect to speculative realism. Speculative
realism is a loosely affiliated philosophical movement that arose out of a Goldsmith's College conference organized
by Alberto Toscano in 2007. While the participants at this eventRay Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham
Harman, and Quentin Meillassouxshare vastly different philosophical positions, they are all united in defending a
variant of realism and in rejecting anti-realism or what they call correlationism. With the other speculative
realists, onticology and object-oriented philosophy defend a realist ontology that refuses to treat objects as
constructions or mere correlates of mind, subject, culture, or language. However, with the anti-realists ,
onticology and object-oriented philosophy argue that objects have no direct access
to one another and that each object translates other objects with which it enters
into non-relational relations. Object-oriented philosophy and onticology thus reject
the epistemological realism of other realist philosophies, taking leave of the project
of policing representations and demystifying critique. The difference is that where the antirealists focus on a single gap between humans and objects , object-oriented philosophy and
onticology treat this gap as a ubiquitous feature of all beings. One of the great
strengths of object-oriented philosophy and onticology is thus, I believe, that it can
integrate a number of the findings of anti-realist philosophy, and continental social
and political theory, without falling into the deadlocks that currently plague antirealist strains of thought.
Alt Solves Warming

While the 1AC might have the ability to solve climate warming
the plan lacks a materialistic view to discuss the issues fully to
prove the impacts as a real threat.
Bryant 12 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/polymorphously-perverse-nature/)
Second, with the growing rise of ecology as a site of political struggle due to climate change, we increasingly
Appropriate responses to climate change

require us to treat ozone holes, the pollution of rivers and lakes due to fracking and
other forms of waste, shifts in weather patterns and changes in agriculture,
droughts, dead zones in oceans, and so on as real. We cant effectively approach
issues pertaining to climate change through a focus on how we signify things alone,
but need both a materialist and realist dimension in our thought to discuss these
issues. Clearly analysis and deconstruction of our narratives regarding nature will
be necessary here, but we also need to be clear that rises in global temperatures
and their effects are as real as a heart attack and arent simply social or linguistic
constructions.
witness the limitations of culturalist approaches.
Coexistence Solves
Only an Ecological ethic based on Co-existence can understand
the way our relation to nature . The intersections of natures
mesh are the only way to understand the totality of the world
around us and challenge our understanding of the Non-Human.
If we think the ecological thought, two things happen. Our perspective becomes
very vast. More and more aspects of the Universe become included in the ecological
thought. At the same time, our view becomes very profound. If everything is
interconnected to everything, what exactly are the things that are connected? In
some significant sense, if we already know what they are, if we already have a box
in which to put them, they are not truly different beings. If the ecological thought is
profound as well as vast, we cant predict or anticipate just who or what and can
we tell between who and what, and how can we tell? arrives at the
intersections in the unimaginably gigantic mesh. Individual beings become more
unique, even as they become more susceptible to measurement and analysis.
Really thinking the mesh means letting go of an idea that it has a center. There is no
being in the middlewhat would middle mean anyway? The most important?
How can one being be more important than another? This creates problems for
environmental ethics, which risks oversimplifying things to coerce people to act.
Movies about endangered species tend to focus on one species at a time. From a
penguins point of view, seals are dangerous monsters. 59 But from a seals point of
view, an orca or a human with a club is the monster. The aesthetic of cuteness a
rough version of Kantian beauty (its small and perfectly formed and doesnt hassle
our mind)might only be applicable to one species at a time. A dog might look cute
until it bites into a partridges neck. When we consider the mesh, we must drop this
one at a time sequencing. So awareness of the mesh may suck the cuteness out
of beings. Songs about the mesh, such as We Are All Earthlings (from Sesame
Street), may have it wrongthey are about multitudes of cute creatures, and
cuteness doesnt come in multitudes. 60 (In Chapter 2, I discuss some exceptions to
the problem of cuteness.) 39 If we keep thinking this no center or edge aspect of
the mesh, we discover that there is no definite within or outside of beings.
Everything is adapted to everything else. 61 This includes organs and the cells that
constitute them. The mesh extends inside beings as well as among them. An organ
that may have performed one function in one life form might now perform a
different function in another one, or none at all. Then there is symbiosis. Margulis
asserts that symbiosis is the fundamental driving force of evolution. 62 This also
affects the rhetoric of cuteness. What is cute and cuddly about symbiosis? Even
worse, what about endosymbiosisthe fact that our cells contain anaerobic
bacteria, for example? It sounds more like monstrosity. Cuteness requires a
minimum of integration. Although there is no absolute, definite inside or outside
of beings, we cannot get along without these concepts either. The mesh is highly
paradoxical. Endosymbiosis abolishes inside outside distinctions. A life form must
have a boundary for filtering nutrients and poisons. Yet these boundaries are not
perfectly defined. An oyster makes a pearl by secreting fluids around a piece of grit
it has accidentally absorbed. Surgeons can transplant organs. The same thing
occurs at larger scales. You only have to think of a coral reef to realize how life has
influenced Earth; in fact, you only have to breathe, as oxygen is a by-product of the
first Archaean beings (from 2.5 billion years ago back to an undefi ned limit after
the origin of Earth 4.5 billion years ago). The hills are teeming with the skeletal
silence of dead life forms. The ecological thought permits no distance. Thinking
interdependence involves dissolving the barrier between over here and over
there, and more fundamentally, the metaphysical illusion of rigid, narrow
boundaries between inside and outside. 63 Thinking interdependence involves
thinking difference. This means confronting the fact that all beings are related to
each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge.
In a language, a word means what it means because of its difference with other
words. There is nothing intrinsic to the word that makes it mean what it means. The
same goes for how it sounds. 64 The mesh is also made of negative difference,
which means it doesnt contain positive, really existing (independent, solid) things.
This should be an utterly mindblowing idea, so dont worry if youre having trouble
imagining it. Consider Indras net, used in Buddhist scripture to describe
interdependence: At 40 every connection in this infinite net hangs a magnificently
polished and infinitely faceted jewel, which reflects in each of its facets all the
facets of every other jewel in the net. Since the net itself, the number of jewels, and
the facets of every jewel are infinite, the number of reflections is infinite as well. 65
What were examining here is that scary thing, totality. Recent thinkers have been
shy of totality. 66 They fear that totality means totalitarianism. Totality may be
difficult and frightening. But the current global crisis requires that we wake up and
smell the total coffee. Its strictly impossible to equate this total
interconnectedness, Indras net, with something beyond us or larger than us. Total
interconnectedness isnt holistic. Were definitely not talking about totalitarianism,
and were not talking about large things as opposed to small ones. Indras net
implies that large and small things, near and far things, are all near. Totality
doesnt mean something closed, single, and independent, nor does it mean
something predetermined and fixed; it has no goal. Very large finitude is harder to
deal with than an abstract, ideal infinity. 67 As I noted in the Introduction, it might
be harder to imagine four and a half billion years than abstract eternity. It might be
harder to imagine evolution than to imagine abstract infinity. Actuality presents us
with disturbingly large finitudes. Quantity humiliates. 68 The other appears in this
world, not beyond it. 69 Face it we must. Perhaps untotality would express it
better, but we dont need to invent clever ways of saying the same thing. Think big,
then bigger stillbeyond containment, beyond the panoramic spectacle that
dissolves everything within itself. 70 The mesh is vast yet intimate: there is no here
or there, so everything is brought within our awareness. The more we analyze, the
more ambiguous things become. We cant really know who is at the junctions of the
mesh before we meet them. Even when we meet them, they are liable to change
before our eyes, and our view of them is also labile. These beings are the strange
stranger. You wont see references to animals in this book except in quotation
marks. You will see absolutely no references to the animal or, even worse, to the
animal question, as some contemporary philosophers put it (have they forgotten
the resonance of the Jewish question?). Might this question be a product of a
capitalist age, in which, as Marx comments, money is removed from other
commodities and made to stand for 41 commodity-ness as such, as if there existed
the Animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom? 71 Could
treating people like animals result from this alienating abstraction? If we think the
ecological thought, two things happen. Our perspective becomes very vast. More
and more aspects of the Universe become included in the ecological thought2. At
the same time, our view becomes very profound. If everything is interconnected to
everything, what exactly are the things that are connected? In some significant
sense, if we already know what they are, if we already have a box in which to put
them, they are not truly different beings. If the ecological thought is profound as
well as vast, we cant predict or anticipate just who or what and can we tell
between who and what, and how can we tell? arrives at the intersections in
the unimaginably gigantic mesh. Individual beings become more unique, even as
they become more susceptible to measurement and analysis. Really thinking the
mesh means letting go of an idea that it has a center. There is no being in the
middlewhat would middle mean anyway? The most important? How can one
being be more important than another? This creates problems for environmental
ethics, which risks oversimplifying things to coerce people to act. Movies about
endangered species tend to focus on one species at a time. From a penguins point
of view, seals are dangerous monsters. 59 But from a seals point of view, an orca or
a human with a club is the monster. The aesthetic of cuteness a rough version
of Kantian beauty (its small and perfectly formed and doesnt hassle our mind)
might only be applicable to one species at a time. A dog might look cute until it
bites into a partridges neck. When we consider the mesh, we must drop this one at
a time sequencing. So awareness of the mesh may suck the cuteness out of
beings. Songs about the mesh, such as We Are All Earthlings (from Sesame
Street), may have it wrongthey are about multitudes of cute creatures, and
cuteness doesnt come in multitudes. 60 (In Chapter 2, I discuss some exceptions to
the problem of cuteness.) 39 If we keep thinking this no center or edge aspect of
the mesh, we discover that there is no definite within or outside of beings.
Everything is adapted to everything else. 61 This includes organs and the cells that
constitute them. The mesh extends inside beings as well as among them. An organ
that may have performed one function in one life form might now perform a
different function in another one, or none at all. Then there is symbiosis. Margulis
asserts that symbiosis is the fundamental driving force of evolution. 62 This also
affects the rhetoric of cuteness. What is cute and cuddly about symbiosis? Even
worse, what about endosymbiosisthe fact that our cells contain anaerobic
bacteria, for example? It sounds more like monstrosity. Cuteness requires a
minimum of integration. Although there is no absolute, definite inside or outside
of beings, we cannot get along without these concepts either. The mesh is highly
paradoxical. Endosymbiosis abolishes inside outside distinctions. A life form must

have a boundary for filtering nutrients and poisons. Yet these boundaries are not
perfectly defined. An oyster makes a pearl by secreting fluids around a piece of grit
it has accidentally absorbed. Surgeons can transplant organs. The same thing
occurs at larger scales. You only have to think of a coral reef to realize how life has
influenced Earth; in fact, you only have to breathe, as oxygen is a by-product of the
first Archaean beings (from 2.5 billion years ago back to an undefi ned limit after
the origin of Earth 4.5 billion years ago). The hills are teeming with the skeletal
silence of dead life forms. The ecological thought permits no distance. Thinking
interdependence involves dissolving the barrier between over here and over
there, and more fundamentally, the metaphysical illusion of rigid, narrow
boundaries between inside and outside. 63 Thinking interdependence involves
thinking difference. This means confronting the fact that all beings are related to
each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge.
In a language, a word means what it means because of its difference with other
words. There is nothing intrinsic to the word that makes it mean what it means. The
same goes for how it sounds. 64 The mesh is also made of negative difference,
which means it doesnt contain positive, really existing (independent, solid) things.
This should be an utterly mindblowing idea, so dont worry if youre having trouble
imagining it. Consider Indras net, used in Buddhist scripture to describe
interdependence: At 40 every connection in this infi nite net hangs a magnificently
polished and infinitely faceted jewel, which reflects in each of its facets all the
facets of every other jewel in the net . Since the net itself, the number of jewels,
and the facets of every jewel are infinite, the number of reflections is infinite as
well. 65 What were examining here is that scary thing, totality. Recent thinkers
have been shy of totality. 66 They fear that totality means totalitarianism. Totality
may be difficult and frightening. But the current global crisis requires that we wake
up and smell the total coffee. Its strictly impossible to equate this total
interconnectedness, Indras net, with something beyond us or larger than us. Total
interconnectedness isnt holistic. Were definitely not talking about totalitarianism,
and were not talking about large things as opposed to small ones. Indras net
implies that large and small things, near and far things, are all near. Totality
doesnt mean something closed, single, and independent, nor does it mean
something predetermined and fixed; it has no goal. Very large finitude is harder to
deal with than an abstract, ideal infinity. 67 As I noted in the Introduction, it might
be harder to imagine four and a half billion years than abstract eternity. It might be
harder to imagine evolution than to imagine abstract infinity. Actuality presents us
with disturbingly large finitudes. Quantity humiliates. 68 The other appears in this
world, not beyond it. 69 Face it we must. Perhaps untotality would express it
better, but we dont need to invent clever ways of saying the same thing. Think big,
then bigger stillbeyond containment, beyond the panoramic spectacle that
dissolves everything within itself. 70 The mesh is vast yet intimate: there is no here
or there, so everything is brought within our awareness. The more we analyze, the
more ambiguous things become. We cant really know who is at the junctions of the
mesh before we meet them. Even when we meet them, they are liable to change
before our eyes, and our view of them is also labile. These beings are the strange
stranger. You wont see references to animals in this book except in quotation
marks. You will see absolutely no references to the animal or, even worse, to the
animal question, as some contemporary philosophers put it (have they forgotten
the resonance of the Jewish question?). Might this question be a product of a
capitalist age, in which, as Marx comments, money is removed from other
commodities and made to stand for 41 commodity-ness as such, as if there existed
the Animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom? 71 Could
treating people like animals result from this alienating abstraction?
Ethics Key
Ecological Thought must originate from our ethical
understanding of the world . Only this strategy is able to
challenge SQUOs aesthetic based orientation to nature.
id=10496853&ppg=41..page , //Notjacob
Im not alone in thinking that consequentialism and hedonism wont do. John
Vucetich and Michael Nelson argue that hoping for a better future is precisely what
blocks ecological action. Vucetich and Nelson maintain that we should abandon
hope (as they put it), if only because k's too easily hamstrung by that other
environmentalist meme, the threat of imminent doom.77 We should act ecologically
out of a modified Kantian duty that doesnt depend on a powerful aesthetic
experience such as the sublime to ground it. If it absolutely must depend on an
experience, perhaps it should be a downgraded version that includes various
experiences that Kant wants to edit out of the aesthetic, such as disgustbecause
the life forms whom weve got under our skin arent something we can spit out.
(Ecology without Nature argues that the trouble with the aesthetic dimension is that
you can*t just exit from it, rather like Alice trying to leave the Looking Glass House.
Any post environmentalist ecological view must include the aesthetic.)78 Perhaps
the sentiment were going for is not We can because we must, but rather We must
because we are.
This means that we must base ecological action on ethics, not aesthetics. Ecological
action will never feel good and the nonworld will never seem elegant. This is
because we are not embedded in a lifeworld and can thus never get our bearings
sufficiently to achieve the appropriate aesthetic distance from which to experience
that kind of refined pleasure. Hedonistic forms of consequential ismideas,
however expressed, that ecological concern makes us or others feel better dont
work. Environmental politics has been barking up the wrong tree, trying to make
people feel or see something different. If only we could see things differently can be
translated quickly into ,I wont act unless suitably stimulated and soothed by a
picture of reality built to my preexisting specifications., This is now impossible. We
cant con ourselves into a touchy-feely reason to act. This is beginning to look much
more like Kantian ethics than the authoritarian voice of aesthetic compulsion. There
is a twist, which is that Kantian duty gets its cue from a quasi-aesthetic experience
that Kant calls sublimity, we havent totally edited the aesthetic out of the
equation. We cant escape the experiential dimension of existence, and wouldnt be
awful if we could? Yet the ecological thought drops Kantian aesthetics, too, if by that
we mean being able to spit out disgusting things (the premise on which Kantian
taste is built). We cant spit out the disgusting real of ecological enmeshment. Its
just too close and too painful for comfort. So its a weird, perverse aesthetics that
includes the ugly and the horrifying, embracing the monster. Ultimately it means
not swapping our dualism and our mechanism for something that seems nicer, such
as vitalism or monism. We have to make do with the nasty stuff that has been
handed to us on our plate. That includes the fact of consciousness, which forever
puts me in a paradoxical relationship with other beingsthere is always going to be
an ironic gap between strange strangers. This is good news, actually, because it
means I can be ecological without losing my sense of irony. Irony isnt just a slogan
on a cool t-shirt; its the way coexistence feels. Dont just do somethingsit there.
But in the mean rime, sitting there will upgrade your Version of doing and of sitting.
A2 Aff Solves the Alt

Hyperobjects control the way we think about ecology, not the
other way aroundsolvency only goes one way
Stop the tape of evolution anywhere and you wont see it. Stand under a rain cloud
and its not global warming youll feel. Cut your coat into a thousand piecesyou
wont find capital in there. Now try pointing to the unconscious. Did you catch it?
Hyperobjects compel us to think ecologically, and not the other way around. Its not
as if some abstract environmental system made us think like this; rather, plutonium,
global warming, pollution, and so on, gave rise to ecological thinking. To think
otherwise is to confuse the map with the territory. For sure, the idea of hyperobjects
arose because of quantum-theoretical thinking about the nuclei of atoms and
electron orbits (nuclear bombs), and because of systems-theoretical approaches to
emergent properties of massive amounts of weather data, and so on. Yet
hyperobjects are not the data: they are hyperobjects.
A2 Aff = Only Way to Solve Warming

The Aff cant solve warmingthey cant even comprehend it
When you feel raindrops, you are experiencing climate, in some sense. In particular
you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming. But you are
never directly experiencing global warming as such. Nowhere in the long list of
catastrophic weather eventswhich will increase as global warming takes offwill
you find global warming. But global warming is as real as this sentence. Not only
that, its viscous. It never stops sticking to you, no matter where you move on Earth.
How can we account for this? By arguing that global warming, like all hyperobjects,
is nonlocal: its massively distributed in time and space. What does this mean? It
means that my experience of the weather in the hic et nunc is a false immediacy.
Its never the case that those raindrops only fall on my head! They are always a
manifestation of global warming! In an age of ecological emergencyin an age in
which hyperobjects start to oppress us with their terrifying strangenesswe will
have acclimatize ourselves to the fact that locality is always a false immediacy.
When you see a Magic Eye picture, you realize that all the little squiggles that you
thought were individual squiggles are actually distributed pieces of a higherdimensional object that seems to emerge when you do that crossing-your-eyes
thing. In a Magic Eye picture, the cup or flower is distributed throughout the mesh of
fuzzy little patches of the image. The object is already there. Before we look at it.
Global warming is not a function of our measuring devices. Yet because its
distributed across the biosphere and beyond, its very hard to see as a unique
entity. And yet, there it is, raining on us, burning down on us, quaking the Earth,
spawning gigantic hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are
distributed pieces: the raindrops falling on my head in Northern California. The
tsunami that pours through the streets of Japanese towns. The increasing
earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor. Like the image
in a Magic Eye picture, global warming is real, but it involves a massive,
counterintuitive perspective shift to see it. Convincing some people of its existence
is like convincing some two- dimensional Flatland people of the existence of apples,
based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world.
A2 Utopian Alts Bad

The alt is not utopian Only the inclusion of the ecology as
depressing and dark can create new political strategies.
The ecological thought is as much about opening our minds as it is about knowing
something or other in particular. At its limit, it is a radical openness to everything.
The ecological thought is therefore full of shadows and twilights. The ecological
world isnt a positive, sunny Zippity Doo Da world. 40 The sentimental aesthetics
of cute animals is obviously an obstacle to the ecological thought. But so is the
sublime aesthetics of the awesome. We need a whole new way of evoking the
environment. In this respect, utopian eco-language turns me off. It is far too
affirmative. This is one reason why Chapter 2 is called Dark Thoughts. I am
perhaps unfairly 16 nauseated by the idea of bright green a shade of
environmental thinking that recently gained some popularity. 41 Bright conveys
optimism, intelligence, and an acceptance of the sunny world of consumer products.
The inventors claim that ecological thinking can accommodate itself to postmodern
consumer capitalism. Maybe at heart Im an old-fashioned goth, but when I hear the
word bright I reach for my sunglasses. The ecological thought is intrinsically dark,
mysterious, and open, like an empty city square at dusk, a half-open door, or an
unresolved chord. It is realistic, depressing, intimate, and alive and ironic all at the
same time. It is no wonder that the ancients thought that melancholy, their word for
depression, was the earth mood. In the language of humor theory, melancholy is
black, earthy, and cold. Environmental rhetoric is too often strongly affirmative,
extraverted, and masculine; it privileges speech over writing; and it simulates
immediacy (feigning one-to-one correspondences between language and reality).
Its sunny, straightforward, ableist, holistic, hearty, and healthy. Where does this
leave negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness,
irony, fragmentation, and sickness? Are these simply nonecological categories?
Must we accept the injunction to turn on, tune in, shut up, go outdoors, and breathe
Nature? Are we ostriches compelled to stick our ironic heads in the sand for fear of
embarrassing Nature? I dont think so. If the ecological thought is as big as I think it
is, it must include darkness as well as light, negativity as well as positivity.
Negativity might even be more ecological than positivity is. A truly scientific attitude
means not believing everything you think. This means that your thinking keeps
encountering nonidentical phenomena, things you cant put in a box. If the
ecological thought is scientific, this implies that it has a high tolerance for
negativity. Psychoanalysis asserts that melancholia bonds us inextricably to the
mothers body. Are we similarly bonded to Earth itself? Is the dark experience of
separateness from Earth a place where we can experience ecological awareness? Is
loneliness a sign of deep connection? Chapter 2 answers yes to these questions. I

explore the possibility of a new ecological aesthetics: dark ecology. Dark ecology
puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking.
The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a
supposedly external situation, from a 17 supposedly neutral point of view, only to
discover that she or he is implicated in it. The point of view of the narrator herself
becomes stained with desire. There is no metaposition from which we can make
ecological pronouncements. Ironically, this applies in particular to the sunny,
affirmative rhetoric of environmental ideology. A more honest ecological art would
linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference. With dark ecology, we can
explore all kinds of art forms as ecological: not just ones that are about lions and
mountains, not just journal writing and sublimity. The ecological thought includes
negativity and irony, ugliness and horror. Democracy is well served by irony,
because irony insists that there are other points of view that we must acknowledge.
Ugliness and horror are important, because they compel our compassionate
coexistence to go beyond condescending pity. Things will get worse before they get
better, if at all. We must create frameworks for coping with a catastrophe that, from
the evidence of the hysterical announcements of its imminent arrival, has already
occurred. Chapter 2 provides extra shading to the idea of strange strangers, the life
forms to whom we find ourselves connected. The strange stranger is at the limit of
our imagining. As well as being about melancholy, dark ecology is also about
uncertainty. Even if biology knew all the species on Earth, we would still encounter
them as strange strangers, because of the inner logic of knowledge. The more you
know about something, the stranger it grows. The more you know about the origins
of the First World War, the more ambiguous your conclusions become. You find
yourself unable to point to a single independent event. Viewed from a distance, the
United Kingdom looks like a triangle. When you view it at a scale of millimeters, it
looks very crinkly. 42 The more we know about life forms, the more we recognize
our connection with them and the stranger they become. The strange stranger isnt
just a blank at the end of a long list of life forms we know (aardvarks, beetles,
chameleons . . . the strange stranger). The strange stranger lives within (and
without) each and every being. Along the way toward this idea, we visit the
philosophy of consciousness, and in particular theories of artificial intelligence.
Animals and robots (and computers) are often held in the same (low) esteem.
A2Top
A2 All Things Equal

Our argument isnt that all things exist equally to one another
its that all things equally exist. The difference is that
everything is an object, but not all objects are equally
significant.
Bryant 10
(Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, Flat Ontology,

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/flat-ontology-2/)
Bogost captures the central intuition of flat ontology nicely in his recent post on
materialism: I get the sense that many people misconstrue object-oriented
ontology as a singular material affair, as a reductionism: everythings an object.
But instead, proponents of OOO hold that all things equally exist, yet they do not
exist equally. The funeral pyre is not the same as the aardvark; the porcelatta is not
equivalent to the rubgy ball. Not only are neither pair reducible to human
encounter, but also neither are reducible to one another. In this respect,
McLuhan is a better place to look for materialism than is Marx. Notice Bogosts
skillful inversion of the difference between equally existing and existing equally. The
two concepts are not identical. To say, as flat ontology says, that things equally
exist is not to say that things exist equally. Both the sun and my coffee mug equally
exist, but it is not the case that they exist equally. In terms of its range of effects,
the sun has a far more extensive impact on other objects than my coffee cup. Both
entities are, but it is not the case that both entities affect other entities to the same
degree. There are a couple of points worth making in this connection. First, flat
ontology is not a prescriptive thesis or a moral thesis. And this for two reasons. On
the one hand, it is not the moral call to treat all beings as equal. These are
ontological matters, not ethical matters. Each entity relates selectively to other
entities and as such does not relate to other entities equally. If we distinguish
between object, world, and environment we can see how this is the case. The world
is the infinite totality of objects that exist, whereas the environment consists of the
selective relations dictated by the structure of an object. Thus, for example, an
automobile belongs to the world in which a snake exists, but it does not belong to
the environment of a snake. For the snake automobiles might as well not
exist. The snakes environment is instead populated by all sorts of scent and heat
signatures pertaining to mating and food. The point here is that the snake relates
selectively to the world. On the other hand, ontologically we want to, as Plato put it,
carve being at the joints. If this is to be possible we need to recognize the
inequalities among objects, the degree to which they unequally affect the world
about them, if we are to properly understand the being of beings. Yes beings equally
exist but they dont exist equally amongst themselves. However, it should also be
borne in mind that this determination of inequalities amongst beings is a moving
target. The most humble pebble can suddenly take on maximum impact on other
entities if it enters into the right assemblage. Drawing on Harmans example from
Prince of Networks, the emperor of the Roman empire can choke on that pebble and
die, generating a whole cascade of consequences for the empire of Rome. These are
variable determinations. Likewise, drawing on Bennetts example, a humble tree
can fall on a power line contributing to the 2003 Northeast blackout that had a
whole cascade of consequences for peoples lives, economy, the institutions that
provided power, and government regulation. Here its worthwhile to recall Deleuze
and Guattaris contrast between the games of go and chess. Second, the claim that
all beings equally exist is not the claim that all beings are the same. Beings, one
and all, have their own internal structure, essence, or nature and these internal
differences should be tracked and understood. The fictional world of Avatar might
have an equal claim to existence with the sun, but nothing about this suggests that
there arent important differences between fictions and natural entities like the sun,
or that the two entities exist equally. Avatar produces all sorts of effects in the world
as Adrian Ivakhiv has noted, but this is not to make the absurd claim that you can
jump on one of those winged creatures and fly about as they do in the film. The film
has a claim to being because it produces aleatory effects that exceed any of the
intentions of the writers, directors, and producers and that can never be summed
up by any of the viewers, but the differences or effects this fictional entity produces
differ from the sorts of effects a natural pterodactyl would have if it came back into
existence. The latter can eat fish, is very light (around 165lbs), flies about, makes all
sorts of sounds, etc. The former can do none of these things. Part of ontology
consists in the activity of regional ontology, and a big part of regional ontology
consists in determining the internal ontological structure of different types of
beings. Yes, they both equally exist but they do not exist in the same way or have
the same kinds of causal powers.
A2 Framework
Onticology allows us to decenter the human first view. This
allows us to break thought the barrier of language.
Meillassoux 08 - a French philosopher. He teaches at the Universit de Paris 1 Panthon Sorbonne (Quentin, After Finitude:
An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Translated by Ray Brassier, 2008, pg 6-7, ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-9674-4,
http://aaaaarg.org/upload/quentin-meillassoux-after-finitude-an-essay-on-the-necessity-of-contingency.pdf)
During the twentieth century, the two principal media of the correlation were
consciousness and language, the former bearing phenomenology, the latter the
various currents of analytic philosophy. Francis Wolff has very accurately described consciousness and language as objectworlds. 6
They are in fact unique objects insofar as they make the world. And if these objects
make the world, this is because from their perspective everything is inside but at
the same time everything is outside ... Wolff continues: Everything is inside because in order
to think anything whatsoever, it is necessary to be able to be conscious of it, it is
necessary to say it, and so we are locked up in language or in consciousness
without being able to get out. In this sense, they have no outside. But in another
sense, they are entirely turned towards the outside; they are the worlds window: for
to be conscious is always to be conscious of something, to speak is necessarily to
speak about something. To be conscious of the tree is to be conscious of the tree
itself, and not the idea of the tree; to speak about the tree is not just to utter a word
but to speak about the thing. Consequently, consciousness and language enclose
the world within themselves only insofar as, conversely, they are entirely contained
by it. We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out. 7 What is remarkable about
this description of the modern philosophical conception of consciousness and
language is the way in which it exhibits the paradoxical nature of correlational
exteriority: on the one hand, correlationism readily insists upon the fact that
consciousness, like language, enjoys an originary connection to a radical exteriority
(exemplified by phenomenological consciousness transcending or as Sartre puts it
exploding towards the world); yet on the other hand this insistence seems to dissimulate a
strange feeling of imprisonment or enclosure within this very exteriority (the transparent cage).
For we are well and truly imprisoned within this outside proper to language and
consciousness given that we are always-already in it (the always already
accompanying the co- of correlationism as its other essential locution), and given
that we have no access to any vantage point from whence we could observe these
object-worlds, which are the unsurpassable providers of all exteriority, from the
outside. But if this outside seems to us to be a cloistered outside, an outside in
which one may legitimately feel incarcerated, this is because in actuality such an
outside is entirely relative, since it is and this is precisely the point relative to us.
Consciousness and its language certainly transcend themselves towards the world,
but there is a world only insofar as a consciousness transcends itself towards it .
Consequently, this space of exteriority is merely the space of what faces us, of what exists only as a correlate of our own
existence. This is why, in actuality, we do not transcend ourselves very much by
plunging into such a world, for all we are doing is exploring the two faces of what
remains a face to face like a coin which only knows its own obverse. And if contemporary
philosophers insist so adamantly that thought is entirely oriented towards the outside, this could be because of their failure to come to terms with a bereavement the denial of a loss concomitant
with the abandonment of dogmatism. For it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative
to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with
the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory of being entirely elsewhere
Debate is a system of communication that feeds off radically

different speech objects generating creative affective response
the illusion of limits dissolves the system into entropy.
Bryant 12
Levi Bryant. Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. January 2012. A Disturbing
Thought About Communication. Larval Subjects.
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/a-disturbing-thought-aboutcommunication/
One of the central claims of Luhmanns sociological autopoietic systems theory is
that societies consist entirely of communications. For those not familiar with
autopoietic theory, an autopoietic system is roughly a system that 1) produces its
own elements, and 2) that has no direct relationship to other entities in its
environment. Thus, for example, a cell produces the elements that compose it
through interactions among these elements. Each event that takes place within the
cell is a response to other events that take place within the cell. Moreover, since the
cell is contained by a membrane, it shares no direct relationship to itstf environment
or is operationally closed. While the cell can be perturbed by events in its
environment, the manner in which these perturbations will affect the cell will result
from the cells internal organization, not the instigating cause. In other words, an
autopoietic system will always process perturbations according to its own
organization. One of the key claims of autopoietic theory is that these systems are
without teleology or goal. While from an outside observers perspective, we might
perceive the cell as having a particular function as in the case of nerve cells
relaying information, from the standpoint of the cells internal functioning the only
aim of the cell is to continue its operations from moment to moment. From this
perspective, the cell serves no particular function, but rather merely operates in
such a way as to maintain its own existence. Luhmann sought to apply autopoietic
theory to society, arguing that societies are autopoietic systems. In approaching
society in this way the claim was that societies produce themselves and their own
elements (various social roles, positions, and institutions), and as operationally
closed systems, they share no direct relationship to their environment or that which
lies outside their boundary. For Luhmann, the events or elements of which societies
consist are communications. In other words, one of the most disturbing Luhmannian
claims is that societies are not composed of persons, but rather communications. As
such, persons belong to the environment of such systems. They are literally outside
of societies. As a consequence, because the elements of a system can only respond
to other elements of a system, humans cannot communicate with societies and
societies cannot communicate with humans. To be sure, humans can perturb social
systems, but those perturbations will always be processed or registered in terms
of the organization of the social system, not what the person intended. As Luhmann
strikingly puts it, communications can only communicate with communications. In
keeping with the non-teleological orientation of autopoietic theory, for Luhmann
communication has no goal beyond producing more communication so as to

continue the existence of the social system. In other words, unlike theorists such as
Habermas where communication is directed towards an aim such as consensus,
finding truth, justice, etc., for Luhmann communication only communicates to
communicate. Nothing more, nothing less. And here we must recall that for
Luhmann its not people that communicate we might very well have all these
admirable goals but rather its only communications that communicate. This is
where things get very disturbing from the standpoint of emancipatory theorists
and seekers of truth such as ourselves. If Luhmann is right, if it is true that the aim
of social systems (not people) is to continue communications so as to maintain and
continue their existence, then it follows that the central problem every social
system faces is how to produce new communications based on events of
communication that just took place. This entails that social systems will privilege
those communicative events that contain, in germ, the maximal possibility of
producing further communications. For Luhmann, systems will evolve selection
mechanisms that privilege those communicative events that maximize the
possibility for producing further and additional communication. At this point,
everything is turned upside down. For if Luhmann is right, what types of
communicative events will be privileged in the operations of such a system? They
will not be events such as consensus, because consensus leads to the dissipation of
communication and therefore the disintegration of the social system (as the social
system only exists in its continuing operations, just as Harvey observes of capital).
Rather, the types of communicative events that will be favored in such a system will
be all those that produce novelty or the possibility of further communication. As
Luhmann often remarks, information is the difference that makes a difference and
information repeated twice is no longer information. Information goes stale and
thus requires the production of novelty to generate subsequent communication. Yet
if this is true, what are the types of communications that will be privileged in such a
system: controversy, scandal, vagueness, the obscure, paradox, conflict, the
enigmatic, disagreement, the strange, and many other things besides that share a
family resemblance to these things. If these sorts of communicative events will be
privileged within social systems, then this is because they maximize the possibility
of producing further or subsequent communications. Where clarity and consensus
tend to lead to a cessation of the production of further communicative acts, all of
these communicative acts call for further communicative acts. With controversy
everyone encounters the need to put in their two cents. The enigmatic, strange,
obscure, and vague (as in the case of works of art), call for interpretations which are
further communicative acts. Scandals, like controversies call for everyone to
participate. Those things that are impediments to clarity and consensus seem to be
favored within social systems, whereas those things that tend towards clarity and
consensus also tend to be passed over unremarked. And if they are passed over
unremarked, then this is precisely because, according to Luhmann, they arent
generative of further communications. Here we might think of television news
as a paradigm case. The old joke at least in The China Syndrome runs that bad
news is good news. This is because bad news introduces novelty into the media
system, allowing it to perpetuate its existence from one report to the next. By
contrast, it is a disaster if the only thing to report is that children are well fed
and doing well in school, people are walking about doing their thing unmolested,
countries arent at war, the sun is shining, theres no rain, its 75 degrees, etc.
These things could only become significant news in the context of an absolute
distopia. Contrary to what Michael Moore seems to suggest in Bowling for
Columbine, the news media isnt organized around a conspiracy designed to make
us encounter the world as perpetually menacing, rather it necessarily gravitates
towards the anomalous, the dangerous, the deviant, etc., as these are all
communicative events that generate further communications thereby allowing the
media system to perpetuate itself. Likewise, we might here think about the paradox
of analytic philosophy where the drive for clarity seemed to generate the greatest
obscurity in technical vocabulary. Consider, for example, the writing of Sellars or the
the Zen like koans of Wittgenstein. Doesnt part of their success lie precisely in their
esoteric nature, an esoteric nature that generated all sorts of further
communications at the level of commentary, interpretation, and elaboration.
Indeed, we could think of the analytic/continental divide as two strategies of
obscurity that, out of their obscurity, have generated all sorts of further
communications Those further communications consisting of both commentary
and denunciation. In other words, communicative acts that generate denunciation
are, from the standpoint of autopoietic functioning, highly successful as theyve
continued the ongoing autopoiesis of the social system. In a very real sense, the
opposition and conflict is what perpetuates and holds the social system together. In
connection with this thesis, a number of perplexing things about trends in the
humanities academia become clear. When, for example, a theoretical orientation
becomes regnant, we should not assume that this is because it has somehow
generated a consensus or is agreeable to many academics, but rather that it has
generated a controversy and work for academics. Here we can think of
deconstruction, postmodernism, and phenomenology (and another theoretical
orientation that has recently gotten a lot of attention). From a Luhmannian
perspective, part of the success of deconstruction and postmodernism was that
both orientations generated controversy, thereby generating further communicative
acts throughout the academy in both declarations of allegiance and in
denunciations. Likewise, postmodernism was able to perpetuate itself through
generating controversy at the level of allegiance and denunciation up to and
including the intervention of Sokal and Bricmont. Far from undermining
postmodernism, Sokal and Bricmont actually contributed to the continued existence
of postmodernism as a successful communicative strategy within a particular social
system. The same can be said of the New Atheists with respect to fundamentalist
religious movements. Far from undermining religion they actually perpetuate
religious discourse and intensify it by creating a cite in which a proliferation of
communicative acts were possible. With phenomenology matters are different. Its
unlikely that phenomenology has ever really generated a controversy (which is no
doubt part of what made it attractive during the McCarthy years and their
aftermath). Rather, what accounts for the success of phenomenology like, in part,
the success of deconstruction is that it created work for academics, opening up an
infinite domain of communicativity by creating all sorts of opportunities for further
commentary, analysis, and investigation. By contrast, those philosophical positions
that seem to languish in obscurity would do so not because they fail to hit the truth
or say something significant, but because they fail to create any novelty or
difference capable of generating further communicative acts. Shoulders are
shrugged as people say yeah, thats true.
A2 Perm
The 1AC hegemonizes the debate with the signification of the
aff- Alt must come first to solve.
Bryant 12 (Levi, prof of phil @ Collin College, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/worries-aboutooo-and-politics/)
Again, it is difficult to see how any of these considerations are indifferent to politics for me theyre riddles with political
The entire aim is to enhance our ability

to act, change the world about us, and intervene. This requires that we actually
know what is organizing situations. And here I believe that nonhuman actors play a
significant role in why assemblages take the form they do . If there is currently a focus on
considerations or how they aim to cultivate a political conservatism.
nonhuman entities in OOO and I perpetually go back and forth between human and nonhuman actors in my work, trying to show
their imbrications with each other then
this is because signification currently hegemonizes

cultural studies and the humanities and it is necessary to bring other things into
relief. I would invite Berry to tarry a bit with the question of what difference toilets make especially in human assemblages
where they are absent and what changing introducing plumbing might make in those assemblages. If he thinks seriously about
signifying intervention is not the only form of

intervention and that often big emancipatory differences can be introduced by
attending to non-signifying entities.
such earthly things he might begin to see that
A2 Policy Key
Only the inclusion of philosophy and Human experience with
science can resolve the current ecological crisis.
Taken at their trivial and ideological worst, the humanities is hamstrung by

factoids, quasior pseudofacts that havent been well thought out, while the
sciences are held in the sway of unconscious opinions. Humanities and sciences
hold broken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, pieces that might not fit together. Like William
Blake Im suspicious of fitting & fitted. 32 The ecological thought must interrogate
both the attitude of science, its detached authoritarian coldness; and the nihilistic,
baselessly anthropocentric arguments in the humanities as well as humanist
refusals to see the big picture, often justified by self-limiting arguments against
totalizationtalk about shooting yourself in the foot. 33 The ecological thought is
about warmth and strangeness, infi nity and proximity, tantalizing thereness and
head-popping, wordless openness. The ecological thought is intrinsically open, so it
doesnt really matter where you begin. There are good reasons for trusting the
biases and specialties that I bring to this task. Studying art is important, because art
sometimes gives voice to what is unspeakable elsewhere, either temporarily one
day we will fi nd the words or intrinsicallywords are impossible. Since the
ecological thought is so new and so open, and therefore so difficult, we should
expect art to show us some of the way. The ecological thought supplies good
reasons to study culture and philosophy. Ecology is a matter of human experience.
Humanities research can ask questions 13 that science should address, questions
that scientists may not have asked yet. For its part, science is about being able to
admit that youre wrong. This means that if we want to live in a science-based
society, we will have to live in the shadow of the possibility of wrongness. A
questioning attitude needs to become habitual. Philosophy and critical theory in the
humanities can help-. Some people, including left humanities scholars who should
know better, either think that scientists should be left to get on with their work, or
even when they dont, the net effect of their beliefs is that science is untouched. 34
We have a responsibility to examine, participate in, support, and criticize scientific
experiments: to that end, this book shall propose some. For example, are
nonhumans capable of aesthetic contemplation? Can they enjoy art? Fascinating
research projects, to say the least, are beginning find out whether the beings we
call animals are capable of this. If they were, it would be essential to find out
whether this contemplation was an advanced cognitive state or a simple one, if not
the simplest. Is our capacity to enjoy art one of those things that makes us uniquely
human (along with hands, tools, laughter, and dancing, all of which have been
discovered in nonhumans)? Or do we share this capacity with nonhuman beings?
These questions get to the heart of some of our cultural and political assumptions
regarding nonhuman beings. While its deeply informed by critical theory, this book
wont be talking very explicitly about theory. Why? Not because I want to dumb
down the argument. I do this because people who arent members of the in crowd of
specialists familiar with the language of theory (and the kinds of things that are cool
to say with it) badly need to read this book. Otherwise the ecological thought
separates theory haves from have-nots. Humanities scholars have some very good
and important ideas, if only they would let others read them. We simply cant leave
environmentalism to the antiintellectualists. If youre interested, this book does
engage with theory in the notes. Or you can read my essays, perhaps starting with
Queer Ecology in PMLA, and also Ecology without Nature. 35 I wont be doing a lot
of green close reading either. You can find some examples, based on the view this
book lays out, by following this note. 14 Current ecological scholarship in the
humanities is divided between ecocriticism, environmental justice criticism, science
studies ethnography and anthropological investigations of non-Western
environmental perception; and there is a growing body of philosophical and
theoretically oriented work. The humanities are where we reflect on culture, politics,
and science. If they mean anything at all in this age of scientism, the humanities
must do serious reflection. While we address the current ecological crisis, we should
regard this moment as a precious, if perilous, opportunity to think some difficult
thoughts about what ecology is. Ecological science has to model ecosystems on
different scales in order to see things properly: its not enough to section off a small
square of reality and just examine that. 37 This is very suggestive for aesthetic and
political thinking. Chapter 1, Thinking Big, argues that for the ecological thought
to lift off, it must escape some terms in which it has been trapped. Terms such as
the local, the organic, and the particular have been good for environmentalist social
policy. These ideas provide at least a pocket of resistance to globalization. But what
about global warming? Doesnt that make a global response necessary? How about
the fact that were witnessing the Sixth Mass Extinction Event? Ecological thinking
risks being caught in the language of smallness and restriction. I use Milton to kick
off the discussion, because he offers us one of the most immense viewpoints of all:
that of space itself. Seeing the Earth from space is the beginning of ecological
thinking. The fi rst aeronauts, balloon pilots, immediately saw Earth as an alien
world. 38 Seeing yourself from another point of view is the beginning of ethics and
politics.
The Alt is a prerequisite to meaningful political action toward

the environment.
id=10496853&ppg=41..page //NotJacob
While their assertion of the death of environmentalism resembles my phrase

ecology without Nature Ted NordJhaus and Michael Shellen-berger are wrong. Its
no surprise that their book Break Through employs Fukuyama in full ideological
mode: capitlism the end of historyget used to it. Break TbrougFs subtitle is From
the Death of Environmentalism to the Polhia of Possibility}Possibility is nicely poised
between potentiality and inevitability. Make do with what youre given. Nordhaus
and Shel-lenbereger advocate not so much a politics of possibility but the usual
miserable oppressiveness of the capitalist reality principle. Their argument
superficially resembles mine they claim, for instance, that a reified product called
the environment" is getting in the way of meaningful ecological politics. But
Nordhaus and Schellenberger rely on limiting our scope to a narrow chink in a
preexisting prison window, reducing ecological thinking to realpolitik. The injunction
to get on with it and put up with the social conditions we have can easily become
another brick in the' prison wall that inhibits the possibility of escape. To this end,
the rhetoric of sustainability becomes a weapon in the hands of global corporations
that would like nothing better than to reproduce themselves in perpetuity. The
current social situation becomes a thing of Nature, a tree that youre preservinga
plastic object you must maintain on pain of death. This social situation is at the
same rime totally autonomous from you yourself, the actual youits an
emergent^ feature like a wave that doesnt concern you as a mere droplet of
water. We are back to our poor old Republican deniers and their contradictory
mindset. Far from rubbishing deep ecology as a religious objectification, we should
take its claims more seriously than it takes them, and go even deeper, deeper into
the mesh. We are 01117 just beginning to think the ecological thought. Perhaps
there is no end to its thinking. T. S. Eliot declared, KHuman kind / Cannot bear ve^
much reality^ {Burnt Norton, lines 44-45).125 We must do far more than bear it.
There might be seeds of future ways of being together in religion, as there are in
art. Perhaps the new eco-religions offer hints of postcapitalist coexistence. This
coexistence is almost unimaginable, so it appears as religion. The ecological
thought must conceive of postcapitalist pleasures, not bourgeois pleasure for the
masses but forms of new, broader, more rational pleasure; not boring,
overstimulating bourgeois reality, not tridges and cars and anorexia for all, but a
world of being, not having, as Erich Fromm puts it. It must guard against ideologies
of social regression the return to Nature in its frightening guises. One always
proposes returning to Nature from a certain position in the here and now, so that
calls co go back can^ help being exercises in bad faith.126 Yet historical change
may feel like taking steps backward. Capitalism has so co-opted the idea of
progress that anything else, as one philosopher said, might feel like yanking on
the emergency brake.127 Religion is a substitute for lost intimacy.128 If Nature is
religion, then the intimacy it expresses as lost returns in ecology encounter with the
strange stranger. The ecological thought successfully mourns for a Nature that
never really existed anj^way, except in some ideological pipe dream. But it isnt
completely over religion. If reason has no place for intimacy, the ecological
thought will indeed seem religious. If the void opened up by the mesh seems too
profound, we might be tempted co freeze it into religion. How to care for the
neighbor, the strange stranger, and the hyperobject, are the long-term problems
posed by the ecological thought. The ecological thought hugely expands our ideas
of space and time. It forces us to invent ways of being together that don^ depend
on self-interest. After all, other beings elicited the ecological thought they
summon it from us and force ms to confront it. They compel us to imagine
collectivity rather than communitygroups formed by choice rather than by
necessity. Strange strangers and hyperobjects goad us to greater levels of
consciousness, wmch means more stress, more disappointment, less gratification
(though perhaps more satisfaction), and more bewilderment. The ecological thought
can be highly unpleasant. But once you have started to think it, you cant unthink it.
We have started to think it. In the future, we will all be thinking the ecological
thought. Its irresistible, like true love.
Appealing to a legislative body on behalf of environmental

catastrophe is ineffective and ethically bankrupt
Morton 12 A key thinker in the emerging philosophical field of Object-Oriented
Ontology. He is the author of The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press,
2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard University Press, 2007)(Timothy, 1/11/12,
AMERICAN AUTUMN Peak Nature Capitalism has no soul., Adbusters,
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/98/peak-nature.html)
This failure of the normal rhetorical routine, these remnants of shattered
conversation lying around like broken hammers (they must take place everywhere),
is a symptom of a much larger and deeper ontological shift in human awareness.
Which in turn is a symptom of a profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As
anyone who has waited while the little rainbow circle goes around and around on a
Mac knows, these upgrades are not necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of
humanists such as ourselves to attune ourselves to the upgrading process and to
help explain it. What is the upgrading process? In a word, the notion that we are
living in a world one that for instance we can call Nature no longer exists in
any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or in the temporarily useful local
language of pleas and petitions. We dont want a certain species to be farmed to
extinction, so we use the language of Nature to convince a legislative body. We
have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and create nostalgic visions of Hobbitlike worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have been going on now since as long as
the Industrial Revolution began to take effect.
A2 Quals/Who is Bryant
Levi Bryant is qualified with a P.H.D. and Larval Subjects is one
of the best blogs for philosophy today.
Harman 14
(Graham Harman Associate Provost for Research Administration Professor of Philosophy American University in
Cairo March 11, 2014 Onto-Cartography An Ontology of Machines and Media Pg. viii
http://www.euppublishing.com/userimages/ContentEditor/1394557044520/Bryant%20-%20Onto-Cartography%20%20Introduction.pdf)
Levi Bryants Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media is the second book in the Speculative Realism
series at Edinburgh University Press.
It is a remarkable effort by an author who has

established himself as an irreplaceable figure in contemporary philosophy. Bryants
early work was strongly influenced by Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and the lessons
In an age when better and worse

philosophy blogs proliferate, Bryants widely read Larval Subjects blog remains
the most formidable gathering-point for younger philosophers in the Continental
tradition. Every post on the blog reflects Bryants omnivorous reading, his
willingness to let his position evolve in the face of new evidence, his boundless
appetite for dialogue with readers, and even his colorful autobiography, rare
among academic authors. One of the most exceptional (and amusing) features of Bryants life history,
as lucidly retold on his blog, is the fact that he wrote his PhD dissertation before his MA thesis
since his advisors at Loyola University in Chicago felt that the MA was too
substantial a piece of work to be wasted on a non-terminal degree, and thus asked him to
learned from these figures still animate Bryants thinking today.
write a shorter work before resubmitting the initial thesis for his doctorate. Bryants candor and his lively style
have led to famous polemical disputes with detractors, but have also earned him thousands of admirers across the
He is also an active international lecturer, increasingly influential in fields well

beyond the discipline of philosophy.
globe.
A2 State Good
State Based solutions to the environment create Static
solutions that can never challenge the ideological creation of
nature.
2While we are on the subject of self-containment, and the irony that punctures it,
we should clarify the Romantic idea of holism. As well as being a major ecological
ideology, holism constitutes the " feel " of nationalism-" we " are interconnected in a
whole greater than the sum of its parts. The struggle between individualism and
holism offers an attenuated choice between absolute liberty and absolute authorityin other words, the dilemma called America. Americans are caught between the
constitution and a militarized state, between placards and pepper spray. There is
something of this in the way in which models of nature give to organisms with one
hand, while taking with another. Organisms are politically all-important, and yet
they are easily sacrificed for the sake of the greater whole. The ideological supports
of American capitalism have gradually shifted away from individualism toward
corporatism. Holism is not as oppositional as some environmentalists claim . State
terror takes an interest in ecological catastrophe. Far from writing it off with the
reactionaries as " junk science," the Pentagon has published documents on the
geopolitical effects of global warming, ?9 Paul Virilio has even suggested that
ecological catastrophe is an excellent simulation of total global war. Hurricane
Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, provides a perfect example. Presi dent Bush
appointed Homeland Security, an umbrella department covering military,
intelligence, and counterterrorism, to oversee the cleanup operation. Popular
resistance, and military might, could both be considered in ambient terms. The war
theorist Clausewitz imagines the Spanish resistance to Napoleon as " something
fluid and vaporous which condensed nowhere into a solid body."80 We have seen
how De Quincey's theory of consumerist reading nowlooks a lot like a theory of
environmental poetics . His experiments with opiated prose generate an
understanding of tone, a plateau of intensity. Art and philosophy have become
interested in the ways in which certain states are indeed static-tonally
undifferentiated and consistent. It may surprise some that Romanticism, far from
supporting sheer temporality, developed a static poetics of environments
suspended in time. Wordsworth's idea of the spot of time) whose name alone
suggests this suspension, is a traumatically vivid experience that punctures the
regular rhythms of consciousness, a moment when something outside the habitual
world breaks through. The mind is j erked out of its normal medium, like a fish out of
water. Heidegger's idea of thinking as dwelling has a static quality. Walter Benj
amin's ideas of dialectics at a standstill and phantasmagoria are static. The musical
perceptions of John Cage, celebrating a notion of quietness, evoke a communitarian
suburban or libertarian form of quiet that is also static in a political sense-there is no
chance of progress, j ust an endless application of laws. Quiet is a meaningful,
continuous absence of noise, often with strict legal definitions.81 Static art and
static philosophy arose as the nation-state, and beyond its borders, the environment
gradually " dissolved" into view. Can progressive ecological thinking rescue the
ecological Thing, fantasy obj ect of the nation-state, and always somewhat in excess
of nationalism, from the place of its birth ? Ecological reality, produced in part by
the industrializing processes of nation-states themselves, has eclipsed national
boundaries . Only an ecological language opposed to the phantasmagorical
positivities of nation-speak is anywhere near legitimate, and only if it does not prove
to be just another "new and improved " version of the same thing.
Capitalism requires the Endlessly expanding wilderness to sustain its exploitation of

the world.
Morton 7 ( Timothy, Prof of Englisj @ Rive. Ecology without nature, Its a book
find it, 112-14)
Identity as dissolution and change becomes a paradox. There remains the part of us
that is stable, " sitting back, relaxing and taking it all in." A fusion of identity and
nonidentity is strictly impossible. But ideology behaves as if it were the only way to
be, turning all consumers into teenagers, that category invented by advertising in
the age of authoritarian anti-communism. In this light, the liquid subj ectivity that
Keats's idea of the " camelion poet" suggests is really a "new and improved" version
of subjectivity in general, mired in the same paradoxes and dilemmas as what Keats
calls the "egotistical sublime." 123 Keats proposes that the true poet's identity is
metamorphic. It can dissolve into the world, shifting its shape to match its
environment. For the " camelion poet," identity is ecomimesis. Instead of sitting
back at one remove from the consumer object, one tries to become it, to slide into
its intrinsically slippery, obj ectal form. No sooner does the subj ect turn into the
object, in this fantasy, than the obj ect naturally starts to behave like a subj ect.
Keats makes this very literal. He describes claret creeping around inside one's
stomach like Aladdin stepping silently around the enchanted underground garden of
j ewels in the Arabian Nights. 124 This image provides the inverted form of the
Romantic consumerist idea that "you are what you eat," a phrase coined by both
the gastronome Brillat-Savarin and the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. 125 For
Keats, you eat what you are. Although it does make peace with the fact that we are
all consumerists, the "camelion poet" does not resolve the inner tension of the
subject-object dualism. Romantic consumerism produced subj ective states that
eventually became technically reproducible commodities. But it also influenced the
construction and maintenance of actually existing environments. Consider how
Wordsworth's Lake District became the National Trust's Lake District, or the
American wilderness, places you go to on holiday from an administered world.
Environments were ca ught in the logic of Romantic consumerism. Wilderness can
only exist as a reserve of unexploited capital, as constant tensions and struggles
make evident. It is an abstraction. I mean this much more strongly than Jack Turner,
for whom wilderness is an abstraction that must be filled in with concrete aesthetic
details. 1 26 Such details tend only to increase the level of abstraction. Wilderness
em bodies freedom from determination, the bedrock of capitalist ideology. It is
always " over there," behind the shop window of distanced, aesthetic experience;
even when you are " in " it, as the elegiac frenzy of much nature writing
demonstrates. " Respect" for the environment entails a certain aesthetic rather than
purely ethical reaction, which involves the distance that Kant says is essential for
maintaining the sublime object: In order to get the full emotional effect from
pyramids one must neither get too close to them nor stay too far away . For if one
stays too far away, then the apprehended parts ( the stones on top of one another)
are presented only obscurely, al1d hence their presentation has no effect on the su
bject's aesthetic j udgment; and if one gets too close, then the eye needs some
time to complete the apprehension from the base to the peak, but during tha t time
some of the earlier parts are invaria bly extinguished in the imagination before it
has apprehended the later ones, and hence the comprehension is never complete.
127 As far as wilderness goes, this distance is not an empirical one, but a social and
psychological one that persists even when you are in a wilderness. If you came too
close, say, by actually living in one, then it would no longer be a wilderness. The
stranger ruins my existential supping on wild vastness. Sartre observes that the s
imple presence of others acts as an " internal hemorrhage " in being, undermining
the self's ability to consume the scene whole.12s Exclusion and violence is the only
way in which quietness and solitude can be guaranteed. Sartre's scene of encounter
is an innocent-seeming suburban lawn. But as we have seen, lawns, with the
communitarian rules they marshal (no stepping on the grass ), are spaces of erased
violence, p ages rubbed out to look spacious and blank. They are j ust a horizontal,
mass-produced version of the wildernesses people visit to find peace and quiet and
a sense of abstract nature. Lawns are a type of " instant distance "-j ust lay down
the sod and sit back contemplatively.
Try or Die/Quick Action Key

Presentism hurts environmentalism because it forces us to
view the world through the lenses of now, and when we dont
see immediate results we decide immediately we have failed.
And just to cap it all, we need ecology without the present. Indeed, one could
successfully argue that its the presentism of contemporary environmentalisms that
put them on the wrong side of history. This presentism manifests in a wide variety of
ways. Consider the rhetoric of immediacy common to what I have called
ecomimesis: stop thinking, go out into Nature, turn off your irony. Presentism also
manifests in the injunction to stop thinking and do something, the paradoxical form
taken by the contemporary beautiful soul, a defining, overarching subject position of
modernity that has been with us since the late eighteenth century.19 All too often
the siren song of the beautiful soul these days comes in the form of a call to act,
now! In this sense it appears to be its opposite. Consider a brief example from a
Twitter exchange I had recently, based on a comment I had read there: Michael
Moore is self-serving because his movies have not created real, substantial social
change. The point is to change things, now. It sounds awfully like the Nature
injunction: The point is to stop thinking, stop reflecting, go out and act. For this
reason, I grow a little queasy when I read Brassiers translation of Quentin
Meillassouxs speculative realist cri de guerre: the great outdoors.20 The cynical
ideological distance typical of modernity is maintained by these injunctions to act,
which induce the guilt that cripples genuine actionwhich of course includes
reflection and art. But more important for our purposes, hyperobjects themselves
prevent us from being presentist. The present is precisely nowhere to be found in
the yawning Rift opening between the future and past, essence and appearance. We
simply make it however big we want, and this product of our imagination is a fetish,
a fiction: one second, one hour, one day, a centuryeven a millennium or a
geological period. The overbearing metaphysics of presence inscribed into every
timekeeping device (especially the digital ones) is, I suppose (without much
evidence), responsible in some measure for the psychic distress of modern
humans. There is a very simple explanation for this distress: there is no present, yet
the clock screams that you must change your focus now and have that meeting,
pull that face on the chat show, sign the divorce paper, buy the product.
Please dont think that this is Luddite primitivism. It is only an observation based on
some quite graphic experiences of different kinds of temporality. It is difficult to
believe, naturally, when one is immersed in a vast ocean of presentist metaphysics
inscribed into every device about ones person. My solution to presentism is not a
quasi-Buddhist living in the now popular with forms of Nature mysticism.
Nonhuman sentient beings are admired (or pitied) for living in this now. In
admiring (or pitying) them thus, we only see them as instruments of our
technological era, extensions of the ticking clocks of metaphysical presence. This is
not a progressive ecological strategy. Like Nature, like matter, the present has not
served ecology well. I shall not advocate presentism to fight presentism. Rather I
am suggesting aikidoan exaggeration of the lack of a true now. What is called
nowness in Buddhist contemplative theory is not a point or even a bubble, no
matter how wide, but a fluid, uncanny washing back and forth like a current and an
undertow. There is a Rift between essence and appearance, the slide between
future and past.21 The exaggeration of the Rift of no present is given to us by
hyperobjects. The present does not truly exist. We experience a crisscrossing set of
force fields, the aestheticcausal fields emanated by a host of objects. Anyone
familiar with relativity theory will find this idea reasonably intuitive. What is called
the present is simply a reification, an arbitrary boundary drawn around things by a
particular entitya state, philosophical view, government, family, electron, black
hole. Time is not a series of now-points (Aristotle himself refuted this idea) but
rather a sickening surge, like crosstown traffic, or an ocean with many currents; or
a river without banks, like the title of a painting by Marc Chagall.22 Time is a
flurry of spells and counterspells cast by objects themselves. Past and future do not
intersect in the usually visualized way, as (say) the left-hand and right-hand sides of
a cursor blinking on a screen. What we have instead is a nonspatial rift between
past and future that corresponds to the Rift between appearance and essence.
Between these two fundamental forces, the present is nowhere: objects are never
present. The present is not even a small sliver, like the cursora now-point. Nor is
the present a bubble whose far side is the past and whose near side is the future (or
however one wants to imagine it). Currently, hyperobjects are so large, compared
with humans, that the way in which essence is the future and appearance is the
past simply become far more vivid than when we consider a pea or a tomcat.
A2More Obscure
A2 Cap = Root Cuase

Practically relating to non-humans is a pre-req to resolving the
worst effects of capitalism
Instead of trying constantly to tweak an illusion, thinking and art and political
practice should simply relate directly to nonhumans. We will never get it right
completely. But trying to come up with the best world is just inhibiting ecological
progress. Art and architecture in the time of hyperobjects must (automatically)
directly include hyperobjects, even when they try to ignore them. Consider the
contemporary urge to maximize throughput: to get dirty air flowing with air
conditioners. Air conditioning is now the benchmark of comfort; young Singaporeans
are starting to sweat out of doors, habituated to the homogeneous thermal comfort
of modern buildings.13 Such architecture and design is predicated on the notion of
away. But there is no away after the end of the world. It would make more sense
to design in a dark ecological way, admitting our coexistence with toxic substances
we have created and exploited. Thus, in 2002 the architectural firm R&Sie designed
Dusty Relief, an electrostatic building in Bangkok that would collect the dirt around
it, rather than try to shuffle it somewhere else (Figures 11 and 12).14 Even- tually
the building would be coated with a gigantic fur coat of dirt.15 Such new ideas are
counterintuitive from the standpoint of regular post-1970s environmentalism.
Process relationism has been the presiding deity of this thinking, insofar as it thinks
flows are better than solids. But thinking this way on a planetary scale becomes
absurd. Why is it better to stir the shit around inside the toilet bowl faster and faster
rather than just leaving it there? Monitoring, regulating, and controlling flows: Is
ecological ethics and politics just this? Regulating flows and sending them where
you think they need to go is not relating to nonhumans. Regulation of flows is just a
contemporary mode of window dressing of the substances of ontotheological
nihilism, the becomings and processes with which Nietzsche wanted to undermine
philosophy. The common name for managing and regulating flows is sustainability.
But what exactly is being sustained? Sustainable capitalism might be one of those
contradictions in terms along the lines of military intelligence.16 Capital must
keep on producing more of itself in order to continue to be itself. This strange
paradox is fundamentally, structurally imbalanced. Consider the most basic process
of capitalism: the turning of raw materials into products. Now for a capitalist, the
raw materials are not strictly natural. They simply exist prior to whatever labor
process the capitalist is going to exert on them. Surely here we see the problem.
Whatever exists prior to the specific labor process is a lump that only achieves
definition as valuable product once the labor has been exerted on it. What
capitalism makes is some kind of stuff called capital. The very definition of raw
materials in economic theory is simply the stuff that comes in through the factory
door. Again, it doesnt matter what it is. It could be sharks or steel bolts. At either
end of the process we have featureless chunks of stuffone of those featureless
chunks being human labor. The point is to convert the stuff that comes in to money.
Industrial capitalism is philosophy incarnate in stocks, girders, and human sweat.
What philosophy? If you want a realism of the remainder, just look around you.
Realism of the remainder means that yes, for sure, there is something real outside
of our access to itbut we can only classify it as an inert resistance to our probing,
a grey goo, to adapt a term suggested by thinking about nanotechnologytiny
machines eating everything until reality becomes said goo. Its no wonder that
industrial capitalism has turned the Earth into a dangerous desert. It doesnt really
care what comes through the factory door, just as long as it generates more capital.
Do we want to sustain a world based on a philosophy of grey goo? (Again, the term
that some futurologists use to describe the nightmare of nanoscale robots mashing
everything up into a colorless morass.) Nature is the featureless remainder at either
end of the process of production. Either its exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff.
Whatever it is, its basically featureless, abstract, grey. It has nothing to do with
nematode worms and orangutans, organic chemicals in comets and rock strata. You
can scour the earth, from a mountaintop to the Marianas Trench. You will never find
Nature. Its an empty category looking for something to fill it. Rather than only
evaporating everything into a sublime ether (Marx via Macbeth: All that is solid
melts into air), capitalism also requires and keeps firm long-term inertial structures
such as families, as Fernand Braudel explored.17 The Koch brothers and GE are two
contemporary examples. One part of capital, itself a hyperobject, is its relentless
revolutionizing of its mode of production. But the other part is tremendous inertia.
And the tremendous inertia happens to be on the side of the modern. That is, the
political ontology in which there is an away. But there is no away in the time of
hyperobjects. Capitalism did away with feudal and prefeudal myths such as the
divine hierarchy of classes of people. In so doing, however, it substituted a giant
myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that exists prior to the
capitalist labor process. Heidegger has the best term for it: Bestand (standing
reserve). Bestand means stuff, as in the ad from the 1990s, Drink Pepsi: Get
Stuff. There is an ontology implicit in capitalist production: materialism as defined
by Aristotle. This specific form of materialism is not fascinated with material objects
in all their manifold specificity. Its just stuff. This viewpoint is the basis of Aristotles
problem with materialism. Have you ever seen or handled matter? Have you ever
held a piece of stuff? To be sure one has seen plenty of objects: Santa Claus in a
department store, snowflakes, photographs of atoms. But have I ever seen matter
or stuff as such? Aristotle says its a bit like searching through a zoo to find the
animal rather than the various species such as monkeys and mynah birds.18 Marx
says exactly the same thing regarding capital.19 As Nature goes, so goes matter.
The two most progressive physical theories of our age, ecology and quantum
theory, need have nothing to do with it.
The things we do, no matter how small, to stop global warming

are good. Trying to fix a problem is better than deciding you
input would be meaningless and idly watching to see if the
situation will be resolved.
Cynicism is all over the map: left, right, green, indifferent. Isnt Gaian holism a form
of cynicism? One common Gaian assertion is that there is something wrong with
humans. Nonhumans are more Natural. Humans have deviated from the path and
will be wiped out (poor fools!). No one says the same about dolphins, but its just as
true. If dolphins go extinct, why worry? Dolphins will be replaced. The parts are
greater than the whole. A mouse is not a mouse if it is not in the network of Gaia.49
The parts are replaceable. Gaia will replace humans with a less defective
component. We are living in a gigantic machinea very leafy one with a lot of
fractals and emergent properties to give it a suitably cool yet non- threatening
modern aesthetic feel. It is fairly easy to discern how refusing to see the big picture
is a form of what Harman calls undermining.50 Undermining is when things are
reduced to smaller things that are held to be more real. The classic form of
undermining in contemporary capitalism is individualism: There are only
individuals and collective decisions are ipso facto false. But this is a problem that
the left, and environmentalism more generally, recognize well. The blind spot lies in
precisely the opposite direction: in how common ideology tends to think that bigger
is better or more real. Environmentalism, the right, and the left seem to have one
thing in common: they all hold that incremental change is a bad thing. Yet doesnt
the case against incrementalism, when it comes to things like global warming,
amount to a version of what Harman calls overmining, in the domain of ethics and
politics? Overmining is when one reduces a thing upward into an effect of some
supervenient system (such as Gaia or consciousness).51 Since bigger things are
more real than smaller things, incremental steps will never accomplish anything.
The critique of incrementalism laughs at the poor fools who are trying to recycle as
much as possible or drive a Prius. By postponing ethical and political decisions into
an idealized future, the critique of incrementalism leaves the world just as it is,
while maintaining a smug distance toward it. In the name of the medium-sized
objects that coexist on Earth (aspen trees, polar bears, nematode worms, slime
molds, coral, mitochondria, Starhawk, and Glenn Beck), we should forge a genuinely
new ethical view that doesnt reduce them or dissolve them. Cynicism is enabled by
the left: Since no one persons action will solve global warming, better to do
nothing, or at most await the revolution to come. As I argued above, vegetarians,
Prius owners, and solar power enthusiasts often encounter this logic. The trouble is,
left cynicism maps perfectly both onto U.S. Republican do-nothing-ism and Gaian
defeatism (Gaia will replace us, like a defective component). Nothing happens.
Result? Global warming continues.
**Needs tag**
There are many reasons why, even if world were a valid concept altogether, it
shouldnt be used as the basis for ethics. Consider only this: witch ducking stools
constitute a world just as much as hammers. There was a wonderful world of witch
ducking in the Middle Ages in which witches were discovered by drowning them,
strapped to an apparatus that submerged them in the local stream: if the supposed
witch didnt drown, she was a witchand should thus be burned at the stake. Witch
ducking stools constituted a world for their users in every meaningful sense. There
is a world of Nazi regalia. Just because the Nazis had a world, doesnt mean we
should preserve it. So the argument that Its good because it constitutes a world
is flimsy at best. The reason not to interfere with the environment because its
interfering with someones or somethings world is nowhere near a good enough
reason. It might even have pernicious consequences. World and worlding are a
dangerously weak link in the series of late-Heideggerian concepts.10 It is as if
humans are losing both their world and their idea of world (including the idea that
they ever had a world) at one and the same time, a disorienting fact. In this
historical moment, working to transcend our notion of world is important. Like a
mannerist painting that stretches the rules of classicism to a breaking point, global
warming has stretched our world to breaking point. Human beings lack a world for a
very good reason: because no entity at all has a world, or as Harman puts it, There
is no such thing as a horizon.11 The world as the significant totality of what is
the case is strictly unimaginable, and for a good reason: it doesnt exist. What is left
if we arent the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soulthe
entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and greater
urgency. Three cheers for the so-called end of the world, then, since this moment is
the beginning of history, the end of the human dream that reality is significant for
them alone. We now have the prospect of forging new alliances between humans
and nonhumans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of world.
A2 Modernity Good
Modernirty can not solve the problems of hyperobjects.
It is Kant who shows, at the very inception of the Anthropocene, that things never
coincide with their phenomena. All we need to do is extend this revolutionary
insight beyond the humanworld gap. Unlike Meillassoux, we are not going to try to
bust through human finitude, but to place that finitude in a universe of trillions of
finitudes, as many as there are thingsbecause a thing just is a rift between what it
is and how it appears, for any entity whatsoever, not simply for that special entity
called the (human) subject. What ecological thought must do, then, is unground the
human by forcing it back onto the ground, which is to say, standing on a gigantic
object called Earth inside a gigantic entity called biosphere. This grounding of Kant
began in 1900. Phenomenology per se is what begins to bring Kantianism down to
Earth, but its hyperobjects and OOO that really convince me that its impossible to
escape the gravitational field of sincerity, ingenuousness, being-there.26 Not
because there is a therewe have already let go of that. Here I must part company
with ecophenomenology, which insists on regressing to fantasies of embeddedness.
No: we are not in the center of the universe, but we are not in the VIP box beyond
the edge, either. To say the least, this is a profoundly disturbing realization. It is the
true content of ecological awareness. Harman puts it this way:
On the one hand, scientism insists that human consciousness is nothing special, and
should be naturalized just like everything else. On the other hand, it also wants to
preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from
the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world. . . . For all their gloating
over the fact that people are pieces of matter just like everything else, they also
want to claim that the very status of that utterance is somehow special. For them,
raindrops know nothing and lizards know very little, and some humans are more
knowledgeable than others. This is only possible because thought is given a unique
ability to negate and transcend immediate experience, which inanimate matter is
never allowed to do in such theories, of course. In short, for all its noir claims that
the human doesnt exist, it elevates the structure of human thought to the
ontological pinnacle.27
The effect of this double denial of human supremacy is not unlike one of Hitchcocks
signature cinematic techniques, the pull focus. By simultaneously zooming and
pulling away, we appear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort
beyond our control. The two contradictory motions dont cancel one another out.
Rather, they reestablish the way we experience here. The double denial doesnt
do away with human experience. Rather, it drastically modifies it in a dizzying
manner. The ecological thought that thinks hyperobjects is not one in which
individuals are embedded in a nebulous overarching system, or conversely, one in
which something vaster than individuals extrudes itself into the temporary shapes
of individuals. Hyperobjects provoke irreductionist thinking, that is, they present us
with scalar dilemmas in which ontotheological statements about which thing is the
most real (ecosystem, world, environment, or conversely, individual) become
impossible.28 Likewise, irony qua absolute distance also becomes inoperative.
Rather than a vertiginous antirealist abyss, irony presents us with intimacy with
existing nonhumans. The discovery of hyperobjects and OOO are symptoms of a
fundamental shaking of being, a being-quake. The ground of being is shaken. There
we were, trolling along in the age of industry, capitalism, and technology, and all of
a sudden we received information from aliens, information that even the most
hardheaded could not ignore, because the form in which the information was
delivered was precisely the instrumental and mathematical formulas of modernity
itself. The Titanic of modernity hits the iceberg of hyperobjects. The problem of
hyperobjects, I argue, is not a problem that modernity can solve. Unlike Latour
then, although I share many of his basic philosophical concerns, I believe that we
have been modern, and that we are only just learning how not to be.
A2 OOO Bad
Their indict of OOO doesnt assume the radical nature of
hyperobjects
With a view to explicating how hyperobjects are already here, this book consists of a
diptych that folds around its middle. First, the basic shock of hyperobjects is
elucidated: the iceberg appears. In this way, the book preserves the feeling that we
humans are playing catch-up with reality. In part 1, What Are Hyperobjects?, I
explore the scope and depth of the quake in being from the viewpoint of objective
description, trying to evoke the objectness of hyperobjects, which consists
primordially in their being prior to thinking. The book then cuts ruthlessly to the
reaction shothow the dawn of hyperobjects appears for us humans, its
implications for our social coexistence, and the thinking that goes along with this
coexistence. Hyperobjects are the harbingers of a truly post-modern age.32 Thus
part 2 is entitled The Time of Hyperobjects. All humans, I shall argue, are now
aware that they have entered a new phase of history in which nonhumans are no
longer excluded or merely decorative features of their social, psychic, and
philosophical space. From the most vulnerable Pacific Islander to the most hardened
eliminative materialist, everyone must reckon with the power of rising waves and
ultraviolet light. This phase is characterized by a traumatic loss of coordinates, the
end of the world. It also consists of an embarrassing shock to the shock troops of
critique, in the form of an all-encompassing hypocrisy that demonstrates, physically
and without compromise, the weirdness of the Lacanian truth that there is no
metalanguage.33 This truth was by no means secured by poststructuralist and
postmodern thinking. Humans have entered an age of hypocrisy, weakness, and
lameness, terms that have a specific valence and definition that I elucidate in part
2. The overall aesthetic feel of the time of hyperobjects is a sense of asymmetry
between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite being of things. There
occurs a crazy arms race between what we know and what is, in which the
technology of what we know is turned against itself. The arms race sets new
parameters for aesthetic experience and action, which I take in the widest possible
sense to mean the ways in which relations between beings play out. Very significant
consequences for art emerge, and the book ends by outlining some of them.
A2 Science = Understanding
There will always be things which cannot be known about
objects.
Around 1900 Edmund Husserl discovered something strange about objects. No
matter how many times you turned around a coin, you never saw the other side as
the other side. The coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible. This
irreducibility could easily apply to the ways in which another object, say a speck of
dust, interacted with the coin. If you thought this through a little more, you saw that
all objects were in some sense irreducibly withdrawn. Yet this made no sense, since
we encounter them every waking moment. And this strange dark side applied
equally to the intentional objects commonly known as thoughts, a weird
confirmation of the Kantian gap between phenomenon and thing. Kants own
example of this gap is highly appropriate for a study of hyperobjects. Consider
raindrops: you can feel them on your headbut you cant perceive the actual
raindrop in itself.18 You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic
translation of the raindrops. Isnt this similar to the rift between weather, which I
can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not the older idea of local patterns
of weather, but the entire system? I can think and compute climate in this sense,
but I cant directly see or touch it. The gap between phenomenon and thing yawns
open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world. But it is worse still
than even that. Raindrops are raindroppy, not gumdroppymores the pity. Yet
raindrop phenomena are not raindrop things. I cannot locate the gap between
phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed
scientific space. Unfortunately raindrops dont come with little dotted lines on
them and a little drawing of scissors saying cut heredespite the insistence of
philosophy from Plato up until Hume and Kant that there is some kind of dotted line
somewhere on a thing, and that the job of a philosopher is to locate this dotted line
and cut carefully. Because they so massively out scale us, hyperobjects have
magnified this weirdness of things for our inspection: things are themselves, but we
cant point to them directly.
We can never entirely understand objects because they

compose and are composed of an unknowable amount of other
objects.
When I hear the word sustainability I reach for my sunscreen. The deep reason for
why sustainability fails as a concept has to do with how we are not living in a world.
It is thus time to question the very term ecology, since ecology is the thinking of
home, and hence world (oikos plus logos). In a reality without a home, without
world, what this study calls objects are what constitute reality. Objects are unique.
Objects cant be reduced to smaller objects or dissolved upward into larger ones.
Objects are withdrawn from one another and from themselves. Objects are Tardislike, larger on the inside than they are on the outside. Objects are uncanny. Objects
compose an untotalizable nonwhole set that defies holism and reductionism. There
is thus no top object that gives all objects value and meaning, and no bottom object
to which they can be reduced. If there is no top object and no bottom object, it
means that we have a very strange situation in which there are more parts than
there are wholes.23 This makes holism of any kind totally impossible. Even if you
bracket off a vast amount of reality, you will find that there is no top and bottom
object in the small section youve demarcated. Even if you select only a sector of
reality to study somewhere in the middle, like they do in ecological science (the
mesocosm), you will also find no top or bottom object, even as it pertains to that
sector alone. Its like a magnet. If you cut it, the two halves still have a north and a
south pole. There is no such thing as half a magnet versus a whole one. Why is
holism such a bad idea? Surely there could be other possible holisms that adopt
some version of bothand thinking so that neither the parts nor the whole
whatever the whole might beare greater. Perhaps the parts are not necessarily
lesser than the whole but exist in some bothand synergistic fashion; you could
havesimultaneously withdrawn objects and something else (just to satisfy our
modern need for things that arent static, lets say an open-ended, possibly alwaysexpanding, something else). First, we must walk through some semirelated points
about this line of questioning. It sounds like good value to have bothand rather
than eitheror, to our somewhat consumerist minds (buy one get one free). But
Im afraid this is a case of eitheror: holism or not. The parts are not replaceable
components of the whole. The more we open up the Russian doll of an object, the
more objects we find inside. Far more than the first object in the series, because all
the relations between the objects and within them also count as objects. Its what
Lacanians call a not-all set. Objects in this sense are fundamentally not subject to
phallogocentric rule. (Commercial break: If youre having trouble with object at
this point, why not try another term, such as entity?) What we encounter in OOO,
which I have been expounding in these last couple of pages, is a Badiou-like set
theory in which any number of affiliations between objects can be drawn. The
contents of these sorts of sets are bigger than the container.
A2 Sustainability Good
Sustainability is Impossible - But the Ocean is a Key site to
Challenge global warming and survive in a Post sustainable
world
Steve Ments 12 (Steve , Professor of Lit At St. Johns ,May 2012 , After
Sustainability , PMLA )
Moving beyond happy actions of sustainability need not mean consigning ourselves
to an unintelligible ecosphere. If we turn from green pastures to blue oceans, we nd
an already present, partly explored environment for postsustainability thinking.
Letting go of harmony, we nd in the world ocean an environment that is, from a
human point of view, clearly unsustainable but that makes up most of the planet.
Two facts seem especially salient. First, the ocean is our world; it covers almost
three- fourths of the earths surface and contains over ninety percent of the
biosphere (DeLoughrey 20). Second, human beings cant survive in the sea. -e
ocean represents our near-est and richest vision of a nonhuman, nonsus- tainable
ecology (Mentz, At the Bottom). As the global climate becomes increasingly unstable, we have begun to recognize that planet- sized ecological questions are really
questions about the ocean (Earle). Imagining earth as ocean rather than garden
enables us to escape pastoral nostalgia. For literary humanists, thats good news,
because building systems to accommodate and even enjoy radical change is
something literature does well. e ecological crisis we live in challenges our
appetites for change. We must learn to love disruption, including the disruption of
human lives by non- human forces (Morton, Ecological ought). After sustainability,
we need dynamic narratives about our relation to the biosphere. e most forthright
public declaration of the postsustainability world comes from Bill McKibben.
McKibbens new name for our planet inserts an almost silent vowel inside a
familiar word, so that eaarth indicates the tough new planet climate change has
built (26). His model, however, still invokes comfortable visions of the premodern
environment. e world before global warming, McKibben claims, occupied the
sweetest of sweet spots, with stable temperatures, gla- ciation, sea levels, and
predictable heat and rainfall (12). To adapt a phrase from Lears middle
daughter, McKibben names the very deed of the love we must feel for our disorderly planet, but he comes too short, because he does not embrace the basic
disorder in all natural systems. Local records and experiences show that global
stasis has never been locally stable. As Vladimir Jankovic notes, early modern
observers found the weather patterns they recorded full of uncommon and
extraordinary events (2), and, especially before the early eighteenth century,
they expressed their ndings in the idiom of marvel and providence (33). Human
beings experience the weather as constant change (Ross 23334), and its weather,
not climate, that our bodies encounter day by day. Eco-logical science may prefer
larger physical and temporal scales, but human meanings get made on the skin. We
may wish to believe that hurricanes rupture a sustainable norm, but historical and
contemporary experiences suggest that departures from stabilitycatas- trophes
constitute the real normal.Intellectual frameworks for postsustainability appear in

the two modeling sciences whose names are built on the Greek root oikos:
economics and ecology. e ecologist Colleen Clements observes that sustainability
itself is an unnatural value ... [a] fairy tale ideal of an ecosystem of achieved and
unchanging harmony (215). The postequilibrium shift in ecological thinking trumpeted its arrival in Daniel Botkins Discordant Harmonies (1992). As Gerrard
narrates, the new ecology of dynamic change displaced the climax, or static
equilibrium, proposed in the early twentieth century by the plant ecologist Frederick
Clements (57). In economics, the neoclassical synthesis that relied on supplyand- demand equilibrium was challenged by John Maynard Keynes, whose postDepression model put pressure on market equilibrium without entirely abandoning the concept (Hayes). In the humanities, however, the pastoral idea of the
sustainable system has not yet been superseded (Dove). To move from a static
ecological relation to a dynamic one requires a new understanding of environmental
interrelations, which, as Col- leen Clements describes them, make up not a wellmeshed, smoothly- working, serene system but one representing many stasis
break- downs compensated for by new inputs which keep the oscillations within
certain critical limits (218). Ecology, in this view, represents a dynamic set of
relations, which sometimes transgress even critical limits. Just as early modern
weather watchers wanted a system that made sense of meteors and eclipses, today we need an ecology of catastrophe that will resonate with literary models
outside pastoral. In a world in which disruptive climate change has tangibly begun
and we recognize that permanent sustainability was never really possible, we
expect and encounter radical disruption in all natural systems at all times. D Recent
efforts to bridge postmodern theory and environmental literary criticism address
ecocriticisms delay in following the ecosciences shi from equilibrium to dynamism. Timothy Mortons Ecology without Nature claims that the idea of nature is
getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and
art (1). Mor- tons plea for a dark ecology of irreducible otherness subverts the
pastoralism of his own -eld of literary study, Romantic poetry (151). Bruno Latours
actor- network theory, which locates agency in networked assemblages of human
and nonhuman actors, further displaces pastoral bias: Political ecology does not
shi attention from the human pole to the pole of nature; it shis from certainty about
the production of risk- free objects ... to uncertainty about the relations whose unintended consequences threaten to disrupt all orderings, all plans, all impacts (25).
While Mortons tragic vision does not always mesh with Latours dizzying optimism
(Mentz, g Tongues), Morton and Latour gesture beyond pastoral stasis. Inhabiting
a dynamic world requires giving up certain privileges and stabilities, but it produces
a new freedom for thinking inside constant change. The task of literary ecocriticism
in a postpastoral world does not exactly mirror the descriptive horizontalization of
Latours or Mortons theoretical criticism. Literary culture generates narratives
about human bodies and minds inside plurality as well as visions of strange
multiplicity. e archives of literary history record human attempts to confront the
chaotic world assemblages about which Morton, Latour, and others theorize. It
turns out that, despite the hegemony of sustainability, we have a long history of
thinking through our dynamic and painful environment. Large parts of this history
involve salt water. Moving beyond sustainability requires dierent models for thinking
about nonstable systems. ats where the sea proves useful. e humanities can add
ocean stories to emerging models of ecological resilience, which measure the
tendency of ecosystems to tolerate disturbance aer perturbation. Lance H.
Gunderson and C.S. Holling have coined the term pan archy to describe an
overarching model of transformation in human and ecological systems. Desires for
new systems, however, should be balanced by an awareness that todays postequilibrium situation is not new. Human structures have never been sustainable,
as rigorous ecothinkers have already recognized (OGrady; Buell 85). McKibbens
Eaarth argues that descriptions of global warming as a problem for
grandchildren represent a failure to face the reality of today (51). To invert
McKibbens claim, I suspect that all gestures toward an orderly past Kib bens, falsify
lived historical experience. Hu- man beings have never lived in pastoral stasis,
natural or cultural. Literary studies can contribute to ecodiscourses by showing
how cultural meanings emerge through encounters between human experiences
and disorderly ecologies. rough these encounters, we learn what living in a
postsustainable world feels like on our bodies, as well as how to devise conceptual
structures to make sense of disorder. To accomplish this accommodation of
dynamic changeto be a connoisseur of chaos, in Wallace Stevenss phrase (166)
requires ornate provisional systems and visionary narrative glimpses of being in
the world. Fortunately, the poets have been there before us.

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Anthropocentrism/OOO Ks

Anthro seems relatively straight-forward, with one caution; its

OOO Stategy Notes

PART TWO IS PRE-REQUISITE CONCEPTS (SLIDE 5)

PART THREE IS WHATS THE POINT? (SLIDES 6-7)

PART FOUR IS HYPEROBJECTS (SLIDE 8)

PART FIVE IS LINKS vs. POLICY (SLIDE 9)

PART SIX IS LINKS vs. K AFFS

PART SEVEN IS THE ALT (SLIDE 10)

PART EIGHT IS ANSWERING MORTON AND OOO (SLIDE 11/11)

Mitchell, 13PhD, Dr. Audra, Professor of Politics @ NYU, Apocalypse then:

Anthro K Extinction Shell

the question of survival can be thought to

This species-contingent paradigm creates unending genocidal

Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the

The alternative is that the judge should vote negative to reject

A true species-being depends on a sort of reconciliation between our human

The structure of the law is revealed as always

Anthro K Warming Shell

the ethical demand to respond to historical and present environmental

This action is itself dependent upon a widespread change

This self-comprehension would need to negate and limit the old

This species-contingent paradigm creates unending genocidal

Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the

, if we take seriously the differing

mythical notion of differing human races) and interspecies

The alternative is that the judge should vote negative to reject

horizon of a future community, the passage to species-being may be experienced as a

A true species-being depends on a

Anthro K Race Shell

Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master

This species-contingent paradigm creates unending genocidal

Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the

The alternative is that the judge should vote negative to

A true species-being depends on a

Anthro o/w2nc overview

Preservation of biodiversity only sustains human economic

From some ethical points of view all forms of

The problem is even more acute in the case of marine biodiversity

Bio and nanotech ensures the ontological and physical death of

a conceptual clarification of the notion

All things are alive the binary between living/nonliving

The Biological Fallacy, equating organisms with life, is the result of a

We demean Earth by equating life and organisms, then

assignment of highest value to the ecosphere and to the ecosystems that it

When life is conceived as a function of the

the ethical demand to respond to historical and present environmental

I reveled in the gorgeous new exhibit: The Sant Ocean

the ocean, it seems, is the new

attempting to place human rights as a category that

Of course, the category of survival is not erased

Kant challenged the over-valuation of the life of

Human rights rhetoric creates a duality in which in the

This figure is easily deployed in

Appeals to human rights are inherently exclusiveit relies

this view of human at the centre puts animals as much in a subordinate

affirm that human and world problems can be resolved only by

the overwhelmingly strong focus on human interests, it seems to me

There's something a little distasteful about using others--any others--as a

Liberalism rests on a binary of civilized/uncivilized, blaming

We are led to believe here that Western civilization has been

societies in the twentieth century. (96)

The threat of ecocatastrophe has become apparent 289. Apocalypse now is