Links

Management

Environment

Environmental policy has been dominated by a Newtonian ontology that exists to ensure the conditions for industrial expansion – even the transition to localized environmental policy is overwritten with adaptation without fundamental changeBavington in 2011(Dean, Nipissing University, “Environmental History During the Anthropocene,” Environmental History in Canada, March 27, http://www.deanbavington.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ehplusbavington.pdf)The above instrumental approach to applying history to policy reflects changes brought on by neoliberal restructuring of the university sector worldwide, with an emphasis on measureable and thereby manageable outputs (impact factors, research funds raised) and shifts toward merit-based compensation tied to productivity rather than secure long-term tenured employment. The trend toward public-private research partnerships and framing research as a market-oriented activity producing alienable intellectual property has advanced in Canada with recent restructuring of the tri-council funding agencies to favour applied market-oriented research. The imposition of intellectual property policies that commodify and enclose publically funded research encourages academics to think about what they have to sell in the newly emerging knowledge economy. There is no role in this new regime for intrinsically-valued curiosity-based research. Indeed research and development are twinned in this new approach with the university being

understood as a producer of intellectual property and an innovator of patentable market-based solutions. The instrumentalist ethos focused on mobilizing academic knowledge for the state and market came to full fruition after World War II. Contemporary environmental policy emerged and was institutionalized in Europe and North America from the end of

the nineteenth century as a technocratic, problemsolving activity charged with applying positivist science to deliver practical assistance for state administrators. Scholars argue that the roots of environmental policy, resource and

environmental management should be understood within the context of Newtonian mathematics, the Baconian scientific method, Cartesian philosophy and the centralizing state-making activities of modernity. Environmental historian Carolyn Merchant notes that our current pattern of human-nature relations evolved out of a particular Western history—a history originating with British biblical reinterpretations in the early eighteenth century. Out of the disorder of post-revolutionary England, biblical passages were reinterpreted to help legitimize the creation of a new social order necessary for entrepreneurial advance and the expansion of market society. Reinterpretations of biblical texts in the early nineteenth century constructed God as “a caretaker, steward, and wise manager of his entire created world.” Through these biblical reinterpretations, “God-as-universe-manager” came to serve as the model for “humans-as-managers-of-the-earth.” 17 These historic roots offer critical insights for explorations of contemporary

environmental policy. The reinterpretation of nature as a collection of dead mechanical objects, in place of a living

earth, allowed for increased exploitation of a secularized nature understood as a collection of inert resources. 18 The need for new social orders following the breakdown of feudalism encouraged the emergence of top-down politics aimed at strengthening centralizing states. 19 Flowing from discoveries and arguments made in science, philosophy and politics that helped to create the conditions for the emergence and expansion of capitalist market society, a small group of human beings were charged with the management of the earth. 20 These historic developments empowered and liberated some members of society (primarily European male land owners and entrepreneurs, scientists and political leaders) and widely dispersed some species (mainly domesticated plants and animals and their associated biota) while denigrating and enslaving others (women, colonized peoples and many endemic wild species and habitats). 21 While sharing roots with this European history and the development of scientific forestry in Prussia and Saxony (1765-1800), the beginning of North American environmental policy is usually associated with the rise of the American Progressive movement at the end of the nineteenth century . 22

Under the utilitarian banner of “the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run ,” American

conservationist and first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, wrote that conservation was about development, not preservation, and that “the first duty of the human race on the material side is to control the use of the earth.” 23 Based on a recognition of “modern industry’s power to deplete natural resources,” state-based environmental policy promoted command and control systems to conserve nature (understood as bundles of natural resources) from “early,

complete, or unrenewable exploitation.” 24 The concern was not to halt industrial expansion, but to ensure the conditions for its continuation. The responsibility for environmental policy was placed in the hands of expert administrators in the nation state who were charged with managing resources as state-property. 25 Traditional environmental policy continued to develop throughout the twentieth century with a focus on

control over people and natural resources through Newtonian science, State-centered bureaucracies associated with top-down administration, and anthropocentric environmental ethics focused on instrumental industrial interests. This traditional understanding of environmental policy is the subject of growing criticism and

rearticulation. From a historic state-based focus on predictability, stability, command and control, contemporary environmental policy and governance theory increasingly advocates a diverse collection of participatory and adaptive learning strategies to cope with uncertain, complex, nested, self-organizing eco-social systems. 26 This shift in emphasis from policy interventions understood primarily as control-oriented to policy understood primarily as coping has led to the erosion of traditional boundaries between policymakers and citizens. This change suggests that environmental policymakers are active participants embedded in dynamic self-organizing ecosocial systems, as opposed to objective observers of a Newtonian clockwork universe who have access to a transcendent God’s eye view . 27 The increasing use of the term ‘self-organization’ to describe ecological and social systems has wideranging scientific, political, and ethical implications as the formerly managed come to be seen as potentially self-managing . As Wilson and Bryant proclaim, “all [humans] can be considered as environmental managers insofar as their livelihoods are primarily dependent on the application of skill in the active and self-conscious [direct or indirect] manipulation of the environment.” 28 Approaches to environmental policy are increasingly founded on ahistoric economic analogies: “We assume that every society has its own means and adaptations to deal with its natural environment…In some cases, the capital of local knowledge may be used and organized in such a way that it…amounts to a management system.” 29 We are led to believe that “management systems,” “capital,” and “adaptation” are universals that appear everywhere throughout history

Oceans/Energy

Traditional notions of ocean space are implicated by commercial interests – the affirmative, trapped in the discourse of energy security, sees the ocean as an Other, which eliminates oversight over it and fails to treat it as a vital part of the global ecosystem. Martens 2011, Emily (University of Miami). "The Discourses of Energy and Environmental Security in the Debate Over Offshore Oil Drilling Policy in Florida" (). Open Access Theses. Paper 254. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_theses/254 To look upon the ocean is to place it within a particular social context according to a perceived utility . For

the Florida beachgoer, the ocean is a pristine environment, where the horizon seems to extend infinitely as it meets the sky. For the oil entrepreneur, it holds great mineral wealth, which, at some point in time, must be exploited to fuel the economy and expand the industry. For the ecologist the ocean contains essential biophysical processes that are not only necessary for marine life, but part of the larger, global ecosystem that sustains all life forms on

the planet. For the fisherman, the ocean is a space where both income and sustenance may be obtained. The ocean has been used for transportation, commercial and military activities for several thousand years ,

but only recently has much credence been given to its location within the global ecosystem . Today, these divergent interests find themselves competing over ocean space in order to define its utility as well as the international and State legislation required to secure these interests against potential threats . In the case of offshore oil drilling, ocean space is the physical arena upon which the security discourses, such as energy and environmental, create knowledge, portraying counter-realities of the ocean and its value for society. Though the security discourses discussed in depth in chapters 3 and 4 attach new images and values to ocean space through the

perpetuation of their associated knowledges, the ocean has, throughout history, been the subject of social representations and value constructions that persist within these discourses. In particular, marine or ocean space, most notably

in terms of its relationship to terrestrial space, has often held the position as the spatial ‘other’ in respect to human processes. As Steinberg (2001) points out, the ocean has held many positions in 13 its relationship with society,

namely as a space for transportation, resource extraction, and, more recently, an intricate part of the biophysical processes that sustain human life. Regardless of the attempts of the latter imagination to integrate ocean spaces into a complex argument about the long-term sustainability of life on earth , the more traditional notion that the ocean is “merely a distance and not a place” where social rules do not apply, persists in contemporary discourses, managing to distance ocean spaces from social controls and oversight (Steinberg 2001: 49; Zalik 2009). During the centuries before widespread seafaring, the ocean was a ‘resource provider’, furnishing littoral communities with food and the occasional luxury items ( i.e. pearls).

With God, Glory and Gold in mind, the Imperial quest to map and mine the world sent many explorers across the oceans, but with little interest given to the content of the oceans themselves . This has resulted,

especially under the auspices of capitalism and neoliberalism, which emphasize material and financial accumulation in tandem with deregulation and privatization, in policies that often ignore or belittle social and environmental consequences to the very social processes transpiring within ocean space . Due to the anthropocentric nature of exploration and resource extraction , the oceans have tended to play merely a service role, as they are viewed simply as the matter lying between the more easily inhabitable terrestrial formations. Social constructions or representations of the oceanen, attempt to provide a static image of this space in order to define the

parameters of its usefulness to society. In the processes of resource extraction, multi-use preservation, and environmental sustainability, the often competing representations of ocean space have seen little compromise, with regulatory policies 14 constantly being implemented, lifted, or ignored in view of competing interests, and their associated ocean-space imaginations. This chapter seeks to highlight the evolution of social constructions and securitization of the ocean, namely in the United States, by deconstructing and analyzing a few of the dominant perspectives regarding

ocean space throughout history. I hope to show that despite an increase in scientific inquiry aimed at increasing an understanding of ocean spaces and reconfiguring the spatial imagination, the ocean as a resource provider and the ‘other’ to terrestrial spaces remains a prominent vision that serves to inform human actions within that space . As a result of the ocean’s

seemingly fixed construction as the ‘other’, limited authority is placed on any knowledge that conceptualizes ocean space as a vital element within the Earth’s ecosystem, and the subsequent need for protections and regulations to ensure its sustainability. In fact, where protections of ocean space exist it is most frequently in light of efforts to maintain the ocean as a multiple use space for commercial enterprises , and not as a result of an incorporation of a new knowledge that seeks to protect ocean space for the purpose of environmental sustainability or ecosystem protection. In the case of energy and environmental security, the conceptualization of the ocean provides the frame of reference from which each discourse imagines the ocean’s relationship and utility to society. For instance, under the discourse of energy security the ocean is constructed as the frontier for oil resources, that would be produced and used domestically in order to secure the American oil supply from the volatile foreign oil market and oil-funded terrorism. In the case of environmental security, the ocean is perceived as [1] a vital element in the larger ecosystem on which humans rely upon for long-term survival; and [2] is the site where 15 the commodification of the pristine, unspoiled by dirty offshore drilling activities and rigs, is able to generate thousands of jobs and billions in annual income for coastal tourism.

Enframing

Hegemony

Hegemony is a nihilistic pursuit of power for power’s sake – it situates all nations in a constant struggle for supremacy which means that military action is both necessary and inevitable under their framework. This makes war a permanent condition of society.MITCHELL 2005, ANDREW J., Stanford University, “HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM,” Research in Phenomenology 35, 181-218With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, the exhaustion of resources is no longer possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the idea

of an “in itself ” is already drained of reality ahead of time. There are no longer any “losses” that cannot be replaced. In

other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place. Everything is monitored and controlled. The whole “battle” is given over to a planning that is able to incorporate everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is already planable in essence, the standingreserve.

Strategy’s demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on interminably as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of replacement, the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitz’s ideal is realized in a manner that collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. “War” is no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitz’s absolute war in the mirror of technology. War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern for resources, consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of “consumption of beings” no different from peace : “War no longer battles against a state of peace, rather it newly establishes the essence of peace” (GA 69: 180). The essence of

peace so established is a peace that defines itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently to

war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too much continuity or “continuation” between war and peace, “War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace” (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing

restful; instead it is the peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the war will end. Such a question, Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, “not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but because the question itself asks for something which no longer is, since already there is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace” (GA 7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between ideal and real. It also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such distinctions depend upon a difference between war and peace, they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a soldier—a “worker,” one might say, or otherwise put, a target. With everyone involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already enlisted in advance. There are no longer any “innocent” victims or bystanders in this, and the same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no longer are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong to even consider it war. Terrorism is the only conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can have everything as its target. Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings indicative of the technological age. This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become uncommon.

Competitiveness

The framework of economic competitiveness is self-defeating – by framing all interactions in terms of profitability it places everyone into a Darwinian struggle for survival in which war and environmental destruction are inevitable. Economic success is an unending process that demands constant efforts to beat out competitors.Joronen 2010, Mikko “The Age of Planetary Space,” UNIVERSITY OF TURKU, department of geography, onlineAs a monolithic economic tradition with a particular understanding of economic practices and particular

positioning of “economic subjects”, contemporary globalization of capitalism in particular expresses its metaphysical totalitarianism and uniform- ity in the devaluation of local, alternative, and marginal practices as “traditional” and “informal” (See Dirlik 1999:8; 2003; Köchler 2000:10; Escobar 2001:153; GibsonGraham 2002:35;

Castree 2004:137). Such a burst of “techno-capitalism”, as Brockelman (2008a) puts it, sees the whole planet as a mere standing-reserve for the endlessly growing power of economic “will” to productize and value all in proportion to their success in such ‘productisation’. In such a Framework, all beings are simply disclosed through the Event in which they are valued, measured, and used according to their competency to be producible. Since this competency is measured in terms of market value, producability becomes calculated through a process that eventually spans the whole earth as a one big global market place (Heidegger

2001b:112). Thus, all things are simply transformed into commodities for efficient production of profits and accumulation. Even alarming topics such as global environmental change and the destruction and degradation

of natural habitats have become significantly relevant only when they are set under the market calculation – either when these ecological topics start substantially affect to, or when they are wished to be affected by (for instance through emission trading mechanism), the growth rates. In both cases, all beings are uniformly

mutated into commodities mastered by the calculable price mechanisms. In fact, no other way of measurement is able to enter this system of orderings without spoiling its overall efficiency – they are just “utopians” disturbing the “reality” of the efficient handling that works (i.e. the reality inside the manipulative power

of machination). Since these charges of utopianism already place themselves in control of reality and thus in a realm from which all strange (i.e., the Macht-los, the “power-free”, and thus all thinking breaking free from the power of

machination) becomes utopian, the reality turns into a domain of ‘what(ever) works’ and hence becomes grounded upon efficiency and workability (Dallmayr 2001:261–262). Under such colonization of calculable price mechanism, the

whole globe eventually becomes an area of domination: the metaphysical essence of markets is to bring all beings into a quasi-Darwinian struggle for survival between the powers of business calculation. It is precisely because this survival is based

on successful accumulation and efficient commodification of beings, that under the contemporary global capitalism the whole globe becomes conquered for its market. Under such economic malleability everything is established as producible products and hence delivered to the markets in terms of growing efficiency and competitiveness. Out of the colossal competition between the figures of calculation and machination, globalization turns into a struggle between different technological worldviews (Heidegger 1977d:134–135; See also Joronen 2008; Moisio 2008:89–90). Globalization – growing giganticism fuelled by the competition between powers of efficient manipulation – and survival – a struggle to maximize the utility and control of beings under the pre-delineating framework of gigantic calculation – are both

manifestations of the operational logic of technological Gestell. Consequently, economic survival struggle and the glorification of competitiveness hide the fact that they aim at massive ordering , thus admiring the megalomania of endless growth and expansion. By penetrating and spreading, and hence, by turning all beings under the logic of technological manipulation, the techno-capitalist logic of optimization of productivity and competitiveness that constantly seeks to open new markets by turning things into products of profit making eventually present one of the ontic realities that have accelerated the globalization of Gestell.

Security

Their rhetoric of security relies on an ontology that assumes security can be made certain – this makes war inevitable, leads to escalation, and lengthens conflict duration Burke, 2k7 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Theory and Event 10.2, ontologies of war: violence, existence, and reason, project muse]This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of

institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be

discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful

structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the

nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation

and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded

in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national

security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects . In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay

describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt

and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger),

showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of

Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger

calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction , and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and

Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21

Impact

Material Impact

Structural violence/Extinction

Modern technology is embedded in a mode of ontological revealing which is responsible for the worst consequences of massive global consumption and for the technology which makes extinction possible.Joronen 2010, Mikko “The Age of Planetary Space,” UNIVERSITY OF TURKU, department of geography, online

Although Heidegger obviously could not foresee the ontic consequences of technological thinking – the internet, the globalization of capitalism, the way the latter speeded up the former so that in addition to productionist logic of technological unfolding also the process of exchange became an integral part of the rise of the globalization – his mature understanding about the ontological structure that eventually led to the rise of the planetarization is not simply overstepped by referring to ontic nuances of recent developments. In fact, as Feenberg pinpoints (2005:6), the case is almost the contrary: when Heidegger wrote about technology it was still “intellectually respectable” to ignore his views about gigantic, total, and global characters of the logic intrinsic to technological revealing. However, during the last few decades we contemporaries have become increasingly satiated with awareness about the matter that we now live in a technological age, witnessing its global trajectories. Such awareness, of course, could be understood as a symptom of the growing number of more and more complex technological devices we are increasingly dependent on. From the ontological perspective, however, this apparently is not the case: the multiplicity of the ontic consequences should not blind us from the matter that behind them lays the age grounding understanding based on a historically destining mission of being. These contemporary changes, then,

are understandable implications of the intensification and perhaps unpredictably gigantic size of the logic intrinsic to the ontological condition Heidegger described decades ago as technological ordering and machination. Heidegger, thus, did not just contrive to discuss the possible spatial implications of the operations of technological

machination already at the end of 1930’s; he also managed to show how the emergence of such machination is structured to lead to a whole new era of gigantic computing in which the whole of the earth eventually turns into a global resource to be used and used up by a way of greater ordering and efficiency. Accordingly, Heidegger understands modern technology above all as a metaphysical project. Modern technological devices, from the “manual technology and manufacture” of the industrial age to the revolutions made first by the “engine technology” and then by what Heidegger (1998h:132–133) calls the ruling determination of modern technology as “cybernetics” (i.e. the rise and irruption of the systems of maximum possible automation of command), all manifest a peculiar mode of revealing that is not just total in nature, but an ever-growing imperial drive structured to constantly reach towards global enlargement and intensification. Eventually such technological unfolding leads to a diversity of phenomena, including the worldwide homogenization of modes of living, the constant mobilization of cultural and economic practices, the global circulation of information, goods, capital, people, and knowledge, the establishment of colossal stocks of energy with massive potentiality of destruction as

well (with the weapons of mass destruction), and the commodification and productisation of all aspects of life from nature to culture, from genetic information to consumption culture – even a certain insensibility with regard to tragedies of suffering (for instance through the television spectacles of war and catastrophe), as Haar adds (1993:80; see also Gillespie 1984:128; Mugerauer 2008:xv-xviii). In spite of the seemingly diverging characters, the former phenomena are nothing but epiphenomena of the age defining metaphysical scaffolding of technological revealing; it is the ‘framework’ of calculative drive, the technological revealing of ‘enframing’, which allows for multiple set of phenomena to emerge. As will be later shown in more detail, such sense of unity is first and foremost typical for a metaphysical mechanism of unfolding operative throughout the 2300 year tradition of Western thinking, a mechanism still being constitutive for the contemporary technological ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and self-heightening ‘machination’ (Machenschaft) of all things. As a matter of fact, it is the planetary outcome of such a technological mode of unfolding, which according to Peter Sloterdijk (2009) was first initiated and

started as a ‘mathematical globalization’ – as a project that in Heideggerean reading was boosted into its technological form

by early modern philosophers and mathematical physicists – further proceeding as a ‘terrestrial globalization’, finally leading to an age of ‘planetary globe’, which eventually turned the earth into a mere planet under totally penetrable networks of orderings (Thrift 2008:234–235; Morin 2009; See also Heidegger 1998h:133; Dallmayr 2005:44; Radloff 2007b:36–48). As the thesis will show, the contemporary planetary unfolding was first initiated by the latent ground of thought behind the metaphysical formulations of early Greek philosophers, further boosted by the mathematical developments of early modern thinkers,

finally coming forth as cybernetic systems of ordering cast upon the planet. In such a planet, conceived as a mass of matter wandering in empty universe, everything is called to be useable, penetrable, mouldable, ‘decodable’ and mobile.

Environment

Endless consumption, oppression, and the destruction of nature are inevitable as long as the question of being remains unasked.Joronen 2011, Mikko, “Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe,” Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0, online One of the features of contemporary planetary homelessness of machination is precisely the lack of distress and emergency, the lack of mood that affords access to the openness of being via finitude (Heidegger 2000:266–267; see Haar 2002:157; Heidegger 1973:99). It is the sense of ontological finitude that is crucial to dwelling— without it dwelling turns into moulding securing of being, into the metaphysical capturing of earth, when with the sense of finitude we are given both the earth-sites of dwelling

and the finite unfolding of abyssal being. It is precisely the distress about the finitude of being that is able to block and cease the eternal machinery of “will to will” and hence the endless productisation and organisation of all in the names of capital accumulation, winning-valuing and profit-making. Without a sense of finitude,

limitation and dependence, thinking is not just lack of genuine questions concerning our finite existence and ontological situatedness “in-the-world”, but also in danger of encouraging the “ontological violence” of boundless measurement and complete control. As Zimmerman writes, by affording realms of “personal and

collective craving for immortality” such violence generates a ground for the “new oppressive social institutions and nature-dominating projects” of ecological aggressiveness (Zimmerman 1994:107; cf. Taylor 1991:68, 1992:267). The dark side

of the denial of finitude and impermanence is the structured aim for total control and measurement encouraging us to build immortal, megalomaniac and turgid monuments from violent authoritarianism and hierarchic cultures to the contemporary hegemony of capital accumulation and nature exploitation . It is the finitude then that works against what ˇ Ziˇzek calls the “fantasmatic illusion” maintained by the contemporary global “techno-capitalism”, the illusion that the world ruled by machination and its capitalist forces is ontologically complete and perfectly measured by its instrumental-pragmatist problem-solving calculations ( ˇ Ziˇzek 1999:204, 218; see also Brockelman 2008a:84, 2008b).

War

The reduction of the earth to standing reserve makes war a permanent condition of society in which all individuals are implicated. Once everything is rendered replaceable there can be no end to destruction.MITCHELL 2005, ANDREW J., Stanford University, “HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM,” Research in Phenomenology 35, 181-218

With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, the exhaustion of resources is no longer possible. Resources are precisely in themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over to replacement, even the

idea of an “in itself ” is already drained of reality ahead of time. There are no longer any “losses” that cannot be replaced. In other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncertainty is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place.

Everything is monitored and controlled. The whole “battle” is given over to a planning that is able to incorporate everything it encounters, since it only ever encounters what is already planable in essence,

the standingreserve. Strategy’s demise is the ascendancy of planning. What this means is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own . Nothing can resist it. But without resistance, war must end. Peace can now go on interminably as well, subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in question for both war and peace is the logic of replacement, the obligation for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that would supervene or subtend consumption; there is no order outside of it that could contain it. Clausewitz’s ideal is realized in a manner that collapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. “War” is no longer a duel; it recognizes no authority outside of itself. The name for this new amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitz’s absolute war in the mirror of technology. War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their oppositional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern for resources, consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of “consumption of beings” no different from peace: “War no longer battles against a state of peace, rather it newly establishes the essence of peace” (GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so established is a peace that defines itself in regards to war, which binds

itself inseparably to war, and which functions equivalently to war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. In Clausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too much continuity or “continuation” between war and peace, “War has become a distortion of the consumption of beings which is continued in peace” (GA 7: 89/EP, 104). The peace that technology brings is nothing restful; instead it is the peace of

unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when there will be peace or when the war will end . Such a question, Heidegger specifies, cannot be answered, “not because the length of the war cannot be foreseen, but because the question itself asks for something which no longer is, since already there is no longer a war that would be able to come to a peace” (GA 7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppositions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an undoing that includes the distinction between ideal and real. It also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Since such distinctions depend upon a difference between war and peace, they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a civilian-soldier, or neither a civilian nor a soldier—a “worker,” one might say, or otherwise put, a target. With everyone involved in the same processes of consumption and delivery, everyone is already enlisted in advance. There are no longer any “innocent” victims or bystanders in this, and the same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfare against civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no longer are any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for this reason we go wrong to even consider it war. Terrorism is the only conflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available and applicable. It can have everything as its target. Terrorism follows from the transformation in beings indicative of the technological age . This transformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolition of war and peace; beings have become uncommon.

Value Impact

Value to life

There is no value to life within the framework of automobility.Backhaus 2009 April 20, Gary, Loyola College in Maryland, Department of Philosophy “Automobility: Global Warming as Symptomatology,” Sustainability 1, 187-208, online

What about humankind? Humankind engaged in, subject to, the orderings of automobility becomes automata-like. But in terms of spatiality it is to be characterized as uprootedness. Human beings need an existential foothold, a

concretization of existential spatiality. But the spatial transformations of the auto-mobile culture result in the loss of place, the loss of the sense of place, disorientation, displacement, endless movements with no “differentiated wheres” to go.

The literature abounds with the disappearance of human-scale, human-friendly landscapes at the same time that humanity has all but destroyed “natural landscapes”. As the modern landscape becomes more and more homogeneous through globalization, the moving to and fro, the “freedom of” movement of the auto-mobile age

becomes utterly insipid and intolerable as we are ordered about in its time consuming flow. This uprooting (from place and thus a loss of identification and orientation) in which we find ourselves ordered about like the entities of material culture is exactly what keeps us on the move, for to stay put is to become aware of the poverty of auto-mobile

spatiality, while it is necessary to engage automobility in order to conduct everyday life. So we participate in the spatial flow of its functional demands and let ourselves be consumed by its frenzied orderings as a consumer of auto-mobile

material culture. The way of Being that calls on humankind to challenge the earth to be ordered through automobility is an uprooting of ourselves as our lives are organized in its image while we engage a plethora of mobile machines destroying place-Being. An essential characteristic of the modern challenging forth of man is uprootedness. Because humankind engages in automobility human being is uprooted and the automobility maintains an un-free relation to an ecology subject to de-geographication. Our uprootedness alienates us from the earth and this is why we have done so little about the environmental crises. By being alienated from the earth due to the uprooting of auto-mobility, we are neither attuned to the needs of the earth nor to our own needs as earth dwellers. What calls on humankind to eradicate earthly spatial meanings? The same meanings that constitute the modern science paradigm of a quantifiable mechanical universe—progress understood to be the quantifiable increment. The more material culture, the faster material culture, the highest GNP, the bigger burger, the more TV shows, the more automobiles sold, the more money made, the most efficient beer can plant, all constitute progress. Globalization inqsures that material culture gets bigger, gets faster, gets richer, gets jazzier ,

etc. All of this is spatially constitutive of automobility, its unearthing, its unrooting, its leveling, and our uprooting follows from the mechanization of motion and its accelerating progress of quantitatively incremental additions and subtractions. As automata of automobility, humankind measures the matter in motion of material culture and the more and the faster of its flow is the progress that blinds humankind to the destruction of its Being—de-geographication. And even in the face of its symptom, global warming, one of the famous automata by the name

of Al Gore, stills cannot resist its ideology.

Nihilism

Their enframing of the earth culminates in endless nihilistic expansion and consumption.Joronen 2008 Mikko, Department of Geography, University of Turku, “The technological metaphysics of planetary space: being in the age of globalization,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2008, volume 26, pages 596 ^ 610 As an endlessly growing giganticism of the will, calculative enframing does not offer any specific goals. Nor does it deny any specific goals, but simply gathers them into the system, where the only goal is optimal organization of whatever it may be for the sake of organizing itself . Therefore, it would be indeed too hasty to say that technological nihilism means only that all goals are gone. The greatest expression of technological calculation occurs when goallessness is first refused, and when suddenly one believes one has goals again. In nihilism, calculative setting up and pursuit of goalsöfor our

`culture', for our `nation', or for `mankind', in the forms of nationalism or the global reimage of neoliberalism, for

instanceöis itself elevated into a goal (Heidegger, 1991, page 176; 1993b, pages 244, 251). When the erection of values comes to power by dint of enframing, other meaningful horizons are simply ordered under the calculative cast of enframing. As such, enframing becomes an event of being which is capable of appearing around the globe in various guises and disguises of value erection and entrenchment (Heidegger, 1977d, page 135; Kisiel, 2001a). The metaphysics that nihilism maintains is particularly important for clarifying how globalization became possible through the history of being. As a forgetfulness of being,

nihilism is not a sign of faulty interpretations or bad philosophy. Rather, the reverse. Since nihilism is true as metaphysics, it belongs to the history of being (Heidegger, 1993c, page 239). By expressing the technological end of the history of metaphysics correctly, nihilism prepares a way for technological globalization. When the value of all becomes defined by the supreme will to poweröthat is, when willing endlessly constitutes and challenges

humans to will and to posit valueöthe unconditioned hegemony of humans over all beings manifests itself as a global consequence (Heidegger, 1991, page 174). Globalization becomes a consummation of modern calculation nihilism, which

aims to control all beings by transforming them into a useable and exploitable standing-reserve . In

calculative challenging, spaces are allowed globally through the measurable and orderable control and gigantic growth. It is precisely when calculation leads towards the eternal recurrence of gigantic growth that increasing flexibility, efficiency ,

progress, competitiveness, consumption, target-setting, and predictability become understandable as manifestations of the historical age of global calculation.

Alternative

Alternatives

Rethink

The alternative is to rethink our relationship with space and place – the imperative of auto-mobile culture organizes material conditions in favor of endless consumption and environmental degredation. Critical reflection is key to transition from the current paradigm which values our thinking in terms of instrumental rationality. Only a new ontological orientation can replace automobility.Backhaus 2009 April 20, Gary, Loyola College in Maryland, Department of Philosophy “Automobility: Global Warming as Symptomatology,” Sustainability 1, 187-208, online

Automobility has not led to a qualitatively better life, unless one believes that the increase in material consumption at the expense of the environment and traditional human cultures constitutes quality of life. Our culture maintains that it has only because it is the fabric of material conditions that seemingly have made life easier, at least for some. But for sustainable ways of life, material conditions must be radically altered in a way that dramatically curbs automobility—leading to a qualitatively better life without the endless consumption made possible by the spatial flows of automobility. Rethinking spatial flows is necessary for a sustainable world because automobility is not friendly to non-human environments and ecosystems, the atmosphere, and whether we recognize it or not—its de-geographication destroys human environments. In the long run it has neither proved to be expedient nor conserving . Automobility

constitutes a non-sustainable mode of spatial organization. To make this claim is not to renounce automobility. Rather, to implement the paradigm of sustainability requires that we will have to thoroughly rethink the role of automobility in a radically re-organized space to which earthly functions other than the non-earthly machine will be served. Further discussion of how automobility has affected the various interrelated aspects of life is the next step in this discussion. But such a step would not issue from a deep enough reflection without first this Heideggerian turn to look for truth beyond correctness, to ask about the way of Being that claims humankind, which as a modern scientistic hubris has exhausted itself in the near destruction of the earth. And, we have had to uncover the spatiality of enframing, automobility, and the essence of automobility, de-

geographication. Yes global warming is the obvious manifestation of dangerous environmental problems ,

but the essence of automobility is the deep source of a way of Being , a spatial manifestation of the

interpretation of our own Being. So new technologies are not the solution, but rather they shall continue to be a manifestation of a much deeper destruction if we remain within the present paradigm . We must give ourselves over to critical reflection, not to the instrumental rationality of techno-thinking.

Sustainability is nothing less than a new interpretation of our Being, a new way of Being that can claim humankind if we open ourselves to it.

Reject

Reject the ontological framework that sustains contemporary violence must be our first priority. Only by letting go of the imperative to control the earth allows being to disclose itself. Non-violent refusal repudiates the emphasis on atomisitic rational subjectivity that makes enframing possible.Joronen 2011, Mikko, “Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe,” Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0, online The present paper concentrates on showing how lack of awareness about the grounding dimension of machination eventually leads to the uncritical oblivion of the fundamental condition of possibility constitutive for globalisation: the

metaphysical scaffolding of the calculative ordering of space that has reached a climax under the contemporary rubric of planetary economics. Accordingly, even though the contemporary powers of capital have become far more capable and flexible at ordering and utilising the earth than Heidegger imagined in the late 1930s, these forces present only one of the manifestations grounded upon the omnipotent power of machination and its calculative orderings.1 One of the core arguments of the paper is that due to this fundamental condition of machination we also need to sharpen our ways of criticising and resisting the totalitarian and violent tendencies of contemporary capitalism. Resistance of things such as the capitalist means of production or the globalisation of neoliberal ideologies is not radical enough; we also need to enter into the resistance of the violence already promoted at the ontological level of calculative machination, the manipulative ordering and production of beings. In order to fulfil these aims, the paper begins with a preliminary discussion about the general possibility of overcoming the metaphysical condition of planetary machination. Machination is understood as a world-historical disclosure of being, as a metaphysical constituent of an entire epoch of planetary being. After showing how this

metaphysical constitution of machination poses a violent unfolding of entities, by making everything from the earth

to ourselves orderable for its own overpowering, circular and self-strengthening power of manipulation and mastery, the paper

turns to discuss the possibility of a radical resistance of the planetary outgrowth of machination in relation to alternative politics

proposed particularly by Hardt and Negri. The paper continues with a construction of a non-violent way of resistance based both on a non-metaphysical dwelling in the earth-sites of finite being and on Heidegger’s radical critique of the manipulative power of machination—a critique that consists in a “power-free” (Machtlos) “letting-be”

(Gelassenheit) of the “earth”, a thinking free from the metaphysical violence posed by machination. In order to

avoid the passive sense of such “letting-be”, in the third part of the paper it is argued that we should not see power-free letting-be as an end in itself, but as a resistant way of negating the violence implicit in metaphysical longing to grasp earth in terms of coercive power (Macht) and violence (Gewalt) of machination (Machenschaft). Hence,

power-free letting-be is seen as a fundamental chance for a dwelling free from the contemporary ontological mastery of the technological and economic powers of planetary machination, and, further, as letting that allows self-emergence for the earth of things, for “nature”. It is argued that power-free letting-be signifies a radical leap of resistance— a leap of nihilating emancipation taken over the groundless plenitude, a leap promoted by the emergency

and distress about our prevailing unfolding of being. Without this leap (of distress) the mastery of being as a power of machination remains, while with the help of the leap we may become grounders of the open earth and abundant being. Thus, the fourth section continues by discussing our awakening to abyssal being as a possibility for the

“other beginning” of pacifist and anarchist thought capable of constituting groundless dwelling that lets the earth of things come to presence without violent manipulation and gigantic ordering . Themain argument

of the paper is that it is not our subject- and will-centred resistance, but our non-violent refusal of the manipulative power of calculative orderings, that is capable of putting aside the violent capturing of the earth—namely, the capturing that destroys the earth upon which we dwell by turning it into a mere “planet” ordered through the networks cast upon it. Thus, such refusal lets what has already fled our calculative apparatuses become in power: the earth-site(s) of abyssal being.

Let Being Be

The alternative is to let being be – this is a direct negation of the willful and violent power of machination that understands power and violence as intrinsic characteristics of being. Releasement from the violence of will allows the earth to disclose itself to us in a totally new ontological context.Joronen 2011, Mikko, “Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe,” Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0, online According to the first sense of rejecting, letting-be indicates a radical negation of the domain of the power of machination, a negation that interrupts its total and perfectly functioning unfolding (cf. Davis 2007:303). In its first sense, then,

Gelassenheit means a leap that breaks open in the midst of the planetary power of machination through negation, by rejecting. It happens as a breaking open into the primordial freedom of abyssal being, into the openness prior to the freedoms and acts of a subject. Thus, this comportment of rejecting eventually brings out the abyssal groundlessness of being, which according to Heidegger works as an abundant reservoir that “grants us the possibility of dwelling [. . .] in a totally different way” (1966a:55). In its second sense, then, Gelassenheit intimates a possibility of a mode of being radically other than willing, a release from the grasp of limitless power- and profitseeking, a futural force of transformation that eventually offers what Heidegger calls the “other beginning” based on abyssal “time-spaceplay” of the Event of being (see Heidegger 1958:188, 2000:4, 60–61, 181, 2006:84–86). It is the other beginning of being that signifies a radical revolution against the prevailing rule of the manipulative power of planetary machination. The other beginning is a power-free

revolution that comes from a play of being, from a sudden turning (Kehre) in being, and thus is in its essence something that is not achieved by the revolutionary and utopian acts of will ( Caputo 1970:39). The human “letting”, the lassen of

Gelassenheit, therefore presents no acceptance of plain fate, but a middle way beyond the distinction between passivity and activity (Heidegger 1966b:61). It points out that we, human beings, can let being transform: even though the

transformation comes from the turning of being, being cannot transform by itself without the letting-be of human being. Hence, as a relation between being and human being, power-free letting-be does not lead to the opposition of power, to powerlessness, since it always has the force of letting-be, a force that is beyond the violent power and its absence, powerlessness (Heidegger 2006:165–167). Letting-be then has a force of fundamental transformation that

does not measure anything on a scale of power, because power and violence (and thus their absence) merely indicate the deletion of the original non-violent and power-free openness of the abyssal earth-site . It is this inaugural openness that requires us “to let” being transform, that is to say, it requires letting that takes place as a play over the abyssal ground, as a play that allows the primordial mechanism being begins the unfolding through its happening. This play does not encounter power just by changing power relations, balances, dispositions or power forms; it lets being unfold out of the groundless openness without restoring it into power. As Ziarek (2002:180) points out, with a notion about

fundamental power-free openness Heidegger does not just avoid Nietzschean but also Hobbesian emphasis on violence and power as constitutive conditions of being: power and violence are just particular metaphysical determinations of being, which hide the fundamental abyssal openness and thus the possibility of a power-free other beginning. Moreover, such non-violent letting also differs fundamentally from violent modes of resistance supported, for instance, by ˇ Ziˇzek: instead of constituting violent counterpowers, power-free letting-be opens up a non-violentmode of resistance, an “an-archic” thinking based on groundless and abyssal being that lets things on earth emerge on their own (see Armstrong 2008; de Beistegui 2007:8, 16; ˇ Ziˇzek 2006:282–283

Framing

Ontology First

The project of the 1AC is imbedded in the metaphysical imperative to shape and change the world – this project veils over the question of being and erases its own origin. Ontological questions must be prioritized to overcome this concealment.Joronen 2008 Mikko, Department of Geography, University of Turku, “The technological metaphysics of planetary space: being in the age of globalization,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2008, volume 26, pages 596 ^ 610 As Stuart Elden has argued (2005a, page 16), the spatial extension of globalization rests upon the ontological conception of the casting of space. As he notes, we need to ask ontological questions that are ``not concerned with `what is', but with how `what is' is'' (emphasis in original). The most fundamental and primordial question concerning globalization, then, is the one that forces us to ask how it stands with regard to being. Such a question primarily considers the ownmost granting of being that takes place in the event of globalization: in a sense, the whatness or quiddity of globalized spaces. Although the question leads us to consider what is essential for globalization, it never does that with a determination of the essence. The fundamental question concerning being rather

seeks to overcome the unhesitating and forceful character of such metaphysical determination. Overcoming,

however, is not a simple issue of victory. It is, rather, based on a reflection that remains open to thinking with and through the metaphysics. The overcoming of metaphysical determination is a repetition that provides a way to think the ontological question concerning the ownmost disclosure of beingöthe question that remains unthought in metaphysics. It is the how question, not the establishment of the final metaphysical answer, which calls us to think. In order to answer the call and thus to explicate the metaphysics of globalization, in this paper three points are considered: the nature of metaphysics; the relation between metaphysical and being-historical thinking; and the possibility of overcoming the metaphysical conception of space by thinking the ambiguity of the event of being. Without a question concerning being, metaphysics is always unaware of its monumental character. As a monument, metaphysics becomes an ideology-like grounding of being: metaphysics makes a decision regarding the essence of truth, grounds itself upon a final conclusion about the being of all beings, and thus at the same time veils the question of being into oblivion. All metaphysics, perhaps unknowingly but always necessarily, depends on being. In metaphysics, being is bound to

signify beings as a whole, the being of all beings as such. Metaphysical thinking is mesmerized by beingsöit blinds us with beings, and thus obscures the question of being as such. Ultimately, metaphysical thinking leads into the forgetfulness of being. However, if thinking is aware of the ontological difference between being and beings (entities)ö the fact that being is not a characteristic of beings, at least not in a sense of permanent endurance of the immanentöit becomes possible to gain an understandin-g that is not tainted by metaphysics. Those ways of thinking in turn that do not pose beinghistorical questions about the ownmost opening of globalization, but rather take some substantial notion of being for their fundamental starting point, necessarily share the metaphysical conception of being, and thus a metaphysical determination of the domain of globalization (eg Doel, 1996, page 427; Levinas, 1996, page 28; Smith, 2003, page 48). If it is the forgetfulness of the question of being that leaves us to wrestle with the truths about metaphysical grounds, how then should the question of being itself be considered? The question is tricky, since we are asking about the being by asking what it is, by using a form of the word

`being' to signify our means of access (Heidegger, 2006, page 242; Sallis, 1996, page 8). Since all possible answers necessarily presuppose being as their very condition, being as such cannot be defined. As indefinable, being is the emptiest concept, the openness itself, and thus resistant to every attempt at definition.

Ontology is constitutive of action-it molds our understanding-means if we win their ontology is bad they are doomed to material error replicationBavington 2002 Dean, “Managerial ecology and its discontents: exploring the complexities of control, careful use and coping in resource and environmental management,” Environments 30.3 2002, 3-21Humans who accept the insights of complex systems science and post-Newtonian ecology seem to have no other choice than to become responsible managers - albeit internally focussed managers of their values, motivations

and behaviour rather than externally oriented managers of the biophysical world .Due to the widespread acceptance of neoliberal views of human nature in societies dominated by globalized forms of corporate capitalism the radical potentials of post-Newtonian ecology are severely restricted . On the one hand, humans are presented with a moral role that represents a radical break from the hubris of the Enlightenment - humans become responsible natural elements in self-organizing systems. They manage or cope, as subjects of larger systems which they

are made by and help to co-create. On the other hand, humans are forced into a rational calculative role that reflects the egoism of the Enlightenment and contemporary neoliberalism where they become managers of an internalized

Hobbsian Leviathan. Coerced into making rational choices in the context of generalized economic scarcity,

contemporary economic agents are forced to control and carefully use their behaviours, attitudes and values based on a rational calculation of interests vis-a-vis the incentives and disincentives programmed into commodified decision environments. While most post-Newtonian complexity theorists frame their discussions of natural and human resource management in the language of democratic deliberation and stakeholder participation, there are strong forces acting against this realization in practice. The tensions that exist between humans conceptualized as holistic elements of larger systems and sovereign individuals rationally selecting behaviours, attitudes and values in highly controlled

decision environments creates the potential for moralizing and technocratic politics to develop as a direct result of post-Newtonian ecology applied to resource management.

Prioritize ontology over policy – machination is founded on the violence of enframing. This systemic violence makes actual subjective outbursts of violence possible.Joronen 2011, Mikko, “Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe,” Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0, online As a self-strengthening metaphysical imperative, machination is not just structured to further maximise the utility and control of

beings under the pre-delineating framework of calculation it imposes, but also to extend its control over the earth and thus to

use the whole planet as its product. Like the planetary earth, human beings are also set up into this positioning of machination so that everything appears, as Heidegger (2005:29–30) points out in DasGestell, to have the “potential to be set up for orderings and profit making”. Hence, the contemporary globe-wide economic subjugation and commodification of beings under the profit-seeking and utilisation of markets evidently rise out of the ontological foundation of machination: within machination all beings are positioned (gestellt) under the power (Macht) that unfolds everything as makeable (machbar) in the calculation-driven procedures of command (eg Heidegger 1998:47, 2000:88–94; see Eldred 2000; Haar 1993:80; Heidegger 1973:107). Thus, machination does not imply amere levelling of the space of the earth where space becomes amenable to the manipulative orderings. Machination also promotes an ever expanding and enhancing power that orders the globe through the pervasive calculations capable of operating in different disguises— disguises

such as the contemporary capital-led promotion of the allembracing market-globe through expanding profit-seeking activities and increasing consumption of things as a useable resource subjugated under the calculated market value. It is crucial to notice that because of its joint emergence with the power of machination, Heidegger’s notion

of calculation can neither be reduced to a simple method of instrumental counting nor into a mere quantity. The

modern notion of calculative intelligibility belongs to the realm of unfolding that Heidegger calls the quality of the “gigantic”—

a colossal condition and pre-requisition that unfolds everything as an orderable, controllable and measurable resource for universal calculability (2000:94–96). As a quality of unfolding, the gigantic signifies an opening of the totality of beings as a reserve for the endless calculation; as the gigantic, calculative machination signifies emergence of the power of flexible and unbounded manipulation of things through an uncountable number of guises from planning and efficiency to “usability” and “fabricability” of things. Calculation then is the operational intelligibility of the power of machination, intelligibility with no other ends except further expansion and ordering. Fundamentally calculation signifies nothing other than the absence of all other ends except the power of further orderings for their own sake (Haar 2002:156). The most

crucial aspect of Heidegger’s understanding about calculation and machination is that they both work at a metaphysical level: machination unfolds the totality of beings as makeable and malleable, and thus constitutes metaphysical scaffolding for the planetary-wide handling of beings through the systems of calculative orderings it generates. Although it is rather evident that

machination proposes a violent unfolding of things by its way of total ordering and manipulation, machination is also an epiphenomenon of a

broader mechanism of ontological violence specific to all the metaphysical ways of moulding the world. As metaphysics

machination possesses violence by forcing beings into its total mould of unfolding and thus does not let beings selfemerge but violently encloses them in its own ground. Nonetheless, a discussion about violence, especially in the context of metaphysics, may sound unnecessary, even obscure, or at least it may evoke a derogatory sense. Intuitively violence seems as something concrete while metaphysics does not. Heidegger, however, as will be shown in more detail, does not merely move the issue of violence from the concrete tragedies to the metaphysical domain, as Hardt and Negri (2000:46), for instance, seem to worry, but better reads metaphysics, to use Slavoj ˇ Ziˇzek’s words, as corresponding to an ontological domain of “systemic violence”. As ˇ

Ziˇzek further specifies (2007:68–70), it was “implicitly, but clearly” Heidegger’s achievement to show that the violence of metaphysical grounding needs to be understood as something that, by opening up a domain of disclosure for concrete

things, grounds the outbursts of physical and ontic violence. Hence, we cannot categorise this realm of violence as merely ontological: by imposing a certain mould of the world metaphysical violence offers an ontological grounding of the social relations of domination. In order to further explicate the issue of ontological violence implicated by the planetary machination as well as the question concerning the possibility of its resistance, a short introduction to a Heideggerean understanding about metaphysics and its relation to the question of being, and above all, to our possibility of overcoming the metaphysical constitution of machination, is therefore needed.

Answers

AT: Tech Solves

The essence of modern technology is nothing technological – our alternative does not foreclose technology it reframes our relationship with the use and development of technological devices.Sabatino 2007, Charles J., Daemen College, “A Heideggerian Reflection on the Prospects of Technology,” Janus Head 10(1), online

To detach and release represents a reversal that learns to let things be what they are . It does so by

handling what is in a way that respects that though everything is available and accessible, though it is all laid forth

before us, nevertheless, it is not ours to possess and do with as we will simply because we can . Things are what they are and not simply what we demand them to be. This is no small matter in a world where everything has become a resource to fuel the machinery that produces what we want, where nothing is respected except for what it can be taken up and used for, where there is little meaning or value to

anything except as material, energy, even information that can be mobilized and put to work to suit our purposes. Even people, in so

many instances, are caught up and swept up into the routines of usefulness, only to be marginalized with no place to belong when no longer useful. Heidegger did not spell out with any clarity the specific kinds of technology an attitude of releasement would have us develop or how we would use it differently .

Nevertheless, it would have to be consistent with our belonging within the world; and so we could speculate that we would proceed in a way that works with , not against nature, works with and not against one another, works with and not against the interdependencies that find us all connected and thus vulnerable within a shared world. Releasement need not abandon what is possible with the genome, the stem cell; but it would have us approach such areas of research with a hand that remains open: not in the manner of taking, but as receiving and thus grateful before all that is granted and all that becomes possible. It would proceed as the steadied and care-ful hands of the micro-biologist who is astounded, thus humbled, by the world that opens before him. It would proceed, seeking to bring hope where there is suffering and pain, yet thankful for the miracle of those healing energies of life itself that make it all possible. It would proceed with the diligence and care of the parent, proud yet humbled, frightened yet ready to care. The difference would play a basic role not only in the kinds of technology we develop, but also in the purposes to which we put that technology. Do we see ourselves at the center of a world that is increasingly at our disposal, in which nothing else matters but what we will to do, becoming ever more powerful and able to extend what we can control, what we can produce and consume without limits, as though entitled to do so? Do we continue to develop and use technology to enhance the advantage of some regardless of the expense to others? Do we proceed with technology blindly believing that every problem can be fixed with technology itself? Or, do we see ourselves as uniquely destined to a level of responsibility and care toward one another and the earth that is frightening precisely in the power that has been given over to us? And therefore, do we see ourselves as needing to consider how what we do with technology impacts one another as well as the earth that births and sustains us as all belonging together within the shared gift of world?

AT: Science Good

Reject their ontological assumptions – they are predicated on neoliberal ontological commitments which foreclose the possibility of radical change. Science goes neg on this question.Bavington 2002 Dean, “Managerial ecology and its discontents: exploring the complexities of control, careful use and coping in resource and environmental management,” Environments 30.3 2002, 3-21The most influential complex systems models, applied to resource management issues, theorize human nature along neo-liberal lines and often result in forms of politics that are technocratic and moralistic (Taylor 1997, 2002). In

technocratic formulations, objective, scientific, and (typically) quantitative analyses are employed to identify the policies that society as a whole needs in order to restore order or ensure its sustainability or survival -

policies which individuals, citizens, and countries should then submit to in their own best interests . In

contrast, moralistic formulations reject coercion and instead rely on appeals to individuals to change their values and actions so as to maintain valued social or natural qualities of life. Yet, in many senses appeals for technocratic planning and moral change are allied. To command people's attention, exponents invoke the severity of the crisis and the threat to the social or natural order . They appeal to common, undifferentiated interests as a corrective to inadequate governance that stems either, in the technocratic view, from scientifically ignorant leaders or, in the moral view, from corrupt, self-serving or naive ones [...] By emphasizing people's common interests in remedial environmental

efforts, these views steer attention away from the difficult politics that result from differentiated social groups and nations having different interests in causing, and different interests in alleviating, environmental problems.

Dominant social groups are spared scrutiny; their agency is thus privileged. At a more subtle level...special places are reserved in the proposed social transformations for their exponents - the technocrat would be the analyst or policy advisor; the moralist, the

guide, educator, or leader (Taylor 2002: 12). The representation of persons in many complex systems models tend to reflect Enlightenment assumptions of humans as possessive individualists such as those promoted by Thomas

Hobbes and neoclassical economic theory (Hayles 1991, 1999). Post-Newtonian complex systems science, when applied in management

contexts, tends to theorize the human in decidedly reductionist terms. In proposals flowing from computer-based

complex systems simulations, for example, the nature of people and other "agents" are most often understood as self-interested possessive individualists or "cellular automata" that pursue optimization strategies in constructed decision environments (Levin 1999). These "agents" respond to binary choices constrained by the engineered environment of the simulation model. In these models, the human being is reduced to a morally responsible, yet strategic, calculating agent whose behaviour is constrained through the design of incentives and disincentives which make up the choice environment (Barry et al 1996, Hayles 1999). There is no complexity to be discovered at the level of the individual agents in complex system models based on cellular automata. Complex dynamics only emerge as the collective choices of individual agents are aggregated and dynamically evolve over time (Hayles 1996, Knights and Morgan 1990). These computer simulation

models are a classic case of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead 1925), where the constraints programmed into the model (individualized, competitive, self maximizing behaviour) are taken to be an ontological fact that forms the context out of which complexity emerges and management lessons are learned

(Hayles 1999). Neoliberal views of human nature are simultaneously optimistic and revolutionary, disruptive and conserving of the Newtonian status quo, depending on whether human agents, economic processes or biophysical systems are considered complex or relatively simple. Neoliberal theories present individuals who are responsible and rational, moral yet calculating. These neoliberal agents offer managerial ecologists both moralistic and technocratic options for management because "...the rational individual will wish to become [morally] responsible for the self, for...this will produce the most palatable, pleasurable and effective mode of provision for security against risk. Equally, the responsible individual will

take rational steps to avoid and to insure against risk, in order to be independent rather than a burden on others" (O'Malley

1996: 199-200). Humans who accept the insights of complex systems science and post-Newtonian ecology seem to have no other choice than to become responsible managers - albeit internally focussed managers of their values,

motivations and behaviour rather than externally oriented managers of the biophysical world . Due to the widespread acceptance of neoliberal views of human nature in societies dominated by globalized forms of corporate capitalism the radical potentials of post-Newtonian ecology are severely restricted. On the one hand, humans are presented with a moral role that represents a radical break from the hubris of the Enlightenment - humans become responsible natural elements in self-organizing systems. They manage or cope, as subjects of larger systems which they are made by and help to co-create. On the other hand, humans are forced into a rational calculative role that reflects the egoism of the Enlightenment and contemporary neoliberalism where they become managers of an internalized Hobbsian Leviathan. Coerced into making rational choices in the context of generalized economic scarcity, contemporary economic agents are forced to control and carefully use their behaviours, attitudes and values based on a rational calculation of interests vis-a-vis the incentives and disincentives programmed into commodified decision environments. While most post-Newtonian complexity theorists frame their discussions of natural and human resource management in the language of democratic deliberation and stakeholder participation, there are strong forces acting against this realization in practice. The tensions that exist between humans conceptualized as holistic elements of larger systems and sovereign individuals rationally selecting behaviours, attitudes and values in highly controlled decision environments creates the potential for moralizing and technocratic politics to develop as a direct result of post-Newtonian ecology applied to resource management.

AT: Perm

Recognition of incompleteness is key – the permutation merely re-injects rationality and technological ordering, obscuring the question of being. The impact is the perpetuation of ontological violence which makes ecological destruction and violent outbursts possible and inevitable.Joronen 2010, Mikko “The Age of Planetary Space,” UNIVERSITY OF TURKU, department of geography, onlineRather than posing new ontological moulds or theoretical frameworks, according to Heidegger we are faced with the dangers of contemporary technological being; in particular, that we totally lose the open possibility of be-ing and its abyssal site. Under the total drive of orderings and techno-scientific manipulation evidently no other modes of unfolding are allowed to come forth: we simply become satiated with the circumstance that the ordering of things work, and thus

brings more and more ordering, eventually totally darkening the question as well as the openness of be-ing. In short, the danger

of technological rationality is that we totally obscure the limits of its own historically finite mode of unfolding; that we become satisfied with the Nietzschean monopolization of being, with the homelessness of endless possibilities for flexible and efficient optimization treating things as mere resources of our desires , the willfull power of ordering. One of the features of contemporary planetary homelessness of machination is precisely the lack of distress and emergency, the lack of mood that affords access to the openness of being via finitude (Heidegger 2000:266–267; see Haar 2000:157; Heidegger 1973e:99). What such a lack thereby lacks of is the knowledge of limits, an exploration of the finite ontological

conditions that give ground and hence limits to every agegrounding unfolding. It is the sense of ontological finitude that is crucial to dwelling – without it dwelling turns into moulding securing of being, into metaphysical capturing of earth, when with the

sense of finitude we are given both, the earth-sites of dwelling and the finite unfolding of abyssal being. It is precisely the distress about the finitude of being that is able to block and cease the eternal machinery of ‘will to will’ and thus the endless

productisation and organization of all things, especially in the names of the capital accumulation, winning-valuing, and profit-making. Without a sense of finitude, limitation, and dependence, thinking not only has a lack of genuine questions concerning

our finite existence and ontological situatedness ‘in-the-world’, but also is in danger of encouraging the “ontological violence” of boundless measurement and complete control . As Michael Zimmerman writes, by affording realms of

“personal and collective craving for immortality” such violence generates a ground for the “new oppressive social institutions and nature-dominating projects” of ecological aggressiveness (Zimmerman 1994:107; cf. Taylor 1991:68; Taylor

1992:267). The dark side of the denial of finitude and impermanence is the structured aim for total control and measurement

encouraging us to build immortal, megalomaniac and turgid monuments from violent authoritarianism and hierarchic cultures to the contemporary hegemony of capital accumulation and nature-exploitation .

It is the finitude then that works against what Žižek calls the ‘fantasmatic illusion’ maintained by the contemporary global capitalism, the illusion that the world ruled by machination and its capitalist forces is ontologically complete and perfectly measured by its instrumental-pragmatist problem-solving calculations (Žižek 1999:204,218; see also Brockelman 2008a:84; Brockelman 2008b). It is precisely the functioning of everything and that this functioning drives further to more functioning, which implies a lack of distress and emergency about the finitude and impermanence (of the calculative ground) of being. If everything operates so that there is no problem in view, there is no need for emergency and distress alike. Nihilist calculating and reckoning therefore do not just give us the nomadic homelessness of mankind (uniformly

subjecting the living earth into the useable and disposable globe for the will to power) but also violent cults of power, control, accumulation, and oppression (with no other purposes aside from the strengthening and unbounded

expansion of their own world-image, their ‘world-view’). These are just two sides of the same coin of manipulative and

omnipotent power of calculative machination, a power without any distress about its lack of distress. In the end, machination upraises a radical sense of making, a “love affair to power”, as Charles Taylor puts it (1991:67). This alldoable makeability grows into new heights when the value of all becomes decided upon the point of calculative measuring, choosing, and computing – upon a coercive reckoning promoted by the will that wills more power and control. With an expense of truth about the unfolding of be-

ing, we are witnessing an endgame of the long-lasting and still-binding history of the (impossibility of ) full presence: a

global realm of calculative ordering of beings through the demand of their constant presence as fully accessible disposability. In order to follow through Heidegger’s opening to the notion of finitude, it is our possibility for a non-violent dwelling in the finite earth-sites of abyssal being that decides the question whether mankind is still , after planetary capitalism, homelessness of nomadic humanity, and coercive ‘enframing’ and domination of nature, capable of calling the living earth a home.

AT: Action good

Our decision-making arguments are prior to short term impact evaluation – pedagogical choices institutionalize and mask instrumental violence.Dillard and Ruchala 2005, Jessie F. School of Business Administration, Portland State University, and Linda, School of Accountancy, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “The rules are no game: from instrumental rationality to administrative evil,” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 18.5, 2005, ProQuestAn instrumental perspective blurs, and ultimately obscures, the moral issues[13j associated with the actions undertaken to satisfy the organization’s needs, and the public interest implications are excluded from the decision space. Adams and Balfour (1998) argue that at some point within such a context moral inversion may occur, whereby immoral actions are reframed as positive actions taken in the name of the public interest. For example, Chwastiak (2001, p. 512) suggests: “PPB [planning,

programming, budgeting] made humans appear to be superfluous to the weapons acquisition process by fetishizing policy objectives (e.g. mutually assured destruction), making it seem as if weapon systems were chosen by national goals, not interested human beings.” The hierarchy authorizes the actions; the professionals insure that technically rational knowledge is appropriately applied; and the technology facilitates the efficient and effective

disposition of one’s duties. All three provide the legitimizing basis for actions and evaluation, and all three mask administrative evil and the potential for organizational violence . Routinization. Kieman’s second condition facilitating the abdication of moral responsibility routinizes the action through role specification and rule governed procedures. Role specification and rules embodied within bureaucratic hierarchies shield the participants from having to confront moral consequences of administrative actions other than from a theoretical, abstract perspective. At some point, the discipline of narrowly focusing on the details of one’s work creates a “taken for granted” quality that reduces the capability to question the underlying principles or consequences of one’s actions (Baumeister, 1997). The dissociation follows from the functional division of labor, thereby

creating distance between the actor, the action, and the outcome. Parsing the actions into a series of well-specified tasks leads to the substitution of technical responsibility for moral responsibility . Technical responsibility considers only whether the activity has been carried out according to the best available technological knowledge in a cost-effective manner. The means to accomplish the thing or act becomes an end unto itself, and the intermediate steps to the ultimate outcome are not recognized. An intermediary implements the practices that are derived from the rules, separating role, rule, and sanctioned practice. The ethical dilemmas associated with the ultimate outcome are not confronted, only the daily ones demanding more effective and efficient processing. For example, the development of technically rational tools,

such as PPB, shifted (limited) the discussion of military strategies and responses to those that fit into the economic cost-benefit calculus (the best technical knowledge) embodied in the rules (Chwastiak, 2001). In addition, Funnell (1998) and

Dillard (2003) illustrate how accounting, accountants, and other information professionals implicated in the Holocaust were removed from having to confront the organizationally sanctioned violence facilitated by their daily routine and professional actions. Dehumanization of the victim. The third dimension that facilitates the abdication of moral

responsibility is the dehumanization of the victim. As noted earlier, legitimation is predicated on instrumental rationality, which

attempts to eliminate any subjective affiliation with the objects of conoern. Phenomena are translated into quantitative representations. This translation initiates the process of dehumanizing innocent human beings.

“Dehumanizing starts at the point when ... the objects ... can and are, reduced to a set of quantitative measures” (Bauman, 1989, p. 102). Given that those who work within bureaucratic structures are primarily measured on, and therefore interested in, the financial impact of their actions, the predominant quantitative measure is ultimately economic value and is generally denominated in monetary terms[14j. Thus, dehumanization is commonplace with, and within, organizations, which are

predicated on instrumentally rational manifestations such as bureaucratic hierarchies. “If you can get human beings to become tools . .., it’s more efficient by some measure of efficiency.. . a measure which is based on dehumanization. You have to dehumanize it. That’s part of the system.” (Noam Chomsky, cited in Bakan, 2004, p. 69). Within the bureaucratic setting of the Department of Administration and Economy, a division of the Nazi SS responsible for the “Jewish problem,” human beings lost their distinctiveness as they were presented as value-free measurements

(Bauman, 1989, p. 103). In pursuing military policy, the death and destruction of civilians is recast as collateral damage. In articulating public policy, certain groups become “surplus populations .” The worker dismissed because of a plant closing is reified as a production input, evaluated in terms of an economic efficiency ratio, and classified as excess capacity.