Introna Kritik

Notes
This is a free file released by Duhbait.com. It is free to use and distribute, but please
keep the duhbait.com in each of the citations.

What is this?
This is a starter file for an Introna Kritik.

What is this not?

This is not a full file. It may be used in round, but I recommend doing your own
research or using this file in conjunction with other files.

Summary:
The Introna Kritik is rather simple. Stemming from the philosophical thought of
Heidegger and Levinas, Introna argues that objects have an ontology, they are
being as well. He argues that on the ontological plane, everything is flat. We are all
equal. I am the same as this keyboard I am typing on. The problem with the status
quo is that in its anthropocentric frame of reference, the entire world is on stand-by
for our own use. This is a form of violence towards the non-human Other. What right
do we have to control it?

Extra notes:
These cards are very long for a reason. They are very good and make a lot of claims
with warrants, so you should pick and choose and prioritize within the block. A
single card can possibly become a different 2NR from the next, so make sure to read
through and understand each.
I have also included some super far-left anthro cards.

Frontline

1NC
The affirmatives view of the world is problematic---they view
the object as nothing more than a tool---this view of the Other
is
Introna 14. Lucas D. Introna is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics
at the Lancaster University Management School. Ethics and flesh: being touched
by the otherness of things. Ruin memories: materialities, aesthetics and the
archaeology of the recent past. Duhbait.com
Being essentially broken, or, on the radical otherness of all things
Graham Harman (2002; 2005; 2011) argues that Heideggers well known tool
analysisas, for example, presented in section three of division one of Being and
Timeis the thread that holds together his entire philosophy. He argues against the
popular pragmatic interpretation of Heideggers tool analysisas for example
presented by Dreyfus (1991) and otherswhere the present-at-hand (vorhanden) is
our detached theoretical encounter and awareness of things and where the readyto-hand (Zuhandenheit) refers to our practical engagement with tools where they
withdraw from view as objects and function as tools in-order-to achieve practical
intentions. Instead he suggests that both theory and practice are equally guilty of
reducing things to presence-at-hand (Harman 2011, 42)the nature of their
present-at-handness are simply different comportments of making present. In
contrast he suggests that ready-to- handness (Zuhandenheit) already refers to
objects insofar as they withdraw from human view into a dark subterranean reality
that never becomes present to practical action (Harman 2002, 1). Thus, all entities
are ontologically locked into a duality in which they reveal themselves sensuously
(as vorhanden) but also simultaneously withdraw into the silent inaccessible
underground (as tool-being/Zuhandensein). As such any encounter with any entity
whatsoever (as this or that particular entity) is always already present-at-hand
(vorhanden), be it practical or theoretical. In a sense one might say that every
present-at-hand entity, in its presentness, is a caricaturean artifice revealed in
accordance with the comportment, which has as its immediate other the
simultaneously withdrawal of that which is not called upon (in concept or action).
Whitehead makes a similar argument. He suggests that every contact involves an
objectification and an abstraction, [s]omething will always be missing, or left
out. There is nothing outside experience as a constructive functioning; but
experience itself is always partial (in both senses of the word: incomplete, and
biased) (Shaviro 2012, 48/49)
We should however note that, although withdrawnexcept for the artifice present in
each and every encountera thing is nonetheless a being that is thoroughly and
completely deployed in its becoming. As Harman (2002, 21) suggests, in its fullness
of becoming a thing is:
an impact irreducible to any list of properties that might be tabulated by an
observer encountering it. The ongoing functioning or action of the thing, its toolbeing, is absolutely invisible... Whatever is visible of the table in any given instant

can never be its tool-being, never its ready-to-hand. However deeply we meditate
on the tables act of supporting solid weights, however tenaciously we monitor its
presence, any insight that is yielded will always be something quite distinct from
this act [of being] itself (22).
This table, here before me, is more than all the perspectives, levels or layers that
we can enumerate, more than all the uses we can put it to, more than all possible
perspectives, levels, layers or uses. Any and all possible relations between humans
and things will inevitably fail to grasp them as they already arethey are irreducible
to any and all of these relations. Nathan Brown (2007) proposes the notion of
nothing-otherthan-object to name the actuality of this being, this immanent
otherness of that which is never nothing and yet not something (p.41). Harman
argues that this bursting forth of becoming (of the table, for example) is pure
event; Erlebnis is Ereignis, fully invested with significance however, knowledge [or
encounter] halts this event and converts it into mere Vorgang [occurrence],..to
encounter an entity as the represented object of knowledge requires a kind of deliving, a de-distancing, or a de-severing (Harman 2002, 83). Thus, there is always
an irreducible otherness in our entangled encounters with all beings from the
universe, to the person before me, to the disposable polystyrene cup, to the quarks,
and so forth.
Furthermore, he argues, rather controversially, that the withdrawal of objects
[Zuhandensein] is not just some cognitive trauma that afflicts only humans and a
few smart animals, but expresses the permanent inadequacy of any relation at all
(Harman 2011, 44). All relations between entities are in a sense broken from the
start. Zuhandensein is essential to the becoming of all beings themselves, their own
withdrawal even as they offer their sensuous surface for such broken relational
contact. In other words Zuhandensein is the incessant and ongoing eventing (or
worlding) of the world in its own terms: The world grants to things presence.
Things bear world. World grants things (Heidegger 1971, 182)note the coconstitutive relation between world and things. This ongoing worlding of the world is
the inaccessible, always withdrawn, dense referential whole in which exists (but not
pre-exists) an infinite range of possibilities for things to be disclosed as this or that
particular being. However, every disclosure whatsoever is also, always and already,
a withdrawal. The face we encounter, on this occasion, is only a surface, an aspect,
a hint, and nothing more. The other is always other than any contact, category,
concept, abstraction, and so forthit is radically singular, which means we can
never have complete knowledge of it.
The disclosure, in broken contact, should however not be seen as revealing what is
prior to such contact, or more precisely, prior to experience. In this regard I want to
suggest a somewhat more constructivist reading of Heidegger and Harman, in line
with Whitehead (Stengers and Chase 2011; Whitehead 1935; Whitehead 1978).
Every being becomes exactly through such on-going affective provocations
(prehensions), that is, through process. For Whitehead The subject is solicited by
the feelings that comprise it; it only comes to be through those feelings. It is not a
substance, but a process. And this process is not usually conscious; it only becomes
so under exceptional circumstances (Shaviro 2012, 11). The other solicits our

attention for creative contact, even as they withdraw what is not creatively given in
such contactthus, there is an essential revealing/concealing in every creative
contact. What is important for usand something which Heidegger, Harman and
Whitehead agree onis that the contact with the other is affective. The basis of
experience is emotional and equally important the rise of an affective tone
originates] from things (Whitehead 1935, 226). Things provoke us by affecting us.
This provocation is originally emotional and not cognitivein the flesh not in the
mind. It happens in the flesh as a qualitative experience not in the mind, as
content of consciousness. But this is not a humanistic sense of emotion. The
affective tone suffuses all and every contact between entities (Whitehead 1978).
Moreover, emotion is not a response to contact it is the very condition of contact to
the possible at allit is the condition of possibility of contact but does not
determine contact. In that sense it is always precarious. Furthermore, all contact
originates in the provocations of the otherflesh affecting flesh, and the needs of
flesh are all you need for obligation (D. Caputo 1993). The other provokes, and in
provoking implicates, and obligates us, in their becoming. Ethics are matters of
fleshit is affective from the start, that is, originally so.
If this argument of Heidegger (as articulated by Harman), of the radically singular,
irreducible nature, of tool-being (or ready-to-handness), is valid then it also makes
sense to talk of the radical otherness (singularity) of all other Others (in Levinas
terms)not just of human other (as Levinas does) but also of more mundane
objects such as atoms, hammers, fish, cups, trees and pens. In other words, in
encountering the other (as wholly other) no bifurcation is needed in order to reserve
a special place for the becoming of human beings, over against the mute mundane
world of the object (Whitehead 1978). All beings are sites of the blossoming of
becominga becoming that is always other than any creative encounter
whatsoever may disclose. To defend the moral rights of humans because of
their sentience, their consciousness, their rationality or whatever, is to
turn the becoming of human beings into a caricature, but likewise with all
other beings. The hammer appears, but also withdraws, in the disclosive eventing
(Ereignis) of being as always and already wholly other than its usefulness as a
weight to drive in nails or to smash a stone.

This is based upon a western ethical orientation that alwaysalready places certain populations over others---any ethical
system that prioritizes the similar spirals into genocide---the
assumption that populations are on stand by for us takes
the form of a bifurcation between the Self and the Other that
engenders nihilism---the alternative is to affirm the absolute
Otherness of every Other.
Introna 14. Lucas D. Introna is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics
at the Lancaster University Management School. Ethics and flesh: being touched
by the otherness of things. Ruin memories: materialities, aesthetics and the
archaeology of the recent past. Duhbait.com

On not valuing the non-human other

One question one might legitimately ask is why do we not simply extend the realm
of ethically relevant beings, in the way Singer (2002) has done for animals? The
problem with this approach is that, in such an extension our ethical relationship with
the non-human other is determined beforehand by us, it is anthropocentric. In this
form of ethical encounter with nonhumans we have already chosen, or presumed,
the framework of values that will count in determining moral significancethat is,
who is in our circle and who is outside of it, and for what reasons. One might say a
value hierarchy which has as its apex, and measure, the human other. In this ethics,
non-human things are always and already, things-for-us in our terms. They are
always already inscribed with our gazethey carry it in their flesh, as it were. The
defining measure of such an ethics, its fundamental ontological measure, is the
human being the unquestioned and the unquestionable value from which all other
values derive their meaning. Indeed, if we look at it carefully we see that we value
most things which are like us (living, organic, etc.) and value least what is most
unlike us (inanimate beings). Thus, it starts with the idea that relative to the human
there are some non-human beings that are less significant or others which may not
be significant at all (outside of the circle). Such as the inanimate objectthe
disposable polystyrene cup, for examplewhose demise is essentially invisible to
our moral calculus. Indeed, this non-human other is so alien to our moral ordering
that its entire moral claim on our conscience is naught, at least so it seems.
If it is increasingly difficult, or impossible, to draw or enact the boundary between
our things and us, as was suggested above, and if, in this entangled networks of
human and non-humans, some things lack moral significance from the startthat is
to say they are always only mere meansthen it is rather a small step to take for an
ethics to emerge in which all things humans and non-human alikecirculate as
mere things-for-the-purposes-of the network. As means and ends interpenetrate,
switch and circulate in the network we all have the possibility of becoming, at any
moment, mere means. Thus, in the sociomaterial becoming (as heterogeneous
assemblages of humans and objects) our human becoming is ultimately also
ordered as a for-the-purposes-of, as mere means. Thus, the irony of an
anthropocentric ethics of things (of our attempt at moral ordering) is that ultimately
we also become mere means in programmes and scripts, at the disposal of a
higher logic (capital, state, community, environment, etc). In the sociomaterial
becoming other humans and our non-human others also objectify us. In
Heideggers (1977) words we all become standing reserve, on stand by for the
purposes of the sociomaterial nexusenframed (Gestell) by the calculative logic of
our way of becoming. In the becoming of the sociomaterial nexus all beings become
enframed. Enframed, that is, in a global network that has a mode of ordering that
transforms all beings into mere means: Enframing is the gathering together which
belongs to that setting- upon which challenges man and puts him in position to
reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve (Heidegger 1977,
305).
The value hierarchy presumed in a bifurcated anthropocentric ethics is in fact a
dynamic nexus of the becoming of ends and means, of values and interestsin the

flow of valuing there never was, or is, a hierarchy. Our assumed originality, in the
nexus, simply does not exist. Rather, in this nexus, the becoming of our material
objects also becomes our fate. In the bifurcated ethics of such entanglements we
are also already becoming as mere meansindeed it is possible for any being (even
god) to become mere means at any moment. Instead of a hierarchy of values we
discover a complete nihilism in which everything is levelled out, everything is
potentially, at any moment, equally valuable or valueless; a nihilistic network of
ontological entanglements in which the highest values devaluate themselves
(Nietzsche 1968, 9).
If this is so then I would argue that we should not extend our moral consideration
to other things, such as inanimate objectsin a similar manner that we have done
for animals and other living things, in for example environmental ethics. In other
words we should not simply extend the reach of what is considered morally
significant to include more things. Every possible bifurcation, every possible cut that
we can make, or boundary we can draw, between ends and means, will be an act of
violence in which some beings become valued at the expense of othersor, more
fundamentally, transformed into an object of ordering as value. Indeed, to value
humans for their consciousness, their reason, or their capacity to feel pain (as Kant
and many other moral philosophers do), is already to turn them into an object within
the order of valueswhat happens if they lose some or all of these qualities? Rather
we should abandon all systems of moral valuing and ordering and admit, with
Heidegger, that in the characterisation of something as a value what is so valued
is robbed of its worth and admit that what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted
by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value,
furthermore, that every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivising
(Heidegger 1993, 228).
We must abandon ethics for a clearing beyond humanistic ethicsto let beings
become in their own terms. We must admit that any attempt at moral orderingbe
it egocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric (Goodpaster 1978; Singer 2002) or even
ecocentric (Leopold 1970; Naess 1990) will fail. Any ethics based on our image is
arbitrary and will eventually turn everything into an object in our image , pure will to
power (Heidegger 1977). As Lingis (1994, 9) suggests The man-made species we
are, which produces its own nature in an environment it produces, finds nothing
within itself that is alien to itself, opaque and impervious to its own understanding
(emphasis added). We should rather acknowledge that the existence of any being
comes at the cost of denying the becoming of other beingsin ethics every being is
always already implicated in the fate of every other, and that includes also us
humans. In sum: any bifurcation (into the morally significant and the insignificant) is
arbitrary and counterproductive as it always reproduces the conditions of its own
demise. The other always turns out to be already in the category of the same (as
Levinas (1999a) suggest). Indeed, our claim to value and the valuing of value
(which has endured for thousands of years) sounds quite hollow in the face of our
instrumental destruction of the non-human other (and eventually ourselves).
Instead of creating value systems in our own humanistic terms, the absolute
otherness of every other should be the only moral imperative an ethics without

any centre whatsoever. We need an ethics of things that is radically beyond the selfidentical of human beings. Such an ethics beyond metaphysics need as its ground,
not a system of values, for comparison, but rather the recognition of the
impossibility of any comparison. Every comparison is already violent in its attempt
to render equal what could never be equal (Levinas 1999a). The question of what I
value more, my child or the chair, when I have to make a decision, is a perverse and
inappropriate framing of the ethical dilemma. It allows me to dismiss the nonhuman other (chair) without going through the ethical trauma of acknowledging the
otherness of them both. My child is a being other, and infinitely more, than a mere
parent/child relation and the chair is, likewise, other and infinitely more, than a
mere tool for sitting. In framing the ethical dilemma as a value comparison I have
already violated them bothi.e. I have denied what is exactly other, and as such
already robbed them of their worth. How might we approach the other in its
otherness? This is of course a profound aporoiaone which has occupied much of
the work of Levinas and the later Derrida (Caputo 1997). But for them the other
was firstly and most definitely the human other. In his ethics Levinas (1989; 1999a;
2000) has argued for the radical singularity of our fellow human beings, the face of
the other. But what about all other otherssurely the seemingly faceless nonhuman third is also calling for justice.
One might suggest that for us human beings, the wholly other, that is indeed
wholly other, is the inanimate other. Indeed, in many respects, the destitute face of
the human other, in the ethics of Levinas for example, is already in some sense a
reflection of the human face opposite it. We can indeed substitute ourselves for the
human other (become her hostage) because we can imagineat least in some
vague sensewhat it must be like for the human other to suffer violence because
we also suffer such violence. It is possible for us to substitute us for them because
it could have been my friend, my child, my partner, etc.we are a community with
a common unity, our humanity. If it is the forgetting of the self that moves ethics
and justice (as Levinas suggests), then this is hardly the forgetting of self. To grant
the inanimate other (such as the disposable polystyrene cup) its otherness, in the
face of the many human demands of everyday life, that seems to me to be a truly
altruistic act. That is the nature of an ethical dilemma prior to, or beyond
bifurcation. In the next section I will argue that the work of Heideggerespecially as
presented in the recent work of Graham Harmanand also with some help from
Whitehead, might provide us with some hints towards such an ethics beyond
bifurcation. Or, the overcoming of humanistic ethics towards an ethos of the lettingbe of all beings in their becominga community of those who have nothing in
common, as suggested by Alphonso Lingis (1994).

Someday, our lives will end. Either of old age or of the affs
impacts. But this is not the end of us it is a simple point on
the line of becoming. Ethics and value does not leave when we
leave our bodies. The inevitable termination of all matter,
however, demands a response of ethics.
Clark 10. Nigel Clark is a senior lecturer at the Open University. Ex-orbitant
Generosity: Gifts of Love in a Cold Cosmos. Parallax, 16:1, 80-95. Taylor and
Francis. Duhbait.com
In recent writing on the gift, there have been a number of variations on the theme
of Nietzsches selfless, life-giving solar flux. For Adriaan Peperzak, musing on the
heterogeneous character of gift-giving: Not only can the sun, trees, and animals
give, but also anonymous forces and unknown sources. Nature, Fortune, Destiny,
Moira, the gods, or God may be experienced or imagined as givers.51 In a related
way, for Genevieve Vaughan, Gaia, our Mother Earth [... .] the abundant planet on
which we live is a preeminent source of the gifts upon which human life depends.52
While such accounts rarely provide explicit consideration of the relations of give and
take that might pertain amongst these generous entities in our absence, there is
little to indicate that these bounteous flows switch off whenever their human
recipients vacate the scene. Karen Barad, however, is unequivocal. In her extended
consideration of the interactive materiality of the universe, Barad boldly insists that
the worlds constant becoming raises questions of ethical responsibility at every
moment, whether humans are present or not: Ethicality is part of the fabric of the
world; the call to respond and be responsible is part of what is.53
The merger of ontology and ethics that Barad proposes is far from unique. In the
current rage for philosophies of immanence, for neo-vitalism and processuality
the insistence on a single ontological plane in which disparate entities engage in
streams of transmutation generally presupposes that the ethical is implicated in the
all-encompassing creative flux. This does not imply creativity or becoming is
painless, however. In Deleuzes influential take on pure immanence, life may flow on
indomitably, but there is nonetheless plenty of wounding as encounters between
bodies trigger violent and unpredictable transformations. Thus: every dynamism is
a catastrophe. There is necessarily something cruel in this birth of a world which is a
chaosmos.54
For Deleuze, and those in his orbit, the ethical is not primarily a response to the
suffering that arises out of wrenching change or any kind of response or
obligation at all. As the affirmation of the transformative possibility that inheres in
encounters and interactions, ethics is an immanent evaluation of the process of
becoming. Although the usual term in Deleuze and Guattaris writings for the driving
force of creative transformation is desire, John Protevi accentuates the ethicalontological fusion by picking up those instances in their work when this is referred
to as love: When bodies join in the mutual experimental deterritorialisation that is
love, we find Deleuze and Guattaris most adventurous concept: the living,
changing, multiplying virtual, the unfolding of the plane of consistency. Love is
complexity producing novelty, the very process of life. 5 In this way, desire or love

is becoming, and generosity is generativity which makes it, to borrow a

formulation from Ray Brassier, ontologically ubiquitous.56 Effectively, there is no
need for a distinctive ethics to address the injuries of transmutation, because the
catastrophe itself is ultimately productive. With the championing of pure process
and incessant becoming that characterises much of the contemporary take on
immanence, what counts is not so much the substantive bodies that happen to
come into being, so much as the great overarching stream of generative matterenergy from which all individuated forms are bodied forth. Where the unlimited
potential for becoming or change takes precedence over the limited and
constrained condition of the actual bodies it gives rise to, there can be no absolute
and irreparable loss. Whatever dissolution of bodily integrity takes place, what ever
fate befalls actual beings, is less of a termination than a reconfiguration, a
temporary undoing that facilitates a renewed participation in the greater flow. And
with this prioritization of process over product, of virtuality over actuality, whatever
fidelity is called for is to the flux of invincible life itself rather than to its
interruptions.5
Catastrophe, in this sense, is the speedy, if painful, passage to a fresh start, to a
new life. If it is a crack that fissures the ontological universe, then it is ultimately a
self- suturing one. But for some theorists who take the event of the cataclysm to
heart, a non-annihilating disaster is not a disaster worthy of the name. As Edith
Wyschogrod concludes of Deleuzo-Guattarian catastrophism: Because there is
nothing but the fullness of desiring production, they cannot, strictly speaking,
explain disease and natural catastrophe ... . 58 For Ray Brassier, the fashionable
avowal of pure process or immanence raises a more general issue: that of how such
philosophies are to account for discontinuity at all, how they are to explain breaks in
pure productivity or lapses into inactivity. This is a problem not just for Deleuze, he
suggests, but for any philosophy that would privilege becoming over stasis.
Solar Catastrophe and Impossible Giving
Brassiers engagement with solar extinction returns us to the literal exorbitance of
an earth open and precarious in the face of an inhospitable cosmos and to the
Levinasian theme of existence fissured by impassable rifts. Whereas Harman
stresses the innumerable ruptures that punctuate a universe of heterogeneous
objects, Brassier zeroes in on the quandaries posed by one particular juncture.
Against any philosophy that assumes the necessity of thinking being to make sense
of the world, and equally counter to any philosophical stance that posits an
incessant stream of becoming, he draws out the significance of the moment when
terrestrial life might be or rather, will be totally, irredeemably, extinguished.
Playing off a discussion by Jean-Francois Lyotard about our sun gradually burning
out and rendering the earth uninhabitable an eventuality which scientists have
predicted with some confidence Brassier points up the certainty of non-existence
that weighs upon all life.60
For Levinas, the impossibility of self-identity, of synchronicity, and of the closure of
reciprocity is signalled by the passage into the time of the other: the interruption of
self-presence by a time without me. 1 In his working through of the inheritance of

Levinas, Derrida observes that love is always a rupture in the living present,
haunted by the knowledge that One of us will see the other die, one of us will live
on, even if only for an instant. This is loves exorbitance, the impossibility of its
recuperation into an economy of reciprocal, synchronous or symmetrical gestures.
For Brassier, that fact that terrestrial life is eventually doomed by solar catastrophe
promises a time without me, without any of us, without thought or experience,
without even the life that lends death its much-touted significance. This is a quite
literal crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: objective scientific knowledge
that propels thought on the impossible task of thinking thoughts own non-being. As
Brassier announces: Lyotards solar catastrophe effectively transposes Levinass
theologically inflected impossibility of possibility into a natural-scientific register,
so that it is no longer the death of the Other that usurps the sovereignty of
consciousness, but the extinction of the sun.63
In the face of the other, in its exposure to the elements, we catch a glimpse of our
own vulnerability and finitude.6 In the face of a cyclone, or the face of others
traumatised by gale-force winds, we see forces strong enough to overwhelm
communities, cities, entire regions. We may also in some opaque sense but in a
way that is currently subject to elucidation by the physical sciences feel an
intimation of energies that could overwhelm an earth. And ultimately annihilate
every conceivable entity. In Brassiers words:
roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, the accelerating expansion of
the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the
possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging
the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent
husks of collapsed matter.6
Negating the consolation of endless becoming or ubiquitous self-overflowing, this
scenario implies that ethics too is ultimately doomed: the gift of the disaster
pointing finally to the disaster of the gift. And yet, across a nation state that could
have been any patch of the globe, ordinary folk offer beds to complete strangers,
the townspeople of a backwater village ladle out lashings of Hurricane Gumbo to
dishevelled company, and a million and one other obscure acts of love flare and
fade away: tiny sparks of generosity that arc across the cracks in daily life. And keep
doing so in spite of, because of, the perishability that characterises the gift, its giver
and its recipient alike. For John Caputo, who also gazes directly at the coming solar
disaster, it is the very face of a faceless cosmos that makes of an ethical opening
to an other an act of hyperbolic partiality and defianc e.66 In this way, it is not just
that each gift is an offering of flesh and the giving of a terrain, but that every gift
carries the trace of the very extinguishing of existence. In its responsiveness to the
inconsistency or the excessiveness of light, each generous reception murmurs
against the dying of all light.

2NC Overview
The end of the human is an inevitability, someday, we will die.
We will never know when or how we will die, whether its now
in the face of the affs impacts, or in 80 years of old age, this
uncertainty haunts us and is what makes us human in the first
place. We can consistently live in fear of a death that might
not come for decades, or we can shift our politics and live life
to the fullest, a shift to ethics. thats Clark
The question of this debate is a question of living life vs
protecting life under the affs plan, everything is simply seen
for its use value, whether it is this laptop I am speaking from
or myself, the form of politics they embrace simply determines
us by our value, placing things like myself higher than
everything else this creates the world as standing reserve,
on stand-by for use by us. The impact is a never ending
genocide against everything we deem less than us entire
races, species, and beings need to be destroyed because they
are not useful.
The alternative is an acceptance and a letting be of being
instead of constantly intervening in places like the
environment, we reverse the damage we have done before we
cause anymore that all was Introna

Framework
Our interpretation of debate is that they must justify their
advantages before they get access to them this forces teams
to defend the other 7:50 of their 1AC that wasnt just the plan
text.
The question of ethics comes first if we win any of our
arguments are true, were a necessary pre-requisite to passing
the plan if the Bush administration questioned the ethicality
of going into Iraq and Afghanistan, policies like those would
have never happened in the first place.
Their framework replicates the state of exception they force
us to pre-empt every possible security risk, destroying the
possibility for productive politics
Clark 14. Nigel Clark is a professor in the Lancaster Environment Center at
Lancaster University. Geo-politics and the disaster of the Anthropocene. The
Sociological Review, 62:S1, pp. 19-37. Wiley and Sons. Duhbait.com
Planetary crisis and the politics of emergency
But is this a good time to evoke realities that exceed the political? Is it wise to be
pumping up the impolitic at a juncture when the threat or the visitation of disaster
seems to have become a justification for rolling back the achievements of political
struggle? One of the most commanding themes in contemporary political thought popular and academic - is the idea that states of emergency are being wielded by
powerful actors to advance their own interests at the expense of less-resourced and
more vulnerable groups (see Honig, 2009; Clark, 2013). Disastrous events or threats
of impending disaster, it is argued, are being presented as the rationale for
stringent and far-reaching regulatory practices that have profoundly antipolitical
connotations. This mode of critique, I want to suggest, offers a well-tuned
framework for addressing some of the key proposals for responding to the
upheavals of a humanized geology, even before the idea of Anthropocene has been
fully absorbed into critical social and political thought.
In a world in which it is widely accepted that significant hazards and risks
accompany intensifying globalization - a mood exacerbated by the events of 9/11 it has been noted that authorities at every scale are taking it upon themselves to
render the spaces under their jurisdiction more secure. Along with rogue human
collectives, physico-material agencies such as biological life or climatic processes
are also being addressed as elements with the potential to act unpredictably at a
global level - and thus to threaten the security of cities, regions or nation states
(Dillon, 2007; Cooper, 2006). What concerns critical commentators is not so much
the acknowledgement of these risks, as the way they are being mobilized to make it
appear as though securitization measures are the only viable response (Braun,
2007: 15). Drawing variously on the work of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Michel

Foucault, and especially Giorgio Agamben, progressive thinkers have sought to

expose the ways in which the exceptional conditions of the emergency or disaster
are being invoked with such frequency that they risk being normalized (Aradau and
van Munster, 2011). A generalized condition where potentially catastrophic events
might suddenly irrupt in any form, at any moment, anywhere in the world, they
argue, is being invoked to justify sweeping new measures of surveillance, ordering
and regulation, to the point of undoing hard-won political freedoms. But perhaps
most relevant to the event horizon of the Anthropocene, is the claim that active preemption - getting in first and changing the conditions which might precipitate a
crisis - is a vital tactic of forces of securitization (see Dillon, 2007).
Pre-emption, observes sociologist Melinda Cooper, transforms our generalized
alertness into a real mobilizing force, compelling us to become the uncertain future
were most in thrall to (2006: 125). The trouble with pre-emptive measures, she
cautions, is that they can be just as unpredictable and irruptive as the hazards they
would defuse (2010: 184). It is precisely this logic that Cooper recognizes in a 2003
report on the consequences of abrupt climate change for the US which proposes
geoengineering the Earths climate to stave off dangerous climate change:

Permutation
1. The permutation is incoherent the 1AC was a call to
action, a call to subdue nature for human benefit the
alternative is a letting-be of nature, a rejection of the
entire logic of pre-empting disaster
2. Inclusion of the aff dooms the alternative Introna says
that reformist knowledge systems, like ecocentrism (or
whatever they say the plan does), are still caught within
Anthropocentric frames of reference that guarantee
endless violence
3. The permutation relegates the non-human Other to the
backdrop of our politics, replicating the hierarchies that
create oppression
Introna 14. Lucas D. Introna is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics
at the Lancaster University Management School. Ethics and flesh: being touched
by the otherness of things. Ruin memories: materialities, aesthetics and the
archaeology of the recent past. Duhbait.com
This view of things, as sediment, or as backdrop, has led to a situation where, for
many archaeologists, things and the physicality of the world... sometimes seem
reduced to little more than discursive objects or phenomena of the subjects
cognitive experience (Olsen 2010, 4). However, the recent turn to the material
non-human other in sociology and social studies of technology, by for example
Latour (2005; 1988) and others, has questioned this view of the material world as
passive receptacles of human intentions and cultural practices. For example, in his
recent book Entangled Ian Hodder (2012) makes a plea for archaeology to
explore how the objectness of things contributes to the ways things assemble us,
and to examine how our dependence on things includes the desire to be shorn of
them (p.14). In other words the material world is not merely a passive canvas for
the expression of human culture. These material non-human actors also
simultaneously assemble us as the humans that we are becoming. In his elegantly
developed analysis Hodder highlights our human dilemma of being constituted by
the material world, yet wanting to separate ourselves from it especially, I would
suggest, in our ethical obligations. In our entanglement with the material world it is
the human being that is always more significant, more worthy, of consideration, it
seems. Indeed, there is a long and, as some believe, venerable tradition of
privileging the human when allowing for beings that ought to be taken as worthy of
ethical consideration, intrinsically. For example, Kant, in his deontological ethics,
argues that only beings capable of reasoning out their duties and acting freely upon
thesethat is to say, human beings qualify as the recipients for the duties of
others. Only such beings are, according to him, the bearers of rights. For him our
conduct towards the non-human others are only ethically significant with reference
to our rights and duties towards the human other.

1. If we win a risk of a link, that means the permutation will

fail Ill do that work here

Links

Economy/Neoliberalism/State
The rush to state based politics is caught up in neoliberal
governmentality, a vicious system where only a beings use
value is considered this form of politics transforms the world
into a nihilistic form of standing reserve, only to be viewed as
how it can benefit the economy
Joronen 13. Mikko Joronen, Department of Geography and Geology, Geography
Section, University of Turku, Finland. Conceptualising New Modes of State
Governmentality: Power, Violence and the Ontological Mono-politics of
Neoliberalism. Geopolitics, 18, pp 356-370. Duhbait.com
The ontology of governance: enframing the homo economicus
Even though the reception of neoliberalism in geographical literature has grown
enormously during the last three decades,10 contradictions between mutable
particularities and theoretical contributions still seem overwhelming for a
conceptual consensus. Most of this comes back to ontological resiliencies between
the approaches, in spite of the evident overlapping and possibilities for hybrid
interpretations. While more policy-based approaches seem to focus on state reforms
and transformations,11 others are more comfortable at framing neoliberalism as an
ideological project entangled with the hegemony of the elites protecting their
comparative advantage in the neoliberal redistribution of the wealth.12 Studies
focusing on neoliberal governmentality in turn tend to emphasise, mainly by
following the thoughts of Michel Foucault, the techniques and rationalities
concerning the mentality of how our conducts are governed and rationalised as a
neoliberal common sense.13 While within governmentality studies considerable
focus has been directed to the art of governing the social body of the state - after
all, Foucaults original definition of governmentality referred to institutions,
administrative practices and knowledge that, instead of the rule over territory, were
aimed to govern the conducts of entire populations14 - recently more geographers
have followed Foucaults own passage to explore the ways through which
individuals are governed, and further, how they govern themselves.15
As Foucault argues in the Birth of Biopolitics, neoliberal governmentality works by
framing and encouraging a specific modality of self-repressive subjectivity: the
economically calculating, benefit-maximising and efficiently productive atom of
self-interests, the homo economicus.16 While classic liberalism made homo
economicus a partner of exchange, such exchange defining the anthropology of
man and the societal space of the markets, in neoliberalism, Foucault writes, homo
economicus becomes defined solely in terms of competition. Unlike in liberalism,
where the process of exchange was defined as a natural action, in neoliberalism
competition becomes an artificial space, which needs to be defended against the
monopolies and interventions of the state. The central problem in neoliberalism,
then, is how the existing political power can be organised on the basis of market
principles: while the classic liberalism aimed to free up the natural space of market

exchange, for the latter the question is more of a style, of how one acts, of how
ones conducts must be governed with a proper manner.17
Although Foucaults discussion on the constitution of the self through the particular
form of subjectivity covers a great deal of the process of making the neoliberal
state, governmentality approaches seem to leave the question concerning the new
ontology of human and non-human existence relatively untouched. As Braun
suggests,18 governmentality does not merely rely on a rationality of self-control,
but also denotes a material process of governing and measuring natural entities.
Hence, it seems to subject both human and non-human entities to the trade of
calculative profit-making, not just by reducing capabilities of citizens to the
economically rational and productive conducts, but also by enframing all things to
the assemblage of standing- reserves set available for the market-efficient use. As
David Harvey reminds us,19 eventually neoliberalism can continue its process of
accumulation only by disposing the commons, such as clean water, through the
commodification and privatisation. The neoliberal governmentality, thus, does not
lead into a mere encouragement of the economically rational conducts, but
encloses all beings in terms of a uniform plane of existence: as a part of enframing
(Gestell), through which things are revealed as a usable and available set of
standing-reserve (Bestand).20
According to Heidegger, the emergence of the apparatus of enframing (Gestell) is
fundamentally rooted in the historical process where the modern techniques
originally developed for controlling the nature became turned back to us.21 In the
process, both the modern subject and the modern nature of paralysed objects were
sucked up into standing-reserves and thus revealed as an enframed array available
for the use of calculative machinations. Apparently such ontological shift has had
massive consequences: enframing can take place through an unlimited number of
guises, practices and material settings, since it works by creating certainty on the
availability, usability and controllability of things and subjects. Through the
apparatus of enframing, defined by Heidegger as the gathering together of that
setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in
the mode of ordering, as a standing-reserve,22 subjects and objects are simply
made available for the power to control, calculate and order them with predictable
certainty. As a number of studies have pointed out, enframing is able to measure
different sets of practices, discourses and material relations related, for instance, to
creative industries,23 carbon economy,24 colonialism,25 forest conservation,26
globalisation,27 and science,28 and should be understood above all as a broader
political order based on metaphysical positioning of entities.
As a modality of enframing, the process of neoliberalisation has evi-dently created
an entire array of governmental politics actualised through the different orders,
possibilities, and positions of things. First of all, as Foucault writes, neoliberalism
denotes an ethical order defining the proper constitution of the self. In
neoliberalism, every action human subjects attempt to recognise as an end of their
actions becomes assimilated to the economy of market rationality, to the robust
calculations of costs against the benefits . Hence, human existence is solely caught
up to serve the nihilist utility of maximum profit. Under such ethos, or better, under

such inversion of ethos, human existence is reduced to a nihilist framework

constituted by the arrangements efficiently implementing seemingly value neutral
means. Enframing thus represents everything that is nihilist in a contemporary
world-economy: planetary homelessness, calculative aimlessness, mischief of other
forms of rationalities, and the constant devaluation of nature and human existence
as mere stocks of profits.29 As Zizek writes, global cap-italism is a truth-withoutmeaning, a worldless constellation capable of accommodating itself to any cultural
and material setting.30
In enframing, a calculative regulation of all domains of life becomes a fundamental
goal of its own. As Heidegger prudently wrote as early as 1939,31 the humanity
seems to be producing itself in such a manner that the absolute meaningless is
valued as the one and only meaning. The preservation of such nihilism appears not
only as a human domination of the globe, but also as a mode of existence sucked
up to the process where the will to calculate fumbles its own strengthening. Hence,
enframing leads into a nihilist mode of subjectivity, where the human will is
challenged to will more of the optimal calculations. Heidegger makes a great effort,
in the four-book series of Nietzsche lectures in particular, in order to show how such
production of the nihilist mode of revealing was inaugurated by Nietzsches notion
of will to power. Through the will to power, beings are revealed as makeable, as
something dragged under the strengthening power of human willing and
machinations. Eventually, the will wills nothing but its own empowerment, its will to
will more of itself. In the neoliberal modality of homo economicus this will to will
turns into a will to profit evidently following the same ontological logic of selfincreasing calculations. As a consequence, human beings turn into technical
subjects self-controlling their conducts through the value-neutral calculation of the
means for the maximum profit. In a neoliberal common sense, we are hence not
only part of the value neutral and de-politicised economic nihilism, but also
enframed, positioned, and tranquilised by the self-optimising drive of calculative
arrangements.32
This leads us to the second point: even though human existence is enframed into
usable reserve, our position in enframing still differs from the position of non-human
entities. Foucault evidently refers to this when exploring the historical emergence of
homo economicus, wherein the worker of liberalism turns into a human capital of
neoliberalism.33 In neoliberalism, Foucault argues, the wage earner of liberalism, an
individual who without the possession of capital is obligated to sell his/her labour
power as a commodity, turns into a human capital, into a usable reserve of the
individuals acquired skills and genetic qualities. Accordingly, such a change
signifies an ontological process where the modern subject becomes translated into
a late-modern reserve: human beings are constantly optimised and ordered to
flexibly serve the instrumental interests of profit-making.34 In neoliberal enframing,
human beings eventually turn into what Foucault calls the entrepreneur of himself:
an indivisible unit of calculating self-interests who remains for himself his own
capital, his own producer, and his own source of earnings.35

Environment/Geo-Engineering
The desire to control the non-human Other is an attempt to
remove the limits placed on the human by the outside world
this shedding of finitude props up authoritarian regimes and
global capitalism hell bent upon destroying all difference the
endpoint of this is ontological violence and extinction
Joronen 11. Mikko Joronen, Department of Geography, University of Turku,
Finland. Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical
Globe. Antipode Vol. 43 No. 4, pp 1127-1154. Duhbait.com
Resistance of Finitude: Non-metaphysical Dwelling in the Earth-sites
In spite of the revolutionary sense of power-free letting-be, our role as the ones
who let being make its transformation poses a number of questions concerning our
part in this radical turning from ontological violence to the other beginning of
abyssal being. What exactly is our relation to the finitude of being? Should we only
wait for the end of the prevailing mode of being and thus hope for a new sending of
being? At least Heideggers comment in his posthumously published Der Spiegel
interview about only god (ie a new sending of being) being capable of saving us
seems to imply this, apparently leaving little room for human activism (Heidegger
1993b:107; see also Schatzki 2007:32). Hence, is our part just to question the
prevailing unfolding and so to wait for the new sending, the other beginning, the
new arrival of being? First of all, it is crucial to recognise that waiting for the worldhistorical turning is not inactivity but a revolution that turns power-free thinking into
praxis. It is a non-violent revolution, which can take many forms of activism, such as
disobedience and protests. In fact, Dallmayr (2001:267) even compares this praxis
of non-violent resistance with the paths of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Altogether, as Malpas (2006:300) writes, there is no reason why the world-historical
turning of being cannot be awaited through political activism, as long as it avoids
being taken up by a machinational mode of unfolding and thus remains non-violent
and aware of its limitedness and finitude (see also Irwin 2008:170,188-189).
Secondly, it is important that Heidegger relates our letting-be-like recognition of
abyssal being to the earth aspect of the site where things show themselves. The
unconcealment of the abyssal ground, the unveiling of the abundant being
concealed by the limits of particular world-disclosures, is also an unconcealment of
the earth, since the material things that the earth provides are never emptied into
present world-disclosure. Earth rather stands in strife against every particular
rationalisation made by particular world-disclosures. Accordingly, even though all
particular world-disclosures always denote an unfolding of things as what they are,
none of them is an unfolding of things as all that they are (Heidegger 2001a:52-53;
Malpas 2006:193; Schatzki 2007:54-55). All secured realms of disclosure always
conceal other possible ways of unfolding , which means that by concealing the
abyssal realm of abundance against which every particular unfolding takes place,
world-disclosures conceal the inexhaustibility of things on earth in a very
metaphysical sense. Unlike in the manipulative possession promoted by

contemporary planetary machination, earth does not belong to anyone since it can
never be captured as a whole (de Beistegui 2007:17). It is our non-violent rejection
of the manipulative power of calculative ordering that puts aside the violent
capturing of the earth and hence lets what has already fled our rational apparatuses
to become in power: the abyssal ground of earth.
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the need for nonviolent resistance and
power-free following of the abyssal earth is the contemporary event of global
warming. While this devastating change is affecting all parts of the earth, even the
atmosphere, some of the most vulgar solutions, especially the geo-engineering
proposals, aim at intentional, even global-scale, climate modification either by
reducing the incoming radiation from the sunfor instance, by using the refractive
screens or sunshade of autonomous spacecraft installed in space (Angel 2006), or
by spraying cooling sulphate particle concentrations in the stratosphere (Crutzen
2006)or by removing carbon dioxide from the atmospherefor instance, by
increasing carbon sequestration with iron fertilisation of the oceans (Buesseler and
Boyd 2003). These various potential geo-engineering implementations seem to do
nothing but follow the baseline of the gigantic machination, the subjugation of
things into orderable reserve commanded to stand by so that they may be
manipulated by the operations of calculation. Even though such geo-engineering
may eventually mitigate the negative consequences of climate change, it offers a
calculative moulding of the even more complex systems of orderings as a solution
to the problem of global warming, which is itself subordinate to, as well as an
outcome of, this manipulative and calculative subjugation of earth, the logic of
circular self-overcoming in the ever-greater modalities of exploitative power. As
Malpas (2006:298) writes, although it is evident that more complex systems of
orderings also increase the possibilities of their failure, machination always presents
itself as a source for continuous improvements by simply viewing these failures as
an indication of a further need for technological perfection. In other words,
machination does not implicate an achievement of total ordering, but a drive
towards total ordering where this drive itself is never under suspicion . Nevertheless,
as contemporary climate change indicates, earth never allows itself to become
captured, completely controlled or emptied into unfolding that frames it in terms of
orderable and exploitable standing- reserve. Earth rather resists all attempts to
capture it: it resists by pointing out the lack that leads to the failure of all systems of
orderings. It is precisely this lack, the line of failure that has always already started
to flee the perfect rationalisation and total capture of things, which presents the
earth aspect of Heidegger. Instead of the calculative engineering of technical
solutions, non-violent resistance allows the earth to become a source of abyssal
being, a source of self-emerging things that always retains a hidden element since
the earth never allows itself to become completely secured though particular worlddisclosures (see Harrison 2007:628; Peters and Irwin 2002:8). In other words,
instead of mere calculative manipulation, we can resist the manipulative
machination of earth and thus let the living earth become a source of abyssal being,
an earth-site for our dwelling.

Thirdly, it is the recognition of the finitude, the limit, that allows a breakdown of our
taken-for-granted ontological intelligibility of prevailing world-disclosure .
Identification of the finitude affords a view into the possible absence of prevailing
world-disclosure, a situation of distress Polt (2006:30) calls the emergency of
being, where the world we are thrown into becomes unsettled, releases its hold
and eventually allows us to remember its originary happening as a mere historical
appropriation of limits from the groundless abyss. Moreover, compared with
Heideggers earlier notion about the recognition of our own finitudeour death
forcing us to face what stands as completely contrary to the meaning of beingthe
nothingness with empty-of-all- meaningthe notion about the finitude of being as
such refers rather to the positive realm, to the abyssal reservoir of plenitude (Young
2002:190-192). Thus, the nothing is not excluded as the opposite of being, as a
mere negativity of empty nihilism; nothing rather belongs to the realm of being
through the sense of possible absence it implies, absence (the possibility of finitude)
in this case keeping the site opened for the play and other beginning of being.
Planetary machination, however, and the calculative thinking it affords, do not allow
this appearance of finitude: as a total positioning they destroy the earth upon which
we dwell by changing it into an errant planet, into a globe in an astral universe
without the earth-site for making manifest the limits of the happening of being. As
Radloff (2007:36) sums up, earth is not a planetearth is not a planet, because
the planet belongs to the representational thinking that hides the fundamental
openness of the abyssal earth-site through which the sphere of total gaze, the
planetary globe, became possible in the first place. Eventually this globe, ordered
through the networks cast upon the planet, opens neither paths nor possibilities,
but a profound nihilism of calculative consumption and utilisation of the earth (see
Joronen 2008:603-604).
As Critchley (1997:12) writes, rather than simple transgression or restoration of the
conditions that ground the contemporary situation, we need to experience their
limit, to delineate them. The crucial point is that the contemporary ontic
homelessness, the late modern nihilism of planetary machination, does not allow
the fundamental sense of ontological finitude, the distress and emergency about
the limitedness and finitude of the prevailing mode of being, to arise (Heidegger
1996:74-75; Radloff 2007:240). This ontological homelessness, the sense about
finitude and play of being, can only be confronted through the happening of being,
through being that presences through sites, which means that one can become
opened to abyssal being to the extent that one first finds the finitude of the
prevailing mode of being, its limits. Hence, Heideggers notion about dwelling in the
earth-sites, our being-at-home on earth, is properly understood as a
homecoming that takes place through ontological homelessness: out of the
passage through what is foreign, we no more merely live through the given
unfolding, but better, by being unhomely in becoming homely we become to
sense the potential for human beings to dwell on earth with understanding about
the finitude and givenness of the ruling unfolding (Heidegger 1996:120-121; on
Heideggers comparison between modern homelessness and Marxs notion of
alienation, see Heidegger 1993a:243-244). Since the primary aim of this nonmetaphysical and non-grounding dwelling is the recognition of the abyssal earth-

sites, it neither proposes the chauvinism of provincial locality nor bounded

homeland rooted in organic national family of blood and soil, as Thiele (1995:172175) for instance misinterprets all of these definitions, the organic, the
national and the blood, are metaphysical determinations that presuppose a
concept of collective subjectivity explicitly rejected by Heidegger (1993a:244-245;
see also de Beistegui 2007:10; Radloff 2007:241-242). Instead, the possibility of a
non-metaphysical dwelling in the sites of ontological finitude signifies a chance for
an open and abyssal clearing on earth, an eco-poetic promise ecological as
opposed to violent exploitation of nature, poetic as opposed to the metaphysical
violence of calculative rationality. As de Beistegui (2007:18) suggests, instead of
bounded territorialism or cosmopolitanism, such citizenship on earth could
perhaps be translated into something like geopolitanism (cf. Morin 2009; Turnbull
2006).4
Concluding Remarks: A Homecoming to Abyssal Earth
As it has become evident, the contemporary nihilism and planetary homelessness of
(late) modernity does not correspond with the primordial ontological homelessness
based on dwelling in the finite earth-sites of abyssal being. The homelessness of
technological calculation, which is now coming to be the destiny of the world, is a
symptom of the oblivion of beingan abandonment of abyssal being in favour of
metaphysical rationality of ideo-logic-ally and universally grounded conceptual
systemswhen the dwelling in the sites of finitude is a homecoming that founds
our taken-for-granted belongingness to particular world-disclosure by unsettling and
dislocating us from it (Heidegger 1993a:242, 243). At the end, we are left with a
nonmetaphysical sense of dwelling, with a resistance based on the finitude of being.
Accordingly, resistance includes both power-free dwelling on earth, and nonmetaphysical sites based on finite and abyssal being. As I have tried to show, this
sort of dwelling offers neither total unity of intelligibility, an ontologically bounded
and grounded dwelling, nor alienation based on planetary nihilism of willfull
calculations, but a sense of finitude and thus a sense about the limits of the
planetary unfolding of machination. It is a dwelling that remains open for abyssal
being and hence for an Event, which as a play can never be mastered since
mastering does not provide possibilities but necessities. As exposed to abyss, we
human beings are exposed to the concealed ab-ground of beingto the abysmal
reservoir of abundant being and so may turn into the power-free grounders of
abyssal earth (cf. Sallis 2001:188, 194-195).
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 Zizek 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
(ZiZek 1999:204, 218; see also Brockelman 2008a:84, 2008b).
It is precisely the functioning of everything and that this functioning drives further
to more functioning which implies 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 then 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,
violence, accumulation and oppression (with no other purposes aside from the
strengthening and unbounded expansion of their own world-image, their worldview). These are just two sides of the same coin of the manipulative and
omnipotent power of calculative machination, a power without any distress about its
lack of distress. In the end, machination raises a radical sense of making a love
affair to power, as Taylor (1991:67) puts it. This all-doable makeability grows to
new heights when the value of all becomes decided upon the point of calculative
measuring, choosing and computingupon a coercive reckoning promoted by the
will that wills more power and control. In order to follow through Heideggers
opening to the notion of finitude, it is our possibility of a non-violent dwelling in the
finite earth-sites of abyssal being that decides the question whether mankind is still,
after planetary capitalism, nomadic humanity and coercive enframing and
domination of nature, capable of calling the living earth a home.

Climate change has rendered governance of the environment

problematic the silver bullet solution that is the affirmative
renders socio-political transformation impossible and masks
the root causes of environmental destruction
Clark 14. Nigel Clark is a professor in the Lancaster Environment Center at
Lancaster University. Geo-politics and the disaster of the Anthropocene. The
Sociological Review, 62:S1, pp. 19-37. Wiley and Sons. Duhbait.com

Over the last decade or so, the possibility of technological intervention into Earth
systems on a planetary scale has been on the ascendant in some scientific
communities as an emergency measure that might be attempted if global climate
looks likely to pass into a dangerous or extremely dangerous phase. Several key
thinkers associated with the Anthropocene idea, including Paul Crutzen, have
speculated that some form of intentional large-scale climate modification - or
geoengineering - might be considered, in the light of the failure of global climate
governance to reverse or even slow greenhouse gas emissions (Crutzen, 2006:
214). Nearly all proponents of geoengineering research, however, stipulate that this
would be an emergency measure, just as they stress that collective political action
to abate greenhouse gas emission would be greatly preferable to technical
interventions to alleviate or counterbalance the effects of changing atmospheric
composition.
For Cooper, the possibility of a geotechnological pre-empting of dangerous climate
change not only comes with profound risks and uncertainties: the mindset of a
permanent state of emergency to which it belongs shores up existing imperial
power - the power of global or planetary capitalism - at the expense of alternative,
more progressive possibilities (2010: 184). If not quite in these terms, many other
commentators, including a number who are involved in research in the
geoengineering field, have voiced strong concerns about a commitment to technical
fixes taking on a life of its own at the expense of pursuing socio-political
transformation (Hamilton, 2011; Keith, 2000; cf. Heartland Institute, 2007).
As it becomes clearer that it is not simply climate, but a range of interconnected
Earth systems that are currently under profound stress (see Steffen et al, 2004),
geotechnical responses are taking into their purview more than just climate
stabilization.1 Geo-engineering, in this sense, might best be viewed as a response
to all the entangled and mutually reinforcing geologic transformations that are
gathered under the rubric of the Anthropocene. Debates about geoengineering, in
other words, could be seen as a nascent expression of the much bigger issue of
governing the Anthropocene - as a vehicle by which the question of the political
implications of the experience of wholesale planetary emergency is being broached.
Whether or not apocalyptic imagery serves to promote or incapacitate
politicization has long been debated in environmentalist circles and in critical social
thought (see Swyngedouw, 2007; cf. Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011). In another register
and another field, the question of whether actual disasters provide opportunities
for political transformation, or whether they are primarily occasions for the
entrenchment of pre-existing power relations, has also been a matter of lively
discussion (Cuny, 1983; Pelling and Dill, 2010; Kelman, 2012; Tironi, this volume).
Whereas Naomi Kleins (2008) bestselling inquiry into the machinations of disaster
capitalism comes down firmly on the side of the latter, geographer Mark Pelling and
anthropologist Kathleen Dill sift through a range of case studies to arrive,
cautiously, at a more hopeful prognosis. Disaster shocks, they propose open
political space for the contestation or concentration of political power and the
underlying distributions of rights between citizens and citizens and the state (2010:
34).

Engaging in a more general sense with the political potential of the crisis or
emergency, political theorist Bonnie Honig comes to a similar conclusion. Taking
issue with the rush of recent critical work that characteristically equates the state of
emergency with the suspension of civil liberties and the closure of political
possibility, Honig argues for the fundamental ambivalence of invoking emergency,
observing that no declaration of emergency can dictate how it will be received,
interpreted and acted upon. In contrast to claims that the emergency brings an end
to real politics, she seeks out and discovers new possibilities for political renewal
and change: hidden resources and alternative angles of vision that might motivate
action in concert in emergency settings (2009: xv; see also Aradau and van
Munster, 2011).
But what might these political possibilities be? What is demanded of the political in
the face of the threats and challenges designated by the Anthropocene? In the final
section, I want to sketch out some of the ways that responses to the current
geologic predicament of humankind are awakening to Michel Serres call for a
geopolitics in the sense of the real Earth (1995: 44; see also Dalby, 2007). More
than a matter of confronting the consequences of our own actions, I want to
suggest, a growing conception of the inherent instability of the Earth is beginning to
impact upon our understanding of the composition of the political; our sense of
what it is we work with - or against - when we mobilize collectively.
Towards an Anthropocene geopolitics
Resonating with other researchers in the field of science and technology studies,
Sheila Jasanoff writes of the indeterminacy and complexity of many novel risks, and
their refusal to stay within neatly drawn geopolitical lines (2010: 19; see also
Petersen, this volume). It is timely, however, to ask what exactly the geo in
geopolitical is doing in this scenario, and what claims about the coming of an
Anthropocene epoch might mean for such an understanding of geopolitical lines.
Perhaps the most crucial lesson of the Anthropocene is that the Earth itself must be
understood as much more than a mere surface or stage on which political contests
take place: it must acquire a volumetric or vertical dimension (Dalby, 2013; see also
Elden, 2013). That is to say, the geopolitical can no longer simply refer to a
horizontal and synchronous globality.
But this requires something more than extending the conventional concerns of
geopolitical discourse and practice upwards into the atmosphere or downwards into
the depths of the ocean or Earth. It requires us to bring politics into an intensive
engagement with the planets own dynamics: its processes of sedimentation and
mobilization, its layering and folding, its periodicities and singularities. This means
that the crucial borders or thresholds on the political agenda are not only those
which divide nations or other socially inscribed territorial divisions of the Earths
surface, but also the spatio-temporal junctures at which one state or regime of an
Earth system passes into another (Clark, 2011, see Weszkalnys, this volume on the
Cenomanian Turonian extinction or boundary event). Or to put it another way,
politics must expand its concerns with the shaping and reshaping of territory to

embrace processes of stratification and destratification (see Deleuze and Guattari,

1987).
When it comes to the threat of crossing boundaries or thresholds in Earth systems,
as Johan Rockstrom and his interdisciplinary team observes: [c]urrent governance
and management paradigms are often oblivious to or lack a mandate to act upon
these planetary risks (2009: unpag.).While the repeated failure of climate summits
to achieve the binding commitments necessary to ward off dangerous or
extremely dangerous climate change is the most conspicuous manifestation of this
shortfall, the relative paucity of attention to other imminent or already-transgressed
planetary boundaries is no less revealing (Anderson and Bows, 2011; Rockstrom et
al, 2009). Recent calls for what has been variously termed planetary stewardship
(Steffen et al., 2011); Earth System governmentality (Lovbrand et al., 2009); and
global earth system governance (Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011: 1873) express a
growing recognition of the need for new or greatly strengthened frameworks to
meet the political challenge of maintaining Earth systems in socially desirable
states. Needless to say, normative reasoning is far from enough to conjure such
architectures into existence. Any conceivable success, political theorists John Dryzek
and Hayley Stevenson remind us, must work through and from existing experience
(2011: 1873).
But what kinds of experience might be relevant here? We have seen that critical
social thinkers can be as apprehensive about the successful operationalizing of
strategies to manage Earth systems as they are about inadequate planetary
governance. While radical critics tend to champion a generalized advancement of
democratic or deliberative political processes, they are often less than forthcoming
about their own preferences for responding practically to the challenges posed by
dynamic Earth or life processes. There are, of course, no easy answers to the
question of how to gain experience of governing the forces of the Earth. As Latour
argues, novel situations configured by messy admixtures of social and material
ingredients present a new imperative to improvise or experiment (see Farias, this
volume). When it comes to situations with the scale and complexity of global
climate change, however, he suggests we are way out of our depth: The problem is
that while we know how to conduct a scientific experiment in the narrow confines of
a laboratory, we have no idea how to pursue collective experiments in the confusing
atmosphere of a whole culture (Latour, 2003: 31).

Ocean
The politics of current ocean policy is dominated by a mindset
predicated upon destruction of the non-human Otherthe plan
is a separation of the self from natural processes which
constructs the world as a commodity with the sole purpose of
furthering human progress
Gordillo 14. Gastn Gordillo is a professor of anthropology at the University of
British Columbia. The Oceanic Void.
http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.ca/2014/04/the-oceanic-void.html. Duhbait.com
The main protagonist in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane has
been the elusive and intensely mobile oceanic space that satellites, planes, and
ships have been meticulously scrutinizing in search for the planes debris, thus far
to no avail. For four weeks, the surveillance technology that is often very precise in
locating objects anywhere on the planet has been struggling to pierce through the
opacity of this huge mass of water that, in permanently moving, recurrently makes
itself unreadable. This is a vast liquid space whose ambient thickness and intensity
is in a permanent state of becoming: folding, shifting, arching, twisting; always in
motion, always displacing its volume across vast distances, always indifferent to the
life forms enveloped by its mobile flows. Ten days after the plane's disappearance,
satellites pinpointed on the oceanic surface relatively large objects, over twenty
meters long, that looked like debris from the plane. One day, however, the debris
seemed to be here; the next day, it seems to be five hundred kilometers away.
Always on the move, the ocean carries anything floating on it elsewhere ,
particularly in the turbulent waters of the southern Indian ocean. A few days later,
satellites and planes detected hundreds of smaller objects scattered over wide
areas. But when finally reached by ships, these objects turned out to be part of the
vast amounts of ordinary debris drifting in oceanic space, the surplus of the imperial
forms of connectivity that thousands of ships loaded with commodities leave behind
in the oceanic void, turned into the most decisive channel of global capitalism. The
global panopticum has been disoriented by this mobile, textured, multi-layered
spatiality of the ocean, which makes itself even more opaque by getting entangled
with the detritus of globalization. So many transnational and imperial resources
have been put in the search that debris from the plane may eventually be found.
Had the plane fallen on firm land, however, the global panopticum of satelites and
drones that control the atmosphere, and therefore look at the planet from high
above, would have already located the debris. But the plane fell into a liquid vortex
that swallows up most of the heavy objects that fall into it. This is liquid matter that,
because of its physical properties, lets the force of gravity pull those objects down
toward a dark abyss that the naked human body confronts as a physical
environment devoid of solid ground and breathable air: the oceanic void.
We know that the ocean covers two thirds of the planets surface. But what type of
space is the ocean? One way to begin answering this question is to look at those
areas where the spatiality of the ocean meets that of islands and continents. The
material counterpoint between both types of spaces is apparent and seemingly self-

evident. On the one hand, the beaches, mountains, or human-made buildings that
define the coastline and emerge from above the oceanic surface constitute the type
of spaces where the vast majority of humans are born, live, and die. These
geographies are defined by a multiplicity of textures and forms but share the solid
spatiality that has sustained humans as land creatures adapted over millions of
years to breath, eat, move, and reproduce on firm land in direct contact with the
atmosphere. On the other hand, beyond the coastline, the body confronts a
qualitatively different space: fluid, mobile, liquid. This is a space whose multiplicity
is subsumed to the physical properties of water: an incompressible fluid that is
permanently in motion because its molecules can move relative to each other,
adapting to the shape of its container, the Earths surface, and to the forces of the
atmosphere. Shorelines, in short, are among the most dramatic thresholds in human
experiences of space: the point where the consistency and materiality of space
abruptly changes and the body faces the beginning of a liquid world with flows,
rhythms, and properties that are not those of land. But "coastlines," Steve Mentz
reminds me, is not the right name the entanglement between these two spatial
ecologies, which I prefer to see as material sets, inseparable from each other yet
distinct and singular. I would add: the material name for this threshold is edge.
Coastlines are those areas where space folds to reveal the edge of a truly immense
liquid void, planetary in scope and nature. As I argue in Rubble, one of the most
extraordinary sections in Badiou's book on Deleuze, The Clamor of Being, involves
his discussion of the intense private exchanges that they had over several years
through personal letters. One concept stood out in my reading of Badiou: one that
he and Deleuze approved of as part of their shared constellation: "on the edge of
the void." Badiou says that Deleuze interpreted the edge of the void as the
intersection between the territory and the process of deterritorialization, the
dissolution of the territory in the event . On the edge of the oceanic void, the
dissolving vector of deterritorialization is the event of the ungrounding created by a
liquid world.
Humans have long navigated and used oceanic space with high degrees of
expertise and sophistication. Many feel at home there, at ease in that liquid,
untameable world. But they do so as land creatures whose anatomy and physiology
have evolved to move and breathe on firm ground. The liquid space of the ocean
can very quickly envelop and asphyxiate the human bodies that venture in it
without flotation devices. It is in this precise physical sense that the human body
confronts the ocean as a void: as liquid matter that does not halt the pull of gravity
toward the heart of the planet the way firm land does and that, in sinking the body
in a fluid devoid of breathable air, negates and interrupts land-based forms of
mobility and territoriality. This liquid space, in short, imposes on humans a
challenging spatiality that can be socially used but cannot be fully
controlled, for it follows its own, powerful rhythms. These rhythms are created by
forces mobilized by a planet in motion: by the rotation of the Earth around its axis
and around the sun, by the cyclical exposure of the ocean and the atmosphere to
the heat of the sun, by the gravity of the moon, as well as by the friction between
tectonic plates, which occasionally shake the depths of the ocean to create
tsunamis. This vortex is far from being empty: it is inhabited by a pure multiplicity of

intensities in motion and by a large biomass. But the ocean is a void in the physical
sense of the term, simply because alone in the ocean we drown in an instant,
bringing to light what we tend two take for granted: our bodily ontology as land
creatures who breath air.
In this essay, I argue that Deleuze provides us concepts that are particularly
important to examine the liquid spatiality of oceanic space, such as becoming, fold,
multiplicity, intensity, singularity, difference, repetition, eternal return, virtual,
actual, and smooth and striated space. It is especially in the analysis of the
repetitive, rhythmical, and ever-fluid spatiality of the ocean that Deleuzes
philosophy reveals its power to illuminate our understanding of space in its
immanence, independently of human appropriations but also in relation to them. My
analysis is in dialogue with authors like John Protevi and Levi Bryant, who also draw
on Deleuze to think the material becoming and gravitational forces of non-human
made objects and forces. And as Protevi argues, the becoming of water is
particularly amenable to Deleuze's philosophy (Life, War, Earth, p. 45). Yet my
analysis also goes beyond Deleuze because it puts him in dialogue with Alain
Badiou by subsuming the becoming of oceanic space to a figure of negativity such
as the void. This may seem like a counterintuitive move, given Deleuzes wellknown hostility toward the negative and his public disagreements with Badiou. Yet I
see their thinking as creatively entangled in multiple ways, and for starters I
understand the void not as a figure of spatial emptiness but rather, drawing from
Badiou, as a figure of pure multiplicity: that is, a multiplicity that is nonrepresentable. The oceans spatiality forms an immense void not because it is
empty but, on the contrary, because it is a positive presence that is a productive
and disruptive multiplicity of intensities, singularities, and rhythms: a vortex that
voids (interrupts, negates, disrupts) the spatiality of human mobility on firm land.
My analysis of oceanic space draws from recent efforts in the humanities to
examine geo-physical forces in terms of their own materiality and rhythms, without
reducing them to their social appropriations by human societies. The literature on
the social construction of nature played an important role in undermining the
dualism between society and nature and in showing that society is not external to
nature. Yet this perspective often reduces nature to the passive, malleable
background upon which active, human-centered forces operate. Phillip Steinbergs
The Social Construction of the Ocean is the best book devoted to analyzing the
geography of the oceans. Steinberg shows with great detail and sophistication how
human societies have made use of and conceptualized the ocean in different
historical periods and in different parts of the world. He demonstrates that far from
being a space empty of sociality, the ocean has been socialized at multiple levels
and is a crucial component of global currents of trade and relations of territorial
power. And while the book does not examine how the liquid nature of oceanic space
escapes human coding, Steinberg leaves the door open for a non-constructivist view
of the ocean when he writes, at the end of his book, that this remains an important
and pending question: that in being a space of nature, some crucial dimensions of
oceanic space are not reducible to their social uses, most notably the fact that the
sea never stops moving (p. 210)

In his essay, I take this ever-mobile nature of oceanic space as my starting point.
This is also a dimension that Steinberg's most recent work on oceanic spatiality is
exploring (as the conversation we have in the comments below make clear). But I
prefer to view the ocean not as a space of nature but as a spatial set within the
terrain of planet Earth. As several authors have noted, the notion of nature is too
loaded with transcendental connotations to be salvaged as a useful analytic
concept, even if we add the usual disclaimers about the need to overcome the
society-nature dualism. This problem is clear in the very idea that the ocean is a
natural space, for this implies that places made by humans are not natural,
thereby reintroducing the distinction between society and nature that is publicly
disavowed. Terrain is the absolute temporal materialization of what we abstract as
"nature." Seas, mountains, roads, rivers, cities, farms, bridges, forests: they are the
type of singularities that envelope our ever-fleeting bodies as part of the terrain of
planet Earth. As I have argued here, I see terrain as involving all existing, threedimensional material forms (human made or not) that are constitutive of space as
we know it: that is, the tangible space of this world.
This analysis of the ocean as a spatial set within the terrain implies a materialist,
object-oriented, and affective lens but more importantly a geometric eye and
perception. This is why a theory of terrain demands a Spinozian sensibility built in
critical dialogue with the two last philosophical titans of the world: Deleuze and
Badiou. The starting principle of a theory of terrain is that of its pure material
multiplicity. This means that the materiality of the terrain is not homogenous, but
the opposite. Spinoza argued that the body is made up of hard, soft, and liquid
elements: bones, flesh, and blood. Likewise, the planetary terrain is defined by a
multiplicity of physical densities and textures, involving hard, soft, gaseous, and
liquid elements engaging in different degrees of temperature. The ocean is certainly
the largest expression of liquid space on Earth. Comprising over two-thirds of the
surface of the planet, the oceanic void has been one of the most powerful and
determining spatial forces in human history. Its most defining feature is that, for the
human body, it creates the generalized ungrounding we call drowning. The history
of imperial and capitalist expansion into the totality of the planet has revolved, to a
great extent, around technological efforts to counter this ungrounding created by
the eternal, ever-mobile becoming of liquid space.

2NC Blocks

A2: Anthro Good

Speciesism stains their epistemology the focus on human
creates hierarchies of violence and oppression which subjugate
the non-human
Introna 14. Lucas D. Introna is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics
at the Lancaster University Management School. Ethics and flesh: being touched
by the otherness of things. Ruin memories: materialities, aesthetics and the
archaeology of the recent past. Duhbait.com
Singer (2002), in his book Animal Liberation suggests that this privileging of the
human is simply a matter of speciesism. After a two thousand year journey
through the history of moral thought about the non-human other, he concludes that
...little has changed. If animals are no longer quite outside the moral sphere, they
are still in a special section near the outer rim. Their interests are allowed to count
only when they do not clash with human interests. If there is a clash, the interests of
the nonhuman are disregarded (212). In his accusation of speciesism Singer is, of
course, only calling our attention to the sentient non-human other, but what about
all other non-human others? Indeed, one might ask: how is it that this ontological
(and ethical) bifurcation between us humans and them, the non-humans, has
always seemed so self-evident? What is it that makes us assume that this line
between them and us can be drawn in such a definitive way? If one attends to the
recent turn to things in archaeological scholarship (or symmetrical archaeology as
it is sometimes referred to) then it seems that this attempt at bifurcation has
become questioned in a rather significant way (Olsen 2010; Olsen et al. 2012; Olsen
2003; Gosden 2005; Ingold 2006; Webmoor 2007; Webmoor and Witmore 2008). In
spite of this work and the very significant body of work in other fields such as
science and technology studies (STS) it still seems the case that the vast majority of
researchers take it for granted that [t]he power to define the world and ascribe
meaning to it remained a sovereign property of the experiencing subject. The
material inhabitants were plastic and receptive, sitting in silence waiting to be
embodied with cultural significance (Olsen 2007, 582). The appropriation of the
non-human other, it seems, is always in our own terms. In this assumed bifurcated
ontology the human and non-human other inhabit ontologically different worlds in
which they are essentially what they are, even if they may become more or less
entangled.
Once we have accepted, or taken for granted, this bifurcated anthropocentric being
ontology an ethics (with its implied politics) flows quite naturally from it. In this
bifurcation there is an ethics for human beings that take into account what is
supposed to be essential about humans, that is to say, their human nature (living,
conscious, rational beings). There is also a different ethics for the non-humans that
take into account their supposed essential non-human nature with a complex set
of distinctions about the nature of their non-human beingness (are they sentient or
not, are they living or not, and so forth)often resulting in some form of a hierarchy
of value and obligations, in which the human always seems to be a trump card. It is
also interesting that we tend to value more those that are in some way like us and

least those most alien to us. This bifurcated being ontologywith its
anthropocentric biasobviously has a long history and is also deeply embedded in
the enlightenment project (Fuller 2011) and some might say it has served us, the
humans, well. However, I would propose that there are also very good reasons to
question this ontology (and its associated ethics). There are good reasons to say
that it has, in many respects, produced an agential cut (to use Karen Barads (2003)
term) in which ethics (and politics) have become configured in such a manner as to
produce the opposite of what ethics is supposed to becomethat is to say, an
ethics of violence and oppression of the many by the few. The purpose of this essay
is to question this ontology and its implied ethical framing. One might say the
purpose of this essay is to suggest that a different (non)cut is possible, and perhaps
desirable. This essay suggests, with Olson (2010) and others, that all those
enormously varied physical entities we by effective historical conventions refer to as
material culture, are beings in the world alongside other beings such as humans,
plants and animals. All these beings are kindred, sharing certain material properties,
flesh, and membership in a dwelt-in world (p.9). Of course, when we decentre
ethics and acknowledge the otherness of all others then it might have important
consequences. This essay is also an attempt to imagine what that might be, albeit
very tentatively.

Why are animals important? Why are you important?

Everything has intrinsic value, and the affirmatives viewpoint
rests upon a racist pedestal that justifies the destruction of
the world
Heft 14. Peter Heft is a student of philosophy and political science. Thank You for
Not Breeding Anthropocentrism, Homo ecophagus, and Human Extinction.
http://cnqzu.com/mywritings/Thank%20You%20for%20Not%20Breeding.pdf.
Duhbait.com
So, how do we actually know that nature has some objective intrinsic value? Well,
there are a few arguments for this, the first of which I call the Platonic Essence
argument. In metaphysics, there is the concept of the essence that is, the base
standard traits that make up an object. (For example, a pencil is a writing utensil
that uses lead to transfer hand motions to paper, an object that violates part of this
definition is thus not a pencil) Objects in nature, be they rocks, leaves, sticks, etc.
have a Platonic essence as well. They each have a set of traits that make them what
they are. Absent these traits, the objects are no longer what we thought they were.
Now keeping this in mind, these traits that come to make up the object have
extrinsic value in that they make up an object, but once conferred upon the object,
their value is transferred and the object has its own intrinsic value. Each object for
which there are traits that make it up can be thought of using the Heideggerian
term being in that they exist on a base level and this base level is valuable
because it quite literally is what defines the object as existing in the real world.
Springboarding off of that is the so called teleological argument which relies
heavily on the existence of things and their double. Richard Sylvan16 and Val
Plumwood17 argue that objects with extrinsic value are created so they can be used

and if they are not useful, they would not be created. Shovels, in other words,
would not have been invented except as instruments for digging[a]nd since such
things exist by artifice, not by nature, if they had not been invented they wouldn't
exist. This means that the very existence of useful objects proves that there is
extrinsic value at least, so why not the reverse? Objects that arent inherently useful
to humans (or to anything at all) still exist. They have no extrinsic value, yet they
still exist and thus there must be some other reason or source of value. Their
essence, much like the essence of a shovel necessitates that it has extrinsic value,
necessitate that they have objective intrinsic value, for if they didnt, they wouldnt
exist (Callicott). While not the greatest argument, it cuts to the core of Platonic
essentialism and shows that the existence of an object necessitates some
descriptor to go along with it.
In addition to that however, would be the argument that extrinsic value is subjective
and is thus a poor moral standard to use. The view of nature varies from culture to
culture, century to century, and it would be nave to assume that there is any static
human view of nature. In fact, when we look around at the world, the views of
nature have changed radically. Some cultures are very keen to protect the
environment and worship it while others actively work to destroy it. Some cultures
protect it because they feel an obligation because their religion may tell them that
nature is valuable and thus they may not view nature with extrinsic value as a
Westerner would. This crisis of subjectivity is an issue because it can lead to both
sides of the environmental coin, the strong anti-environment side, and the strong
environment side. Thus a new way of looking of nature is needed. When one
recognizes that there is intrinsic value in nature absent human experience, then the
crisis of subjectivity is moot because value is not determined by human interaction
with nature and thus a more productive discussion of naturalism can occur
(Hargrove).
There is another argument, one traditionally called the phenomenological argument
(although I prefer smart-ass argument), that really gets one thinking about ones
place in the world. Allow me to tell a story leading up to the argument: retired
biologist Edwin Pister had a passion for fish and hated the extinction of species. As
such, he was doing research in states around his native California when he came
across the endangered Devils Hole pupfish18. He saw the pupfishs habitat being
destroyed by agriculture and decided to sue to big agro-businesses to save the
habitats. He ultimately ended up winning and the pupfish is no longer on the verge
of extinction (Callicott).
However, after the trial he was often asked why save the fish, it has no benefit?
and the question was very valid from an extrinsic anthropocentric view point the
pupfish was too small to be eaten and didnt have any human value per se. So
Pister thought long and hard about this question of what good is it? until he finally
came up with the perfect retort: what good are you? (Callicott)
The beauty of this answer is that it forces the questioner to examine their utility
through the lens they have set up. For the questioner in asking what use is the
fish? has set up a framework of utility that is, usefulness determines

protectability and thus their own life must be weighed within that specific frame .
Now most people would like to think that their lives hold some sort of importance or
relevance to others, but in reality most peoples lives are useless on the grand
scheme of thing. However, despite their uselessness, people such as the questioner
dont go around saying we should let useless people die because they view
human life as intrinsically worth something. The same is therefore true for the
pupfish, among other species. Even if they serve to be no benefit to humans (ie.
have no extrinsic value), their very existence necessitates them having at least
some degree of intrinsic value. And if one takes the arguments from part one about
the arbitrariness of life and complexity as true, then nature as a whole would have
objective intrinsic value. To quote Callicott19 on the issue, The question How do we
know that intrinsic value exists? is similar to the question How do we know that
consciousness exists? We experience both consciousness and intrinsic value
introspectively and irrefutably. Pister's question What good are you? simply serves
to bring one's own intrinsic value to one's attention. (Callicott)
While simply ignoring the objective intrinsic value of nature isnt a great thing, it is
the belief that humans are the source of value and that humans are the center of
things that is the real problem. This problem, that of anthropocentrism, cuts to the
core of the environmental movement and is an idea from a site of privilege that
must be addressed. To assume the ontological superiority of humans is to deny the
ontological trajectory of, what Keekok Lee20 calls, the natural that is, all that is
non-human.
Whats more, when one operates from a position of anthropocentric privilege, all
nature around humans is viewed as disposable because it simply has extrinsic value
for human needs. This logic, the logic of extrinsic value from an anthropocentric
mindset, is the same logic that allows for the destruction of rainforest to make way
for farm land, the dumping of toxic waste to save money, and the overfishing of the
worlds oceans to enjoy cheap tuna. This logic, which rests on the assumption that
humans are somehow better than other beings21 not only ignores the fact that
nature has the capacity to be different from us in its ontological trajectory, but it is
the same privileged logic that rests at the heart of ethnocentrism and racism (Lee)
(Grey).
Additionally, if one accepts the premises laid out in part one of this paper, humans
are no more special than any other forms of life and thus to assert our superiority is
to deny that simple fact and thus to assert our privilege is absurd, to say the least.

A2: Extinction Bad

1. Theyre behind on a uniqueness question extinction is
inevitable the only call can be one of ethics
2. We can never truly die, our lives and our death are simple
different points on a line of becoming when we die, we
simply transform, but our being still goes on
3. Value does not vacate the scene when we go extinct
humans do not create value, and our lifeless corpses will
always have value, simply in different terms.
4. It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees
everything that makes life worth living is taken away in
the rabid hunt for immortality That all was Clark
5. The extinction of the entire world is inevitable let the
affirmatives impacts occur to blow out the candle of
humanity in an attempt to save the non-human Other
Heft 14. Peter Heft is a student of philosophy and political science. Thank You for
Not Breeding Anthropocentrism, Homo ecophagus, and Human Extinction.
http://cnqzu.com/mywritings/Thank%20You%20for%20Not%20Breeding.pdf.
Duhbait.com
As indicated by the previous sentence, reform is no longer viable solution. We have
tried to change consumption patterns, congresspeople have been lobbied,
Greenpeace has been fighting for decades, and yet the cancer that is Homo
ecophagus continues to spread. A new solution is needed, and fast.
By this point, the open-minded reader will be filled with feelings of hopelessness
and fear for the future (as one should be), but worry not, there is hope. Since
politicians are impotent23 for real change and late capitalism is stuck in its models
of consumption, individual action must be taken. The solution to our current
environmental troubles lies in a proposal set forth by Les Knight24:
Humans ought to go extinct.
Now I know what youre thinking, He cant be serious? People dont actually
advocate human extinction but I assure you, that is what I am advocating.
Because I am advocating such an odd view, I will spend the next several pages
arguing a few things: 1) reform is impossible due to overpopulation, historical
failures, and being locked in our current models of consumption, 2) that the best
way to protect the environment and the objective intrinsic value of nature is so let
ourselves die out and to convince you to halt your urges to breed and recognize
that the best and most viable way of letting ourselves die out is voluntary nonbreeding, and 3) bid you a farewell.
The optimistic minded amongst you may be wondering why we cant simply put
stricter regulations on companies that destroy the environment? There are a few

reasons that reform will fail and I shall explain each of them. First, we are past the
carrying capacity of the Earth and not living within our means. Every year more and
more people are being born and resources are becoming more and more scarce.
Specifically, an excess of 21 million people are born each year and when looking at
the population clock, the births far outpace the deaths25. In fact, as of 1:15 AM on
April 6th, 2014 the world population is at approximately 7,224,552,678 people and
its changing so fast that I had to take a screenshot to get the number. So its clear
that Earths population is not shrinking and we are expected to hit 8 billion people
by 2025 (Foley).
But the question thus arises, can the Earth sustain all these people? The answer is
no. The Earth, like every other ecosystem on the planet, has a carrying capacity
that is, the amount of organisms it can support before there is a crash and mass die
offs and once past the carrying capacity, a crash is sure to follow. Below is a graph
of X species that has surpassed its ecosystems carrying capacity (Hern):
And of course, the next relevant question is what is the carrying capacity of the
Earth? Well, a 2012 United Nations Environment Programme meta-analysis of 65
different estimates of Earths carrying capacity found that the majority of the
studies agreed upon a carrying capacity of, at maximum, 8 billion people (UNEP).
Thus, as per the current rate of population growth and the, from my view even
liberal, carrying capacity of the Earth, we will be headed for a catastrophic crash
that will destroy both cities and the environment in a little over a decade (Lewis et
al.). Thus even if some regulations were placed upon companies, it would do
nothing to address the ever looming problem of overpopulation and the
environmental destruction it brings with it.
Second, environmental reforms, while helping localized areas, have failed globally.
In 1992 the first Earth Summit was held in Brazil where countries from all around
the world came and tried to address the issues plaguing that era. The summit was
met with failure and ultimately ended up getting three resolutions drafted (which
may or may not have done anything). The history of global environmental failures
has been long, but well documented and its easy to understand why the failures
occur. A few reasons are that the United States, the worlds hegemon, has failed to
sign the Kyoto Protocol, amongst other important pieces of legislation, and has not
served as a model for the rest of the world. This has led to complacency by
developing nations as they create their own environmental laws which are, often
times, barely better than having none at all. Additionally, the rise in globalization
has brought about huge financial incentives to stifle attempts at change and,
unfortunately, big business has done exactly that (Foster). And, a decade after
1992, the Johannesburg summit was held in 2002. The United States did not
attend26.
And third, reformism has never, and will never work within the confines of
capitalism. The consumers want things cheap and cheap products come at the price
of environmental destruction. Here I would like to quote an excerpt from an
interview with Dr. Theodore Kaczynski27 which, I think, speaks for itself in
addressing the issue of reformism (Kintz):

I dont think it can be done. In part because of the human tendency, for most
people, there are exceptions, to take the path of least resistance. Theyll take the
easy way out, and giving up your car, your television set, your electricity, is not the
path of least resistance for most people. As I see it, I dont think there is any
controlled or planned way in which we can dismantle the industrial system. I think
that the only way we will get rid of it is if it breaks down and collapses The big
problem is that people dont believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible
precisely because they do not believe it is possible. To a large extent I think the ecoanarchist movement is accomplishing a great deal, but I think they could do it
better The real revolutionaries should separate themselves from the reformers
And I think that it would be good if a conscious effort was being made to get as
many people as possible introduced to the wilderness. In a general way, I think what
has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we
are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things
start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough
that theyre going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions?
So if reform is impossible, what is the alternative? Well, as proposed above, the best
alternative would be for the human race to die out. If the human race were to let
itself die out, the aforementioned issues would be solve in numerous ways.
First, recognizing we arent the center of all things and we arent the givers of value,
allows us as humans to collectively take responsibility for our actions and pay the
price. Whats more, this recognition is the ultimate reconciliation of ethics and
anthropocentrism because we are giving up our place of privilege and power
amongst the natural and ceding biological supremacy to other things. In the face
of reformist failure and increased destruction, this is the only way to break the cycle
of the death of the natural (Kochi and Ordan).
Second, allowing ourselves to go extinct quickly would instantly take the pressure
off the environment because we will no longer be contributing to the death of the
natural28. This will allow the Earths biosphere, to recover to from the initial start of
the cancer of Homo ecophagus around 200,000 years ago. The recovery of the
biosphere will be slow and there will be setbacks of course (ie. toxic leakage,
nuclear plants falling into disrepair, etc.) but over the longer term, the benefits will
be profound. One of the better images Ive seen on the subject is reproduced below
showing what would happen if all humans suddenly disappeared (VHEMT):

A2: Humans k2 Value

The non-human would exist without us, but we wouldnt exist
without it the the Self can only be defined in relation to the
non-human Other
Introna 14. Lucas D. Introna is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics
at the Lancaster University Management School. Ethics and flesh: being touched
by the otherness of things. Ruin memories: materialities, aesthetics and the
archaeology of the recent past. Duhbait.com
Why, and in what way, do non-human thingsassumed to be wholly other than us
matter? Historically things mattered to us because they are useful to us. The more
useful they are the more they matter. In archaeological terms things matter to us
because they make present a human past which is no longer available to us. Things
are, in a sense, a past that has not yet past. They suggest practices, values and
beliefsthey are material expressions of (human) culture. Thus, they matter to us
because, in our making and using of them, they become delegates that can speak
on our behalf, when we are not there to speak. They matter not only because they
are useful but also because they reflect us, our concerns, our practices our values
and our beliefs. When the material culture is lost (or degrades), our way of being is
also lost or degraded. They are most certainly in the service of our needs but they
are also, to the degree that they endure, in service of our enduring memory. In
short: they matter because they are mostly taken as things-in-service-of the human
project. As such their own history is a subjugated history, very much like the
Victorian servants (as suggested by Latour (2005, 73)), always available but never
seen, never acknowledged, in the background silently doing the actual work.
More recently this view of things-in-service-of humans has given way to a new
sense in which matter mattersone which does not necessarily take the human as
its guiding centre. A more symmetrical view one might say (Olsen et al. 2012).
There is a substantial scholarship, in a variety of disciplines, which have contributed
to this more symmetrical view. For example, in media studies Marshal McLuhan
(1964) has argued that the material medium is the message. By this he meant,
amongst other things, that things are not just the neural medium for human
intentions, to be moulded in the service of the human, but that the human is also
simultaneously and immediately produced through such assumed usethus being
the effect rather than the supposed original source or message. In engaging with
things we become different beingsas demonstrated by McLuhan (1964), Ong
(1982), and more recently, for example, by media theorist such as Kittler (1999). In
our supposed making and using of the non-human other we also become made and
used in very fundamental ways. In other words our engagement with things is not
just practical and cultural, it is also ontological (Introna 2011). In the discipline of
science and technology studies Latour and others have argued for a symmetry in
which the constitutive agency of the non-human other is fully acknowledged and
accounted for. Instead of being subjugated they deserve to be housed in our
intellectual culture as full-fledged social actors Latour (1999, p. 214). In
archaeology, as mentioned above, there has also been thus turn to things as

exemplified, for example, in the work of Olsen (2010; 2012; 2003) and Webmoor
(2007; 2008),
But what does this turn to things mean for our ethical encounter with things? Does
it mean that they, the non-human other, have moral significance qua things? Or, are
we still mostly concerned with what they can do with, or to us, in our mutually
constitutive ontological entanglement. What is the nature of the ethical question of
such an entanglement? What is the moral status of our other side in this
symmetrical ontological entanglement? In his essay Morality and Technology: The
End of Means Latour (2002) takes this question to heart. He asks [w]hat can we
do to give to technology the dignity equal to that of morality so that we may
establish between them a relation which would no longer be that of the [mere] tool
to the intention? (248). The first step, he suggests, is to acknowledge the complete
agential involvement of things. That is, to acknowledge that we are only humans
because we are constituted as such by the non-human other (as was articulated by
Hodder (2012)). In doing this, Latour suggests that we give back to things their full
ontological dignity. (252).
In turning to the question of morality he suggests that this too is an heterogeneous
institution constituted from a multiplicity of events, which depends at the same time
on all [human and non-human] modes of existence. (254) Indeed, if we take the
entangled nature of the human seriously then we should acknowledge that
[m]orality is no more human than technology, in the sense that it would originate
from an already constituted human who would be master of itself as well as of the
universe. (254). In Kantian terms we might say that the question of means and
ends is neither a purely human nor a purely non-human question. What is the task
of morality in this ontological entanglement where there are no pure ends and no
pure means but always a complex entanglement of both? Latour answers as
follows: Morality...appears thus [to be] a concern which ceaselessly works upon
being-as-another to prevent ends from becoming means, mediators from being
transformed into simple intermediaries. Thus, according to Latour, morality is a
continual and collective task of working against the slipping (and black-boxing) into
means, that is of humans and nonhumans alike. It is working incessantly for the
end of means, and in all directions in the symmetrical entanglement. For him
morality demands a constant interrogation of human/non- human entanglements
that would prevent a too hasty agreement about the definitive distribution of those
that will serve as means and those that will serve as ends (259). What might this
mean? How and where might we take hold of this all too hasty flow towards
means, and reverse itespecially if, as Latour argues, agency (the capacity to act)
is distributed and in a sense always borrowed, not quite within our immediate
grasp?

A2: Nietzsche
Their life affirmation is nothing but a neoliberal tool that
needs to constantly consume more and more, resulting in
nihilism
Joronen 13. Mikko Joronen, Department of Geography and Geology, Geography
Section, University of Turku, Finland. Conceptualising New Modes of State
Governmentality: Power, Violence and the Ontological Mono-politics of
Neoliberalism. Geopolitics, 18, pp 356-370. Duhbait.com
In enframing, a calculative regulation of all domains of life becomes a fundamental
goal of its own. As Heidegger prudently wrote as early as 1939,31 the humanity
seems to be producing itself in such a manner that the absolute meaningless is
valued as the one and only meaning. The preservation of such nihilism appears not
only as a human domination of the globe, but also as a mode of existence sucked
up to the process where the will to calculate fumbles its own strengthening . Hence,
enframing leads into a nihilist mode of subjectivity, where the human will is
challenged to will more of the optimal calculations. Heidegger makes a great effort,
in the four-book series of Nietzsche lectures in particular, in order to show how such
production of the nihilist mode of revealing was inaugurated by Nietzsches notion
of will to power. Through the will to power, beings are revealed as makeable, as
something dragged under the strengthening power of human willing and
machinations. Eventually, the will wills nothing but its own empowerment, its will to
will more of itself. In the neoliberal modality of homo economicus this will to will
turns into a will to profit evidently following the same ontological logic of selfincreasing calculations. As a consequence, human beings turn into technical
subjects self-controlling their conducts through the value-neutral calculation of the
means for the maximum profit. In a neoliberal common sense, we are hence not
only part of the value neutral and de-politicised economic nihilism, but also
enframed, positioned, and tranquilised by the self-optimising drive of calculative
arrangements.32