Westwood Bhagwandin Reddy Neg Greenhill Octas (1)

8/10/2019 Westwood Bhagwandin Reddy Neg Greenhill Octas (1)

1/13

1NC

A: Interpretation

The affirmative must have a firm advocacy

Merriam-Webster Online . February 17, 2007.

Resolved: to reach a firm decision about.

B: Violation

Without a textual advocacy they can change their argument.

C: Standards

1. Purposelessness The ballot can not be based on self-affirmation. Such aself-affirmation can have no higher purpose, it can not require the judge'sauthority nor can it be premised on success. Like Sisyphus, only when we

persist with no hope of overcoming this world to achieve some metaphysicalvictory can we celebrate life. For their 1AC to be meaningful, you should votenegative now.Robert D. Lane. 1996. .Camus is able to create an extremely powerful image with imaginative force which sums up in an emotional sense the body of the intellectual

discussion which precedes it in the book. We are told that Sisyphus is the absurd hero as much through his passions as through historture. His Scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in whichthe whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. Sisyphus is conscious of his plight , and thereinlies his tragedy . For if , during the moments of descent, he nourished the hope that he would yet succeed, then hislabor would lose its torment . But Sisyphus is clearly conscious of the extent of his own misery. It is this lucid recognition ofhis destiny that transforms his torment into his victory . It has to be a victory for as Camus says:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higherfidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks . He too concludes that all is well. This universehenceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone , eachmineral flake of that night -filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights isenough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Sisyphus' life and torment are transformed into a victory by concentrating on his freedom, his refusal to hope, and his knowledge of the absurdityof his situation. In the same way, Dr. Rieux is an absurd hero in The Plague, for he too is under sentence of death, is trapped by a seemingly


2/13

unending torment and, like Sisyphus, he continues to perform his duty no matter how useless or how insignificant hisaction . In both cases it matters little for what reason they continue to struggle so long as they testify to man'sallegiance to man and not to abstractions or absolutes .

2. Competition Without a plan the affirmative can sever out of all links inthe 2AC. Our argument is not that debate must be fair, but that competitionis valuable and necessary for us to grow. We must have a basis to challengethe affirmative and engage in struggle.Jonathon Yovel . Gay Science as Law: An Outline for a Nietzschean Jurisprudence. Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws . Ed.Peter Goodrich an Mariana Valverde. 20 05 . Pages 31-32.

While reactive forces respond to their context and in this way are dictated by them, active forces find their own mediums for action.

There is a catch, however. Force needs resistance in order to matter, to grow , and to be challenged. In a paragraph whoseimportance to the understanding of Nietzsche's mechanics o power can hardly be exaggerated, he spells it out: [S]trong nature ... needs

objects of resistance; hence it looks for what resists ... The strength of those who attack can be measured in away by the opposition they require; every growth is indicated by the search for a mightyopponent. ... The task is not simply to master what happens to resist, but what requires us tostake all our strength , suppleness, and fighting skill opponents that are equals. Thus the will is measured in the scope of itschallengers. But the active will is not satisfied by those challenges it happens to come b y. For the challenge to beworthwhile it must be the most powerful possible, and so the Person of Power must cultivate thewill to power of those who are not. In debate, the Person of Power will make the best of hisopponent's position, nourish it, then go after the strong points or strongest version or interpretation. Kasparov must play Karpov, then Deep Blue. The philosophical problems most worthy ofengagement and Nietzsche spoke of problems as something a philosopher challenges to single combat are the toughest

ones . Of himself, he asserts: I only attack causes causes which are victorious . ... I have never taken astep publicly that did not compromise me: that is my criterion of doing right.

3. Education We must learn to lie and exploit systems of rules. This isnecessary to function in society, where we have to obey the rules and workwith others.

Stefan Ramaekers. Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche and Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education 35.2, 2001.In Beyond Good and Evil , Nietzsche says about education:

Parents involuntarily make something like themselves out of their children they call that education; no mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that the child she has borne is thereby her property, no father hesitates about his right to subject it to his own ideasand notions of worth.

In view of the importance Nietzsche attaches to obedience, to being embedded, one should not be surprised that he considers initiatingthe child into a particular constellation of arbitrary laws to be a natural part of her education . For the child, education means , at least in the early stages, being subordinated to a particular view of what is worth living for, and being


3/13

introduced into a system of beliefs. Education consists in teaching the child to see and to value particular things,to handle a perspective: to lie. The argument goes even further. In view of Nietzsche's perspectivism one must now say that notinitiating the child into a perspective, not teaching him to lie is educationally speaking not even an option: thechild makes himself familiar with a perspective he cannot ignore since this is the precondition for making senseof anything and exploring the unfamiliar . Put differently, because of the necessity of being embedded ahuman being is molded into a particular shape that he cannot do without. My understanding of Nietzsche isconsequently at variance with any understanding which arguments for a radical individualism and takes the individual to be the point of referenceof all values and truths. Johnston , for example, tilts the scales too strongly towards the individual as a self-affirming autonomous agent and hence disregards the epistemologically and ethically constitutive importance of theindividual embeddedness for what she affirms as true and valuable. He even claims that the individual put forward by Nietzsche is theantithesis of the social realm. For Nietzsche, Johnston writes, there is no question of a reconciliation between the realms of the individual andthe social. Referring to Dewey, he makes it look as if the Nietzschean individual can withdraw herself from social embedded ness since sheapparently has no need to refer her own action to that of others. Adopting a thoroughly Nietzschean stand on education therefore requires, inJohnston's opinion, a break with education conceived as a matter of making familiar with and of being initiated into a part icular cultural

inheritance, that is as a matter of socialization in the rich sense. In consequence education becomes essentially self-education .

4. Creation Creative activity is only possible within a system of rules. We

can not speak from nowhere, so we must locate ourselves within morality inorder to grow or create.Stefan Ramaekers. Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche and Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education 35.2, 20 01.

Much as one values Nietzsche for his cultural criticism and for his culturally innovative ideas, it would be a mistake to overlook the importancehe attaches to obedience. Johnston argues that one cannot infer an anarchistic account of education from Nietzsche's writings because of hisemphasis on obedience and discipline in the primary school. However, Johnston fails to give obedience its rightful place. For Nietzsche's accountof morality (particularly in Beyond Good and Evil , and more specifically in the chapter The Natural History of Morals) shows that obedience isnot just about keeping pupils in line, but means obedience to cultural and historical rules, and as such is a moral imperative for all of humankind.

The most important thing about every system of morals for Nietzsche is that it is a long constraint, a tyranny ofarbitrary laws. For such cultural and historical phenomena as virtue, art , music, dancing, reason, spirituality, philosophy,

politics , and so on the creative act requires not absolute freedom or spontaneous unconstrained development butsubordination to what is or at least appears to be arbitrary . It entails a long bondage of the spirit. The singular fact remains ... that

everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certa inty, which exists or hasexisted, whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art just as in conduct, has only developed

by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law : and in all seriousness, it is not at all improbably that precisely this isnature and natural- an not laisser -aller. The nature of morality inspires us to stay far from an excessive freedom and cultivates the need forrestricted horizons. This narrowing of perspective is, for Nietzsche, a condition of life and growth. It is interesting to see how this is prefigured in

Nietzsche's second unfashionable Observation . The cure for what he there calls the historical sickness, i.e. An excess of history which attacksthe shaping power of life and no longer understands how to utilize the past as a powerful source of nourishment, is (among others) theahistorical : the art and power to be a ble to forget and to enclose oneself in a limited horizon . Human beings cannot live without a belief in

something lasting and eternal. Subordination to the rules of a system of morality should not be understood as a deplorablerestriction of an individual's possibilities and creative freedom; on the contrary, it is the necessary determination and limitation of theconditions under which anything can be conceived as possible. Only from within a particular and arbitraryframework can freedom itself be interpreted as freedom . In other words, Nietzsche points to the necessity of

being embedded in a particular cultural and historical frame . The pervasiveness of this embeddedness can be shown in at leastfour aspects of Nietzsche's writings. First, in his critique of morality Nietzsche realizes all to well that it is impossible to criticize asystem of morals from outside, as a view from nowhere . Instead, a particular concretization is required .

Beyond Good and Evil may very well, as a prelude to a philosophy of the future, excite dreams about unlooked-for horizons and unknown possibilities. In The Genealogy of morals , however, written by Nietzsche as further elaboration and elucidation of the same themes, he explicitly

states that Beyond Good and Evil does not imply going beyond good and bad. Criticizing a systemof morals inevitably means judging from a particular point of view .


4/13

D. This is a voter for competition, education, and self-affirmation.We should fashion the rules of debate to make ourselves more excellentindividuals.

Jonathon Yovel . Gay Science as Law: An Outline for a Nietzschean Jurisprudence. Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws . Ed.Peter Goodrich an Mariana Valverde. 20 05 . Pages 31-32.

In society, the law that best serves the Person of Power is that which challenges him to discover and perfect hisactive powers . Such , for instance, is law that empowers the other to best prepare him for such war.Law must elevate the other's own powers to the fullest of their potential (the overman, of course, has no presupposed

potential: a potential for him would be power-constraining rather than a horizon for development). The person of power will not relyon social norms to serve him in overcoming or dominating: that is the way of ressentiment . Instead she will form law that will makethe best out of that which she must stand up to , namely the others. Nietzsche is no closet liberal : the principle of lawas empowerment of the other is strictly a means for the will to become more, for the power to will. Law does not empower the otheras a subject , although through empowerment the other might discover his own power and so much the better . The other the personenslaved by the psychology of ressentiment , be he called slave or master needs not be empowered to become less contemptible, yet it is

because of his contemptibilitythat he

must be elevated. Empowerment of the other is the active will's maxim in the exact sense

in which the elevated will categorizes natural phenomenon and shapes cognition and language namely, creating the environment for the best

possibilities for the will to cast itself in the world, both natural and social. A will to power that will not face adequatechallenges will degenerate and stagnate . A classical philologist, Nietzsche expressed this trap through the fall of the Romancivilization to the weakling, the slave morality of Judea later transformed into Christianity and the liberalism. The authentic will to

power is ever active, ever strives to become more , find and carve authenticity in defiance of the resisting medium that imposesitself. Below, I exemplify this point through Kafka's parable of the seeker of law, whose will to power act wholly reactively and consciously, andexplore how this medium of resistance law, for that is the representational object that tempts and corrupts the seeker would be confronted by a

will to power that would resist rather than give itself in to it .


5/13

CaseThe A subpoint is the wasp and the orchid and also the human condition

Bernico 13

Matt completed his B.A. in Philosophy at Greenville College. He has also completed a M.A. in PoliticalPhilosophy and Cultural theory at the University of Illinois in Springfield. This summer Matt has begunwork on his PhD in Communication and Media at the European Graduate School in Saas-FeeSwitzerland. Several current interests include Glitch art, Critical Media Studies, Marxism and Autonomy.

BECOMING-WASP, BECOMING-ORCHID

FLUXOFTHOUGHT

http://fluxofthought.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/becoming-wasp-becoming-orchid

/sbhag 8.1.2013

Some of the most foundational thinkers in political philosophy, Rousseau, Hobbes, etc, start thediscussion of the genesis of the collective social body with certain conceptions of human nature. All whohave taken introductory courses in philosophy or political theory learn of the headache that comes witharguing about human nature. While human nature has been an interesting development in politicalphilosophy, asking whether human nature is fundamentally good or evil is the wrong sort ofquestion . Appropriating Spinozas ethics, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt explain that one should notask what human nature is, but what it can become. What is it that drives humans together intoassociation? What does human nature become in capitalism? What can it become? What is the motor ofhuman association? Love. Love is what drives humans together into collaboration and toward freedom

and autonomy . Maybe love sounds a little sentimental as philosophical foundation for politics, but lovecan be understood as a serious political reality. Despite its best efforts, capitalism cannot account forall of the productive energies of the human individual or assemblage. Human society has certainmechanisms that emerge separately from the capitalist mode of production. Negri and Hardt call this thecommons . There are some things, while perhaps swayed by capitalism, are not explicitly governed bythe logic of capitalism . Capitalist production is certainly a dominating logic, but there are other types of

production that are of note. For capitalist production other types of production are necessary, the production of living arrangements, domestic work, friendships, religious communities, intellectualassociations, etc. Capitalist production is an apparatus that has captured these and other types of social

production. These types of social production are what Negri and Hardt call the commons. Love is thedriving force behind the commons and what pushes humanity to desire one another. Love is desire

as a positive force. In Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus the discussion becomings is madethrough a biological narrative of the orchid and the wasp. Evolutionary biology tells a narrative of theorchid imitating the wasp for the propagation of its species. Deleuze and Guattari correct thisnarrative in saying that the orchid is becoming-wasp and the wasp is becoming-orchid. The orchiddoes not reproduce the tracing to the worker, i.e., it of the wasp; it forms a map with the was pWhatdistinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contactwith the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs theunconscious.(A Thousand Plateaus, 12) What is essential here is that the encounter between the two


6/13

entities creates a new reality, a new becoming . What does it mean for the orchid to become-wasp andthe wasp to become-orchid? It means a mutual love for one another. It is a rupture in business asusual. Image Here, one can see that love is a type of production. In Marxs Economic and PhilosophicManuscripts of 1844 he explains the alienation and production of the worker. Capitalist production

produces the worker. [L]abour is external does not belo ng to his essential being; that in his work,therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of1844, 60) Labor is external to the individual, through labor the individual produces and in this meeting offlows the individual becomes a worker. Capitalist labor produces the worker, but love can produce aspecific subjectivity as well . Love produces what Negri and Hardt call the multiplicity, the subjectivityof the commons. Love is the power of the common in a double sense: both the power that the commonexerts and the power to constitute the commons. It is thus also the movement toward freedom in whichthe composition of singularities leads toward not unity or identity but the increasing autonomy of each

participating equally in the web of communication and cooperation. Love is the power of the poor to exita life of misery and solitude, and engage the project to make the multitude.(Commonwealth, 189) Loveis an erasure of our capitalist subjectivities as workers and it is in collaborative power that a rupture iscreated and there is an entrance into a new social body. Asking whether human nature is fundamentallygood or bad is the wrong question, rather the question should be what could humanity become? Love isthe motor of the social assemblage, but love does not go unchallenged. Love can go wrong. Love turned

back upon itself is evil. Evil is that which obstructs love. Very concretely, evil is any barrier that one maysee in daily life. Property, boarders, governments, violence are all evil in that they obstruct the commonand keep humanity apart. Love is the only movement that can remove obstructions and evil. Lovedefeating evil is indignation, it is a liberating joy and the creation of the commons.

The B subpoint is the Heisenberg Principle:All the way back in 1886, just slightly after the bible, Nietzsche wrote inBeyond Good and Evil:**Nietzsche endorses gendered language we dont

9. You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words ! Imagineto yourselves a being like Nature , boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purposeor consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine toyourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power-- how COULD you live in accordance with suchindifference? To live --is not that just endeavouring to be other wise than this Nature ? Is not livingvaluing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different ? And granted that yourimperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how couldyou do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be ?In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon ofyour law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary , you extraordinary stage-players and self-

deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself , and toincorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would likeeverything to be made after your own image , as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism!With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnoticrigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see itotherwise-- and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope thatBECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allowherself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting


7/13

story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today , as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise;philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation ofthe world ," the will to the causa prima.

Nietzsche endorses gendered language we dont. However, five paragraphslater he comments to the biologist who messed up the narrative of the orchidand the wasp:14. It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural philosophy is only a world-expositionand world-arrangement (according to us, if I may say so!) and NOT a world-explanation ; but in so faras it is based on belief in the senses , it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regardedas more--namely, as an explanation. It has eyes and fingers of its own, it has ocular evidence andpalpableness of its own: this operates fascinatingly, persuasively, and CONVINCINGLY upon anage with fundamentally plebeian tastes--in fact, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternal

popular sensualism. What is clear , what is "explained"? Only that which can be seen and felt --onemust pursue every problem thus far. Obversely, however, the charm of the Platonic mode of thought,

which was an ARISTOCRATIC mode, consisted precisely in RESISTANCE to obvious sense-evidence-- perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries, butwho knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of them: and this by means of pale, cold,grey conceptional networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses--the mob of the senses,as Plato said. In this overcoming of the world , and interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato,there was an ENJOYMENT different from that which the physicists of today offer us--and likewise theDarwinists and anti-teleologists among the physiological workers, with their principle of the "smallest

possible effort," and the greatest possible blunder. " Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp,there is also nothing more for men to do "--that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one,

but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridgebuilders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH work to perform.

So we posit the Heisenberg Principle : "What we observe is not Nature itself,but Nature exposed to our method of questioning."Even before we think, we are already domesticated by the asymmetry oflanguage, we are inevitably entrapped in all-too-HUMANness. Thisunderstanding ought to be levied as criticism against the act of speaking the1AC.Our argument is this: given that Being is the site for all clearing, we cannottruly encounter the nonhuman.

The World is never as it is, the human eye is a machine that always makes itthat way through cycles of disclosure and synthesis. Attempts to move pastthis are an erasure of humanity and always produces a life-denying trajectory.128 years after Nietzsche, Claire Colebrook explains


8/13

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University, 2014 [Death of thePostHuman, Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1, Introduction, Framing the End of the Species: Images WithoutBodies, Open Humanities Press, 12-16]/sbhag 4-29-2014

**gendered pronouns in this evidence are written to express the masculine nature of modernity. Later inthe series Colebrook notes I use the term man q uite deliberately here: for it is this figure of man that has

been adopted by both parties, both those who deploy notions of a generic humanity and those feministswho seek to find a space of woman outside the man of reason. The concept of man also bring s with it acertain concept of world: as Heidegger and others have pointed out, the earth becomes world when it islived as our own.

It is possible to argue, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) has done, that there has always been a sense of thehuman capacity for failing to be human. We can lose ourselves extinguish ourselves because we arenothing more than potentiality. If humans were always and already fully human , if humanity were a

simply actuality, then there would never be the possibility of failing to r ealize either ones reason, or torecognize rational humanity in others. This is why Agamben has isolated a last chance for redemption precisely at this point in our history when it becomes apparent that what we are is not somethingessential that will necessarily come into being : our humanity is not an actuality from which we candraw grounds for action. The fact that we forget our impotentiality that we treat humans asfactual beings with a normality that dictates action has reached crisis point in modernity,especially as we increasingly suspend the thought of our fragility for the sake of ongoing efficiency.Both totalitarianism and democratic hedonism are, for Agamben, forms of deadening managerialism.Both act on the basis of man as an actuality . It is at this point of exhaustion, when we have becomefrozen spectators in a world in which images appear as ready-mades , that we can see both that there isno guarantee that we will be human and that it is human to forget oneself. For Agamben it is both themodern horrors of totalitarianism (where humans are reduced to so much manageable and disposablematter or animality) and modern democratic hedonism (where we become nothing more than thetargeted consumers of dazzling spectacle) that demonstrates human impotentiality, our essentialcapacity not to actualize that which would distinguish as human. Most importantly, this highly humaninhumanity seems to center strangely on the organ that organizes the human organism; for it is the sameeye that reads and theorizes that looks with wonder at the heavens that is also seduced, spellbound,distracted and captivated by inanity. Immanuel Kant already drew on a tradition of philosophical wonderwhen he isolated mans capacity to look into the heavens as both a source of delusion that would drawhim away from grounded knowledge into enthusiasm, and as the necessary beginning of a power ofthinking that would not be tied solely to sensation (Kant 1999, 269-70). The eye is geared to spectacle asmuch as speculation, with speculation itself being both productively expansive in its capacity to imaginevirtual futures and restrictively deadening in its tendency to forget the very life from which it emerges.Indeed there is something essentially self-destructive about the human theoretical eye: our very opennessto the world the very relation that is our life is precisely what seduces us into forgetting that beforethere is an eye that acts as a camera or window there must have been something like an orientation ordistance, a relation without relation. I would suggest that we ought to think, today in an era of climatechange, about moralizing laments regarding human reasons self -loss alongside various posthumantheorizations that human reason is constituted by a certain self-forgetting. The human animal or humaneye is torn between spectacle (or captivation by the mere present) and speculation (ranging beyond the


9/13

present at the cost of its own life). There are two directions this criticism of the embodied eye can take:one is to expand the sense of the body, to imagine a receptive or perceptive power that is not a simplesnapshot of the world but a full and expansive openness. Here we might identify a pseudo-Heideggeriancriticism of Descartes that was taken up by cognitive science: Heidegger had already diagnosed Westernmetaphysics with Descartes as a fulcrum: Descartes is able to establish man as the subject (or as thatwhich remains present) because Western thought has always proceeded by forgetting the temporalitythrough which all being comes into presence (Heidegger 1968). By the time Descartes establishes thesubject as that which precedes and provides a foundation, humanism has definitively forgotten that there is no such thing as man as a simply existing thing with an essence . For Heidegger what isrequired is not a retrieval of some pre-Cartesian connectedness to the world, with man and world

being co-present; rather, before there is the dyad of man and world there is something likedisclosure or revealing . Contemporary cognitive science and certain philosophies of the human havedrawn upon this anti-Cartesianism to insist that man is not a camera, not a computer, and the eye is not awindow (Wrathall and Malpas 2000; Thompson 2007; Wheeler 2005). Where such contemporary uses ofHeidegger differ from Heidegger is in their diagnosis of Cartesianism as an accidental lapse rather than asevidence of humanitys self -forgetting essence. These pseudo -Heideggerian diagnoses suggest thatCartesianism can be overcome by returning man to the richer expansive life from which he has becomedetached. The subtitle of Andy Clarks book says it all: putting, brain, body, and world together again(Clark 1997). For Heidegger, though, there is a necessary forgetting in any disclosure of being: toexperience the world as present for me, and to begin questioning as we must from this already givenworld, relies upon a hiddenness or non -revealing that we must leave behind in living the world as ourown. We begin in media res, always already thrown into a world that appears as so many natural andseparate things. Our tendency to forget , and to live life inauthentically not recogniz ing Being as thesite for all clearing, as though the world were just this way naturally is not something one can simply place behind oneself as an unfortunate philosophical error . For Heidegger in-authenticity orhumanism (where we simply take ourselves to be a privileged thing among things) is not an external andunfortunate event but has to do with the very mode of beings appearance: we see being appear, butdo not attend to its coming into being.

One mode of phenomenology after Heidegger has, however,taken the form of a correction or adjustment: we should overcome the deep problems of how we know orarrive at having a world and accept that the world just is that which is always already given andmeaningful for living beings. Phenomenology should be naturalized and tied to a process of embodiedknowledge. We are not minds who represent a world, but organisms from which the capacity and figureof knowing mind emerged. But theres another path, another way of dealing with mans tendency to reifyhimself. This other departure from a restricted subjectivism proceeds not by broadening the self to includeemotions, dynamism and the non-cognitive, but by tearing the eye from the body . Rather than restorethe human to some unified and expansive vision it might be possible to think of the eye as amachine. This machine would not be a computer, for a genuine machine does not have a centralorganizing program but is put to work through connections; one could consider synthesizers as computers receiving inputs and turning out data, or as machines in their creation and recreation of connections.For Deleuze and Guattari, the reference to synthesizers is not another metaphor for thinking, where wesubstitute one machine for another. Thought is a synthesizer: just as musical synthesizers take thesounds of the world and repeat, create and mutate various differences, so thought can maximizerather than diminish the complexity of sensations : A synthesizer places all of the parameters incontinuous variation, gradually making fundamentally heterogeneous elements and up turn ing into eachother in some way. The moment this conjunction occurs there is common matter. It is only at this pointthat one reaches the abstract machine, or the diagram of the assemblage. The synthesizer has replaced

judgment, and matter has replaced the figure or formed substance. It is no longer even appropriate to


10/13

group biological, physico-chemical and energetic intensities on the one hand, and mathematical, aesthetic,linguistic, informational, semiotic intensities, etc., on the other. The multiplicity of systems ofintensities conjugates or forms a rhizome throughout the entire assemblage the moment the assemblageis swept up by these vectors or tensors of flight (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 121)

The C subpoint is the Rhizomatics of DominationHumanitys vehicles are becoming amphibious and biomimetic. We call themanimal names,We paint them animal colors. We replant entire forests andcreate artificial bodies of water at whim. We can DO nature: imitate it, makeit, and control it, MORE than perfectly. Its not that were different, separate,or above nature anymore. No, now we ARE nature. This is a new historicalmoment -- a new, post-biblical anthropocentrism.

MIKULAK 8

MICHAEL MIKULAK is a PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at

McMaster University. His current interests revolve around ecocriticism,

cultural studies, globalization, urban wilderness, critical theory, food

politics, and ecotourism. His thesis is about the convergence of discourses

in food politics and global warming and the ways in which capitalism is

responding to the environmental crisis. In addition to examining the

growth of a green corporate culture, his thesis explores the limitations and

possibilities of a politics of the pantry in addressing broader questions of

ecological modernization, sustainability, and the politics of the everyday.

He has published on topics ranging from bioregionalism, radical

environmentalism, Marxism, and Deep Ecology.

The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology

An [Un]Likely Alliance:

Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari

Edited by

Bernd Herzogenrath, who teaches American Literature and Culture at the

Goethe-University of Frankfurt and at the University of Cologne


11/13

(Germany).

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

/sbhag 8.2.2014

Once again, Darwin's own struggles are illustrative. For example , a biocentric worldview was fosteredby Darwin's removal of God from the cosmic equation, since the Genesis invocation towardsdomination , and the special place of man in the scala naturae was challenged (cf Merchant, Lynn WhiteJr). However , as God was replaced as Nature's original move r, and creation was seen as "repletewith errors, weaknesses, imperfections, and misfits" ( Nature's Economy 175), the human placewithin the order became much more amenable to a Baconian concept of absolute domination. Assuch, "Man must proclaim himself Nature's engineer and must then see about creating his ownparadise on earth" (Nature's Economy 176). This is very much the kind of discourse within biotechnological circles , which refer to lateral gene transfer as nature's genetic engineering, and thus

justify their own socially, politically, and economically mediated practice as somehow entirelynatural (Trees and Seas 348). Although the idea is not new, the rhizomatic flow of Archaea provides anew mode of justification and framework for Man the (bio)engineer, one that draws on rhizomatic andostensibly ecological kinship networks to justify unscrupulous economic, political, and biological

practices.

The affirmative replicates this neo-anthropocentric ethic: equivocation andconnection of all Being is not radical or counter-hegemonic rather, its thecontemporary MOTOR of violence toward the nonhuman. Their lack of aclear adjudication of being reincribes this will to self that internal ink turns

the case

MIKULAK 8

MICHAEL MIKULAK is a PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at

McMaster University. His current interests revolve around ecocriticism,

cultural studies, globalization, urban wilderness, critical theory, food

politics, and ecotourism. His thesis is about the convergence of discourses

in food politics and global warming and the ways in which capitalism is

responding to the environmental crisis. In addition to examining the

growth of a green corporate culture, his thesis explores the limitations and

possibilities of a politics of the pantry in addressing broader questions of

ecological modernization, sustainability, and the politics of the everyday.

He has published on topics ranging from bioregionalism, radical


12/13

environmentalism, Marxism, and Deep Ecology.

The Rhizomatics of Domination: From Darwin to Biotechnology

An [Un]Likely Alliance:

Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze|Guattari

Edited by

Bernd Herzogenrath, who teaches American Literature and Culture at the

Goethe-University of Frankfurt and at the University of Cologne

(Germany).

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

/sbhag 7.30.2014

However, if language is inherently anthropocentric, and we are linguistic creatures, how can weever hope to understand a world outside of ourselves and respect the goals of non-human nature? Is

biocentrism even a tenable position? Should we perhaps be seeking a stronger distinction betweenhumans and the world, rather than collapsing the two? Or is this perceived separation simply alinguistic artifact? How can we speak of/within Nature if language predisposes us towards all sorts ofhumanistic biases? Does this even matter? Gillian Beer asks: "If the material world is notanthropocentric but language is so , the mind cannot be held to truly encompass and analyze theproperties of the world that lie about it " (Darwin's Plots 45). Darwin seems very aware of this,frequently bringing attention to the linguistic limitation of his own theories. In The Origin of Species, hestates that "I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphoric sense, including dependence ofone being on another" (62). Donna Haraway argues that " biology is also not a culturefree universaldiscourse , for all that it has considerable cultural, economic, and technical power to establish what willcount as nature throughout the planet Earth" (Vampires 323). Darwin seems painfully aware of this, and

perhaps for this reason, avoids mentioning humanity in the Origin of Species. However, precisely becauseDarwin is trying to explain something that exceeds the anthropocentric focus of language, the discourse ofevolution can easily be manipulated to serve various political ends. Moreover, because the act ofdescription and observation necessarily results in the transformation of the thing being observed , anytheory of nature that does not take into account its production as a human discourse is dangerousand hugely problematic. Thus, even if one is seeking a nonanthropocentric theory, to avoid thehuman is to obfuscate the ideological, economic, and political conditions of emergence thatnecessarily shape any theory of nature or culture. It is irresponsible and naive at best, and incrediblydangerous and fascistic at worse. Fo r example, Earth First!ers tend to look at human beingsecologically , or as one more "natural population" that has exceeded the carrying capacity of its range;hence, like rabbits, algae, deer, or locusts in similar circumstances, there must be a catastrophic crash ormass die-off to re-equilibrate networks of ecological exchange. The most famous and problematic


13/13

incarnation of this position was an article in the Earth First! journal that argued that AIDS wa s a good thing because it would reduce the pressures of human population on the earth, and consequently,governments should do nothing to help African countries with the epidemic . Although this statementwas later retracted, the Earth First! tendency to take a virulently anti-humanist stance has problematicramifications for the ethico-political communities of kinship they imagine. Although they embrace a

profoundly ecological view that equate s all life , they tend to exclude humans from many of theiraccounts, and thus cannot address issues of environmental justice and the role of hierarchical andexploitative social and political ecologies that produce the conditions of environmental degradation .Chim Blea, a pseudonym for a member of Earth First!, argues that: "We as Deep Ecologists recognize thetranscendence of the community over any individual, we should deal with all individuals animal, plant,mineral, etc. with whom we come into contact with compassion and bonhomie" (Ecocritique 23). The(eco) fascistic tendencies emerge in the complete subsumption of the individual to an imaginedcommunity , without a framework being established for adjudicating how, what, and where oneorganism should live, and another die. If everyone is truly equal, then what does it matter if naturedies in order for humanity to survive? In a strange way, any biocentric theory must take a detourthrough anthropocentrism. And in this sense, Darwin is a key figure. He was instrumental in shatteringthe Arcadian view of nature based on a Romantic concept of pastoral harmony. His focus on struggle andviolence unsettled people's notion of a benevolent creator and creation in place for humankind. Popularkinship imaginaries now had to contend with a natural world that was decidedly inhumane and violent,denuded of a benevolent original mover that provided all life with the means to survive, and the divineright for human domination. What emerged, according to Donald Worster, was a "dismal science" ofnature red in tooth and claw, even though Darwin himself placed a high degree of emphasis on mutualaide and cooperation. This had the effect of decentring humanity and thus providing the necessary firststeps towards a biocentric environmental ethic of rhizomatic interconnectivity. However, it also tended toprovide the ideological naturalization of violence, competition, and hiearchalized humansuperiority. The same act of decentring had profoundly antithetical consequences in terms of humblingand aggrandizing humanity within the networks of worldly kinship, making humans on the one hand, justone member of the great chain of being, and on the other, the rightful conquerors and creators of anearthly garden of Eden (cf Merchant). Thus, "to dwell on the violence and suffering in Nature was, fromthe midnineteenth century on, to be 'realistic' " (Nature's Economy 128).

Documents

Westwood Bhagwandin Reddy Neg Greenhill Octas (1)