1The aff’s rejection of chaos constructs an unreal perfect world opposite reality that they order themselves to – this engenders ressentiment. They blame the chaos that is a part of them on their neighbor, and try to eradicated it.SAURETTE ‘96(Paul Saurette, PhD in political theory at John Hopkins U, in 96 "I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them': Nietzshce, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in INternational Relations Theory." Millenium Journal of International Studies. Vol. 25 no. 1 page 3-6)

The Will to Order and Politics-as-Making The Philosophical Foundation of the Will to Truth/Order •. I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. A will to a system is a lack .of ! integrity." According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give meaning to the phenomenon of human existence within a given cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to , meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a particular community.5 Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of the most basic philosophical foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the origins of

values which we take to be intrinsic and natural. Nietzsche suggests, .therefore, that to understand the development of our modem conception of society and politics, we must reconsider the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of Socratic thought. Nietzsche claims that pre-Socratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life on heroic myths which honoured tragedy and competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the joyful and ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian)

aspects of life were accepted and .affirmed as inescapable aspects of human existence.6 However , this •incarnation of the will to power as tragedy weakened, and became unable to sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the self-respect and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. -Everywhere the : instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were.but five steps from excess: the monstrum-in-animo was a universal danger’. No longer willing to accept the

tragic hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic myth, Greek thought yielded to decadence, a search for a new social foundation which would soften the tragedy of life , while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates' thought became paramount. In the words of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end—And Socrates understood that the world had need of him —his expedient, his cure and his personal art of self-preservation. Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual standard paralleled the widespread

yearning for assurance and stability within society. His expedient, his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that promised mastery and control not through acceptance of the tragic life, but through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent, and the problematic. In response to the failing

power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to renounce the very experience that had given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. In Nietzsche's words, '[rationality was divined as a saviour...it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational....'9 Thus,

Socrates codified the wider fear of instability into an intellectual framework. The Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and order life rationally by renouncing the Dionysian elements of existence and privileging an idealised Apollonian order. As life is inescapably comprised of both order and disorder however, the promise of control through Socratic reason is only possible by creating a 'Real World * of eternal and meaningful forms, in opposition to an 'Apparent World of transitory physical existence. Suffering and contingency is contained within the Apparent World , disparaged, devalued , and^ ignored in relation to the ideal order of the Real World . Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between the experience of Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and

the idealised order of the Real World. According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the emergence of a uniquely 'modern' understanding of life which could only view suffering as the result of the imperfection of the Apparent World. This outlook created a modern notion of responsibility in which the D ionysian elements of life could be understood only as a phenomenon for which someone , or something is to blame. Nietzsche terms this philosophically-induced condition ressentiment . and argues that it signalled a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by exposing the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution. This contradiction, however, was resolved historically through the aggressive universalisation of the Socratic ideal by Christianity. According to Nietzsche,' ascetic Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the Apparent World as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life could be turned. Blame for suffering fell on individuals within the Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the Real World, As Nietzsche wrote, ‘I suffer: someone must be to blame for it’ thinks every sickly sheep.

But his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: ‘Quite so my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,-you alone are to blame for yourself '-This is brazen and.false enough: but one thing, is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered." Faced, with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the prospect of meaninglessness, once again, 'one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational.... '12 The genius of the ascetic ideal was that it

preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by extrapolating ad absurdiuin the Socratic division through the redirection of ressentiment against the Apparent World! Through this redirection, the Real World was transformed from a transcendental world of philosophical escape into a model towards which the Apparent World actively aspired , always blaming its contradictory experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action . This subtle transformation of the relationship between the dichotomised

worlds creates the .Will to Order as the defining characteristic of the modern Will to Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the Apparent World, the ascetic ressentiment desperately searches for 'the hypnotic sense of nothingness , the repose of deepest. sleep, in short absence of suffering According to the

ascetic model, however, this escape is possible only when the Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The Will to Order, then, is the aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the precepts of the moral-Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment of the Will to Order,

therefore, generates two interrelated reactions. First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the Apparent World in accordance with the dictates of the ideal Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve this," however, the ascetic ideal also asserts that a 'truer', more complete knowledge of the Real World must be established creating an ever-increasing Will-to Truth . This self-perpetuating movement creates an interpretative structure within which everything must be understood and ordered in relation to the ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche suggests, [t]he ascetic ideal has a goal—this goal is so universal that all other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation.''1 The very structure of the Will to Truth ensures that theoretical investigation must be increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer to the perfection of the ideal. At the same time, this understanding of intellectual theory ensures that it creates practices which attempt to impose increasing order in the Apparent World. With this critical transformation, the Will to Order becomes .the fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.

Security is founded on the ressentment of difference which strikes away at all that makes life worthwhile.  Only through an embracement of the inevitability of difference and insecurity can we affirm lifeDER DERIAN ‘98 (James Der Derian Research Professor of International Studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University "2. The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard *" On Security CIAO)

One must begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically

establishes the primacy of the will to power: "Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength— life itself is will to power; self- preservation is only one of the most frequent results ."34 The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative

form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's

view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power , an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings—including self-preservation—are produced which affirm life . Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life , for "... life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of ones own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation—but why should one always use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages."35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the

pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.” But the denial of this permanent condition , the effort to disguise it with a con-sensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference —that which is not us, not certain, not predictable.

Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown . Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the reader "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubi lation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the

restora-tion of a sense of security?**37 The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life , in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative pro-duces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates

the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols-. The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?*1 shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause—a cause (hat is comforting, liber-ating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been

experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation , to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation —that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire for security . The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences."39 The unknowable

which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good,"

and other common values come to rely upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial

strength to the illusion of being protected by a god."40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of

error, in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something 10 be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its »4l causes. Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The Gencalo gy of Morals, Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to ones ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplish-ments of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their contin-ued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength/2 Sacrifices, honors, obedience arc given but it is never enough, for The ancestors of the most powerful tribts are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god.4i As the ancestors debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: One lives in a community, one enjoys the

advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today), one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and hostile acts to which the man outside, the "man without peace," is exposed . . . since one has bound and pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44 The establishment of the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by written treaty, however,

and distant gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective resentment . The result? The fear of the external other is transvalued into the "love of the neighbor " quoted in the opening of this

section, and the perpetuation of community is assured through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness, generates the values which uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security: - My rights - are that pan of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they sec in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in

opposition to a hostile third power. Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsche's

critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions that created the security imperative—and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it—have diminished if not disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousncss, and docs so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security. Christian

enjoyment, recreation and evaluation."46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox— all that makes a free life worthwhile . Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions: Of future virtues—How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic clement of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the

incomprehensible and plead tor mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With the diminution of our fearrulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fiarsomeness, not also diminished?47 It is of course in Nietzsche's lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age. Dismissive of Utopian engineering, Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward only so far as to sight the emergence of "new philosophers" (such as himself?) who would restore a reverence for fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-Socratic era to find the exemplars for a new kind of securi iv. In The Genealogy of Morals^ he holds up Pericles as an example, for lauding the Athenians for their "rhatbymia"—a term that incorporates the notion of "indifference to and contempt for security."48 It is perhaps too much to expect Nietzsche's message to resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most uncertain and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a

stimulus for improvement rather than cause for retrenchment. Yet Nietzsche would clearly see these as opportune times, when fear could be willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of difference , rather than canalized into a cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks and benefits.

Melancholy negates the will to act – it makes us slaves of the powerful and makes our fears of death absurd – vote negative to reject the 1AC salvation morality.DELEUZE & PARNET ‘87(famous philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, Dialogues II, European Perspectives, with Claire Parnet, freelance journalist, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 2002 pgs.61-62)

When Spinoza says 'The surprising thing is the body ... we do not yet know what a body is capable of ... ', he does not want to make the body a model, and the soul simply dependent on the body. He has a subtler task. He wants to demolish the pseudo-superiority of the soul over the body. There is the soul and the body and both express one

and the same thing: an attribute of the body is also an expressed of the soul (for example, speed). Just as you do not know what a body is capable of, just as there are many things in the body that you do not know, so there are in the soul

many things which go beyond your consciousness . This is the question: what is a

body capable of? what affects are you capable of? Experiment, but you need a lot of prudence to experiment. We live in a world which is generally disagreeable, where not only people but the established powers have a stake in transmitting sad affects to us . Sadness, sad affects , are all those which reduce our power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priest, the captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. The powers that be need to repress us no less than to make us anxious or , as Virilio says, to administer and organize our intimate little fears . The long, universal moan about life: the lack-to- be which is life ... In vain someone says, 'Let's dance'; we are not really very happy. In vain someone says, ‘What misfortune death is'; for one would need to have lived to have something to lose. Those who are sick , in soul as in body, will not let go of us , the vampires, until they have transmitted to us their neurosis and their anxiety, their beloved castration, the resentment against life, filthy contagion . It is all a matter of blood. It is not easy to be a free man, to flee the plague , organize encounters, increase the power to act , to be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which express or encompass a maximum of affirmation. To make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness. Spinoza’s famous first principle (a single substance for all attributes) depends on this assemblage and not vice versa. There is a Spinoza-assemblage: soul and body, relationships and encounters, power to be affected, affects which realize this power, sadness and joy which qualify these affects. Here philosophy becomes the art of a functioning, of an assemblage. Spinoza, the[wo]manof encounters and becoming, the philosopher with the tick, Spinoza the imperceptible, always in the middle, always in flight although he does not shift much, a flight from the Jewish community, a flight from Powers, a flight from

the sick and the malignant. He may be ill, he may himself die; he knows that death is neither the goal nor the end, but that, on the contrary, it is a case of passing his life to someone else. What Lawrence says about Whitman’s continuous life is well suited to Spinoza:

the Soul and the Body, the soul is neither above nor inside, it is ‘with’, it is on the road, exposed to all contacts, encounters, in the company of those who follow the same way, ‘feel with them, seize the vibration of their soul and their body as they pass’, the opposite of a morality of salvation, teaching to soul its life, not to save it.

Our alternative is to “Do nothing in the instance of the plan.”

The refusal to act accepts the inevitability of struggle, allowing us to understand pain positively.NIETZSCHE ‘78 (The anti-christ Human, All too Human. Aphorism #284 1878)

The means to real peace.— No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves

of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense . Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies

the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition , however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse . At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars , because , as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act . We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things,

will exclaim of its own free will, "We break the sword," and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling— that is the means to real peace , which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace , as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth. Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a "gradual decrease of the military burden." Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.

2Mapping fixes mobile resources in place for exploitation – flattens and terrestrializes ocean space for neoliberalismOlson 10 (Julia, Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS”, Geoforum 41, ScienceDirect)In 1993, a new way of managing Atlantic Sea Scallops in the Northeast United States was ushered in with the

approval of Amendment 10 to the Scallop Federal Management Plan, a change that resulted in a spatially-based system of rotationally closed areas. Such a system of managing was part of a growing interest in re- conceptualizing both ocean space and livelihoods, changes that draw upon both ecologically-minded discourses of ecosystem- based management (Pikitch et al., 2004) as well as increasingly neoliberal tendencies in fisheries management (Mansfield, 2004). While neoliberalism—as many theorists have stressed (e.g. Castree, 2008; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004)—manifests itself in a variety of heterogeneous forms and

contexts, it also draws upon sets of coherent arguments and practices, which in fisheries management

center primarily on privatizing the commons and substituting market-based controls for governmental regulations. This convergence of influences in the scallop fishery, while ostensibly seeking simply to increase the productivity of what is the largest wild scallop fishery in the world, has also heralded a

transformation from fishing to farming the resource. This transformation has been promoted as a more rational form of stewardship, but it also implies changes in subjectivity—along with changing forms of knowledge and ways of knowing the ocean—with potentially broader and longer-term implications for social-resource dynamics (cf. Agrawal, 2005). Moreover, these new forms of

management have developed along with more spatially-specific modes of

science at the same time that they have utilized technologies of

visualization such as GIS , as will be discussed. The effect of these new spatialities in the ocean has been to make fisheries in some ways seem more ‘‘land-like” and terrestrial (cf. Steinberg, 1999)

such that fishermen can more easily participate in neoliberal moments of enclosure. Farming the ocean, however, also engages the politics of knowledge involved in fishing, and as such has also enabled diverse and internal resistances (e.g. Mansfield, 2007a,b). The structuring context of a seemingly smooth fit between a neoliberal drive to privatization and farming’s appeal to private property—at least in this sociocultural context—not only does not fully determine the beliefs and practices of the many different fishermen involved in the scallop fishery (cf. Glassman, 2003), but has also served as a means to rethink more empowering ways of producing

nature. The inability to fix resources in space has been at the heart of many understandings of common property. Mobile resources such as fish have given rise to particularly intractable common-pool problems, for their mobility implies a lack of ‘‘excludability (or control of access). That is, the physical nature of the resource is such that controlling access by potential users may be costly and, in the extreme, virtually impossible” (Feeny et al., 1990, p. 3). Not only do fish move but, at least in conventional accounts, so do mobile fishermen, ever seeking highest profit in a rationalist movement through space (e.g. Sanchirico and Wilen, 1999). There are of course fissures in this story, even for such seemingly mobile resources as fish. While rotational management is argued particularly appropriate for semi-sedentary species such as scallops (e.g. Hart, 2003), others similarly contend that locally diverse sub-species, like populations of cod in Norway that follow the ebb and flow of particular fjords and inlets, necessitate more locally-based science and management (e.g. Jorde et al., 2007). Fishermen too, while often portrayed as opportunistically mobile, may have multiple rationalities that inform their fishing practices, including their spatial decision-making (Olson, 2006). My point here is not to counter movement with an equally mythical lack of movement, but rather to ask how forms of resource use—here especially, fishing or farming the ocean—involve culturally constructed subjectivities, networks of social relations,

and spatially grounded knowledge and practice. In the case of contemporary fisheries management, these subjectivities, relations, and knowledge and practice are now increasingly mediated through technologies like GIS. While mapping and counter-mapping have become more intertwined with stories of common property in general, the case of fisheries poses a double sort of enigma, for not only is

there the issue of mobility and excludability in space but there is also the question of visualization, or lack thereof. In Hardin’s classic account of the tragedy of the commons, for example, he asked that we ‘‘Picture a

pasture open to all” (1968: 1244, italics added), where the herders, herds, and resource degradation are palpable

and countable. For fisheries management however, this has not been such an easy task. The inability to see what is happening has in part structured the orientation of both fisheries management and biology: stock assessment is a statistical exercise in estimating hidden populations, while management tries to reconcile its

strategies around fishermen who might cheat without being seen. Fisheries management, however, has recently begun to take a distinctly visual turn through the use of GIS and other spatial techniques for understanding and monitoring where different resources are and how they are used—not only supporting policy analyses from habitat classification and protection of essential fish habitat, to the social and

economic impacts of closed areas (Meaden, 2000; NOAA, 2004; St. Martin, 2004), but also coupled to increasing interest in spatially- based methods of management. What tends to be missing, however, is an appreciation of arguments raised within geography and other social sciences that critique the use of GIS as technologically or socially neutral, or which have conversely grappled with how to use GIS for

qualitative and critical approaches to social knowledge.1 The presumed neutrality and objectivity of GIS in fisheries management has not only assumed a sense of ‘‘space that is broadly taken for granted in Western societies—our naïvely assumed sense of space as emptiness” (Smith and Katz, 1993, p. 75), but

has also tended to privilege universal understandings. Thus while the fishery management process has

begun to incorporate spatially sensitive analyses into its development of area-based management, such incorporation has utilized neoliberal constructions of the typical fisherman that are challenged by more nuanced notions of fishing and resource dependence. New directions in the mapping of scallops that focus on crucial habitat and life cycle issues, for example, promise changes both in the science underlying fisheries management and in management itself by better directing fishing effort to particular places and by better understanding the conditions for resource enhancement through seeding, which at first glance recalls the warnings from early GIS critics that digital maps would serve to create or reinforce relations of power through the discovery of new things or people to exploit (Schuurman, 2000, p. 580). Yet as this reframing of resources from fishing to farming intersects with an increasing interest in aquaculture (where the idea of farming is obviously more explicit), it becomes clear that while ideas about property can be more easily enrolled into neoliberal discourses that commodify resource relations, transformations from fishing to farming also enable alternative projects through their articulation with cultural practices and processes. This includes the differential spatial practices of often smaller-scale fishermen as well as community-based interests in scallop seeding, who have sought—quite literally—to sow the seeds of community stability and, in the process, resist and redefine the terms of neoliberal market logic. This paper thus considers the differing worldviews, practices, and spatialities among and between so-called highliners and small-scale fishermen, fishers and farmers of scallops, different resource-users and the scientists who map them, and the radically new forms of economic practice and sustainability that inhere, potentially, in different uses and forms of maps and spatial knowledge, looking in particular at US Federal management of Sea Scallops, a Canadian example of a private-state partnership, and community-based seeding efforts in Downeast Maine.

NEOLIB RESULTS IN A DEATH DRIVE THAT CREATES COLLECTIVE SUICIDESantos 3 (Boaventura de Sousa, director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, EUROZINE, COLLECTIVE SUICIDE OR GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW, http://www.eurozine.com/article/2003-03-26-santos-en.html)Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied . If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo . Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred

years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic , and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive , a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other . Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war against Iraq and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, - and much more if the costs of reconstruction are added - enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years.

The Alternative is to use this academic space to stand in opposition to neoliberalism

Only through utilizing every public space’s potential for democratic politics can we fend off neoliberalism slide into fascismGiroux 06 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, “The Emerging Authoritarianism in the United States: Political Culture Under the Bush/Cheney Administration”, Symploke, 2006)PMThe emerging American proto-fascism that threatens the future of democracy can best be understood by examining a number of characteristics that relate it both to an older form of fascism and to a set of contemporary conditions that give it a distinctive character. After documenting and analyzing these central, though far from exhaustive, features of proto-fascism under the current Bush administration, I want to conclude by examining how neoliberalism provides a unique set of conditions for both producing and legitimating the central tendencies of proto-fascism. [End Page 103] The cult of traditionalism and a reactionary modernism are central features of proto-fascism and are alive and well in Bush's America. The alliance of neoconservatives, extremist evangelical Christians, and free-market advocates on the political Right imagines a social order modeled on the presidency of William McKinley and the values of the robber barons. The McKinley

presidency lasted from 1897 to 1901 and "had a consummate passion to serve corporate and imperial power" (Moyers 2003c). This was an age when blacks, women, immigrants, and minorities of class "knew their place"; big government exclusively served the interests of the corporate monopolists; commanding institutions were under the sway of narrow political interests; welfare was a private enterprise; and labor unions were kept in place by the repressive forces of the state. All of these conditions were being reproduced under the leadership of the Republican Party that held sway over all branches of government. William Greider, writing in The Nation, observes a cult of traditionalism and anti-modernism within the Bush administration and its return to a past

largely defined through egregious inequality,3 corporate greed, hyper-commercialism, political corruption, and an

utter disdain for economic and political democracy. A second feature connecting the old fascism to its updated version is the ongoing corporatization of civil society and the diminishment of public space. The latter refers to the fact that corporate space is destroying democratic public spheres, eliminating those public spaces where norm-establishing communication takes place . Viewed primarily as an economic investment rather than as a central democratic sphere for fostering the citizen-based processes of deliberation , debate, and dialogue, public space is consistently shrinking due to the relentless dynamic of privatization and commercialization. The important notion that space can be used to cultivate citizenship is now transformed by a new "common sense" that links it almost entirely to the production of consumers. The inevitable correlate to this logic is that providing space for democracy to grow is no longer a priority. As theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and David Harvey have argued, the idea of critical citizenship cannot flourish without the reality of public space.4 Put differently, "the space of citizenship is as important as the idea of citizenship" (Kaiser 18-19). As a political category, space is crucial to any critical understanding of how power circulates, how disciplinary practices are constructed, and how social control is organized. Moreover, as Margaret Kohn points out in her landmark study on radical space, "spatial practices can also contribute to transformative politics " (7). Space as a political category performs invaluable theoretical work in connecting ideas to material struggles, theories to concrete practices, and political operations to the concerns of everyday life. Without public space, it becomes more difficult for individuals to imagine themselves as political agents or to understand the necessity for developing a discourse capable of defending civic institutions. Public space confirms the idea of individuals and groups having a public voice, thus drawing a distinction between civic liberty and market liberty. The demands of citizenship affirm the social as a political concept in opposition to its conceptualization as a strictly economic category. The sanctity of the town hall or public square in American life is grounded in the crucial recognition that citizenship has to be cultivated in non-commercialized spaces. Indeed, democracy itself needs public spheres where education as a condition for democracy can flourish , where people can meet and democratic identities, values, and relations have the time "to grow and flourish" (Kaiser 17-18). Zygmunt Bauman captures the historical importance of public spaces for nourishing civic discourses and engaging citizens as well as the consequences of the current disappearance of non-commodified spheres as significant spaces in which powerful individuals can be held directly accountable for the ethical and material effects of their decisions: These

meeting places . . . public spaces—agoras and forums in their various manifestations, places where agendas are set, private affairs are made public . . . were also the sites in which norms were created—so that justice could be done, and apportioned horizontally, thus re-forging the conver-sationalists into a community, set apart and integrated by the shared criteria of evaluation. Hence a territory stripped of public space provides little chance for norms being debated, for values to be confronted, to clash and to be negotiated. The verdicts of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, proper and improper, useful and useless may only descend from on high, from regions never to be penetrated by any but a most inquisitive eye; the verdicts are unquestionable since no questions may be meaningfully addressed to the judges and since the judges left no address—not even an e-mail address—and no one can be sued where they reside. No room is left for the "local opinion leaders"; no room is left for the "local

opinion" as such.(1998a, 25-6) [End Page 105] The totalizing belief that commercial interests and commodification should be free of any regulation is equally matched by the belief that "every domain of human life should be open to the forces of the marketplace " (Grossberg 112). The values of the market and the ruthless workings of finance capital become the template for organizing the rest of society

3

THERE IS NO FUTURE—Speed itself has been internalized as a political technology as we are never able to be “outside” of speed. Every inch of the planet has been colonized. Bifo 11. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, After the Future, pg. 16-8Because of this change political power has changed its nature. When the machine was external the State had to regulate the body and for this used the law. Agencies of repression were used in order to force the conscious organisms to submit

to that rhythm without rebellion. Now the political domination is internalized and is

undistinguishable from the machine itself . Not only the machine but also the machinic imagination

undergoes a mutation during this passage. Marinetti conceived the machine in the modern way, like an external enhancer. In the bio-social age the machine is difference of information : not exteriority but linguistic modeling, logic and cognitive automatism , internal necessity. ¶ A hundred years on since the publication of the

Futurist Manifesto, speed too has been transferred from the realm of external machines to

the information domain . Speed itself has been internalised . During the 20th century,

the machine of speed accomplished the colonisation of global space ; this was followed by the colonisation of the domain of time , of the mind and perception , so that the future collapsed. In the acceleration of psychic and cognitive rhythm is rooted the collapse of the future. ¶ Thanks to the external machine the colonization of the space of the planet has been accomplished: transportation tools have made us reach every inch of the Earth, and have given us the possibility of knowing, marking, controlling and exploiting every single place. The machines have made it possible to displace fast, to penetrate the bowels of the Earth, to exploit the underground resources, to

occupy every visible spot with the products of technical reproduction. As long as the spatial colonization was still underway, as far as the external machine could go towards new territories, a future was conceivable, because the future is not only a dimension of time, but also a dimension of space . The

future is the space that we do not yet know; we are yet to discover and exploit it. When every inch of the

planet has been colonized , the colonization of the temporal dimension has began , i.e., the

colonization of mind, of perception, of life. Thus began the century with no future .¶ The

question of the relationship between an unlimited expansion of cyberspace and the limits of cyber time opens up here. Being the point of virtual intersection of the projections generated by countless issuers, cyberspace is unlimited and in a process of

continuous expansion. Cybertime , which is the ability of social attention to process information in time , is organic, cultural and emotional , therefore it is everything but unlimited . Subjected to the infinite acceleration of the info-stimuli , the mind reacts with either panic or de-

sensitisation . The concept of sensibility (and the different but related concept of sensitivity) are crucial here:

sensitivity is the ability of the human senses to process info rmation, and sensibility is the faculty that makes empathic understanding possible, the ability to comprehend what words cannot say, the power to interpret a continuum of non-discrete elements, non- verbal signs and the flows of empathy. This faculty , which enables humans to understand ambiguous messages in the context of relationships,

might now be disappearing . We are witnessing now the development of a generation of human beings lacking

competence in sensibility, the ability to empathically understand the other and decode signs that are not codified in a binary

system. When the punks cried “No Future ” , at the turning point of the year 1977 , that cry seemed a paradox not to be taken too seriously . Actually, it was the announcement of something

quite important: the perception of the future was changing . Future is not a natural

dimension of the mind, rather it is a modality of perception and imagination , a feature of expectation and attention, and its modalities and features change with the changing of cultures. Futurism is the artistic movement that embodies and asserts the accomplished modernity of the future. The movement called Futurism announces what is most essential in the 20th century because this century is pervaded by a religious belief in the future. We do not believe in the future in the same way. Of course, we know that a time after the present is going to come, but we don’t expect that this time will fulfill the promises of the present.¶ The Futurists – and the moderns in general – thought that the future is reliable and trustworthy. In the first part of the century Fascists and Communists and the supporters of Democracy held very different ideas, and followed divergent methods, but all of them shared the belief that the future will be bright, no matter how

hard the present. Our post-futurist mood is based on the consciousness that the future is not

going to be bright , or at least we doubt that the future means progress .Modernity

started with the reversal of the theocratic vision of time as Fall and distancing from the City of God. Moderns are those who live

time as the sphere of a progress towards perfection, or at least towards improvement, enrichment, and rightness. Since the turning point of the century that trusted in the future – and I like to place this turning point in the year 1977 –

humankind has abandoned this illusion. The insurgents of ’68 believed that they were fulfilling the Modern Hegelian Utopia of the becoming true of thought, the Marcusean fusion of reason and reality. By the integration of Reality and Reason (embedded in social knowledge, information and technology) turned history into a code-generated world. Terror and Code took

over the social relationship and utopia went dystopic. The century that trusted in the future could be described as the systematic reversal of utopia into dystopia. Futurism chanted the utopia of Technique , Speed and Energy, but the result was Fascism in Italy and totalitarian communism in Russia.

The affirmative breaks down the distinction between cognitive and economic labor - the knowledge they produce is introduced into a knowledge economy of representation that erupts into unpredictable and violent revolt - that destroys cognition. Bifo '7 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan, and Founder of A/traverse, Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination, SubStance #112, Vol. 36 no. 1, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia, pp. 68-72)

When we talk about the mental nature of the productive process we mean that the functions assigned by governments to the productive processes are subsumed and internalized by them. There is no longer any distinction between processes of social labor and the general governance of society. Of course, there remains the fiction of a political decision, of a   political representation,   but the actual ability to govern the social processes on the part of the political will can only play an extremely marginal role. It isn’t politics (with all its complicated mechanisms of representation, decision, and sanction) that decides on the fundamental questions arising in the spheres of technology and finance or in the creation of an interface

connecting technology, finance, society, languages, and the imaginary. Government is integrated into the circulation of information , if we consider information in its fullest sense, as an algorithm of processes that can be activated by techno-social automatisms . Programming, understood as the elaboration of a software able to analyze, simplify, systematize, and mechanize entire sequences of human work, is at the core of government action, if we call government a function of decision and regulation. Within the process of techno-social elaboration, of software

development, we see the configuration of alternatives which have completely disappeared from the scene of political representation and of ideology. According to the user interfaces realized by the programmer, technology can function either as an element of control or as an agent of liberation from work. The political problem is entirely absorbed within the activity of the mental worker, and of the programmer in particular. The problem of the alternative, of a different social use of certain activities, can no longer be detached from the very forms of this activity. The person who works in a machine shop, or on the assembly line, has to separate herself from her workplace if she wants to rediscover the conditions for a political transformation, if she wants to upset the political and technological modes of oppression. This is why, during the proto- industrial era, it was necessary to build a political organization external to the factory and to the working knowledge of the worker. But this is no longer the case when work becomes an activity of coordination, invention, understanding, and

programming. In the age of mental labor, the problem of organization and of political action can no longer be separated from the one concerning the paradigms of the productive operation . Software programming reveals the close relation between dependent labor and creative activity; in this case, we observe how the mental work of the programmer acquires a political function of transformation within his very way of operating, and not only a productive function of valorization. The two functions can be distinguished in the sphere of project-oriented consciousness, but they live on

the same operational plane. The consequence of the increasingly mental nature of social labor is that

politics is replaced by an internalized function of social production and becomes a specific and decisive choice between the alternative uses of a certain knowledge, an invention of interfaces situated between crystallized information and social use, between cognitive architecture and an ecology of communication. Obviously, this doesn’t prevent politics from continuing to celebrate its ever more excessive rituals.

But these rituals have lost their efficacy; their only consequences are internal to politics itself .  But if this is what is happening to politics, what about economics, both as a discipline and as a field defining human activity? Is economics still a science when the determining factors in the economic field are becoming unstable and immaterial, when they seem to elude the quantifying rules which are at the core of economics as a conceptualizing system? Keynes, the post-Keynesians and the neo-classicists alike cast the economy in a model in which a few constants drive the entire

machinery. The model we now need would have to see the economy as “ecology,” “environment,” “configuration,” and as composed of several integrative spheres: a “microeconomy” of individuals and firms, especially transnational ones; a “macroeconomy” of national governments; and a world economy . Every earlier economic theory postulated that one such economy totally controls; all others are dependent and “functions.” […] But economic reality now is one of three such economies. […]. None totally controls the other three; none is totally controlled by the others. Yet none is fully independent from the others, either. Such complexity can barely be described. It cannot be analyzed since it allows of no prediction. To give us a functioning economic theory, we thus need a new synthesis that simplifies – but so far there is no sign of it. And if no such synthesis emerges, we might be at the end of economic theory.25 Economics became a science when, with the expansion of capitalism, rules were established as general principles for productive activity and exchange. But if we want these rules to function we must be

able to quantify the basic productive act. The time-atom described by Marx is the keystone of modern economics. The ability to quantify the time necessary for the production of a commodity makes possible the regulation of the entire set of economic relations.   But when the main element in the global productive cycle is the unforeseeable work of the mind, the unforeseeable work of language,when self-reproducing information becomes the universal commodity, it is no longer possible to reduce the totality of exchanges and relations to an economic rule. In any system as complex as the economy of a developed country, the statistically insignificant events, the events at the margin, are likely to be the decisive events, short range at least. By definition they can neither be anticipated nor prevented. Indeed, they cannot always be identified even after they have had their impact.26 Economic science doesn’t seem able to understand the current transition because it is founded on a quantitative and mechanistic paradigm that could comprehend and regulate industrial production, the physical manipulation of

mechanical matter,   but is unable to explain and regulate the process of immaterial production based on an activity that can’t easily be reduced to quantitative measurements and the repetition of constants: mental activity. Information and communication technologies are disrupting the social and economical

mechanisms of the developed countries. The current indicators of traditional macroeconomics are becoming obsolete and of little significance; moreover, the place and function of economics itself as we still see it are put into question. The phenomenon of growth without job creation devalues a whole series of concepts.   This is how   even the concept of productivity fails to resist the challenge raised by the new realities. With the new technologies, the majority of production costs are determined by research and equipment expenses that actually precede the productive process. Little by little, in digitalized and automated enterprises, production is no longer subjected to the variations concerning the quantity of operational factors. Marginal cost, marginal profits: these bases of neoclassical economic calculations have lost a good part of their meaning. The traditional elements of salary and price calculation are crumbling down.27 Robin’s analysis shows that economic categories can’t explain the majority of the processes that are truly meaningful in our time, and the reason clearly consists in the fact that mental work is not quantifiable like the work performed by

an industrial worker.Therefore, the determination of value – the keystone of classical economy both as a science and as daily economic practice – becomes aleatory and indefinable. In Symbolic Exchange and

Death, Baudrillard wrote: The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather than the outdated reality principle. Finalities have disappeared,

the models generate us now. […] Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. With the digitalizing of production, the abstraction of capital makes a

qualitative leap. Not only is production an abstract production of value, but the economic indicators are autonomous from the system of production, and are constituted as a synchronic, structural, self- referential, and autonomous system, independent from the real world. The increasingly financial nature of our economy means

exactly this. The stock markets are the places where obsessions, psychological expectations, fears, play, and apocalyptic ideologies regulate the game. Realist economies were governed by their goals, the naïve goal of producing use value for the satisfaction of specific needs, or the subtler goal of valorization as the increase of invested capital.

Now, instead, it is impossible to explain our economies on the basis of their goals, whether we identify them with the intentions of certain individuals or certain groups or with the goals of an entire society . The economy is governed by a code , not by its goals : Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the code.

We can see that nothing has changed – the order of goals has simply ceded its place to a molecular play, as the order of signifieds has yielded to the play of infinitesimal signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation. 29   The economy therefore appears as a hyper-reality , a simulated, double, and artificial world that cannot be translated in terms of real production. The mental nature of today’s economy is not only expressed by the technological transformation of the productive process, but by the global code in charge of interpreting the process constituting

our entire world. Consequently, the science of economics can no longer explain the fundamental dynamics governing humanity’s productive activities; nor can it explain their crisis.   Economics has to be replaced by a global science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still unknown: a science that would be able to study the processes of formation of Cyberspace, understood as the global network of signs-commodities. In an interview published in 1993 by the Californian magazine Wired, Peter Drucker develops once again the theme of the inadequacy of economic categories associated

with the digitalization of productive processes: International economic theory is obsolete. The traditional factors of production – land, labor, and capital – are becoming restraints rather than driving forces. Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production. It has two incarnations: knowledge applied to existing processes, services, and products is productivity; knowledge applied to the new is innovation. […] Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography. It underlies the most significant and unprecedented social phenomenon of this century. No class in history has ever risen as fast as the blue-collar worker and no class has fallen as fast. All within less than a century. Furthermore, Drucker remarks that the concept of intellectual property, which is the juridical concept that was at the basis of classical economy and of the capitalist system, no longer has any meaning in an age when the circulating commodity is information and the market is the

info-sphere: We have to rethink the whole concept of intellectual property, which was focused on the printed word. Perhaps within a few decades, the distinction between electronic transmissions and the printed word will have disappeared. The only solution may be a universal licensing system. Where you basically become a subscriber, and where it is taken for granted

that everything that is published is reproduced. In other words, if you don’t want everybody to know, don’t talk about it. The system of property regarding the products of intellectual labor no longer works in the age of the reproducibility of information. As a conclusion to these observations on the obsolescence of economics as a generalized

interpretive code, I would like to quote André Gorz, who writes in his Métamorphoses du travail: Discipline by means of money is a hetero-regulation that interrupts the communicational infrastructure ensuring the symbolic reproduction of the experiential world. This means that all the activities that transmit or reproduce cultural acquisitions, knowledge, taste, manners, language, mores […], and that allow us to find our bearings in the world as givens, certitudes, values, and self-explanatory norms; all these activities cannot be regulated by money or by the state without causing serious pathologies in our world of experience. Money (i.e. economics) and the State (i.e. politics) are no longer able to govern or to discipline the world of production, now that its center is no longer a de-brained force, a uniform and quantifiable time

of manual work. That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the ethereal substance of intelligence, which eludes every measurement and cannot be subjected to any rule without inducing enormous pathologies and causing a truly maddening paralysis of cognition and affectivity.

This focus on rational economic science has created a bloodthirsty form of production that erases affective engagements with desire and makes violence inevitable - this constantly produces crisis to rationalize its capacity for control, making the destruction of all life the very impulse of the economy James Wiltgen 2005 (Professor of History and Critical Theory at CalArts, "Sado-Moneatrism or Saint Fond – Saint Ford", in Consumption in the Age of Information, ed. Cohen and Rutsky, BERG, New York, p. 107-10 6 [NN])

How does digital capitalism intertwine with the concept of uncertainty? What key changes have taken place in the structuring of the world, via the digital and the biotechnological, what forces have emerged or coalesced, and finally, how do they affect the realm of subjectivity and consumption ? Here, Arthur Kroker has transposed McLuhan into the twenty-first century, performing an interrogation of what he calls the “digital nerve,” basically the exteriorization of the human sensorium into the

digital circuitry of contemporary capitalism (Kroker, 2004: 81). This (in)formation, “streamed capitalism,” rests not exclusively on exchange value, nor material goods, but something much more

immaterial, – a post market, post biological, post image society where the driving force, the “will to will,” has ushered in a world measured by probability. In other words, this variant of capitalism seeks to bind chaos by ever-increasing strictures, utilizing an axiomatic based on capture and control, with vast circuits of circulation as the primary digital architecture. This system runs on a densely articulated composition, similar to the

earlier addressed concept of sado-monetarism, based upon extensive feedback loops running between exchange value and abuse value. This assemblage, however, has multiple levels, and not all are connected to the grid at the

same speeds; a number of different times exist within this formation, including digital time, urban time, quotidian time, transversal time, etc. Spatially, the structure relies not on geography but “strategic digital nodes” for the core of the system, and connectivity radiates out from these nodal points (Kroker, 2004: 125). For example, a key site for these points would be the Net corporation,

defined as “as a self-regulating, self- reflexive platform of software intelligence providing a privileged portal into the

digital universe” (Kroker, 2004: 140). Indeed, his mapping of digital capitalism has clear parallels with the shifts

Katherine Hayles analyzes, in particular the underlying, driving mechanism whereby information severs itself from embodiment. Boredom and acquisitiveness become the principle markers of this new form of capitalism, which provides a rationale, or a new value set for the perpetual oscillation between the two poles, producing an insatiable desire for both objects and a continuing stream of fresh and intense experience. Perhaps the most densely argued assessment of capitalism, whose obvious parallel would be Marx’s Capital, is the two volumes by Deleuze and Guattari,

Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. With all the concern over the theoretical concepts developed in these books, it remains extremely important to understand the analysis as possessing a fundamental focus on the question of political economy. Capitalism forms, via its structural and affective matrix, a system capable of unparalleled cruelty and terror , and even though certain indices of well being have increased, “exploitation grows constantly harsher, (and) lack is arranged in the most scientific ways” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 373). Their framework for analysis targets the global, where the deepest law of capitalism sets limits and then repels those limits, a

process well known as the concept of deterrorialization. Capitalism functions, then, by incessantly increasing the portion of constant capital , a deceptively concise formulation that has tremendous resonance for the organization of the planet – resources continually pour into the technological and machinic apparatus of capture and control, to the increased exclusion of the human component (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 466–7).

In other words, it not only thrives on crisis but one of the principle definitions of capitalism would be to continually induce crisis; nostalgia for a “lost Sado-Monetarism or Saint

Fond-Saint Ford 109 time” only drives these processes. The planet confronts the fourth danger, the most violent and destructive of tendencies, characterized as a turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 229). Deleuze and Guattari make clear this fourth danger does not translate as a death drive, because for them desire is “always assembled,” a creation and a composition; here the task of thinking becomes to address the processes of composition. The current assemblage, then, has mutated from its original organization of total war, which has been surpassed “toward a form of peace more terrifying still,” the “peace of Terror or Survival” (Deleuze & Guattari,

1987: 433). Accordingly, the worldwide war machine has entered a post fascist phase,

where Clausewitz has been dislocated, and this war machine now targets the entire world, its peoples and economies. An

“unspecified enemy” becomes the continual feedback loop for this war machine , which had been originally constituted by states, but which has now shifted into a planetary , and perhaps interstellar mode, with a seemingly insatiable drive to organize insecurity , increase machinic enslavement, and produce a “peace that technologically frees the unlimited material process of total war ” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467).7 Deleuze has analyzed these tendencies extensively in his own work, in particular with his dissection of active and reactive forces in his book on Nietzsche but also in his work on Sade and Masoch, where he points to a type of sadism that seems capable

of attempting a “perpetually effective crime,” to not only destroy (pro)creation but to

prevent it from ever happening again, a total and perpetual destruction, one produced by a pervasive odium fati, a hatred of fate that seeks absolute revenge in destroying life and any possible recurrence. (Deleuze, 1989: 37). This tendency far outstrips what Robert Jay Lifton has described as the “Armageddonists,” in their more commonly analyzed religious variant and in what he calls the secular type, both of which see the possibility of a “world cleansing,” preparing the way for a new world order, be it religious or otherwise (Lifton, 1987: 5–9). Embedded within the immanence of capitalism, then, one can find forces which would make fascism seem like “child precursors,” and Hitler’s infamous Telegram 71 would be applied to all of existence, perpetually. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467). One final complication in terms of currently emerging subjectivities, the

well-known analysis in Anti-Oedipus where capitalism, as basically driven by a certain fundamental insanity, oscillates between “two poles of delirium, one as the molecular schizophrenic line of escape, and the other as paranoiac molar investment” (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1983: 315).8 These two markers offer dramatically different possibilities for the issues of subjectivities and agency, and questions of consumption and the political can be posed within their dense and complex oscillations.

Prefer exhaustion—Their attempt to invest debate with symbolic activity only strengthens the hands of neoliberal economics.Bifo '11 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and Founder of A/Traverse, After the Future, ed. Genesko%26Thoburn, AKPress, p. 135-139)

Time is in the mind. The essential limit to growth is the mental impossibility to enhance time

(Cybertime) beyond a certain level. I think that we are here touching upon a crucial point. The process of re-composition, of conscious and collective subjectivation, finds here a new – paradoxical – way. Modern radical thought has always seen the process of subjectivation as an energetic process: mobilization, social desire and political activism, expression, participation have been the modes of conscious collective subjectivation in the age of the revolutions. But in our age energy is running out, and desire which has given soul to modern social dynamics is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games, as Jean Baudrillard (1993a) argues in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, first published in 1976. In this book Baudrillard analyzes the hyper-realistic stage of capitalism, and the instauration of the logic of simulation. Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the

real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also , in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. […] The reality principle corresponds to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose

finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real: the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious. Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. The entire apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming part of the third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 2) ¶ Simulation is the new plane of consistency of capitalist growth: financial speculation, for instance, has displaced the process of exploitation from the sphere of material production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and immaterial labor. The simulation process (Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits, irradiating signs

that go everywhere in the attention market. The brain is the market, in semiocapitalist hyper-reality. And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot expand and accelerate indefinitely. The process of collective subjectivation (i.e. social recomposition) implies the development of a common language- affection which is essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist acceleration of time has destroyed the social possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-flow. The proliferation of simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated the

space of attention and imagination. Advertising and stimulated hyper-expression (“just do it”), have submitted the energies of the social psyche to permanent mobilization. Exhaustion follows, and exhaustion is the only way

of escape: ¶ Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostage’s death for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act. (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) ¶ In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: ¶ all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6) ¶ This goes much further than hatred for the

dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. This malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this order’s benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order: No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects. Very logically – inexorably – the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that “Even God cannot declare war on Himself.” Well, He can. The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared war on itself. (Baudrillard

2003: 6-7) ¶ In Baudrillard’s catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a reversal of the energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the

opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on depression and exhaustion In the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the social body to escape the vicious destiny that capitalism has prepared: deactivation of the social energies that once upon a time animated democracy and political struggle. But exhaustion could also become the beginning of a slow movement towards a “ wu wei” civilization, based on the withdrawal , and frugal expectations of life and consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the mode of passivity. A radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless productivity that neoliberal politics has imposed. ¶ The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much during the last thirty years. The current depression could be the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive, and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade – the struggle

between Western domination and jihadist Islam – we recognize that the most powerful weapon has been suicide.

9/11 is the most impressive act of this suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to destroy American military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. ¶ The suicidal implosion has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a form of political action everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and employees have killed themselves in the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009 recession destroyed one million jobs, many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the direction

of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life?I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion, if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment, and wipe out the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth, and start a new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good.

Shipping

Multiple alt causes to protectionism, indian ocean SLOC security, natural disasters can all have effects on our shipping routes.Free trade causes environmentally catastrophic resource extraction for exportTim Lang, Director of Parents for Safe Food and Colin Hines, coordinator of Greenpeace International’s

Economic Unit, 1993, The new protectionism, p. 62-63

The gearing of entire economies to increasing raw material exports for international trade also has

its environmental impact at the point of extraction or production, especially in developing countries. Tropical timber is perhaps the best publicized case . Although the massive deforestation of the last decade has a range of causes, including clearing land for agriculture and grazing, mining, fuelwood gathering and trees felled for domestic use, the timber trade represents a significant proportion, about 50 per cent of the total production of

industrial hardwood in tropical countries.8 The effect of timber trading on deforestation is larger than the mere numbers of trees cut down for export, since roads built for commercial logging bring in their wake farmers, miners and those seeking fuelwood. In 1991, this tropical timber industry was worth $6 billion, but it is beginning to decline as forests are decimated in one country after another to provide for the needs of Europe, Japan and North America. Thailand and the Philippines, which were once exporters, are now net inporters; Nigeria’s exports have slumped over the last decade and several other countries will soon be in the same position. At its most extreme, Sarawak, which along with Sabah provides more than 90 per cent of Japan’s tropical imports, is predicted by environmentalists to have no trees left for felling in five years time. This would be both an environmental disaster and a human tragedy, since it would destroy the homeland of the local Penan

people, who are aggressively fighting this trend.9 The fate of timber in international trade is repeated with other commodities sold by the South. Developing countries exploit resources such as food, fish, minerals and energy for export mostly to repay debts, with often dire adverse environmental effects.

Environmental destruction leads to a global rash of interstate and civil wars Thomas Homer-Dixon, assistant professor of political science and director of the Peace and Conflict Studies

Programme at the University of Toronto, 1998, World Security Challenges for a New Century, p. 342-343

Another possibility is that global environmental damage might increase the gap between rich and poor soci eties, with the poor then violently confronting the rich for a fairer share of the world’s wealth. Severe conflict may also arise from frustration with countries that do not go along with agreements to protect the global environment, or that “free-ride” by letting other countries absorb the costs of environmental protection. Warmer temperatures could lead to contention over more easily harvested resources in the Antarctic.

Bulging populations and land stress may produce waves of environmental refugee s, spilling across borders and disrupting relations among ethnic groups. Countries might fight among themselves because of dwindling supplies of water and the effects of upstream pollution .6 A sharp decline in food crop production and grazing land could lead to conflict between nomadic tribes and sedentary farmers.

Environmental change could in time cause a slow deepen ing of poverty in poor countries, which might open bitter divisions between classes and ethnic groups , corrode democratic institutions, and spawn revolutions and insurgencies . In general, many experts have the sense that environmental problems will “ratchet up” the level of stress within states and the international community, i ncreasing the likelihood of many different kinds of conflict — from war and rebellion to trade disputes—and undermining possibilities for cooperation.

Trade liberalization causes cycles of food shortagesSeedling, October 1996, http://www.grain.org/publications/oct961-en.cfm

In the South, the different elements of trade liberalisation often translate directly into food insecurity . Among these elements the following have the most severe impacts on peoples livelihood. In addition

they easily result in internal migration, urban growth and environmental destruction: * undoing land reform and allowing concentration of land ownership * privatising water * introducing monopoly control on seeds through IPRs * diverting land from food to cash crops for exports * diverting food from local to global markets Volatile prices and globalisation are creating an unstable , insecure and costly food system and undermine the ecological security of agriculture, the livelihood security of farmers and the food security of both poor and affluent consumers. "We in the South Asian subcontinent have more than

the World Bank indices as our guide. We have our history", says Vandana Shiva. "India's worst famines took place when India's economy was most integrated though the globalisation of the colonial period."

Blips in food prices kill billionsTampa Tribune, 1-20-96

On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are not abundant. In 1995, world production failed to meet demand for the third consecutive year, said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. As a result, grain stockpiles fell from an average of 17 percent of annual consumption in 1994-1995 to 13 percent at the end of the 1995-1996 season, he said. That's troubling, Pinstrup-Andersen noted, since 13 percent is well below the 17 percent the United Nations considers essential to provide a margin of safety in world food security. During the food crisis of the early 1970s,

world grain stocks were at 15 percent. "Even if they are merely blips, higher international prices can hurt poor countries that import a significant portion of their food ," he said. "Rising prices can also

quickly put food out of reach of the 1.1 billion people in the developing world who live on a dollar a day or less." He also said many people in low-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.

Food shortages lead to World War IIIWilliam Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The

Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64

The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies , unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding , both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries would attempt to use their armies , before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not

using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.

Food Prices Low Now- We Control UQUN News Centre 9/14 (September 11th, 2014, UN News Center, “Food prices drop to four-year low – UN agency” http://www.un.org/apps/news/story. asp?NewsID=48690#.VGDdFPTF _yA//Shah)

11 September 2014 – Global food prices continued to dip for the fifth month straight reaching their lowest level since September 2010 , the United Nations agriculture agency reported today. ¶ The Food and Agriculture Organization’s ( FAO ) price index – which measures monthly changes in the global price of a basket of meat, dairy, cereals, oils and fats, and sugar – averaged 196.6 points in August 2014 which is a 7.3 point (3.6 per cent)

decrease compared to July. With the exception of meats, prices for all of the commodities measured by the index dipped markedly.¶ According to a statement to the press, FAO’s sub-index for dairy products averaged 200.8 points in August, down 25.3 points (11.2 per cent) versus July and 46.8 points (18.9 per cent) compared to a year ago- the result of abundant supplies for export coupled with reduced import demand.¶ Russia’s prohibition at the beginning of the month on imports of dairy products from several countries helped depress prices, while slackening imports of whole milk powder by China (the world’s largest importer) also contributed to market uncertainty.¶ Meanwhile, the vegetable oils sub-index clocked in at 166.6 points in August, 14.5 points (8 per cent) less than the previous month and the lowest level since November 2009. Sugar prices averaged 244.3 points last month, down by 14.8 points (5.7 per cent) from July.¶ FAO’s price index for cereals averaged 182.5 points in August, down 2.8 points (1.5 per cent) from last month and 24.2 points (11.7 per cent) versus August 2013.¶ With 2014 being another record year for wheat production, prices for the staple grain continued to slide in August, reaching their lowest value since July 2010. Similarly, near ideal growing conditions in key producing areas, coupled with abundant stocks, have seen maize prices retreat to a four year low, the index reported.¶ However, the price of rice rose in August, reflecting increased import demand, lower-than-expected releases from stockpiles by Thailand, and unfavourable weather in Asia.¶ “Rice prices appear to be ample worldwide, but stocks are very much concentrated in a small number of countries, and often owned by Governments. This means that these countries can very much influence world prices, by deciding whether to let those supplies flow to the market or not,” said FAO economist Concepción Calpe.¶ Meanwhile, FAO’s monthly Cereal Supply and Demand Brief, also released today, has upped the Organization’s forecast for 2014 world cereal production by 14 million tonnes. At 2.5 billion tonnes, the projection would be 0.5 per cent short of last year’s record.¶ Wheat production is now expected to reach 716.5 million tonnes – also just shy of last year’s record harvest. Wheat crops in China, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the United States are now projected to be larger than previously anticipated.¶ Production in Argentina, Brazil, China, the European Union, India, and Russia has increased significantly, offsetting reductions in Australia, the United States and especially Canada]

– where the latest official forecast points to a decline of almost 10 million tonnes (26 per cent).¶ In addition, rice production outlook has worsened compared to July by about 3 million tonnes, as an erratic rainfall pattern and concerns over weather impacts on crops early next year marred prospects in China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.¶

Protectionism inevitableMattoo 9 (Aaditya, World Bank Economist 1/6/09, “The World Must Go Beyond Doha, http://www.iie.com/publications/opeds/oped.cfm?ResearchID=1089)

As the financial crisis has morphed into a crisis in the real economy, the world is facing a sharp and perhaps prolonged economic slump. In these circumstances, resurgent protectionism is a real threat , especially sin ce pre-existing anxieties about globalisation are widespread . Restrictions on trade and investment would deepen the recession and undermine efforts to reduce poverty. Recognising these dangers, and to head off protectionist pressures, leaders at the G20 summit called for a completion of the Doha development agenda of trade negotiations at the World Trade Organisation. But the current Doha agenda cannot

adequately deal with all the challenges facing the trading system. First of all, any likely Doha deal would deliver

little by way of new market opening. It would also provide only limited insurance against future reversal of trade policies. The recent trade restrictions attest to the fact that the WTO does not bind developing countries’ policies effectively . Even if the Doha talks had not stalled earlier this year and had resulted in a deal, the outcome would not seriously have changed that. Doha also would do little to tighten disciplines on contingent protection in the form of anti-dumping and safeguard actions. Such instruments, which some industrial countries adopted in past recessions, are now employed by many developing countries.

High Oil Prices key to Middle East stabilityHargreaves 13 — Steve Hargreaves, reporter for CNN, 7/18/13, CNN Money, “Falling oil prices could spark global turmoil” http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/18/news/economy/opec-oil/As a result, Saudi Arabia now needs oil prices close to $100 a barrel just to balance its budget. If oil prices fall, it may have to cut social spending. In a country that's been a reliable oil exporter to the global market for over half a century , yet has both a restless segment clamoring for reform as well as extremists in the ranks, the repercussions could extend well beyond OPEC. I t's not in the U.S. interest to have a more unstable Middle East, even if we are importing no oil from

that region ," said Meghan O'Sullivan, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government who specializes in Mideast petro-politics. "Or Russia either," she added, referring to the world's second largest oil exporter. OPEC in a bind: Thanks to an energy boom in United States, Canada and elsewhere, plus a slowing of Chinese demand as that economy matures and shifts to less energy-intensive industries, demand for OPEC oil may fall by a million barrels a day over the next three years, according to the latest projections from the International Energy Agency. Coupled with rising oil consumption at home and a projected fall in oil prices, OPEC nations could see a 30% cut in revenue by 2018, according to Trevor Houser, an analyst at the Rhodium Group.

MDA

Alt. Cause to Russia Relations – Ukraine and the U.S. cannot affect Russia’s perceptionShishkin and Barnes, 11/3/14 (Philip Shishkin [Reporter, The Wall Street Journal] and Julian E. Barnes [Harvard University Graduate, Reporter on the Department of Defense and national security issues from The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau], “U.S. Russia Relations slide over Ukraine Rebel Election”, URL: http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-russia-relations-slide-over-ukraine-rebel-election-1415056381)WASHINGTON—U.S.-Russian relations headed into a new slide over the crisis in Ukraine following a lull that ended Monday with Moscow’s embrace of disputed elections in rebel-controlled areas, according to U.S. officials. U.S. officials warned Russia that

such “destabilizing and dangerous actions,” including what they called a new buildup of Russian military close to the Ukraine border, would carry a cost . At the same time, they acknowledged the limits of the U.S. ability to influence Russian foreign policy. “For the Russian leadership, Ukraine is the central national-security issue, and it wasn’t going to be easy to change their policy, certainly not in the short run,” a

senior U.S. official said. “We’ve seen some change in tactics, but I think we don’t see a fundamental change in the strategic direction on Ukraine, which is to intervene, to destabilize.” The latest manifestation of that tactic was Sunday’s vote held in the areas of east Ukraine held by pro-Russia insurgents, which saw rebel militia leaders installed as “prime ministers” of two self-declared republics carved out of eastern Ukraine with Moscow’s backing. Kiev and Western officials denounced the vote as a sham and a threat to the fragile peace there, and had urged Russia—which had helped broker the two-month-old truce—to follow

suit. But Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it “respected the will expressed by the population in the southeast” of Ukraine. “The elected officials received a mandate to solve practical tasks of the restoration of normal life in the regions,” the ministry said. As part of the peace deal, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a law granting special status to the separatist regions and providing for local elections there in December, but the rebels ignored it and went ahead with their own vote. On Monday, Mr. Poroshenko said the law would likely be repealed.

Limited US presence enables Arctic cooperation and solves tensions – Russian aggression is simply rhetoric and won’t escalateBernstein 14 – Leandra, reporter for Ria Novosti, citing Marlene Laruell, program director at the George Washington Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Research Professor of International Affairs, Ph.D. at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures, 2014 (“Arctic Cooperation May Ease Russia-US Tensions – Analyst,” Ria Novosti, May 22nd, http://en.ria.ru/world/20140522/190037278/Arctic-Cooperation-May-Ease-Russia-US-Tensions--Analyst.html | ADM)Tense relations between Russia and the US and NATO could potentially be cooled

through Arctic cooperation , according to the program director at the George Washington Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.“I think the Arctic is, today at least, one of the last places for cooperation with Russia following the Ukrainian crisis,” Marlene Laruelle said.“US-Russia [Arctic] cooperation will probably be less directed to cooperation on security issues because of the Ukrainian crisis,” she specified, “but there are several other

elements that are still open for discussion.”

Since 2011 the US has increased its stake in Arctic security and development and currently holds the chairmanship for the Arctic Council. The US is planning to invest $1.5 billion focusing on the Arctic, according to former State Department official Heather Conley.However, US assets in the region are limited and they rely on dated technology and

borrowed equipment from other Arctic nations. Russia is currently the only country employing nuclear-powered icebreakers.“The securitization trend we see in the Arctic from the Russian side is mostly not an issue

of military aggressiveness , but it is a business issue,” Laruelle said.Concerning Russia’s delimitation of its continental shelf and control over the North Sea Pass, Laruelle said “ Russia is playing by the rules .” The demarcation of national and international waterways is contested within the Arctic Council, but the first voyage of a Chinese merchant ship, Hong Xing, through the North Sea Pass last year set a precedent when the ship adhered to all Russian requirements for passage.There are hopes that increased trade will take place through Arctic routes. The route is expected to see between ten and twelve commercial trips this year.Laruelle’s remarks were part of a panel discussion at the Wilson Center on the interests of the Arctic nations, and the increasing participation in the region by non-Arctic players, particularly China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

The aff’s containment strategy provokes Russia into brinksmanship and wrecks relations – causes miscalculation and escalating aggressionMurray and Keating 14 – Robert W. Murray, Vice-President, Research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta, holds a PhD, Political Science, from the University of Alberta. Tom Keating, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta, 4/25/14, (“Why Neo-Containment Should Not Extend to Arctic”, http://opencanada.org/features/the-think-tank/comments/why-neo-containment-should-not-extend-to-arctic/)//AWAs the situation in Ukraine continues to worsen, Canada is under increasing pressure to include the Arctic as part of NATO’s strategy to counteract Russian aggression. In the following, we content that it should continue to resist this pressure—even in the wake of events in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.The efforts to increase NATO’s common interests in the Arctic began as far back as 2010 with Norway broaching the subject at a NATO Summit. At that time, Canada requested that the Arctic be removed from the Summit’s agenda as Canada felt that NATO had no place in Arctic affairs.Recent events in Ukraine have evoked concern among NATO allies about Russia’s potential interest in expanding its borders. In a recent meeting of the Russian Security Council, Russian President Putin highlighted the “special” place of the Arctic in Russia’s sphere

of influence . Referring directly to Russia’s future Arctic strategy, Putin noted: “We need to take additional measures so as not to fall behind our partners, to maintain Russian influence in the region and, maybe in some areas, to be ahead of our partners.” Russia is in the process of continuing its militarization of the Arctic and this week’s comments regarding Russia’s future Arctic interests is cause for concern.

Having mishandled the crisis in Ukraine for so long, NATO’s response can now be defined as “neo-containment” in which NATO bolsters its military presence in Poland and the Baltic states in an effort to dissuade Putin from going any further with his quest for what he has called “New Russia.” However, it would be incredibly unwise for NATO to include the Arctic as a component of the neo-

containment strategy moving forward.The idea of extending NATO to the Arctic theatre is not a new one. Canadian officials raised the possibility of such an extended mandate in the 1950s when Soviet bombers posed a threat to North America through Arctic airspace. Canada’s concerns at the time, however, were shaped as much by the relationship with its southern neighbour as they were with the Soviet threat. Indeed, Ottawa was hoping to deflect living under an exclusively bilateral (NORAD) umbrella by including our European allies in the plan. The Americans and NATO’s European members took little interest in the Canadian request and the matter was dropped.The situation today is completely different. Russian interests in the Arctic are not

primarily about a global competition for power through territorial expansion (despite the indirect implications of power accumulation); it is about pressing territorial and resource claims to their most extreme limits. At the same time, every other Arctic state is pressing similar claims. While military power is not insignificant in asserting and defending such claims, it has not been the exclusive, nor even primary, means employed thus far . Diplomatic and institutional measures are still a viable option for resolving these territorial disputes. A NATO presence in the Arctic would severely undermine these non-military measures and would likely provoke Russia into a game of brinkmanship .

To date, Arctic relations have been entirely diplomatic , with no genuine hint of armed conflict on the immediate horizon. It is true that Arctic states have invested significant domestic resources into Arctic scientific exploration, resource extraction technology and military assets but thus far relations in the Arctic Region have been cooperative . For the first time since the crisis in Ukraine began, though, the Arctic became a component of a broader strategic discussion when Canada withdrew from the meeting of the Arctic Council’s task force on black carbon and methane held in Moscow. Even so, it is likely that Canada’s withdrawal from the proceedings had more to do with the fact that the meeting was being held in Moscow and not a sincere effort on Canada’s part to goad Russia on policy issues concerning the Arctic.The disputes at play in the Arctic are also fundamentally different from those being

played out in Ukraine. Any attempt to link them would be counterproductive on many fronts. Much has been made in the weeks since the implosion in Ukraine on the effects that NATO expansion has had on Russian foreign policy. Regardless of how one interprets the effects of NATO’s expansion to the borders of Russia, extending the alliance into the Arctic would only confirm the perception in Moscow that the

alliance’s primary objective has been to encircle Russia and deny what it views as legitimate security interests on its borders . If Russians weren’t paranoid about being trapped before, such a move by NATO would surely reinforce such a view . ‘

The Arctic is safe – no miscalc, intentions are benignRybachenkov 13 (Vladimir, Counselor for nuclear affairs at the Russian embassy in Washington, Lecturere at Carnagie-Plowshare, “The Arctic: region of multilateral cooperation or platform for military tension?”, http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_04_03/The-Arctic-region-of-multilateral-cooperation-or-platform-for-military-tension/)

Some western media have recently been highlighting the view that military conflicts in the struggle to secure the Arctic 's natural resources are inevitable . Russia is carefully monitoring developments in polar region and considers the general situation in the area to be positive, stable and , on the whole, predictable , based on the assumption that there are no

immediate issues that might call for a military solution . This assessment has recently been confirmed

in a report by the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research (SIPRI), which refuted recent conjecture

about a polar arms race. ¶ It is commonly recognised that there are currently three major factors determining the Arctic situation; Firstly, the end to military and political confrontation from the Cold War when the Arctic was almost exclusively seen in the context of flight trajectories for strategic nuclear weapons as well a route for nuclear submarine patrols. Now the threat of a global nuclear war is substantially reduced ,

with US–Russian arms control treaties being a key element in the gradual movement towards a world without nuclear weapons. Impartial assessment of the arms control proces s shows that both countries' nuclear potentials have

steadily diminished over the last 20 years . The START 1 treaty resulted in the removal of about 40% of the nuclear weapons deployed in Russia and the USA while the 2010 New START treaty provided for their further fourfold reduction. Substantial efforts have also been made by both countries to reduce the likelihood of accidental nuclear launches due to unauthorised actions or misunderstandings: strategic nuclear bombers were taken off full time alert and “Open ocean targeting" was mutually agreed, meaning that in the event of an accidental launch, the missile would be diverted to land in the open ocean .

Two other factors were contributing to the opening up of new opportunities in the Arctic: the emergence of new technologies and rapid thawing of the Arctic ice, both rendering natural resources and shipping routes more accessible. It should also be noted that the ice-cap depletion also has a military dimension, namely the gradual increase of US multipurpose nuclear submarines and the deployment of missile defence AEGIS warships in the Northern Seas may be considered by Russia as a threat to its national security. Russia was the first Arctic state to adopt , in 2008, a long term policy report in response to the new realities, it pointed to the Arctic region as a, “strategic resource base for the country" which would require the development of a new social and economic infrastructure as well as an upgrading of military presence in the region to safeguard the Arctic territory. The document however underlined that there was no question of militarising the Arctic and expressed the

importance of sub-regional and international cooperation to form a favourable social, cultural and

economic space. ¶ All other Arctic states have adopted similar strategies with the key common point

being a statement that the national interests of each Arctic state can only be met through

multilateral cooperation. ¶ A “race" for territory, energy and seafood has been curtailed by historical decisions taken at the 2008 Ilulissat (Greenland) meeting when five Arctic coastal states declared that their basic framework for future cooperation, territorial delimitation, resolution of disputes and competing claims would be the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS ).