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| 10/10/2010 | ALL AFF 1ACsTournament: All tournaments | Round: 1 | Opponent: | Judge: UGA Tournament Round 2Can we debate energy production without implying visions of what is beautiful? Aren’t we receiving artistic training when we’re given techniques to ‘make it clear’ for the judge, ‘resonate’ with them, ‘paint them a picture’? What if strategic debate is defined by particular aesthetic rhythms, the affective winds that carry the ballots turning the turbines of production of aff and neg cases? Do we dare deny the genealogy of aesthetic imperialism and its racial divisions of natural and unnatural, pure and impure? If the violence of our aesthetics never reached our conscious perception, could we enjoy nationalism, slavery and genocide as beautiful harmony? Wouldn’t this aesthetic machinery necessitate an investigation, such that we ensure debate trains our ideological packaging in ways worth training? At the nexus of every discourse on energy production is a set of aesthetic assumptions about what that world is, where the energy is coming from. Whether the world conceived as dead materiality to be exploited or even a mother Earth that was harmonious before the entrance of human agents, a violent aesthetics of the Whole and the One purifies the world of alterity before it can even enter our conscious consideration. The wind turbine is a strategic nodal point in aesthetic programming. Specifically, wind energy debates produce the notion of the ‘landscape’ as untouched nature that we can enjoy as visual resource. The landscape fetish will end in climate disruption and mass extinction. Our false confidence in the harmony of nature is the source of our failure to limit violence against so called natural alterity as well as ourselves. The logical result of the landscape fetish is eco-fascism and hyper consumerism – life must be nature-ized becoming so ordered, harmonious and predictable so as to make it impossible to assign a value to life. If our consciousness operates ideologically, how can we intervene consciously to correct its biases? Wouldn’t the intervention fall to the same ideological operations because its form is the same conscious revealing? How could we compare the value of different aesthetic approaches, given our comparison will take place invisibly infected by the aesthetic bias that we are attempting to address, thus begging the question? Instead of closing these questions too quickly with the comfort of an answer, we offer the following poetic intervention, an imagining of what would happen were the United States federal government to reduce aesthetic restrictions on wind turbines: The turbines began their stampede, Blades gleaming with thirst for Earth, They resembled Genghis Khan, and their height recalled my impotence. I hate to be reminded of my impotence. We had always wanted to be like Shelley and everyone he fucked, Words worth a little death or two, so we breathed unfathered vapor, sapped from a shimmering ficus, ensconced in petticoat of dew, embalmed in a mountainous Paradise. Cold vortexes ended us. They sliced every ridgeside coalmuck and bullion lake. I weep for the American Bald Eagles – they are dead! I know the only way to remember is to light these poems. I hope they will shriek, like a pack of chimps in a gas fire. We defend that wind turbines should be read as embodying the aesthetics of the sublime. We enjoy the pain that we cannot know the turbine, and enjoy the turbine’s disruption of natural beauty. The sublime is the sentiment of pleasure at the failure to represent, pleasure from the pain of unpresentability. Beautiful aesthetics position the turbine as impure, corrupted by the human, and thus disruptive. Voting aff flips status quo aesthetics by enjoying that disruption, undermining the ideological basis of the landscape. The sublime sentiment checks the violence of the beautiful because it invests enjoyment in the failure of the beautiful. The Ballot is a decision on Aesthetic Education. Vote for the team that provides the best aesthetic training. Aesthetic tastes create the possibility or impossibility of genocidal violence. How debaters learn to present phenomena will effect how they make policy as well as how they engage in activism – there is no way to avoid making aesthetic judgments because consciousness requires them. In our framework, fiat is an aesthetic tool. Instrumental policy disads are not a reason to vote negative b/c the 1ac asks an aesthetic question that they do not disprove. You would not vote against the film titanic on the icebergs disad nor would you vote against a teen slasher flick on the ‘maybe we should stick together’ counterplan. The presenting of the unpresentable wind turbine is an aesthetic performance the neg can read disads to – just google some keywords like wind, nature, sublime, aesthetics and the bibliography is a mile long. Creative crisis is what makes debate revolutionize itself – exclusion of aesthetic education is terror that makes debate static and education genocidal. There is no pure or natural policy debate. What is most valuable for debate is generating new questions and new ideas – the riches behind our aesthetic training cannot be imagined or calculated because they will create new criteria of imagination. Indiana Round 1Contention One is the Unspoiled Landscape First is our thesis: Aesthetic evaluations are required now in considering changes to the environment or landscape – it doesn’t matter what the benefits of the project may be, the government has absolute discretion to reject “eyesores” – this is in the context of energy developments Walworth ‘6, “Case Note: Regulating Aesthetics of Coastal Maine: Kroeger v. Department of Environmental Protection”, (J.D. University of Maine, Law Review), North Dakota Law Review, 85 N. Dak. L. Rev. 329 Aesthetics finally were explicitly addressed in the dicta of Berman v. Parker. n53 Justice Douglas argued that the concept of the public welfare must include aesthetics and that legislatures ought to control and protect beauty in their communities: "[t]he concept of public welfare is broad and inclusive. The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, [*106] aesthetic as well as monetary." n54 Berman led commentators to debate the lasting effects of the dicta: had it sanctioned aesthetics legislation under the general welfare power or did it lack constitutional support? n55 The question inspired by Berman was addressed in the notable and more recent case of Metromedia Inc. v. City of San Diego, where a billboard ordinance regulating specific types of signs was overturned for violating the First Amendment. n56 Despite the free speech focus of the case, the majority also recognized aesthetic regulations as a "substantial government goal," effectively affirming aesthetic regulations as a permissible government function. n57 It is important to note that the Court in Metromedia acknowledged the risk of aesthetic regulations: with the acceptance of aesthetic notions as permissible goals comes the danger that regulations can be based on subjective rationales that defy "objective evaluation." n58 The Court pointed out that this risk mandates aesthetics be scrutinized carefully "to determine if they are only a public rationalization of an impermissible purpose" that would not fall within the police powers. n59 These "impermissible purposes" have been the subject of much litigation, as demonstrated by state court cases below.¶ C. Approach by State Jurisdictions: The Ancillary and Primary Views¶ Berman heralded a growing awareness of the importance of aesthetics regulation in American society. Federal action soon followed: Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, n60 the Wild and Scenic [*107] Rivers Act, n61 the National Trails System Act, n62 and the Coastal Zone Management Act, n63 all to protect the environment against public and private mistreatment. n64 States soon became involved as well, and as of the 1960s, legislatures were passing statutes protecting wetlands. n65 State regulation even went so far as to focus regulations on locations ranging from golf courses to battlefields. n66 The new legislation had to pass judicial scrutiny for impermissible purposes, however, and two judicial approaches towards aesthetic regulation began to emerge under the police powers: the ancillary approach and the primary approach. n67 In some jurisdictions, aesthetic regulations were deemed ancillary to health and safety components of the police powers. n68 Conversely, other jurisdictions devised an "aesthetics alone" approach, making aesthetics the primary purpose for regulations under the general welfare police power. n69 During the mid-1990s, the trend in jurisdictions was to utilize the primary over the ancillary approach in aesthetic regulation cases. n70 The ancillary approach focuses on the health and safety functions of the police power first, with aesthetics second. For instance, the Court of Appeals of New York linked billboard regulation to issues relating to traffic safety, such as clear visibility and distraction prevention, although it [*108] acknowledged the blight billboards created on motorways was akin to "a plague of locusts." n71 Where developments near or on natural resources are challenged, some jurisdictions addressed the public health and safety issues first, and included scenic uses last. n72 Scenic areas often overlap with natural resource areas, creating an "easy alliance" between aesthetics and environmental protection. n73 In Oswego Properties, Inc. v. City of Lake Oswego, n74 the City denied a housing development plan to build a forty-four foot wall in the proximity of existing trees because it failed to satisfy the city's open space requirement. n75 The court held that the city's standard of maintaining aesthetic appearances justified the protection of the nearby trees. n76 Other jurisdictions such as Arkansas have also accepted the promotion of tourism as a basis for regulations protecting the visual landscape, rather than aesthetics alone. n77 In Donnrey Communications Co. v. City of Fayetteville, ordinances regulating outdoor advertising advanced the legitimate government interest in tourism and aesthetics. n78 In its opinion, the court took note that the city's board of directors had deemed billboards as not only ill equipped mechanisms to provide useful information to tourists, but also objects detrimental to the scenic resources [*109] that attracted tourists to the city in the first place. n79 Although the case of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council n80 admittedly focused on a takings and compensation challenge to South Carolina's total ban on coastal development rather than a specific aesthetic regulation, both aesthetics and tourism were among the numerous factors behind the state's Beachfront Management Act that prohibited new development below an established erosion line. n81 Despite reversal on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, n82 the Supreme Court of South Carolina deemed preservation of "this existing public resource . . . a 'laudable goal.'" n83¶ The primary approach advances protection of visual resources as its chief objective and suggests that the general welfare prong of the police powers includes aesthetics. n84 Regulations of eyesores such as junkyards and wind turbines pass judicial scrutiny for solely aesthetic purposes. In Oregon, for instance, the Supreme Court upheld an ordinance regulating a wrecking yard for purely aesthetic purposes. n85 In the case In re Halnon, the Supreme Court of Vermont upheld the Vermont Public Service Board's denial of a certificate to build a wind turbine based on the adverse aesthetic impact it would have on the environment. n86 The New Hampshire Supreme Court has been explicit in its acceptance of the primary approach. In Asselin v. Town of Conway, n87 where a sign owner protested the municipality's directives regarding lighted signage, the court stated, "We now conclude that municipalities may validly exercise zoning power solely to advance aesthetic values, because the preservation or enhancement of the visual environment may promote the general welfare." n88 Asselin was cited by the Court in the more recent case of Taylor v. Town of Plaistow, where a zoning ordinance required a distance of 1,000 feet between car dealerships for purely aesthetic reasons. n89 This process has always rejected wind turbines as “unappealing” or “hideous” – this is formed out of the way we see the environment as an interconnected universal idea Brisman ‘5, “The Aesthetics of Wing Energy Systems”, (J.D. University of Connecticut, Law Clerk to Judge Alan S. Gold of the Southern District of Florida), written under advising by Dr. Frima Hofrichter, Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture at the Pratt Institute, New York University Environmental Law Journal, 13 N.Y.U. Envtl. L.J. 1 Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. . . . At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the [*81] mysterious loveliness of such effects. n232¶ ¶ Entire books and entire undergraduate-and graduate-level philosophy courses are devoted to the study of "aesthetics." Some philosophers have dedicated their whole careers to discussing and writing about "aesthetics." n233 Thus, it is well beyond the scope of this Article to provide even a basic introduction to the elements of the branch of philosophy called "aesthetics." n234 Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to present a definition of "aesthetics" to ground our discussion of the aesthetic precedent for wind energy systems. According to Allen Carlson:¶ ¶ Aesthetics is the area of philosophy that concerns our appreciation of things as they affect our senses, and especially as they affect them in a pleasing way. As such it frequently focuses primarily on the fine arts, the products of which are traditionally designed to please our senses. However, much of our aesthetic appreciation is not confined to art, but directed towards the world at large. We appreciate not only art, but also nature - broad horizons, fiery sunsets, and towering mountains. Moreover, our appreciation reaches beyond pristine nature to our more mundane surroundings: the solitude of a neighborhood park on a rainy evening, the chaos of a bustling morning marketplace, the view from the road. n235¶ ¶ [*82] In Part III, this Article identified two types of negative visual aesthetic responses to wind farms, echoing Carlson's definition of aesthetics. Whereas some individuals dislike the structural form of wind turbines and regard them as unappealing objects of fine art ("I can't believe how large and hideous they are . . . . They look like alien monsters coming out of the ground."), n236 others object to turbines because of turbines' impact on their aesthetic appreciation of the landscape ("a blight on unspoiled mountainsides and seascapes"). n237 While at least one commentator has noted that "the pinwheel-like motion of . . . wind plants is a source of playful visual interest to many," n238 and while one could make a fairly convincing argument that the meditative experience of this pinwheel-like motion resembles the contemplative encounter with one of George Rickey's kinetic sculptures (such as Summer III (1963); Sedge IV (1964); Two Lines - Temporal I (1964); Five Lines in Parallel Planes (1965); Six Lines in a T (1965-66); Peristyle II (1966); Two Vertical, Three Horizontal Lines (1966)), n239 or with one of the mobiles of Alexander Calder (such as Non-Objective (1947); Object in Y (1955); Red, 1959 (1959); Antennae with Red and Blue Dots (1960)), n240 Lynn Chadwick (Dragonfly (1951)), n241 or Kenneth Martin (Small Screw Mobile (1953); Screw Mobile with Black Centre, (ca. 1958-65)), n242 this [*83] Article is more interested in demonstrating how an exposure to certain artworks might affect the sentiment that wind turbines disrupt the "purity" of the landscape or "spoil" the view. This logic justifies religious, selfish, and identity based violence that operates outside of and above conceptions of morality Kateb 2000 [George, Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Source: Political Theory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 5-37Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192282Accessed] Other ideals that are unconsciously or theoretically raised above morality can be suggested. I do not have the whole list. The reason for talking about them in this essay is really to propose that all of these ideals are, to some extent, aesthetic. None is completely aesthetic, but all are partly so. Aesthetic motives help to animate pursuit of ideals that are untheorized but enacted, or theoretically defended, at large moral cost, that are loved more than morality or are so loved that the moral cost does not break into consciousness with any force. If I am right, then the place to begin the discussion of the cooperation and hostility between aestheticism and morality is with the hostility, which is, I believe, the main part of the story. Both unconscious immorality and ration-alizations of the (ostensibly nonaesthetic) supra-moral are helped along by unconscious aestheticism. A more conscious aestheticism, on the other hand, may be either more self-limiting and hence less productive of immorality or, by being given its proper name, more easy to denounce and resist. But these last speculations are uncertain. I say, then, that despite all denials and failures of recognition, some part of the passion for religious faith, for the preservation or expansion of a way of life or a solidary group identity, for politics as an end in itself, for the project of masculinity, for acquiring the pleasures of a symbolic life, for rising in the world as a great individual, or, finally, for saving nature from the predatory verminous human race is aesthetic. All these salient (or potentially salient) features of the human record, theorized or unconsciously enacted, are to be accounted for, in part, by what I shall call aesthetic cravings. These cravings, seeking satisfactiono r gratification, help to swell the amounto f unconscious or rationalized immorality in the world. (To repeat, I am talking about pur-suits that are immoral but not preponderantly egotistical, selfish, or person-ally vicious, pursuits that involve numbers of people who act idealistically. In the case of extremist and assertive individualism, the will to play one's role to the limit-an aesthetic craving-often is a good deal more important than mere egotism or lack of scruples.) When I maintain that unconscious aes-theticism is responsible for a substantial amount of the world's wickedness, am I saying something surprising or something obvious? I cannot tell. But if the claim is obvious, then I still think that it needs repeating and explaining. If it is surprising, then it needs explaining all the more. For the moment my theme is unconscious (or indeliberate or un-self-aware) aestheticism. Even when the immoral supra-moral is theorized, the ideal, whatever it might be, is not recognized as aesthetic except occasionally by a rare theorist such as Nietzsche or Hegel, and then not continuously. The immoralism of the latter two is steady, but their characterization of its motiva-tion as aesthetic is not steady. The idea that a harmonious and authentic nature that can be accessed is so vague and unknowable that it can be enlisted in the most conservative, racist and terrifying violence in the name of the natural. Morton 7 [Ecology without Nature, p. 14-17] One of the ideas inhibiting genuinely ecological politics, ethics, philosophy, and art is the idea of nature itself. Nature, a transcendental term in a material mask, stands at the end of a potentially infinite series of other terms that collapse into it, otherwise known as a metonymic list: fish, grass, mountain air, chimpanzees, love, soda water, freedom of choice, heterosexuality, free markets . . . Nature. A metonymic series becomes a metaphor. Writing conjures this notoriously slippery term, useful to ideologies of all kinds in its very slipperiness, in its refusal to maintain any consistency.11 But consistency is what nature is all about, on another level. Saying that something is unnatural is saying that it does not conform to a norm, so "normal" that it is built into the very fabric of things as they are. So "nature" occupies at least three places in symbolic language. First, it is a mere empty placeholder for a host of other concepts. Second, it has the force of law, a norm against which deviation is measured. Third, "nature" is a Pandora's box, a word that encapsulates a potentially infinite series of disparate fantasy objects. It is this third sense—nature as fantasy—that this book most fully engages. A "discipline" of diving into the Rorschach blobs of others' enjoyment that we commonly call poems seems a highly appropriate way of beginning to engage with how "nature" compels feelings and beliefs.¶ Nature wavers m between the divine and the material. Far from being something "natural" itself, nature hovers over things like a ghost. It slides over the infinite list of things that evoke it. Nature is thus not unlike "the subject," a being who searches through the entire üniverse for its reflection, only to find none. If it is just another word for supreme authority, then why not just call it God? But if this God is nothing outside the material world, then why not just call it matter? This was the political dilemma in which Spinoza, and the deists of eighteenth-century Europe, found themselves,- Being an "out" atheist was very dangerous in the eighteenth century, as evidenced by the cryptic remarks of Hume and the increasingly cautious approach of Percy Shelley, who had been expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism. God often appeared on the side of royal au- thority, and the rising bourgeoisie and associated revolutionary classes wanted another way of being authoritative. "Ecology without nature" means in part that we try to confront some of the intense notions which nature smudges.¶ Ecological writing is fascinated with the idea of something that exists in between polarized terms such as God and matter, this and that, sub-ject and object. I find John Locke's critique of the idea of ether to be helpful here. Locke's critique appeared toward the beginning of the modern construction of space as an empty set of point coordinates. Numerous holes in materialist, atomist theories were filled by some thing elemental. Newton's gravity worked because of an ambient ether that transmitted the properties of heavy bodies instantaneously, in an analogy for (or as an aspect off the love of an omnipresent God.14 If ether is a kind of "ambient fluid" that surrounds all particles, existing in between" them, then what surrounds the particles of ambient fluid themselves?) If nature is sandwiched between terms such as God and immer, what medium keeps the things that are natural sandwiched to- gether? Nature appears to be both lettuce and mayonnaise. Ecological writing shuffles subject and object back and forth so that we may think they have dissolved into each other, though what we usually end up with is a blur this book calls ambience.¶ Later in the modern period, the idea of the nation-state emerged as a way of going beyond the authority of the monarch. The nation all too often depends upon the very same list that evokes the idea of nature. Nature and nation are very closely intertwined. I show how ecocritique could examine the ways in which nature does not necessarily take us outside society, but actually forms the bedrock of nationalist enjoyment. Nature, practically a synonym for evil in the Middle Ages, was considered the basis of social good by the Romantic period. According to numerous writers such as Rousseau, the framers of the social con- tract start out in a state of nature, the fact that this state is not much different from the "concrete jungle" of actual historical circumstance has not escaped attention.¶ In the Enlightenment, nature became a way of establishing racial and sexual identity, and science became the privileged way of demonstrating it. The normal was set up as different from the pathological along the coordinates of the natural and the unnatural.lb Nature, by then a scientific term, put a stop to argument or rational inquiry: "Well, it’s just in my nature." He is ideological, you are prejudiced, but my ideas are natural. A metaphorical use of Thomas Malthus in the work of Charles Darwin, for example, naturalized, and continues to naturalize, the workings of the "invisible hand" of the free market and the "survival of the fittest"—which is always taken to mean the competitive war of all (owners) against all (workers). Malthus used nature to argue against the continuation of early modern welfare, m a document produced tor the government of his age. Sadly, this very thinking is now being used to push down the poor yet further, in the battle of the supposedly ecologically minded against "population growth" (and immigration). Nature, achieved obliquely through turning metonymy into metaphor, becomes an oblique way of talking about politics. What is presented as straightforward, "unmarked," beyond contestation, is warped.¶ One of the basic problems with nature is that it could be considered either as a substance, as a squishy thing in itself, or as essence, as an abstract principle that transcends the material realm and even the realm of representation. Edmund Burke considers substance as the stuff of nature in his writing on the sublime.27 This "substantiahsm" asserts that there is at least one actually existing thing that embodies a sublime quality (vastness, terror, magnificence). Substantialism tends to pro- mote a monarchist or authoritarian view that there is an external thing to which the subject should bow. Essentialism, on the other hand, has its champion in Immanuel Kant. The sublime thing can never be represented, and indeed, in certain religions, says Kant, there is a prohibition against trying (Judaism, Islam). This essentialism turns out to be politically liberating, on the side of revolutionary republicanism.21 On the¶ whole, nature writing, and its precursors and family members, mostly in phenomenological and/or Romantic writing, has tended to favor a substantialist view of nature—it is palpable and there—despite the ex- plicit politics of the author. Further work in ecocritique should delineate a republican, nonsubstantialist countertradition running through writers such as Milton and Shelley, for whom nature did not stand in for an authority for which you sacrifice your autonomy and reason.¶ Ecological forms of subjectivity involve ideas and decisions about group identity and behavior. Subjectivity is not simply an individual, and certainly not just an individualist, phenomenon. It is a collective one. Environmental writing is a way of registering the feeling of being surrounded by others, or more abstractly, by an otherness, some- thing that is not the self. Although it may displace the actual social col- lective and choose to write about surrounding mountains instead, such displacements always say something about the kinds of collective life that ecological writing is envisaging. Fredric Jameson outlines the necessity for criticism to work on ideas of collectivity:¶ Anyone who evokes the ultimate value of the community or the collectivity from a left perspective must face three problems: 11 how to distin- guish this position radically from communitarianism; Z) how to differentiate the collective project from fascism or nazism; 3) how to relate the social and rhe economic level—that is, how to use the Marxist analysis of capitalism to demonstrare the unviability of social solutions within that stratem. As for collective identities, in a historical moment in which individual personal identity has been unmasked as a decentered local of multiple subject positions, surely it is not too much to ask that something analogous be conceptualized on the collective level.2'¶ The idea of the environment is more or less a way of considering groups and collectives—humans surrounded by nature, or in continuity with other beings such as animals and plants. It is about being-with. As La- tour has recently pointed out, however, the actual situation is far more drastically collective than that. All kinds of beings, from toxic waste to sea snails, are clamoring for our scientific, political, and artistic attention, and have become part of political lite—to the detriment of mono- lithic conceptions of Nature.,n To write about ecology is to write about society, and not simply m the weak sense that our ideas of ecology are social constructions. Historical conditions have abolished an extra- social nature to which theories of society can appeal, while at the same time making the beings that tell under this heading impinge ever more urgently upon society.
The idea of “nature” presumes an intelligent designer – this causes an annihilation of difference – what does not jive with the intelligent natural design becomes metaphysically demonic and must be eliminated. Morton 7 [Ecology without Nature, p. 18-0] The more we study it. the more we see that, beyond the fact that many different people have many different opinions about it, nature in itself flickers between things—it is both/and or neither/nor. This flickering affects how we write about it. Nature is . . . animals, trees, the weather . . . the bioregion, the ecosystem. It is both the set and the con tents of the set. It is the world and the entities in that world. It appears like a ghost at the never-arriving end of an infinite series: crabs, waves, lightning, rabbits, silicon . . . Nature. Of all things, nature should be natural. But we cannot point to it. What we usually get is a suggestive effusion on something "Whose dwelling is in the light ot setting suns, /¶ In the round ocean, and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man," as Wordsworth marvelously put it.12 Nature becomes supernatural, a process made clear in John Carta's decisive treatment ot the history of Puritan ideas about nature and wilderness (though Gatta sets aside the more radical Puritan possibilities of the Diggers, the mystic Jacob Bochme and the vegetarian Thomas Tryon)." Or nature dissolves and we are left with sheer matter, and a sequence of ideas with numerous high points in radical materialist philosophy, such as Spinoza. We want there to be something in berween. But would that be natural? Would it not be supernatural? Would that be supernatural like a spirit—more of a refined essence—or a ghost—something more sub- stantial, maybe made of ectoplasm? We could go on splitting hairs infi- nitely. Our journey to the middle, of the "in between" space, whatever we call it, would go on generating binary pairs, and we would always be coming down on one side or the other, missing the exact center. It does not matter whether this is materialist spirituality, or spiritual materialism. Thinking posits something "over there" that maintains a mysterious allure.¶ Since the Romantic period, nature has been used to support the capitalist theory of value and to undermine it; to point out what is intrinsically human, and to exclude the human; to inspire kindness and compassion, and to justify competition and cruelty. It is easy to see why M. H. Ahrams would have written a book on Romantic poetry called Natural Supernaturalism. In short, nature has been on both sides of the equation ever since it was invented. Ecology without Nature takes nature out of the equation by exploring the ways in which literary' writing tries to conjure it up. We discover how nature always slips out of reach in the very act of grasping it. At the very moment at which writing seems to be dissolving in the face of the compelling reality it is describing, writing overwhelms what it is depicting and makes it impossible to find anything behind its opaque texture. Even as it establishes a middle ground "in between" terms such as subject and object, or inside and outside nature without fail excludes certain terms, thus reproducing the difference between inside and outside in other ways.'4 Just when it brings us into proximity with the nonhuman "other," nature reestablishes a comfortable distance between "us" and "them." With ecological friends like this, who needs enemies?¶ Some will accuse me of being a postmodernist, by which they will mean that I believe that the world is made of text, that there is nothing real. Nothing could be further from the truth. The idea of nature is all too real, and it has an all too real effect upon all too real beliefs, practices, and decisions in the all too real world. True, I claim that there is no such "thing" as nature, it by nature we mean some thing that is single, independent, and lasting. But deluded ideas and ideological fixations do exist. "Nature" is a focal point that compels us to assume cer- tain attitudes. Ideology resides in the attitude we assume toward this fascinating object. By dissolving the object, we render the ideological fixation inoperative. At least, that is the plan.
The idea of nature is so pure and ecstatic that it demands genocidal violence. We will just conduct an impossible search and find scapegoats to eliminate, scientists, technocrats, overly consumptive nations –all must be annihilated as roadblocks to natural bliss. Grove 9 [Jairus, associate professor at U of Hawaii. Democracy and Pluralism P. 193.) Where Habermas believes that the current trajectory of scientfic development can be arrested, or even regulated, to the point of being abolished, Connolly sees in this desire to slow things down a kind of ressentiment – one not that different from the hatred of the world that prompts Habermas’s reaction in the first place. In his criticism of Sheldon Wolin, Connolly argues that it may in fact be:¶ A quick tempo of life, to put it bluntly, that sets a crucial condition of possibility for the vibrant practice of democratic pluralism. [Connolly’s] wager is that it is more possible to negotiate a democratic ethos con- gruent with the accelerated tempo of modern life than it is either to slow the world down or to insulate the majority of people from the effects of speed.¶ (Connolly, 2002: 162)¶ Slowing down the world will come at a cost. The nostalgia for a simpler or slower life often inspires a rogues gallery of enemies and scapegoats to blame for the failure of restoration movements (ibid.: 162). In part, this is because the pace of life is not solely under the dominion of human control. Life has a life of its own. But failure to constrain life’s unpredictability and acceleration leads to the redirection of energies of ressentiment to the vilification of those identied with the acceleration of life. Across the political landscape one can observe the Right blaming queer lives for the breakdown of ‘stable’ families and from the Left the scapegoating of technophiles and scientists for destroying nature and human authenticity.¶ This seems true of Habermas who, from his chosen perspective of the ‘Future Present’, can consider evolution and change only in apocalyptic terms. The fear of change and of the unpredictable expresses a kind of revul- sion toward life. And life is nothing if not mutable and aleatory. Connolly’s political theorist as seer also attempts to peer into the future, but the seer looks for incipient possibilities not catastrophic certainties. Instead the political theorist as seer ‘reviews forking moments, not apparent to most participants when things are still open’ (Connolly, forthcoming: 9). Plan The United States federal government should remove restrictions on wind energy production based on adverse aesthetic evaluations.
Contention Two is The Challenge Status quo aesthetic politics are IMMENSLEY dangerous—it claims that a myopic, Western view of beauty and thought is universally applicable. The effects of this sort of false consciousness cannot be understated
Taylor, 1998 [Clyde R. Taylor, film scholar and literary/cultural essayist, is Professor at the Gallatin School and in Africana Studies, New York University. His publications include Vietnam and Black America and the script for Midnight Ramble, a documentary about early Black independent cinema. “The Mask of Art—breaking the aesthetic contract” Chapter 1]
"Reality is socially constructed."' The application of this axiom came to politics, religion, law, journalism, science, sports, history, psychiatry, criminology, and many other fields of knowledge before it approached the aesthetic, defended by its definition as an autonomous sphere with rules of its own. We may conclude, however, that when such interrogations collide with the aesthetic, the potential damage is all the greater, because of its character as a construct without a ground in reality apart from its own self-assertion.¶ Awareness mounts that the aesthetic is an eighteenth-century bourgeois construction (taken over from aristocratic beginnings) for the control of knowledge, specifically of the "beautiful." The central place set aside for the aesthetic experience in the arena of culture is increasingly identified with the ruler-of-the-roost posture assumed by imperial Western knowledge. The position occupied by the man of taste scrutinizing the art-object reverberates the arrogance of the subject-object relation in Western philosophical discourse, describing the distinction between the thinker and the thing being thought. For artist and theorist Laura Kipnis, then, aesthetics "is a key instance in the formation of the bourgeois subject and in the constitution of subject positions from which first world domination is effected and reproduced."' The enabling event of the aesthetic was the construction of this subjective individualism. "In the po‑ litical realm of reality," notes Susan Kappeler, "very different values adhere to the possibilities of subject and object: the role of the subject means power, action, freedom, the role of the object powerlessness, domination, oppression. The two roles are not equally desirable. Hence the role of subject constitutes a site for a power struggle."'¶ But the invention of the aesthetic first appealed to its fashioners as an alternative to power. The aesthetic emerged out of a fusion of concepts of morality and beauty, inherited from the neo-Platonist ideas of the Renaissance; a crucial difference however was that the morality of the first aesthetic philosophers was more thoroughly secular than seventeenth-century neo-Platonic thinkers whose notions of beauty and morality were more spiritual, deeply implicated with ideas of the soul. Englishman Francis Hutcheson, who is credited with being the first moderm philosopher of the aesthetic, indicated by his titles the chief concerns of the new discipline. Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design was the first part of his An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725).¶ The aesthetic became a philosophical growth industry, although it should be noted that the concept has never existed without formidable philosophical refutations.' As it grew, it incorporated ideas about the imagination, taste, morality, beauty, art, the senses, into an expansive category of knowledge and experience. The ecstatic spread of aesthetics in European thought profited from the appeal to (and maybe the corruption of) the desire for beauty, for sensory satisfaction for an emerging upper middle class whose accumulations of wealth and power were outgrowing their pioneering values of puritanical self-denial. The seduction of the aesthetic as a body of principles concerning taste also served the desire to regulate social distinction for a class which, having gotten money, now hungered for status. White British theorist Terry Eagleton makes the compelling argument that, having acquired dominance in the material sphere, the bourgeoisie used the aesthetic to extend control over the senses and the feelings of interior life, thus ensuring further compliance with its social order.'¶ The opacity of the aesthetic, its endless definitions and clarifications, may be reduced by noting its two institutionalized functions. One boundary of meaning organizes it as a foundational principle in art criticism. The other reference, the philosophical, relates it to cognition, in which a space of contemplation is marked out as characterized by the aesthetic gaze or experience. In most of its incarnations, this aesthetic gaze is identified as disinterested, removed from considerations of politics, money,self-interest, in favor of a higher inquiry. The ideal object of this aesthetic experience is autonomous, autotelic, an end in itself, when bracketed by the gaze of the observer. It is both transcendent and universal, unbounded by history or geography.¶ The capacity for aesthetic appreciation, placing a priority on form over function, is, as Bourdieu notes, a disposition affordable by individuals who have lifted themselves above the imperatives of necessity and survival—is in fact, celebrated as a sign of that deliverance.' The aesthetic disposition functions as a base for the fabrication and exploitation of countless social distinctions separating the cognoscenti from the benighted, the privileged from the pitiful, the elect from the damned, through what Baudrillard calls a "political economy of signs."' Grounded in this base is the mechanically reproduced normative superiority of bourgeois knowledge, experience, and practice. The aesthetic, then, is a system of representation and reception encoding the world for the spectator position of the Western upper middle class. Or as seen by Susan Kappeler from a slightly different angle, "culture, as we know it, is patriarchy's self-image."'¶ But the aesthetic serves an even more powerful function than individualistic self-empowerment. Not only is the aesthetic an ideology, it gives crucial support to general ideological stability. Hadjinicolaou points out "different spheres or forms of the ideological level: for example, the moral, legal, political, religious, economic, philosophical and aesthetic spheres. The process by which one sphere dominates the others is extremely complex."' Despite this complexity, it is plain to see the role of the aesthetic in uniting, rationalizing, legitimating—bringing order to these other levels. Just as the aesthetic arose as a body of knowledge uniting but transcending principles located in literature, the graphic arts and music, its influence including harmonizing the divisions of social order. Part of its spell is its claim to function as an imaginative model of the dynamic by which these spheres, indeed, the natural world, are held together: "The aesthetic, one might argue, is in this sense the very paradigm of the ideological."' In Fanon's calculation, the aesthetic functions like internalized psychic policemen operating throughout the body politic, maintaining the society's symbolic order:¶ In capitalist societies, the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior—all these aesthetic expressions of re‑spect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably.3°¶ The premises of the aesthetic raise it above ideology. Among these premises are the assertions that the work of art is autonomous and autotelic on the one hand and universal, transcending geography and history on the other. One of the more ambitious recent efforts to support the universality of aesthetic consciousness is White anthropologist Jacques Maquet's The Aesthetic Experience.' Much of his argument is based on a search for the purely ornamental in the artifacts of a wide range of the world's cultures. His argument is that the ornamental dimension of such work expresses its autotelism, its existence for its own sake, outside of function. But his illustrations range from instances in the West where the work for its own sake has achieved great respect in some social contexts to artifacts from cultures where the ornamentation of objects may be epiphenomena of entirely different values. The demonstration of the widespread appeal of ornamentation makes a thin support for the universal presence of "the aesthetic experience" as defined in the West.¶ The point is that if the appropriate definitions were expanded to a neat capsule of aesthetic discourse, many of their elements would be found in societies around the world, but in very few societies outside the West would they be synthesized as a category of knowledge. Just as they did not appear in Europe in that form until the eighteenth century. The aesthetic, then, is an ethnic gaze, and a class-bounded one at that. It operates in that region where the beliefs of its converts grant it an undeniable reality as a mental object. It is only when that provisional reality is exceeded and the aesthetic is underwritten as a universal category that it becomes identifiable as false consciousness, on a staggering scale. The fragility of its universalist claims, however, undermines its authority and weakens the whole of its discursive reach. If its face-value definition in dictionaries were replaced by a more practical one, such as "the taste and appreciative conventions of the Western ruling and bourgeois classes," we could begin to see how deeply its history has strained under false illusions.¶ This study will resist the weak temptation to refute the philosophical validity of aesthetic discourse at length. A much briefer and even summary discussion seems adequate to establish its dishonesty in the terms of the politics of representation. Of course, the discipline of aesthetic reasoning would have it otherwise, would insist on an entry into the Sumaoro's chamber of finely spun, devious, casuistic argument recalling the vacuous medieval reasoning that has characterized its discussionfrom the beginning.' And once one enters into this chamber, arguing the issue on its ground, an honorable exit is unlikely, without great loss of time and energy. (From experience, I have found defenders of aesthetic knowledge unable or unwilling to grant any presuppositions except that such a mental category exists in all of us, thereby making all argument circular and pointless—it exists because it is there.) But in fairness to those who cannot proceed without such confirmation of their doubts, we might pause to consider two cogent recitations of aesthetic logic.¶ The first is from White philosopher George Dickie (of the United States), who considers the much reputed "aesthetic attitude" or aesthetic gaze. This gaze is crucial to the "aesthetic experience" and different from other ways of knowing. In aesthetic theory, the special mode of being of the work of art demands a disinterestedness, an "aesthetic distance." The condition of art can theoretically only be approached and appreciated through this mode of mental cognition in order for its character as art, as opposed to everyday life and artifact, to stand forth. Dickie's close analysis, however, determines that no such unique mode of appreciation or recognition can be isolated. He concludes, "But the aesthetic attitude ('the hallmark of modern aesthetics') in this formulation is a great letdown—it no longer seems to say anything significant. Nevertheless, this does seem to be all that is left after the aesthetic attitude has been purged of distancing and disinterestedness. The only thing which prevents the aesthetic attitude from collapsing into simple attention is the qualification closely."'¶ Tony Bennett's critique begins with an acknowledgment of the general existence of "discourses of value" (which I have called "hierarchies of value"). These discourses of value make sense only with an ideal valuing subject in mind, someone capable of responding adequately to the prompt of experience, and of being a good citizen in the "valuing community" where such values are legislated and shared. Such discourse for knowing thus depends on "the individual's valuation of self as both subject of discernment and ultimate valued object. Their structure is thus narcissistic."' This seems to be a normative condition of human behavior, though one that can place severe limits on the human capacity to understand and cope with difference. But these hazards are compounded by aestheticism, specifically by its reach toward hegemony and its claims to universal validity.¶ For aesthetic reasoning to go forward it must rely upon a "universal valuing subject" (or privileged collective consciousness) much more commanding and absorptive than the "particular valuing communities" that¶ are to be found everywhere. This universal valuing subject relies on an "already elaborated theory of knowledge." Given what has been said, it is not merely unlikely but impossible for this universal valuing subject of aesthetic discourse to reflect any origin but its own, namely Western, ruling-class ideology. Bennett's analysis revolves around the crucial point of the receptor of "aesthetic" information, the subject located in the subject-position from which judgments of taste are confirmed or rejected. His critique assures that once again, the logical process is circular: the object is beautiful because I think it is beautiful. He quotes White Scottish philosopher David Hume: "Thus, though the principles of taste be universal, and nearly the same in all men; yet few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty. .. . some men in general, however difficult to be particularly pitched upon, will be acknowledged by universal sentiment to have a preference over others."' Hume will give us clear indication in a footnote of this work of some who must be excluded from the considerations of taste, or even civilization. Kant's much subtler analysis affirms the necessarily subjective condition of aesthetic reasoning, as well as relying on a universal valuing subject, but fudges the difficult question of relativity of judgment by positing an ultimately true judgment of taste in posterity. In other words, the most refined elaboration of aesthetic theory ends by asserting that there ought to be final unanimity on the questions of beauty and taste, some day in the future.¶ It is worth recalling Bennett's conclusion at length:¶ Notwithstanding the scientific claims which often accompany it, aesthetic discourse is ideological in the Althusserian sense that it functions as a discourse producing subjects. The universal valuing subject (man) it constructs interpellates the reader into the position of a valuing subject who is defined, in relation to the valued object (man), within a mirror structure of self-recognition. Yes, indeed, man is manifested in this object; yes, indeed, I recognize myself in it; isn't it/aren't I wonderful?—such is the effect of aesthetic discourse for the subject who takes up the position it offers. As ideology, however, aesthetic discourse is characterized by a number of contradictions and torsions, albeit ones which vary in their consequences depending on the political articulations of such discourse. In the case of bourgeois aesthetics, the production of a unified valuing subject, although necessary in providing a theoretical legitimation for the representation of class-specific aesthetic norms as universally valid, is also at another level, a sham, and necessarily so.¶ ¶ As with both of these critiques, the validity of the aesthetic as a category of knowledge rests largely on the issue of universality. But the uni‑versality of the category carries different meanings. The category can be thought of as responding to a science of the beautiful whose rules are universally valid, regardless of regional variations: one aesthetic law for everybody. Or, the aesthetic can indicate a category found explicitly in many civilized societies and implicitly in less civilized societies, or even in all societies, but a category whose content varies with the cultural contexts in which it is exercised: we all have an aesthetic, but my aesthetic may be different than yours.¶ You don't have to be clairvoyant to guess which of these versions of universality arose first. The historical shift from one idea of universality to another is revealing. One aesthetic for all is the legacy of ethnocentric Euro-enlightenment. The first aesthetic philosophers considered themselves as uncovering a category of "Universal Reason," and anyone who differed from their opinions was merely exposing his or her backwardness. But even in this period, there were occasional and routine demurrers, raising the possibility of some relativity among nations and peoples when it came to perceiving the beautiful. Museology may have been responsible for the extension of aesthetic criteria to other societies whose arts and artifacts acquired vogues among Western consumers, i.e., Japanese scrolls, Chinese vases, Persian carpets, as well as greater knowledge of the architecture and other cultural forms of non-Western societies past and present. Then, the dogmas of taste became a criterion for the civilized. It has only been under the impetus of decolonization theory, reflected in comparative anthropology, that the aesthetic sense has been attributed to all societies.¶ The absurdity of one aesthetic of universal application for all cultures is transparent, though doubtless some philosophers and psychologists continue the search, despite its diminishing returns. In the place of this universal dogma, many are drawn to a multicultural notion of plural aesthetics. Yet the fallacy of this more modern, supposedly democratic multicultural notion of the aesthetic is epistemological. It needs to be repeated that the distribution of categories of knowledge among different cultures shows no pattern where they overlap around one category devoted to aesthetic knowledge. Instead, evidence shows that protocols of beauty are integrated within other categories in different societies and often are not isolated in any fashion resembling what Western knowledge has defined as the aesthetic. Notoriously, many languages have no word for art, just as no society in the world had a word for aesthetics until 1735. Where anthropologists have ferreted out such hierarchies, they haveseldom shown them as they exist in the raw, i.e., integrated within their home cosmologies. The discovery of such "aesthetic systems" is much like the discovery of the Americas, bearing all the marks of the preconceptions and interests of the discoverers. They find aesthetic systems the way Columbus found "the Indies" in the Caribbean. Aesthetic universality is bourgeois cognition caught in a permanent "mirror phase." The question becomes, can such investigators who have invented a scheme of knowledge for their own self-fashioning locate the same kind of knowledge among foreign cultures without appending the biases of their self-fashioning, and if they could remove their "idols of the tribe," why would they not remove the category altogether, since the category is itself largely a repository of mental idolatry? In other words, only an investigator who had no preconceptions about the existence of the aesthetic as a category of knowledge could objectively locate one in a remote culture. Even more unlikely, though technically possible, would be for Western scholars, busy establishing the order of things in the ioos, to discover a principle in a non-Western society and make that foreign principle the basis for a category of "Universal Reason" or a discipline of study.¶ The quest for the universality of the aesthetic mistakes the existence of hierarchies of values in all cultures around objects, performances, or events as evidence of "aesthetic" calculation. But value hierarchies operate within cultural cosmologies and ideological configurations. Two societies often venerate the same object, but for entirely different reasons, as we are reminded when a museum piece is reclaimed by its originating cultural community for its ritual or other value. Or the intensity of veneration in two societies may appear similar but be very differently motivated.¶ The world's diverse cultural hierarchies have been shanghaied into service of aesthetic theory in two ways. Non-Western value systems are sampled to disguise the isolation of the aesthetic as a local, Western middle-class preoccupation. But under the assumption that the aesthetic is a Western philosophical discovery (of universal import), and most highly developed in its articulation and intellectual finesse in the West, aesthetic theory is simultaneously used to establish the relative inferiority of these non-Western societies in this area of development, and by inference, generally.¶ Maquet's inquiry is part of a very recent anthropological effort, researching oral cultures to discover the nature of their "aesthetics." This research responds to a liberal ideological motive, to reverse the use of aes‑¶ thetic criteria for inferiorization, and instead to use it to help establish the common humanity of all peoples. Not surprising, investigators have unearthed the criteria for stratified valuation of different objects. This is unremarkable, since very little human activity is undertaken without ideas for gauging anticipated success. Researches like this also have a double function. The "discovery" of scales of respect for different objects or experiences elevates that society in the ranks of civilization, in the liberal ethnographer's eyes. At the same time, the "discovery" tacitly confirms the universality of a specifically Western perspective. But this liberal gesture effects a "one way universality," as noted by two interrogators of the complex idea of the "primitive."' If ethnographers have only recently begun to inquire into the criteria of beauty and desirability among non-Western peoples, neither they nor other aestheticians have hardly ever inquired about response by "primitives" to objects from outside these cultures, like the Mona Lisa, for instance.' The best form of resistance to the status quo’s aesthetic narrative of beauty and perfection is a complete embrace of imperfection. This is an ironic gesture that mocks and lays bare the exclusive and arbitrary nature of status quo aesthetic practice Taylor, 1998 [Clyde R. Taylor, film scholar and literary/cultural essayist, is Professor at the Gallatin School and in Africana Studies, New York University. His publications include Vietnam and Black America and the script for Midnight Ramble, a documentary about early Black independent cinema.“The Mask of Art—breaking the aesthetic contract” Chapter 1] Positive imagism and self-authentication reflect different angles on a crucial problem in the politics of representation—how to position oneself in the face of overwhelming, alienating power/knowledge. Beneath that question lies another: who are the "we" that is mounting this resistance and how do "we" conceive ourselves? Though very different, even diametrical alternatives, the two perspectives are alike in limiting themselves within a low-productive culturalism. The weakness of culturalism as defined here lies in buying into notions of culture organized by the canonical art-culture system, partly as articulated by Matthew Arnold and partly by classical anthropology. This is a view of culture divorced from history (except a kind of museum catalog, cultural history), and therefore from political analysis.¶ The limitation of these two culturalist perspectives are overcome in the theoretical insights of Julio Garcia Espinosa's essay "For an Imperfect Cinema."' Writing as a Cuban filmmaker and theorist, Espinosa fashioned an argument usually considered a part of third cinema theory, and as such, remains one of its most endurable products. If dominant cinema has managed to present itself as "perfect cinema—technically and artistically masterful," then there is no better choice for the resistant film activist than to cultivate an "imperfect cinema."5¶ Espinosa's case for a new concept of cinema rests on an anti-elitist critique of "art." Art as an isolated, impartial, uncommitted activity, as produced by individuals regarded as special and different, as an activity carrying its own, peculiar cognitive agency, is recognized by Espinosa as an irrelevance: "A new poetics of the cinema will, above all, be a 'partisan' and 'committed', art, a consciously and resolutely 'committed' cinema—that is to say, an 'imperfect' cinema."' Instead of the "perfection" claimed by high art, Espinosa advances popular art, by which he means cultural work practiced as a general, social activity, in which the collaboration between the work and the receiving audience/population is foregrounded.¶ For critiques of aestheticism, the example of jazz quickly rises as an example of cultural production amazingly vital and yet amazingly free of the rules and regularities of classicism. Not surprisingly, then, in an argument somewhat parallel to Espinosa's, one writer, Ted Gioia, discusses jazz as The Imperfect Art: True, jazz embodies many of the features that mark the concept of Espinosa's imperfect cinema, its call-response relation to its audience, its commitment to improvisation and process rather than to calculation and product, its collective authorship, its irreverence toward tradition, its unabashed populism. Gioia senses the revolutionary potential in this configuration: "An aesthetics of jazz would almost be a type of non-aesthetics."' If Gioia inches back from the precipice of this discovery, retreating into bromides about the creative artist in an attempt to win a place for jazz musicians in this lineage, we need not follow him in these regressions.¶ In both these descriptions "imperfect" must be understood as ironical, that is, as depending on a double meaning, twinned with the concept of the perfect that those with the privileges of power/knowledge are eager to impose. The concept of "imperfect" culture acknowledges this power to define at the same time that it rejects the substance of the definitions. It exposes the irony that resistance will always embrace contraband meanings and values, and these meanings and their carriers will always be framed as unofficial, unorthodox, indiscrete, undisciplined, chaotic, methodologically incorrect, vulgar, or in a word, imperfect. Speaking in an entirely different context, Fanon glimpsed the imperfection of the colonized populations: "In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation."' This is the Fanon that sees the condition of the colonized as a pathology, not the later Fanon that sees it as a moment pregnant with change and transformation. In other words, Fallon and Gioia recognize the impurity of uncanonized people and their thought and culture, but with less of the irony that Espinosa brings to the models against which they are inevitably deemed lacking. The shallowness of "perfection" is perhaps more quickly grasped in Espinosa's example of the cinema of perfection, the slick, technically poised practice of the culture industry.' It is the perfection of an aestheticized cultural regime, of the Crystal Palace, and by isolating it from other possibilities Espinosa refreshes our eyes to the ordinary. 1AC – Kentucky The idea of “nature” presumes an intelligent designer – this causes an annihilation of difference – what does not jive with the intelligent natural design becomes metaphysically demonic and must be eliminated. The idea of nature is so pure and ecstatic that it demands genocidal violence. We will just conduct an impossible search and find scapegoats to eliminate, scientists, technocrats, overly consumptive nations –all must be annihilated as roadblocks to natural bliss. Contention Two is The Challenge This brief and selective trace of the development AND understanding and engagement of local inhabitants. Status quo aesthetic politics are IMMENSLEY dangerous—it claims that a myopic, Western view of beauty and thought is universally applicable. "Reality is socially constructed."' AND these cultures, like the Mona Lisa, for instance.' 1AC Cites – Emory Mullins/Lack – GSU TournamentWhat is powering our laptops? The lights in this building? The air conditioner that keeps us cool and the elevators that carry us between floors? What sort of fuel is burning to keep the power plant running at peak capacity? Where is it from? Who--and what--is hurt by it?Most everyone in current society is unable to answer these questions, because energy and electricity are intangible and taken for granted. We simply expect power to be there when we plug in to an outlet. We don’t worry about where it came from.This is a direct result of the design of the centralized energy system on which modern society runs—we are distanced, geographically and emotionally, from the sources of electricity. This distance and the attendant intangibility of energy makes awareness and sustainability impossible.Pierce and Paulos, 2010 [James Pierce, Eric Paulos, researcher and Cooper-Siegel Endowed Chair at the¶ Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University “Materializing energy”, http://www.paulos.net/papers/2010/MaterializingEnergy_DIS2010.pdf] The Intangibility of Energy AND sharing, and activating energy. The result of this intangibility of energy is an untenable relationship between society and the environment. Because we, as consumers, are alienated from the production of electrical energy, we are willing to ignore environmental consequences and authorize violence in order to ensure an unending, cornucopian supply Byrne and Toly, 2006 [John BYRNE Director Center for Energy and Environmental Policy and Public Policy @ Delaware AND Noah TOLY Research Associate Center for Energy and Environmental Policy ‘6 in Transforming Power eds. Byrne, Toly, and Glover p. 1-3] From climate change to acid rain, contaminated landscapes, AND of conventional and sustainable energy futures. The environmental costs of the traditional power system-- from climate change to water pollution to air pollution—are massive but not accounted for. This destroys the environment and makes renewables economically uncompetitive. Sovacool, 2009 [Benjamin, Energy Governance Program, Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Also, knocked Herndon out of the NDT his junior year. On vagueness. Siiiiiiiick. “Rejecting renewables: The socio-technical impediments to renewable electricity in the United States” Energy Policy 37 (2009) 4500–4513] 3. Economic impediments While renewable AND is much like racing a tricycle against a Ferrari. This relationship to the energy economy makes massive environmental destruction and species extinction inevitable because of pollution, resource competition, and global warming. Only a new energy paradigm focused on micro-generation can create change fundamental enough to avert disaster Rifkin, 2012 [Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the bestselling author of nineteen books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His books have been translated into more than thirty five languages and are used in hundreds of universities, corporations and government agencies around the world. His most recent books includeThe Third Industrial Revolution, The Empathic Civilization, The Hydrogen Economy, The European Dream, The End of Work, The Age of Access, and The Biotech Century. Jeremy Rifkin has been an adviser to the European Union for the past decade and is the principle architect of the European Union’s Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan.. “The third Industrial Revolution”. Feb 14th. http://www.makingitmagazine.net/?p=4514] Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and AND engage in civic life. PLAN: The United States federal government should provide necessary financial incentives for community-planned solar and wind energy production. Momentum exists for a fundamental change in our energy system. Our policies need to stop supporting centralized elite, technocratic, corporate solutions and empower local community movements by encouraging smaller-scale generation and distribution of energy. An overt political challenge is a necessary component of this strategy. The plan’s confrontation with status quo energy elites galvanizes movements and lends legitimacy to broader environmental movements. Scrase and Smith, 2009 [Ivan SCRASE Science and Technology Policy Research @ Sussex AND Adrian SMITH Science and Technology Policy Research @ Sussex ‘9 “The (non-)politics of managing low carbon socio-technical Transitions” Environmental Politics 18 (5) p. 722-724] Political strategies for transitions In the AND view, this suggests possibilities for mobilisation in a political programme for low carbon transitions. And, Government support is essential to the adoption of renewable tech—it LEADS to community and market acceptance. The negative’s complaints about “intermittency” aren’t failures of technology, they are failures of status quo political leadership. The plan’s STRONG SIGNAL at the POLICY LEVEL is key. Wolsink, 2011 [Maarten, Maarten Wolsink∗ Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam,” The research agenda on social acceptance of distributed generation in smart grids: Renewable as common pool resources” Elsevier Journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews] 3.2.1. Inadequate policies¶ The challenges of AND was demonstrated to be viable [59]. And, the plan’s incentive for local renewable microgeneration creates a material and emotional interaction with energy that challenges the monolithic energy structure of the status quo and fosters a broader discussion and participation in discussions about energy. Awareness alone is insufficient—this sort of material engagement is a prerequisite to meaningful participation, and creates sustainable relationships to the environment more generally Pierce and Paulos, 2010 [James Pierce, Eric Paulos, researcher and Cooper-Siegel Endowed Chair at the¶ Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University ”Designing for emotional attachment to energy” http://www.jamesjpierce.com/publications/pierce-emotional_energy.pdf] 4.2. Transforming our relationships with energy. One of AND interactions and practices toward sustainability. The material and communal connection to energy engendered in the plan allows us to form emotional relationships with energy and remake the way we value it Criticisms of this attachment, while important, ignore the fact that we already have an unsustainable relationship to energy—only the aff’s move towards tangibility and awareness can “sustainably recode” society. Pierce and Paulos, 2010 [James Pierce, Eric Paulos, researcher and Cooper-Siegel Endowed Chair at the¶ Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University “Materializing energy”, http://www.paulos.net/papers/2010/MaterializingEnergy_DIS2010.pdf] Designing for energy as material and symbolic¶ Proposing a more AND of our sustained¶ care and attention. And, the plan’s focus on community-based solutions is essential for both broader adoption of technology and functional distributed generation schemes. Allowing communities to come together around their local generation networks creates a shared sense of ownership—leading people to participate—and responsibility—leading to changes in consumption patterns. Cookie cutter, imposed solutions are doomed to failure. Wolsink, 2011 [Maarten, Maarten Wolsink∗ Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam,” The research agenda on social acceptance of distributed generation in smart grids: Renewable as common pool resources” Elsevier Journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews] 4. Community perspective 4.1. Trust In addition to being physically AND a substantial number of members derive their¶ income from tourism [88,89]. Start your evaluation of the debate from an integrated, socio-technical perspective. Politics, technology, economics, and society form a co-productive, interactive web. Their arguments about “impossibility” or “technical failure” or “inevitability” take minor contingent facts and treat them as immutable—the plan is a change at every level that can radically alter our relationship to technology and the world Sovacool, 2009 [Benjamin, Energy Governance Program, Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Also, knocked Herndon out of the NDT his junior year. On vagueness. Siiiiiiiick. “Rejecting renewables: The socio-technical impediments to renewable electricity in the United States” Energy Policy 37 (2009) 4500–4513] By laying out these impediments as “economic,” “political,” and AND it remains “lost” and “marginalized” – cannot be answered prior to its adoption. The plan’s flexible approach to generation emphasized local needs, ownership and control. This is an institutional change that challenges the central energy system by encouraging polycentric decision-making and empowering local actors at the expense of status quo energy elites Wolsink, 2011 [Maarten, Maarten Wolsink∗ Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam,” The research agenda on social acceptance of distributed generation in smart grids: Renewable as common pool resources” Elsevier Journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews] 6. Concluding remarks What are the social foundations of smart grids? They AND promising solutions for smart¶ grid development. And, the plan encourages a set of technologies that mediates our relationship with energy in such a way that it directs it towards sustainability—the psychological effects of its integration create wholesale cultural change and awareness Pierce and Paulos, 2010 [James Pierce, Eric Paulos, researcher and Cooper-Siegel Endowed Chair at the¶ Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University “Materializing energy”, http://www.paulos.net/papers/2010/MaterializingEnergy_DIS2010.pdf] Our approach is grounded in a belief AND into those capable of being sustained. |
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