Melville-Craig Aff

Open Case List
SFSU Cailen Melville, Sarah Craig Affirmative:

Oil alone moves the wheels of modernity. Our attempts to narrate our own historical significance demand that we give yield to oil’s specific ontology within our culture. Oil doesn’t keep many secrets. It is an ecologically destructive agent of Progress. We know this. But, because of its omnipresence it is necessary to rethink the ways that Oil’s centrality to progress and economy has fashioned cultural formations that are hell-bent on displacing opposition to the rationale of oil extraction… In the case of the United States this has often led to oil encounters as war, So, if we are to being a history of Oil, what better place to start than a reimaging if the Gulf oil wars of the last 60 years.

Hitchcock  2010 ( Peter, Professor of English at the graduate center and Baruch College of the City University of New York, “ Oil in an American Imaginary” in New Formations (69) p/81-97

If Climate Change has provoked utopian desires for a planet where oil does not and cannot centrally drive its economic activity then that challenge must include an imaginative grasp of its otherwise abstruse narrative f modernity, not in the mere content of oil’s omnipresence, but in the ways oil has Actively come to define so much of being in modernity, an oil ontology. The law of oil held another lesson culminating in the 1979-81 US Embassy hostage crisis.
It is in the contours of this retelling of the major oil encounters of the last 60 years that we can begin to see visages of oil in the American imaginary. The role that Oil has in the cultural production of

Hitchcock 2010  ( Peter, Professor of English at the graduate center and Baruch College of the City University of New York, “ Oil in an American Imaginary” in New Formations (69) p/81-97
Nothing could be more stark than the contrast between the second oil war and the third. Such a narrative of oil constructs cultural brackets for the American Century just as it holds a warning about our ability to articulate and read resource scarcity in the future.
Advocacy Statement- Our affirmative reimagines the history of oil. We critique eco-managerialism and both the material practices and the cultural production of oil with regards to American Identity,

If our telling of the petrofictions at the heart of U.S. Exceptionalism is constitutive of the cultural practices of U.S., then it is not without it’s material practices. The epistemological practices of managerialism enables the extraction oil. This process enables the American Century at the same time as it constructs nature as a resourse.

Luke 2003 (Timothy, Distinguished Prof of PoliSci @Virginia Polytechnic Univ, Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation” Aurora Online http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)
Before scientific disciplines and industrial technologies turn its’ matter and energy into products nature must be transformed by discursive processes into natural resources. The mission statements of sustained yield pushed natural resource management towards realizing the maximum maintainable output up to or past even the point where one reached ecological collapse, which in turn of course caused wide-spread ecological degradation.

The separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion enables the deferment of responsibility from man to the machine and creates a space of managed and restricted access that calls itself public.

Haraway 1996 (Donna, Professor in the History of Consciousness Program At UC Santa Cruz. The Disunity of Science, pg 430-432)
Experimental philosophy-science—could spread only as its materialized practices spread. This was not a question of ideas, but of the apparatus of production of what could count as knowledge.

The Technological production and consumption of knowledge is the ultimate performance of war
Haraway 1996 (Donna, Professor in the History of Consciousness Program At UC Santa Cruz. The Disunity of Science, pg 435-7)
Science made was nature undone getting nature to reveal her secrets was the prize for the manly valor—all of course merely valor of the mind. The word is spermatic; it is made flesh.