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Graziano-Steiner Aff

Last modified by Nate Graziano on 2012/10/13 18:06

The Middle of Life- Holderlin

With yellow pears and full of wild roses, the land hangs over the lake, you fair swans, and drunk with kisses you dunk your heads into the sacred, neutral water.

Woe is me! Where, when it is winter, will I get flowers, and where the sunshine, and the shade of the earth? The walls stand mute and cold; in the wind the weathervanes rattle.

The way that we talk about the resolution this year is one that orders and objectifies the way that we talk about nature and energy; this is a concept called enframing which hides truth through rhetoric of violence and exploitation
Beckman 2K
[Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences at Harvey Mudd College
Tad Beckman, “Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,” 2000, http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html//WYO-NG]

Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each seems to have followed different human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, "the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such." {[7], p. 14} Modern technology sets-upon nature and challenges-forth its energies, in contrast to techne which was always a bringing-forth in harmony with nature. The activity of modern technology lies at a different and more advanced level wherein the natural is not merely decisively re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The rhetoric in which the discussion is couched conveys an atmosphere of violence and exploitation. (6) To uncover the essence of modern technology is to discover why technology stands today as the danger. To accomplish this insight, we must understand why modern technology must be viewed as a "challenging-forth," what affect this has on our relationship with nature, and how this relationship affects us. Is there really a difference? Has technology really left the domain of techne in a significant way? In modern technology, has human agency withdrawn in some way beyond involvement and, instead, acquired an attitude of violence with respect to the other causal factors? Heidegger clearly saw the development of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with the harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. (7) As a representative of the old technology, the windmill took energy from the wind but converted it immediately into other manifestations such as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it for later arbitrary distribution. Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of wind into electrical power which can be stored in batteries or otherwise. The significance of storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of this storage the powers of nature can be turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is, in this sense, the symbol of our over-coming of nature as a potent object. "...a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit." {[7], p. 14} This and other examples that Heidegger used throughout this essay illustrate the difference between a technology that diverts the natural course cooperatively and modern technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not only is this achieved by force but it is achieved by placing nature in our subjective context, setting aside natural processes entirely, and conceiving of all revealing as being relevant only to human subjective needs.

Our encouraging of hoarding energy and nature through our debates is putting them into a Standing Reserve- this puts the topic fuels into a mindset that things are “good” unless they are “good for” something; we tear the environment apart in order to collect energy

Beckman 2K
[Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences at Harvey Mudd College
Tad Beckman, “Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,” 2000, http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html//WYO-NG]

The essence of technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still regarding nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of modern technology is a revealing of phenomena, often far removed from anything that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not only diverts nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing, technology today is a challenging-forth of nature so that the technologically altered nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in reserve for our use. We pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances and we ship these to gas stations around the world where they reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power our automobiles or airplanes. Technology has intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that represents a consistent direction of domination. Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve" and, in that, loses its natural objective identity. The river, for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydro-electric power, as a water supply, or as an avenue of navigation through which to contact inland markets. In the era of techne humans were relationally involved with other objects in the coming to presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued elements of the universe so that, within this new form of revealing, objects lose their significance to anything but their subjective status of standing-ready for human design. (8) At this point, we have almost completed the analysis of modern technology in its essence. Only one final aspect of this analysis remains; it is an understanding of the overarching context in which technology came to proceed along this path. Heidegger named this context by the German word 'Ge-stell,' which has been translated to the English word, 'enframing.' In Heidegger's words, "enframing [Ge-stell] means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve." {[7], p. 20} But, "where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense." {[7], p. 28}

Nuclear energy is the epitome of western technology and science and one of the largest causes of enframing in our world

Kinsella 2007

[Dr. William J. Kinsella- PhD in communication. Rhetoric and environmental communications theorist, expert on public rhetoric involving nuclear policy. “Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation: Standing Reserve, Enframing, and Environmental Communication Theory” Environmental communication: A journal of nature and culture, October 16th 2007, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&hid=113&sid=7ee38f5d-f349-4243-82b7-d2ab8386bc66%40sessionmgr104//WYO-NG]

In his essay on ‘‘the question concerning technology,’’ Heidegger (1977a) critiqued the reduction of nature to a ‘‘standing reserve’’ (bestand), a stockpile of phenomena appropriated for human exploitation. Hanford is a compelling example, as the place was taken from its former residents, farmers and ranchers who had taken it in turn from their Native American predecessors, by the government for use as a plutonium factory. Hanford’s plutonium ‘‘product,’’ as it is known in the jargon of workers and officials, remains an essential element in the US nuclear ‘‘stockpile.’’ The example is even more fitting, however, because Heidegger viewed atomic energy as the quintessential product of modern science, technology, and Western metaphysics, which he linked in an instrumental ‘‘enframing’’ (gestell) of the natural world (Foltz, 1995; Heidegger, 1966, 1969, 1977a). Enframing involves a stance toward the world that ‘‘challenges,’’ ‘‘regulates,’’ and ‘‘secures’’ its elements to create a standing reserve of usable resources (Heidegger, 1977a, p. 16). Human intervention in nuclear processes enframes nature in a way that is historically unprecedented, but was already implicit in the founding premises of modernism (Kinsella, 2004, 2005)

Through observing and caring about the enframing of nature we have the power to open up a place to discuss environmental communications
Kinsella 2007

Additionally, and consistent with Rogers’ search for a ‘‘transhuman’’ approach, Heidegger’s phenomenology enables a powerful critique of humanism. By analogy with models of ‘‘bounded rationality’’ (March & Simon, 1958) and ‘‘bounded emotionality’’ (Mumby & Putnam, 1992) in organizational theory, such an approach might take the form of a ‘‘bounded constitutive’’ model of communication. In that model, humans have substantial power to constitute the world and its meanings, but that power is constrained by, and must be responsible to, the transcendental facticity of nature. Below, I outline the directions such a model might take, using as foundations Heidegger’s critique of humanism, the notion of ‘‘care’’ that emerges in his critique of enframing, and a recent philosophical reading of his phenomenology as a form of ‘‘ontic realism’’ (Carman, 2003, pp. 44ff). Consistent with Rogers’ liberatory goals, such an approach opens up the discursive space for a broader range of voices and arguments in public environmental discourse, environmental conflict, and environmental policy debate. In that spirit, I now examine some key ideas from Heidegger’s phenomenology and their potential for integrating concerns for nature, as conceptualized in radical ecology, with concerns for human welfare and emancipation.

Environmental communication through discourse in language and writing provides relief outside these constructions through transcendental experiences

Kinsella 2007

Already, implications are evident for communication theory. At the ontological level, being, itself*both our own being and the being of other entities*lies outside the realm of social construction and confronts us with its recalcitrant facticity. Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation 201Furthermore, particular beings have their own inherent qualities, prior to human recognition or attribution. Carman (2003) reads Heidegger’s attitude as one of ‘‘ontic realism’’ (pp. 44ff) that ‘‘takes occurrent entities to exist and to have a determinate causal structure independently of the conditions of our interpreting or making sense of them’’ (p. 159). On that reading, without humans ‘‘there would still be occurrent entities; indeed, they would have much (or at least more or less) the same ontic structure we find in them in our everyday encounters and in scientific inquiry’’ (p. 201). This ontic realism is consistent with the ‘‘transhuman, materialist’’ position taken by Rogers (1998), and can point the way toward a ‘‘resurrection of a place for natural forces, traits, and structures in communication theory’’ (p. 268). Environmental communication reveals such ontic structures in a variety of contexts including the uncanny, transcendental experiences expressed in discourses of the sublime in nature writing (Oravec, 1996); in our recognitions of the radical otherness of nonhuman animals (Haraway, 2003; Heidegger, 1995); 10 and in the quasi-theological discourses of nuclear energy (Chernus, 1986; Hales, 1991; Kinsella, 2005). Such examples illustrate the limits of social construction: while human agency is involved in discursively producing the meaning of these phenomena, they also exhibit irreducible, primordial dimensions.
Nature is not yet fully enframed; Our communication is key to either dooming or saving nature

Kinsella 2007

Nature, both non-human and human, persists in its ways of being and often resists enframing, as indicated by continuing crises of containment at Hanford. Nuclear materials continue to travel beyond their designated boundaries, carried by the animals that roam the reservation and transported by gravity through the soil, into the groundwater, and on to the Columbia River. Salmon still spawn in the river in the shadows of decommissioned reactors, albeit at risk for health effects and genetic changes, and the river flows on, to the Pacific. Threats of earthquakes and dam breaches complicate the plans for environmental clean-up and closure of the site. Scientific risk analyses are judged by critics as deficient, as nature reveals itself as too complex for control by calculation. Dissident scientists, organizational whistleblowers, and determined downwinders breach the boundaries of discursive containment, insisting that their voices be heard and their perspectives be recognized (Kinsella, 2001; Kinsella & Mullen, 2007). Although regarded by the agents of enframing as mere nuisances, these are hopeful signs. Nature, culture, and communication are not yet fully enframed, and the possibilities for the future remain open. Human communicative choices, made in conflict or collaboration with nature, will contribute to the disclosure of that future.

If we lose our ability to communicate we lose our access to how we exist within the world; our Daesin. The technological grasp that is closing in on us is attempting to silence our ability to speak poetically.

Kinsella 2007

Heidegger’s concept of projection indicates that nature is always disclosed in light of its usefulness for Dasein’s practical activities. This characteristic of disclosure is fundamental and inevitable, and Heidegger is not critical of this basic human propensity to utilize the world. The technological attitude that he calls enframing, however, is a problematic mode of utilization in which nature becomes a ‘‘standing reserve’’ (Heidegger, 1977a) or a ‘‘gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry’’ (Heidegger, 1966, p. 50). Heidegger (1977a) illustrates this concept with a series of poignant examples, which I quote here at length in order to preserve their cumulative, poetic effect: The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging . . . which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind . . . But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it. In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit . . . Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy . . . . . . The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in order that it may simply be present somewhere or other. It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it. The warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running. The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine . . . In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine appears as something at our command . . . What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station . . . But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry. (Heidegger, 1977a, pp. 1416) 12 These examples do not reflect mere nostalgia. Instead, they illustrate a radical break in Dasein’s relationship with the earth. The primacy of that relationship is now replaced by calculation, control, and deliberate disruption of the natural order. Indeed, in the last two of these examples the natural order is displaced when steam and a tour group are ‘‘ordered,’’ and ambiguously, this ordering can be understood both as a calculated physical arrangement and as an imperative command. Another aspect of enframing is the loss of poetry, which for Heidegger is a mode of language crucial to Dasein. In his example of the appropriation of the Rhine as a power source, he laments: In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, ‘‘The Rhine’’ as dammed up into the power works, and ‘‘The Rhine’’ as uttered out of the art work, in Ho¨lderlin’s hymn by that name. (Heidegger, 1977a, p. 16, emphasis in original) Here, technological control replaces poetic response, as ‘‘language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over things’’ (Heidegger, 1977b, p. 199). 13 When enframing fully displaces ‘‘poetic dwelling’’ as the prevailing mode of human being, human beings are threatened with a fatal blindness, as mastery of the world blocks the fullness of being in the world. Heidegger (1966) concludes that ‘‘an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little. For precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life is preserved, an uncanny change in the world moves upon us’’ (p. 52, emphasis in original).

Thus, Nate and I affirm that we should engage in poetic discourse within debate in order to reshape our relationship with energy and the environment
Ecopoetics is the fasting way to return to the state of dwelling; adapting towards our original stance with nature through poetry allows us to separate nature and culture to overcome capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. Only poetic acts is the only way to show our thoughts and feelings

Peters 2002

[ Micheal A Peters- PhD in both education and philosophy. Written over 35 books and 300 articles on philosophical and criticisms alike. “Earthsongs: Ecopoetics, Heidegger and Dwelling” THE TRUMPETER VOL 18 NO 1, 2002, http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/2183/1/peters_irwin%5B1%5D.pdf//WYO-NG]

Jonanthan Bate’s[7] The Song of the Earth,[8] as he says, is a book about, “why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology.” He elaborates further: “It is a book about modern Western man’s alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home.”[9] Restoring us to the earth is what good ecopoetry can do and ecopoetics (rather than ecocriticism) is not just the pastoral theme, which Bates asserts, following de Man, may be “in fact, the only poetic theme,” it is poetry itself .[10] Ecopoetics is more phenomenological than political and while its force does not depend upon versification or metrical form, it constitutes the most direct return to the place of dwelling. Bate[11] explains:
Ecopoetics asks in what respects a poem may be a making (Greek poiesis) of the dwelling place – the prefix eco- is derived from the Greek oikos, “the home or place of dwelling.” And as he says elsewhere: I think of this book as an “experiment in ecopoetics”. The experiment is this: to see what happens when we regard poems as imaginary parks in which we may breath[e] an air that is not toxic and accommodate ourselves to a mode of dwelling that is not alienated.[12] When Bate uses the concept “dwelling” he is self-consciously drawing on his earlier understanding of Wordsworth[13] —for Wordsworth “remains the founding father for a thinking of poetry in relation to place, to our dwelling on the earth”[14] —and running this sense of place together with the special sense that Heidegger[15] gives the term in two essays based on lectures delivered in the early 1950s (“Building Dwelling Thinking,” 1950 and “…Poetically Man Dwells …,” 1951). Indeed, there is a peculiar set of relationships between place, poetry, and bioregion. At school, many New Zealand children found Wordsworth fanciful, though they were forced to read and rote memorize his poetry as part of the curriculum. They did not understand his poetry because they did not appreciate the local topography and landscape of the Lake District, which is much more manicured, man-made over many generations, and “tame” compared to the relatively wild and uninhabited New Zealand land and seascapes. Clearly, the set of relationships between place, poetry, and region generates a further set of questions about the construction of the canon and the curriculum, the role and representation of Nature in the formation of national and cultural identity—in defining a people through representing their relationship to the (home)land—and pedagogy.[16] Within this set of relationships it is easy to see how a particular representation of Nature became mainstream. Romanticism depends upon the assumption in the west of the separation of nature and culture, for before it can contemplate any spiritual union or sacred reunification, separation is required. Thus, Romanticism, developed through a series of associations—intuition over rationality, feelings over beliefs, with a sense of mysticism and oneness with Nature—as though it was possible to overcome the alienation and reification that had emerged with capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. Nature was often pictured by the Romantics as the garden, the landscape, the village, or the earth that conjured up an idealized pastoral space—a paradisical Eden—which constituted the natural habitat for the soul. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth suggests that poetry is “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,”[17] but also “emotion recollected in tranquillity” leading to the creation of a new emotion in the mind.[18] The creative nature of poetic act is said to be the ability to be affected by “absent things as if they were present” and to express “thoughts and feelings” that arise “without immediate external excitement.”[19] Yet what really distinguished Wordsworth from other poets belonging to the Romantic Movement was his “view of nature as having palpable moral significance.”[20]

There is currently no eco-poetics or eco-criticism that exists in the squo- looking at our policies and evaluating how we feel about the problems in front of us is key to bring around the change of speaking for nature, not just to it. Poetry is necessary to step away from the technological world view we hold

Peters 2002

While we have feminist history, philosophy, and literary theory, there is no equivalence promoting environmentalism, no ecocriticism or ecopoetics. In the 1970s and 1980s there was no text of ecological literary criticism and certainly nothing resembling a tradition. And he argues the case for theory (against activism alone) by suggesting that, “Before you can change policies, you must changes attitudes.”[25] He writes: “a green reading of history—and literary history and philosophy and every other humanistic field—is a necessary precondition for a deeper understanding of our environmental crisis.”[26] Green cultural studies were slow to develop because “environmentalism does not conform to the model of “identity politics.” In other words, “The ecocritical project always involves speaking for its subject rather than speaking as its subject: a critic may speak as a woman or as a person of colour, but cannot speak as a tree.”[27] Environmentalists must speak on behalf of the non-human Other, of which we are part. While Bate[28] criticises the “postmodern self-indulgence of the Parisian gurus” against the grounded work of Raymond Williams and others, nevertheless, he turns to Heidegger (we might say, one of the forefathers of poststructuralism) to explicate the claim that “Poetry is the song of the earth.”[29] In this regard he traces the interconnections between three questions that occupied Heidegger in his later years: What are poets for? What does it mean to dwell upon the earth? and, What is the essence of technology? Bate proceeds to give an account, somewhat truncated but largely accurate, of Heidegger’s view of technology as a mode of revealing and the distinctive form it takes in the modern era, where “enframing” conceals the truth of things. Referring to Heidegger’s discussion of original Greek sense of techne, and poiesis as a bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful, Bate arrives at the proposition that “poetry is our way of stepping outside the frame of the technological, of reawakening the momentary wonder of unconcealment.”[30] Poetry, when we allow it to act on us, can “conjure up conditions such as dwelling and alienation in their very essence, not just in their linguistic particulars.”[31] Thus, “Poetry is the original admission of dwelling”[32] and dwelling is an authentic form of being, which avoids Cartesian dualism and subjective idealism. These are the conceptual connections that Bate makes in order to arrive at his conception of ecopoetics.

Ecopoetics is what truly enables us to return to the earth which is out home- it allows us to project our thoughts and feelings into a communicative space where we can imagine the world with our being

Peters 2002

Young 2004
[Damon A. Young-philosopher at the University of Melborne. “Not Easy Being Green: Process, Poetry and the Tyranny of Distance” Ethics, Place & Environment: A Journal of Philosophy & Geography. Feb 22, 2002. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1366879022000041605//WYO-NG]

For the ‘later’ Heidegger, the truth in each World is a matter of poetic ‘unconcealing’. In his oft-quoted words, ‘language is the house of Being’ (Heidegger, 1971b, p. 132). Here, language is not simply an internal expression of an external reality. Nor is language the externalisation of our internal reality. Rather, Heidegger (1971b) speaks of language as a kind of poiesis, meaning ‘making’, or ‘building’ (p. 214). Moreover, this ‘making’ works precisely because of physis, the ‘emerging and rising in itself of all things’. Not only do ‘all things’ develop from potentiality to actuality, but also from darkness to light, or hiddenness to unhiddenness. Many things do not ‘be’ for us, for they have not been taken into our World; they have not been ‘housed’ in language. Quite simply, ‘being loves to hide itself’ (Heraclitus, cited in Brogan, 1994, p. 227). With poiesis, we are ‘making’ a World by allowing it to rise up to us and be ‘unhidden’. Poiesis as language, in Heidegger’s (2000, p. 60) words, is ‘a naming of being … not just any saying, but that whereby everything steps into the open, which we can then talk about in everyday conversation’. Of course, as ‘building’, such poetry can be architecture, sculpture, or painting; each may ‘make’ the World for us (Heidegger, 1935, pp. 143–206; 1971b, pp. 361–363). Put simply, ‘poetry occurs not simply in poems, but wherever poiesis, ‘bringing forth’ of a previously concealed part of Being, occurs’ (Young, 2001b, p. 281). True poetry, in this sense, is not the introspective indulgence of melodramatic teenagers, or some kind of boutique lifestyle choice. Rather, it is the way in which a people bring parts of the world ‘to light’ and, in doing so, ‘make’ their World. This ‘making’, in turn, is something each of us can do to ‘reworld’ ourselves and others. Outside my study, for instance, is a huge elm tree. After reading the simple lines ‘You linger your little hour and are gone,/And still the woods sweep leaﬁly on’, in Robert Frost’s ‘On going unnoticed’ (1928, p. 146), I could see the tree anew. I began to see, for the ﬁrst time, the ‘leaﬁness’ of it: the mix of pale yellow and green, the way in which the leaves cluster on the upper boughs, and the contrast between the slow growth of the trunk and limbs, the wax and wane of the leaves in each season, and quick ﬂutter of the yellow and green in the breeze. This, in turn, allowed me to see the friendly bond between the searing summer sun of Melbourne, the shading ‘leafy sweep’ of the elm, and the cool eastern windows of my study and balcony. Consequently, ‘truly poetic words go “into the depths” of us, reminding us of those “hidden” elements of our Being that are removed from the “ready to hand” nature of our everyday lives’ (Young, 2001b, p. 280). With poetry, then, we are able to ‘open ourselves up’ to previously ‘hidden’ places, near or far.

Dwelling on our relationship with the environment is necessary to move away from current politics- as long as we keep our current structure we will always lose to technology. Poetry is the way that we save earth.

Peters 2002

In Bate’s terms, ecopoetics is experiential rather than descriptive, based as it is on the poet’s articulation of the relations between the environment and humankind. A green poem is a revelation of dwelling rather than a narrative of dwelling; it is “phenomenological before it is political.”[33] Ecopoetics is pre-political in the sense that it is “a Rousseauesque story about imagining a state of nature prior to the fall into property, into inequality and into the city.”[34] For this reason, “ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness,” and when it comes to politics or practice we have to speak in other discourses.[35] Bate argues, “The dilemma of Green reading is that it must, yet it cannot, separate ecopoetics from ecopolitics”—the very problem that besets Martin Heidegger himself, and typifies the connections between deep ecology and fascism. One cannot consistently derive a Green politics from ecopoetics, just as one cannot derive a Green politics from scientific ecology. Bate consolidates this position by arguing: “Green has no place in the traditional political spectrum …”[36] and, “Nature is so various that no consistent political principles can be derived from it.”[37] Thus, for Bate: “the very conception of a ‘politics of nature’ is self-contradictory: politics is what you get when you fall from nature. That is the point of Rousseau’s second Discourse.”[38] He allegedly avoids “Heidegger’s dilemma” (if we can use this shorthand to stand for the problem of whether Heidegger’s Nazism arises out of his philosophy) by insisting on the radical separation of discourses—theoretical/practical, poetic/political—and by suggesting that while “[h]istories, theories, political systems are all enframings,”[39] “[e]copoetics renounces the mastery of enframing knowledge and listens instead to the voice of art.”[40] As he suggests: “To read ecopoetically is … to find ‘clearings’ or ‘unconcealments.’”[41] This enables him the Heideggerian parting conclusion: If mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth.[42]

POETRY IS THE BEST DISCURSE METHOD TO TRANSFORM OUR UNDERSTANDING OF GLOBAL POLITICS BY DISRUPTING STATIC, ENTRENCHED VALUES AND CREATING NEW SPACES FOR THOUGHT AS PART OF A SLOW TRANSFORMATION OF VALUES.
BLEIKER 2K (Roland, coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program @ U of Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, )

Poetry does, in a sense, what critical international theory seeks to do: instead of accepting prevailing structures of the world as given, it questions them in an effort to create space for alternative and perhaps more inclusive ways of organising global life.46 Poetry reveals how important political transformations may occur through practices of dissent that deliberately and self-consciously stretch, even violate existing linguistic rules. ‘Inventions from the unknown’, Arthur Rimbaud says, ‘demand new forms’.47 The present, relatively limited analysis of the Prenzlauer Berg poetry scene should thus be seen as a case study that illustrates how, in a much larger context, discursive forms of dissent have the potential to transgress boundaries and engender human agency, not by directly causing particular events, but by creating a language that provides us with different eyes, with the opportunity to reassess anew the spatial and political dimensions of global life. Discursive and transversal forms of dissent unleash their power only through a long process that entails digging, slowly, underneath the foundations of authority. They work through a gradual and largely inaudible transformation of values. A poetic search for thinking space, for instance, acknowledges that there are no quick and miraculous forms of dissent to discursive domination. Poetry resists the temptation to provide ‘concrete’ answers to ‘concrete’ questions. It does not bring certainty. In fact, poetry generates more questions, creates ambivalence and doubt. And in doing so it comes to terms with the death of God, makes room for a more tolerant politics, recognises that a society is oppressive and closed if all major questions either have an answer or are considered irrational, absurd, taboo.48

As our efficiency in energy production has increased, so intimacy with energy has diminished. We’ve reduced energy to the standing disposable reserve, which sees only how we can put the world to work. This is the logic of destruction: without a shift in our understanding of energy, we’re doomed to nuclear build-up, resource depletion, and eco-annihilation.

Stoekl 07

(Allan, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Penn State University University Park, Bataille’s Peak, “Chapter 1: Rereading Bataille,” pgs 55-56wyo-mm) Just as there are two energetic sources of economic value, then—muscle power and inanimate fuel power—so too there are two kinds of expenditure. The stored and available energy derived from fossil or inanimate fuel expenditure, for production or destruction, is different in quality, not merely in quantity, from muscular energy. The latter is profoundly more and other than the mere “power to do work.” No intimacy (in the Bataillean sense) can be envisaged through the mechanized expenditure of fossil fuels. The very use of fossil and nonorganic fuels—coal, oil, nuclear— implies the effort to maximize production through quantification, the augmentation of the sheer quantity of things. Raw material becomes, as Heidegger put it, a standing reserve, a measurable mass whose sole function is to be processed, used, and ultimately discarded.28 It is useful, nothing more (or less), at least for the moment before it is discarded; it is related to the self only as a way of aggrandizing the latter’s stability and position. There is no internal limit, no angoisse or pain before which we shudder; we deplete the earth’s energy reserves as blandly and indifferently as the French revolutionaries (according to Hegel) chopped off heads: as if one were cutting off a head of cabbage. “Good” duality has completely given way to “bad.” As energy sources become more efficiently usable—oil produces a lot more energy than does coal, in relation to the amount of energy needed to extract it, transport it, and dispose of waste (ash and slag)—more material can be treated, more people and things produced, handled, and dumped. Consequently more food can be produced, more humans will be born to eat it, and so on (the carrying capacity of the earth temporarily rises). And yet, under this inanimate fuels regime, the very nature of production and above all destruction changes. Even when things today are expended, they are wasted under the sign of efficiency, utility. This very abstract quantification is inseparable from the demand of an efficiency that bolsters the position of a closed and demanding subjectivity. We “need” cars and SUVs, we “need” to use up gas, waste landscapes, forests, and so on: it is all done in the name of the personal lifestyle we cannot live without, which is clearly the best ever developed in human history, the one everyone necessarily wants, the one we will fight for and use our products (weapons) to protect. We no longer destroy objects, render them intimate, in a very personal, confrontational potlatch; we simply leave items out for the trash haulers to pick up or have them hauled to the junkyard. Consumption (la consommation) in the era of the standing reserve, the frame work (Ge - Stell), entails, in and through the stockpiling of energy, the stockpiling of the human: the self itself becomes an element of the standing reserve, a thing among other things. There can hardly be any intimacy in the contemporary cycle of production -consumption -destruction, the modern and degraded version of expenditure. As Bataille put it, concerning intimacy: Intimacy is expressed only under one condition by the thing [la chose]: that this thing fundamentally be the opposite of a thing, the opposite of a product, of merchandise: a burn -off [consumation] and a sacrifice. Since intimate feeling is a burn -off, it is burning -off that expresses it, not the thing, which is its negation. (OC, 7: 126; AS 132: italics Bataille’s) War, too, reflects this nonintimacy of the thing: fossil fuel and nuclear powered explosives and delivery systems make possible the impersonal destruction of lives in great numbers and at a great distance. Human beings are now simply quantities of material to be processed and destroyed in wars (whose purpose is to assure the continued availability of fossil fuel resources). Killing in modern warfare is different in kind from that carried out by the Aztecs. All the sacrificial elements, the elements by which the person has been transformed in and through death, have disappeared. Bataille, then, should have distinguished more clearly between intimate and impersonal varieties of useless squandries when it came to his discussion of the Marshall Plan.29 (In the same way, he should have distinguished between energy that is stockpiled and put to use and energy that is fundamentally “cursed” not only in and through bodily excess but in its ability to do “work.”)30 It is not merely a question of our attitude toward expenditure, our “self -consciousness”: also fundamental is how it is carried out. Waste based on the consumption of fossil or inanimate (nuclear) fuels cannot entail intimacy because it is dependent on the thing as thing, it is dependent on the energy reserve, on the stockpiled, planned, and protected self: “[This is] what we know from the outside, which is given to us as physical reality (at the limit of the commodity, available without reserve). We cannot penetrate the thing and its only meaning is its material qualities, appropriated or not for some use [utilité], understood in the productive sense of the term. (OC, 7: 126; AS, 132; italics Bataille’s) The origin of this destruction is therefore to be found in the maximizing of the efficiency of production; modern, industrialized waste is fundamentally only the most efficient way to eliminate what has been over produced. Hence the Marshall Plan, proposing a gift -giving on a vast, mechanized scale, is different in kind from, say, a Tlingit potlatch ceremony. “Growth” is the ever -increasing rhythm and quantity of the treatment of matter for some unknown and unknowable human purpose and that matter’s subsequent disposal/ destruction. One could never “self -consciously” reconnect with intimacy through the affirmation of some form of indus trial production -destruction. To see consumer culture as in some way the fulfillment of Bataille’s dream of a modern -day potlatch is for this reason a fundamental misreading of The Accursed Share.31 Bataille’s critique is always an ethics; it entails the affirmation of a “general economy” in which the particular claims of the closed subjectivity are left behind. The stockpiled self is countered, in Bataille, by the generous and death -bound movement of an Amélie, of a Sadean heroine whose sacrifice puts at risk not only an object, a commodity, but the stability of the “me.” To affirm a consumption that, in spite of its seeming delirium of waste, is simply a treatment of matter and wastage of fossil energy in immense quantities, lacking any sense of internal limits (angoisse), and always with a particular and efficacious end in view (“growth,” “comfort,” “personal satisfaction,” “consumer freedom”) is to misrepresent the main thrust of Bataille’s work. The point, after all, is to enable us to attain a greater “self -consciousness,” based on the ability to choose between modes of expenditure. Which entails the greatest intimacy? Certainly not nuclear devastation (1949) or the simple universal depletion of the earth’s resources and the wholesale destruction of ecosystems (today).

Not addressing the management and objectification that is continuing in the squo will lead to nuclear disaster, environmental catastrophe, but a complete loss of who we are and our ability to create relationships

McWhorter 92

[Ladelle McWhorter-professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and women, gender, and sexualities studies at university of Richmond. “Heidegger and the Earth: essays in environmental philosophy,” University of Toronto Press Incorporated, http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rVxSkV511dcC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=heidegger+and+the+earth+mcwhorter&ots=3WrpN30zlv&sig=17qGWHvGkrzrIvdZpX_46gQn2pE#v=onepage&q=heidegger%20and%20the%20earth%20mcwhorter&f=false//WYO-NG]

What is most illustrative is often also what is most common. Today, on all sides of ecological debate we hear, with greater and greater frequency, the word management. On the one hand, business people want to manage natural resources so as to keep up profits. On the other hand, conservationists want to manage natural resources so that there will be plenty of coal and oil and recreational facilities for future generations. These groups and factions within them debate vociferously over which management policies are the best, that is, the most efficient and manageable. Radical environmentalists damn both groups and claim it is human population growth and rising expectations that are in need of management. But wherever we look, wherever we listen, we see and hear the term management. We are living in a veritable age of management. Before a middle class child graduates from high school she or he is already preliminarily trained in the arts of weight management, stress management, and time management, to name just a few. As we approach middle age we continue to practice these essential arts, refining and adapting our regulatory regimes as the pressures of life increase and the body begins to break down. We have become a society of managers - of our homes, careers, portfolios, estates, even of our own bodies - so is it surprising that we set ourselves up as the managers of the earth itself? And yet, as thoughtful earth-dwellers we must ask, what does this signify? In numerous essays - in particular the beautiful 1953 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" - Heidegger speaks of what he sees as the danger of dangers in this, our age. This danger is a kind of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness that Heidegger thought could result not only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in the loss of what makes us the kind of beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in thoughtful relationship to things. This forgetfulness is not a forgetting of facts and their relationships; it is a forgetfulness of something far more important and far more fundamental than that. He called it forgetfulness of 'the mystery'.

This drive to control the environment is the exact reason that led to things like the holocaust- complete control of things like the environment is no different than controlling extermination camps, putting people in famine, or manufacturing weapons.

Athanasiou 2003

[Athena Athanasiou teaches at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, in Athens, Greece. “Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1 (2003) 125-162, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/differences/v014/14.1athanasiou.html//WYO-NG]

Heidegger's essential questioning of technology can give us an interesting cue, however. Technology for Heidegger is not just a means to an end and an assemblage of equipment—as the "uncannily correct" instrumental definition of technology maintains, according to him("Question" 5)—but also truth and a mode of revealing, a destining of Being, the very mode of Being's manifesting of itself. In the Heideggerian idiom, modern technology is in force in the vanishing figures of an aesthetico-material arsenal of artifacts: the chalice, the ancient temple, the peasant shoes. How does the extermination camp enter this enchanted semiotic phantasmagoria? Is there a way to refocus our attention and move beyond Heidegger's intentions and disavowals, and recognize in his philosophical thinking "on the grounds of technology" the conditions of intelligibility by which the biopolitical technology of modernity seeks to mark off unthinkable/unlivable life from possible/recognizable configurations of human life? The operation of this technology cannot be captured, as the following remarks attempt to show, in a construal of language as authorizing and authenticating self-identity. One would need a more shaded and oblique poetics of language as difference, political as much as psychic, in order to start thinking the question of how the body of the effaced Other—ultimately disposable and transposable—emerges, albeit obscurely and uninvited, in Heidegger's language. Let us consider the question of taking up a sign—in particular, the injurious possibilities of it erability—in Heidegger's writings on technology. Heidegger delivered a cycle of four lectures on the subject of technology at Bremen in 1949. In the only one that remains unpublished, he wrote . Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs . ( qtd. in Lacoue- Labarthe 34) 6 Several things deserve notice in this gesture of repudiation, wherein Nazi death emerges in the consciousness of the Heideggerian text as a paradeigma (etymologically associated with what is para - [beside or amiss], what is subsidiary to diction [pointing out in words], deiknynai [to show, to prove]). This oblique reference to the extermination camp—as an example, an instance, and a paradigm—relates mass annihilation to industrial agricultural production, and both to a certain indirect sense of Enframing that underlies the essence of modern technology for Heidegger. The "now" that serves to connect temporally the two realms of the formulation signals a point in time that heralds the Other of human finitude's time, the "brink of a precipitous fall," the advent and event of the regime of calculative-representational thinking: in a word, the time of Technik . What concerns me in this scene of being-in-technology is precisely this: that Heidegger's language manifests the camp in the context of calculative and objectifying technology and in its ambiguous proximity with technologies of agricultural production; at the same time, as Heidegger turns his attention to the problem of technology his text comes to be haunted by a force arguably exceeding its author's writerly intention and control, namely, the historical specificity of the dead other. Heidegger's fugitive illustration of the bodies of the camp à propos of his meditation on the loss of "the human" and its originary authenticity in the time of modern technology may be seen as a hint but also as a symptom or signal as well as a symbolic lapse. Is Heidegger putting into play his own notion of the hint? "A hint can give its hint so simply," he writes, "[. . .] that we release ourselves in its direction without equivocation. But it can also give its hint in such a manner that it refers [End Page 132] us [. . .] back to the dubiousness against which it warns us" ("The Nature of Language" 96). Heidegger's "hint" ( der Wink ) emerges as a shadowy trace that inscribes itself in the precarious flickering between presence and nonpresence, evidence and non evidence, and above all, revelation and dissimulation in the topos of textual representation. This opening up of present phenomenal actuality by and to proliferating suggestion alludes to the very spectral nature of referential representation, its incomplete and dismembered texture and structure. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Heidegger's writings on technology is the conviction that the question concerning technology cannot be posed or thought apart from the question concerning the tradition of Western metaphysics. Heidegger's questioning of technology should be seen within the context of his critique of the way in which metaphysics has construed—or not—the problematic relation between Being and beings, between Being andtime. And yet, Heidegger's questioning appears to be indelibly marked by a residual investment in a particular metaphysics whereby the determination of essence is knotted together with authorial disengagement; the disarticulation of the thematized "production of corpses" from any authorial or political response becomes the very condition under which the extermination becomes posable and nameable in the Heideggerian textual body. In a text that asserts the preeminence of the question , the camp and the author's relation to it remain unarticulated, unasked, unaddressed, and unquestionable, the very limit to (Heidegger's own) questioning. Questioning, then, the piety of thinking in Heidegger's terms ("Question" 3–35) becomes not only a master modality but also an authoritative means of avoiding the politics of address. 7 In a similar vein, it is instructive to read Heidegger's deployment of the trope of analogy through the lens of his special relation to metaphoric language (which he mixes with technical language), a relation consisting both in identifying metaphor with metaphysics and in putting metaphor into play. On the one hand, there is an experience in language and with language that entails the tropological reinscription and disinscription of metaphor; on the other is Heidegger's ambivalentel aboration on the divestiture and overcoming of metaphysics as an alternative mode of conceiving the real, beyond the calculative-representational frame incited by modern Technik . The role of metaphor in envisaging or creating a novel reality through redescription signals the point at which motorized agricultural production and the mass obliteration of lives in gas chambers and concentration camps are posed in tandem

Contributing to the idea of controlling humans as commodities turns them into mere objects that have no value, and there lies no values behind their lives

McWhorter 92

The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows - not in its penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in what it forgets, what it itself conceals. It forgets that any other truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management. We can never have, or know, it all; we can never manage everything. What is now especially dangerous about this sense of our own managerial power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to be stored or consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the world, all things as mere Bestand, standing-reserve. All is here simply for human use. No plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any significance, apart from human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has any intrinsic value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will. Whether we believe that God gave Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or rationality) in the face of ecological fragility makes us always right, we managerial, technological thinkers tend to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be managed, bought, and sold. The forest is timber; the river, a power source. Even people have become resources, human resources, personnel to be managed, or populations to be controlled.

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Created by Nate Graziano on 2012/09/29 12:33

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