Security/Targeting K- Targeting Links

WARFARE NO LONGER FUNCTIONS IN ACCORDANCE WITH COLD WAR LOGIC INSTEAD, WAR HAS BECOME AN EVER PRESENT PHENOMENON OF INTERNALIZED FEAR Chow, 2006 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and English, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, Duke University Press, pg. 30-33) In the essay cited above, Heidegger argues that in the age of modem technology, the world has become a "world picture." By this, he means that the process of (visual) objectification has become so indispensable in the age of modern scientific research that understanding"conceiving" and "grasping" the worldis now an act inseparable from the act of seeingfrom a certain form of "picturing." However, he adds, "picture" in this case does not mean an imitation. As he explains: World picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.' For Heidegger, the world becoming a picture is what distinguishes the essence of the modem age, and he emphasizes the point "that the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man's becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is."19 By the word subiectum, he is referring to "thatwhich-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself."20 As such "ground," men struggle to conquer the world as their own particular pictures, bringing into play an "unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things." As is clearly demonstrated by the case of the United States, science and research have thus become "an absolutely necessary form of this establishing of self in the world."21 Supplementing Heidegger, we may say that in the age of bombing, the world has also been transformed intois essentially conceived and grasped asa target. To conceive of the world as a target is to conceive of it as an object to be destroyed. As W. J. Perry, a former United States Under Secretary of State for Defense, said: "If I had to sum up current thinking on precision missiles and saturation weaponry in a single sentence, I'd put it like this: once you can see the target, you can expect to destroy it."22 Increasingly, war would mean the production of maximal visibility and illumination for the purpose of maximal destruction. It follows that the superior method of guaranteeing efficient destruction by visibility during the Second World War was aerial bombing, which the United States continued even after Japan had made a conditional surrender.21 If the dropping of the atomic bomb created "deterrence," as many continue to believe to this day, what is the nature of deterrence? (We can ask the same question about "defense," "protection," "security," and other similar concepts.) The atomic bomb did not simply stop the war; it also stopped the war by escalating and intensifying violence to a hitherto unheard of scale . What succeeded in "deterring" the war was an ultimate (am)munition; destruction was now outdone by destruction itself. The elimination of the actual physical warring activities had the effect not of bringing war to an end but instead of promoting and accelerating terrorism, and importantly, the terrorism of so-called "deterrent" weaponry. The mushroom cloud, therefore, is also the image of this semiotic transfer, this blurring of the boundary between war and peace. The transfer ushered in the new age of relativity and virtuality, an age in which powers of terror are indistinguishable from powers of "deterrence," and technologies of war indissociable from practices of peace. These new forces of relativity and virtuality are summarized in the following passages from Virilio: There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perceptionthat is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of object...

... By demonstrating that they would not recoil from a civilian holocaust, the Americans triggered in the minds of the enemy that information explosion which Einstein, towards the end of his life, thought to be as formidable as the atomic blast itself. ... Even when weapons are not employed, they are active elements of ideological conquest .24 This fuzzing of the line between war and representation, between war technology and peacetime technology, has brought about a number of consequences. First, the visual rules and boundaries of war altered. While battles formerly tended to be fought with a clear demarcation of battlefronts versus civilian spaces, the aerial bomb, by its positionings in the skies, its intrusion into spaces that used to be off-limits to soldiers, and its distance from the enemies (a distance which made it impossible fat the enemies to fight back), destroyed once and for all those classic visual boundaries that used to define battle. Second, with the transformation of the skies into war zones from which to attack, war was no longer a matter simply of armament or of competing projectile weaponry; rather, it became redefined as a matter of the logistics of perception, with seeing as its foremost function, its foremost means of preemptive combat. Third, in yet a different way, the preemptiveness of seeing as a means of destruction continues to operate as such even after the war. Insofar as the image of the atomic blast serves as a peacetime weapon to mobilize against war, it tends to preclude other types of representation. For a long time nuclear danger remained the predominant target against which peace coalitions aimed their efforts, while the equally disastrous effects caused by chemical and biological weapons (nerve gases such as satin and bacteria such as anthrax) seldom received the same kind of extended public consideration until the Gulf War of 1991. The overwhelming effect of the continual imaging of the mushroom cloud means that the world has been responding to the nuclear blast as if by mimicry, by making the nuclear horror its point of identification and attack, and by being oblivious (until Fairly recently) to other forms of damage to the ecosphere that have not attained the same level of visibility. THIS FORM OF ONTOLOGICAL VIOLENCE MASQUERADES AS PEACE WHILE HIDING THE STRUCTURAL ANTAGONISM THAT RESULTS FROM ITS DRIVE TOWARDS TECHNOLOGICAL PERFECTION Chow, 2006 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and English, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, Duke University Press, pg. 38-39) Once the relations among war, racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as some still do, that the recognizable features of modem war its impersonality, coerciveness, and deliberate crueltyare "divergences" from the "antipathy" to violence and to conflict that characterize the modern world.41 Instead, it would be incumbent on us to realize that the pursuit of warwith its use of violenceand the pursuit of peacewith its cultivation of knowledgeare the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the coin that I have been calling "the age of the world target." Rather than being irreconcilable opposites, war and peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a virtualized world. More crucially still, only the privileged nations of the world can afford to wage war and preach peace at one and the same time. As Sherry writes, "The United States had different resources with which to be fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the will to destroy."46 From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique to the United States a point which is easy enough to substantiatewhat is nonetheless remarkable is the manner in which such acts are, in the United States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and the pursuit of peace . In a country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions by an electorate, violence simply cannotas it can in totalitarian countriesexist in the raw. Even the most violent acts must be adorned with a benign, rational story. It is in the light of such interlocking relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the following comments about area studies, the academic establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the "humane" practices of peacetime learning.

LIKEWISE, WITHIN THIS GLOBAL ENFRAMING, POLITICAL ENTITIES CAN ONLY REVEAL THEMSELVES IN TERMS OF THE TARGET, ONTOLOGICALLY FLATTENED BEFORE THE ALL ENCOMPASSING SOVEREIGN EGO OF THE BOMBER Chow, 2006 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture & Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and English, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, Duke University Press, pg. 40-41) Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the "scientific" and "objective" production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special "areas" became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target.52 In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits of higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as warif, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes53 is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to "know" the other cultures? Can "knowledge" that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare's accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign "self"/"eye"the "I"that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just thata target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber . As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bombersuch as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapterwill never receive the attention that is due to them. "Knowledge," however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences.54 This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by "the absence of a definable object"-and by "the problem of the vanishing object."

Security/Targeting K- Security Links

THE AFF IS COMPLICIT IN SECURITIZATION--THIS VIOLENT ONTOLOGY REFUSES TO QUESTION ITSELF AND INSTEAD REMAINING COMFORTABLE IN ITS CHAMPIONING OF CERTAINTY AND ORDER METAPHYSICAL TRUTHS GUARANTEEING SYSTEMATIC ERROR REPLICATION AND CONSERVATIVISM Burke, 2007 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10.2, Muse) By itself, such an account of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides only a general insight into the perseverance of military violence as a core element of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think military violence works. As I argued earlier, such an ontology is married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought that claims to link violent means to political ends predictably and controllably, and which, by doing so, combines military action and national purposes into a common -- and thoroughly modern -- horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic potentials of modernity in thought, it is helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology -- one that is modern in its adherence to modern scientific models of truth, reality and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific truth from the physical sciences (such as mathematics and physics) onto human behaviour, politics and society. For example, the military theorist and historian Martin van Creveld has argued that one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his 'ideas seemed to have chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial revolution'.54 Set into this epistemological matrix, modern politics and government engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which all of the world's resources -- mineral, animal, physical, human -- are made part of a machinic process of which war and violence are viewed as normal features.
These are the deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian strategic reason. One of the most revealing contemporary examples comes from the writings (and actions) of Henry

wrote during the Vietnam war that after 1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy'.55 Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States, but in a particular epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data -- the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set
Kissinger, a Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He the West apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian At the same time , Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that, in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery were harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had 'encouraged political view that the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer'.56 multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability. Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in values,

He mourned that 'the greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based around a hunger for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony: For the two decades after 1945, our
goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). international activities were based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in "emerging countries". Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political

This direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too simple.

Kissinger's statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were to continue in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to 'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par excellence, had already decided
multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers.58 that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal to accept this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of dja vu as another Republican Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein

In this struggle with the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation, we are witness to an enduring political and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of continual uncertainty. Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara
from power. and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule -- over numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technology and its associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61

THE DRIVE FOR SECURITY AND PREDICTABILITY IN THE INTERNATIONAL SPHERE ARE DRIVEN BY EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ENFRAMING CAPABLE OF RENDING THE HUMAN POPULATION AS STANDING RESERVE MAKING VIOLENCE INEVITABLE. Burke, 2007 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10.2, Muse) What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action. The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made.

Security/Targeting K- Terrorism Links

THE WAR ON TERRORISM HAS BECOME A WILL-TO-WILL THAT ADMITS NO QUESTIONING IN FAVOR OF ENFRAMING THE GLOBE SUCH THAT IT CAN ONLY REVEAL ITSELF IN TERMS OF CERTAINTY AND STRATEGYTHIS ONTOLOGICAL MOVE MAKES THE POLITICAL PHENOMENON OF TERRORISM INEVITABLE BY WILLFULLY IGNORING TERRORISMS ONTOLOGICAL NATURE. Mitchell, 2005 (Andrew J., Stanford University, Heidegger and Terrorism, Research in Phenomenology, 35) There can be no security. If being is what threatens then security as the absence of terror would be the absence of being. But the absence of being is precisely the threat. Obviously, security is just as little to be found in the absence of danger as it is in the consummation of the danger, total annihilation. Instead, security is to be found within the danger and threat of being. But how? Heidegger likewise provides us endangered
ones with a way of thinking security and preservation. This is his fourth contribution to a thinking of terrorism. Security and assurance, both equally apt translations of the German Sicherung, are indissociable from certainty (Gewiheit) for Heidegger. In the course of the 1968 seminar in Le Thor, Heidegger provides a brief history of this relation between security and certainty: the quest for certainty appears first in the domain of faith, as the search for the certainty of

salvation (Luther), then in the domain of physics as the search for the mathematical certainty of nature (Galileo) (VS, 30/13). Heidegger unites these two concerns for certainty within a single concept: assurance (Sicherung), In the quest for mathematical certainty, what is sought is the assurance of man in nature, in the sensible; in the quest for the certainty of salvation, what is sought is the assurance of man in the supra-sensible world (VS, 30/14).22 Certainty is in the service of assurance or security and is only the epistemological aspect of a greater ontological condition of security. Security is freedom from uncertainty in all of its forms, sensible, super-sensible, and ontological. Salvation and the mathematical certainty of nature are themselves to be understood as instances of an ontological assurance against uncertainty. Ontological uncertainty would be found in conceptions of singularity, where the uniqueness of a thing renders it irreplaceable and thus opens us to the possibility of loss, or in conceptions of alterity, where the other is not anticipated and confined in advance to the strictures of categorical thought. Uncertainty in this broader sense is eliminated in security. One is securely insulated against these differences of the world. For modern thought, the securing of representations for representational thinking provided the backdrop for the arrival of certainty (see GA 7: 82; EP, 98). Modern metaphysics itself, according to Heidegger, means the securing of the human being by itself and for itself (GA 67: 167). Such a policy must be abandoned as the human becomes more and more a piece of the standing-reserve like everything else. This postmodern security is accomplished through bestowal and appraisal of value, Securement, as the obtaining of security, is a grounding in valuation (GA 5: 262 /195; tm). What is valued can be replaced by something of equal value, and this fact lies at the center of our conception of security today. Securement, as a giving of value, assures us against loss by making the world replaceable. In this respect, security is nothing other than total availability, imagined as a world of utter transparency where all resources, human and otherwise, are constantly surveilled and traced through their paths of circulation. The transformation in being coincident with
the end of modern warfare likewise puts an end to modern politics and establishes in its place an impersonal commitment to the furthering of planned replacement. Security is only possible when everything works according to these plans, and this requires leaders, whose true function now becomes evident. For the plan, the necessity of leadership, that is, the planned calculation of the securing of the whole of beings, is required (GA 7: 8990/EP, 105; tm). The demand for security is always a call for

such Fhrers. Planning is a matter of ensuring the smooth and frictionless circulation of resources along channels and pipelines of order and delivery. The plans success is assured from the outset, because beings are now in
essence planable. The mathematical tracking of stock and supplies becomes a total tracking when things have become completely available. Nothing is concealed from this taking of inventory, with the effect that the mathematical model of the thing is no different from the thing itself. The mathematical modeling of things, an operation that Heidegger traces back to Ockham and the nominalist split between word and thing (see VS, 3031/1314), is paradigmatic for the disappearance of identifiably discrete beings under the rule of technology. The model is no longer a representation of what is modeled but, in a paradoxical manner, the thing itself.

Nothing beyond the things mathematical model is recognized . Everything essential to the thing is contained in the model, without remainder. Such is the truth of the standing-reserve; it is a collapse of the distances that made possible representation. Without that spacing, there is only the suffocating rush of the standing-reserve
along the circuitry of the plan. The plan makes manifest the self-willing nature of technology, in that the plan has no purpose other than to assure its own expansion and increase. For the plan to function, it is therefore necessary that beings be consumed and their replacements follow right upon them. The plan plans for consumption, outlining the paths and channels that the standing-reserve will occupy in its compelled obedience to order. The world wars have pointed towards this end, according to Heidegger, for They press toward a securing of resources [Bestandsicherung] for

a constant form of consumption (GA 7: 88; EP, 1034; tm). This consumption is synonymous with replacement, since there is nothing lost in consumption that is not immediately replaced. The plan is to protect itself from loss by completely insulating itself from uncertainty. The plan seeks the all-inclusive [restlose] securing of the ordering of order (GA 7: 92; EP, 107; tm). Order is only secured when there is nothing that resists it, nothing that remains in disorder. Any remainder would stand outside of the prevailing order, as would any difference, in complete disorder. There is another Nietzschean intimation in this, as Heidegger reads the will to power as a drive to secure and order all chaos. Without remainder (restlose), without rest, the standing-reserve threatens to encompass everything in a monotonous, swirling sameness. The more secure the world becomes, the greater is the abandonment of being as it is further enframed within the plan. Homeland security is thus an oxymoron, since one of the most prominent effects of planning is the elimination of national differences and homelands. Security itself is precisely the planned elimination of differences, and as for homeland, it is ever more difficult to conceive of a homeland that would be nationally distinct from another. This is not to be understood as a complaint against internationalism either, for Just as the
distinction between war and peace has become untenable, the distinction between national and international has also collapsed (GA 7: 92; EP, 107). We have already seen that Heidegger attributes a will to the annihilation of homeland to Americanism; what needs to be added to this view is that there is not one form of government any different; each is run by leaders: The uniformity of

beings arising from the emptiness of the abandonment of Being, in which it is only a matter of the calculable security of its order, an order which it subjugates to the will to will, this uniformity also conditions everywhere in advance of all national differences the uniformity of leadership [Fhrerschaft], for which all forms of government are only one instrument of leadership among others. (GA 7: 93; EP, 108; tm) Government and politics are simply further means of directing ways of life according to plan; and no one, neither terrorist nor politician, should be able to alter these carefully constructed ways of life. Ways of life are
themselves effects of the plan, and the predominant way of life today is that of an all-consuming Americanism. National differences fall to the wayside. The homeland, when not completely outmoded, can only appear as commodified quaintness. All governments participate in the eradication of national differences. Insofar as Americanism represents the attempt to annihilate the homeland, then under the aegis of the abandonment of being, all governments and forms of leadership become Americanism. The loss of national

differences is accordant with the advent of terrorism, since terrorism knows no national bounds but, rather, threatens difference and boundaries as such. Terrorism is everywhere, where everywhere no longer refers to a collection of distinct places and locations but instead to a here that is the same as there, as every there. The threat of terrorism is not international, but antinational or, to strain a Heideggerian formulation, unnational. Homeland security, insofar as it destroys the very thing that it claims to protect, is nothing opposed to terrorism, but rather the consummation of its threat. Our leaders, in their attempt to secure the world against terrorism, only serve to further drive the world towards its homogenized state. The elimination of difference in the standing-reserve along with the elimination of national differences serve to identify the threat of terrorism with the quest for security. The absence of this threat would be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absence of being as well. Security is only needed where there is a threat. If a threat is not perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then there is no need for security. Security is for those who know they can be injured, for those who can be damaged. Does America know that it can be damaged? If security requires a recognition of ones own vulnerability, then security can only be found in the acknowledgment of ones threatened condition, and this means that it can only be found in a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this reason, all of the planned securities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Security requires that we preserve the threat, and this means that we must act in the office of preservers.As preservers, what we are charged to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment that inhabits it. Preserving a thing means to not challenge it forth into technological availability, to let it maintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essencing of being does not make of it a subjective matter, for there is no isolated subject in preservation, but an opening of being.
Heidegger will name this the clearing of the truth (Wahrheit) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves (bewahrt). When a thing truthfully is, when it is what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein participates in the truth (preservation) of being. The truth of being is being as threat, and this threat only threatens when Dasein preserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the terrorization of being. On the contrary, Dasein is complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish terrorism. For this reason, a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remain skeptical of all the various

measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to circumvent it. These are so many attempts to do away with what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degree willful. This will can only impose itself upon being, can only draw out more and more of its wrath, and this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a never-ending supply. The will can only devastate the earth. Rather than approaching the world in terms of resources to be secured, true security can only be found in the preservation of the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security measures and the frantic organization of

resources that we directly assault the things we would preserve. The threat of being goes unheeded when things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, and surveilled . The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to rest. In the notes to the Evening Conversation, security is thought in just such terms: Security (what one understands by this) arises not from securing and the measures taken for this; security resides in rest [in der Ruhe] and is itself made superfluous by this. (GA 77: 244)23 The rest in question is a rest from the economic cycling and
circulating of the standing reserve. The technological unworld, the situation of total war, is precisely the era of restlessn ess (The term totality says nothing more; it names only the spread of the hitherto known into the restless [GA 69: 181]). Security is

superfluous here, which is only to say that it is unnecessary or useless. It is not found in utility, but in the preserved state of the useless. Utility and function are precisely the dangers of a txnh that has turned antagonistic towards nature. In rest, they no longer determine the being of the thing. In resting, things are free of security measures, but not for all that rendered insecure. Instead, they are preserved. There is no security; this is what we have to preserve. Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away from simple presence and absence. It thinks what Heidegger calls the between (das Zwischen). This between is a world of nonpresence and nonabsence. Annihilation is impossible for this world and so is security. The terror experienced today is a clue to the withdrawal of being. The world is denatured, drained of reality. Everything is threatened and the danger only ever increases. Dasein flees to a metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there to find security. But security cannot do away with the threat, rather it must guard it. Dasein guards the truth of being in the experience of terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being calls for terrorism and for terrorists. With the enframing of being and the circulation of standing-reserve, what is has already been destroyed. Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point. As we have seen, being does not linger behind the scenes but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorizeif, in other words, this is an age of terrorismthen being must call for terrorists. They are simply more slaves of the history of
beyng (GA 69: 209) and, in Heideggers eyes, no different from the politicians of the day in service to the cause of America nism. But someone might object, the terrorists are murderers and the politicians are not . Granting this objection despite its obvious navet, we can nonetheless see that both politicians and terrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its nonabsence, that the plan will reach everyone everywhere, and the other to ensure its nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into circulation by the threat of destruction. In this regard, human resources are no different from livestock, and with this, an evil worse than death has already taken place. Human resources do not die, they

perish. FAILURE TO AKNOWLEDGE THE METAPHYSICAL ASPECT OF TERRORISM ENSURES SERIAL POLICY FAILURE AND ESCALATING VIOLENCE. Mitchell, 2005 (Andrew J., Stanford University, Heidegger and Terrorism, Research in Phenomenology, 35) Heideggerian thought is a thinking that is engaged with its times. Whatever we might make of Heideggers political choices, the fact remains that even these decisions can be seen as attempts to think with and against the times. It is no stretch to say that our time today is the time of terrorisman uncommon time, no matter how common a claim this may be
especially in the United States. What then might a Heideggerian engagement with our time of terrorism bring to light? To answer this, it is important to note that Heideggerian thinking, as a thinking of being, must engage with its times precisely because it is through these times that we first find our access to being (or rather beyng, Seyn). For Heidegger, however, the contemporary scene is

dominated by technology and, as his later writings endeavor to show, this is indicative of a withdrawal of beyng. Heidegger distinguishes himself from the various foes of technology, however, by viewing this withdrawal as nothing negative on its own. Instead, this withdrawal is a further dispensation of being. Beyng withdraws and grants us these withdrawn times. This does not mean that beyng exists unperturbed somewhere behind or beyond these beings. The withdrawal of being is found in these abandoned beings themselves and is determinative for the way they exist. Heideggerian thinking, then, allows us to ask the question of our times and to think terrorism. My contention in the following is that the withdrawal of being shows itself today in terrorism , where beings exist as terrorized. Terrorism, in other words, is not simply the sum total of activities carried out by terrorist groups, but a challenge directed at beings as a whole. Terrorism is consequently a metaphysical issue, and it names the way in which beings show themselves today, i.e., as terrorized. This ontological point demands that there be the ontic threat of real terrorists. Further, this metaphysical aspect of terrorism also indicates that a purely political response to terrorism is destined to fail . Political reactions to terrorism, which depict terrorism from the outset as a political problem, miss the fact that terrorism itself, qua metaphysical issue, is coincident with a transformation in politics. That is to say, political responses to terrorism fail to think terrorism. In what follows I will elaborate some of the consequences of thinking terrorism as a question of being and sketch a few
characteristics of the politico-technological landscape against which terrorism takes place.

Security/Targeting K- Impact: Value to Life

THE POLITICS OF THE STANDING RESERVE REDUCE ALL BEINGS TO OBJECTS OF ITS OWN MANIPULATIONDESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE BY SACRIFICING ETHICS IN THE NAME OF PROTECTING INSTRUMENTAL VALUE Mitchell, 2005 (Andrew J., Stanford University, Heidegger and Terrorism, R esearch in Phenomenology, 35) The elimination of difference in the standing-reserve along with the elimination of national differences serve to identify the threat of terrorism with the quest for security. The absence of this threat would be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absence of being as well. Security is only needed where there is a threat. If a
threat is not perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then there is no need for security. Security is for those who know they can be injured, for those who can be damaged. Does America know that it can be damaged? If security requires a recognition of

ones own vulnerability, then security can only be found in the acknowledgment of ones threatened condition, and this means that it can only be found in a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this reason, all of the planned securities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Security requires that we preserve the threat, and this means that we must act in the office of preservers. As preservers, what we are charged to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment that inhabits it. Preserving a thing means to not challenge it forth into technological availability, to let it maintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essencing of being does not make of it a subjective matter, for there is no isolated subject
in preservation, but an opening of being. Heidegger will name this the clearing of the truth (Wahrheit) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves (bewahrt). When a thing truthfully is, when it is what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein participates in the truth (preservation) of being. The truth of being is being as threat, and this threat only threatens when Dasein preserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the terrorization of being. On the contrary, Dasein is complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish terrorism. For this reason, a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remain skeptical of all the various measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to circumvent it. These are so many attempts to do away with what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degree willful. This will can only impose itself upon being, can only draw out more and more of its wrath, and this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a never-ending supply. The will can only devastate the earth. Rather than approaching the world in terms of resources to be secured, true security can only be found in the preservation of

the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security measures and the frantic organization of resources that we directly assault the things we would preserve. The threat of being goes unheeded when things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, and surveilled . The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to rest. In the notes to the Evening Conversation, security is thought in just such terms: Security (what one
understands by this) arises not from securing and the measures taken for this; security resides in rest [in der Ruhe] and is itself made superfluous by this. (GA 77: 244)23 The rest in question is a rest from the economic cycling and circulating of the

standing reserve. The technological unworld, the situation of total war, is precisely the era of restlessness (The term totality says nothing more; it names only the spread of the hitherto known into the restless [GA 69: 181]). Security is superfluous here, which is only to say that it is unnecessary or useless. It is not found in utility, but in the preserved state of the useless. Utility and function are precisely the dangers of a txnh that has turned antagonistic towards nature. In rest, they no longer determine the being of the thing. In resting, things are free of security measures, but not for all that rendered insecure. Instead, they are preserved . There is no security; this is what we have to preserve. Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away from simple presence and absence. It thinks what Heidegger calls the between (das Zwischen). This between is a world of nonpresence and nonabsence. Annihilation is impossible for this world and so is security. The terror experienced today is a clue to the withdrawal of being. The world is denatured, drained of reality. Everything is threatened and the danger only ever increases. Dasein flees to a metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there to find security. But security cannot do away with the threat, rather it must guard it. Dasein guards the truth of being in the experience of terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being calls for terrorism and for terrorists. With the enframing of being and the circulation of standing-reserve, what is has already been destroyed. Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point.
As we have seen, being does not linger behind the scenes but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorizeif, in other words, this is an age of terrorismthen being must call for terrorists. They are simply more slaves of the history of beyng (GA 69: 209) and, in Heideggers eyes, no different from the politicians of the day in service to the cause of Americanism. But someone might object, the terrorists are murderers and the politicians are not. Granting this objection despite its obvious navet, we can nonetheless see that both politicians and terrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its nonabsence, that the plan will reach everyone everywhere, and the other to ensure its nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into circulation by the threat of destruction. In this regard, human resources are no different from livestock, and with this, an evil worse than death has already taken place. Human resources do not die, they perish.

Security/Targeting K- Impact: Nuclear War

Nuclear war is ONLY possible from within a system of technological enframing the alternative is a prerequisite to a form of ethics that would discount the possibility of nuclear relationality

Jacerme, 2k2 (Pierre,Prof. of Philosophy @ Lycee Henri IV Paris , Is There an Ethics for the Atomic Age?, Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, p. 30710)
Hence, Heideggers

anger and sarcasm when he sees his contemporaries neglect this crucial event in favor of superficial activities: Defiant man is utterly at a loss simply to say what is" (EGT, 57). And close to anger, there is a passionate
hope, akin to despair. "Perhaps the world's time is now becoming the completely destitute time. But also perhaps not, not yet, not even yet, despite the immeasurable need, despite all the suffering, despite nameless sorrow, despite the growing and spreading peacelessness, despite the mounting confusion."9 This is why we need to understand that what is essential can only

come from Being itself and not from the management of entities, or the entity man, even when he lives with "atomic fear": "Long is the time because even terror, taken by itself as a ground for turning, is powerless as long as there is no turn with mortal men. But there is a turn with mortals when these find the way to their own being [Wesen]" (PLT, 93, trans. slightly modified). How can we dwell in our "proper being"? On the basis of the instancy in the "truth of Being." The atomic bomb is nothing but another signneglected, as in the case of the othersof what has existed from the beginning, namely, the lack of concern for Being itself in favor of the will to control everything: "What is deadly is not the much-discussed atomic bomb as this particular death-dealing machine. What has long since been threatening man with death, and indeed with the death of his own nature, is the unconditional character of mere willing in the sense of purposeful self-assertion in everything" (PLT, 116). Hence, the atomic bomb can have the inverse effect of blinding man about being and concealing the fact that "the terrifying has already taken place": "Man ... stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened," namely, "the way in which everything presences [...1 despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent."1 What is "terrifying" is that there is no concern whatsoever for presence as such, which remains in the withdrawal: "Science's knowledge, which is compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects, already had annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb exploded [...] the thing as a thing remains nil" (PLT, 170). This annihilation deprives all that is of its life. "Atomic physics [...j observes nature (phusis) insofar as nature exhibits itself as inanimate."11 Here appears the first demand of the "originary ethic": to see what is, "Instead of shying away from this demand, by taking refuge in powerless determinations of goals which are limited to safeguarding humanity."12 "Demand," because even if he concerns himself with entities alone, man is still able to hear (although not always aware of it) a call of Being that speaks to him through language. Rockets, atomic bombs, reactors, those things that are, are "what they are in the name of their name"; "hurry" acts insofar as it speaks to man and to that extent "has" its being: "If that call to such hurry
had not challenged him and put him at bay, if the word framing that order and challenge had not spoken: then there would be no sputnik."13 In the word the withdrawal of being speaks, and according to this modality we are given various dispensations of presence on the basis of which entities will be present to us in various ways (as phenomena, as objects , or as standing reserve, etc.). Thereforeand this is another demand of "original ethics"man is always in a relation to a call, and always called to a destiny of unveiling. In 1955-56, ire The Principle of Reason, Heidegger noted that "the characterization of an epoch as the^ atomic age probably touches on what is" (PR, 29). This nomination will help us determine the fundamental mood on the basis of which we would be able to feel and tlen characterize the modality of givenness of presence that determines our being. ccording to Heidegger, this mood is "uncanniness" hidden under "an apparently harmless naming." This uncanniness lies in the fact that, "Humanity defines an epoch of its historical-spiritual existence by the capacity for, and the availability of, a nat ural energy" (ibid.). Now, "there would be no atomic age without atomic science," aiid no microphysics without reassembling the manifold of elementary particles into new unity, that is, without obeying the call of the principle that reason be given (bid.). On that basis we reach an ethical characterization in the sense of that which concerns the sojourn or dwelling of existent man: "As the global epoch of humaniety, the atomic age is distinguished by the fact that the power of the mighty Principle=, of the principium reddendae rationis, displays itself (if not completely unleashed) in m strange manner in the normative domain of human existence" (PR, 30). Why strange [unheimlich]? Because "the demand to render reasons threatens everything of the humans' being-at-home [alles Heimischel [...] it robs them of the roots of their subsistence [...] the more decisively humans try to harness the "mega-energies" [...] the more impoverished becomes the human faculty for building and dwelling in the realm of what is essential" (PR, 30-31). In what form is presence given to us when we #eel this uprooting? In fact, not only have not there not been "things" for us for a lor- ag time now, but "we already move in a world where there are no more ob-jects" (PR_, 33). That point is important in order to determine correctly that which is, that is, "what approaches us from what has-been and, as this, is what approaches" (PR, 80).The very presence of nature in the thematic region of nuclear physics remains

unthinkable as long as we still represent it as objectivity and not as "orderability" (Bestellbarkeit), which means tiElatthe entity is present in a sense of "proposed to. . . ordered to ... (bestelIt] while being at the same time summoned, provoked ... (Gestellt)."The consequence of this, as Heidegger -explains in a carefully worded letter to Kojima Takehiko on September 2, 1963, is that "through modern technology the energy hidden in nature is unleashed, unleashed is transformed, what is transformed is amplified, what is amplified is set forth, and vhat is set forth is organized" (Philosophie, 14). The modality of the withdrawal of beirig that governs this deployment resonates as a call to place everything under a regulation that is itself guaranteed by what Heidegger names Die Macht des Stellens [The power of summation]; we also could render that expression as follows: the force of the summon. "Everywhere reigns the provocative, calculative, and justifying summon (Ste lien)" (ibid.) . It follows, then, that "everything

that can be and is" only gives itself as a "stable calculable ground (Bestand)" and is only experienced from the perspective of securing that ground. Such a power, because it is not human, always "calls" for more security, more summons, more guaranteeswe also should add, in remembrance of the survivors of Hiroshima, more dignity, more humiliation, more shameand rules over technology, science, industry, economy, and the rest, without anythingcoming from manbeing able to oppose it: "the ineluctable and irresistible character of this summoning force leads to
the unfolding of its domination over the entire planet" (ibid., 15).

Security/Targeting K- Impact: Terrorism

THE WILL TO WILL OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM SUSTAINS ITSELF BY VIOLENTLY REJECTING THE VULNERABILITY THAT TERRORISM HAS REVEALED RESULTING IN AN AMORPHOUS WAR ON DIFFERENCE THAT ESCALATES APOCALYPTICALLY Lifton, 2003 (Robert, Taught at Harvard, Super Power Syndrome: Americas Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Rogue_State_US/War_Terrorism_SPS.html) A superpower dominates and rules. Above all, it is never to be humiliated. In important ways, then, the "war on terrorism" represents an impulse to undo violently precisely the humiliation of that day. To be sure, the acts of 9/11 had a warlike
aspect. They were committed by men convinced that they were at war with us. In post-Nuremberg terms they could undoubtedly be considered a "crime against humanity." The use of some kind of force against their perpetrators was inevitable and appropriate. The humiliation caused, together with American world ambitions, however, precluded dealing with the attacks as what they were-terrorism by a small group of determined zealots, not war. A more focused, restrained, internationalized response to al-Qaeda could have been far more effective without being a stimulus to expanded terrorism. Unfortunately,

our response was inseparable from our superpower status and the syndrome that went with it. Any nation attacked in that way would have felt itself humiliated. But given our national sense of being overwhelmingly powerful and unchallengeable, to have our major institutions violently penetrated was an intolerable, even inconceivable breach of superpower invulnerability, a contradiction that specifically fed our humiliation. We know from history that collective humiliation can be a goad to various kinds of aggressive behavior-as has been true of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. It was also true of the Nazis. Nazi doctors told me of indelible scenes, which
they either witnessed as young children or were told about by their fathers, of German soldiers returning home defeated after World War I. These beaten men, many of them wounded, engendered feelings of pathos, loss, and embarrassment, all amidst national misery and threatened revolution. Such scenes, associated with strong feelings of humiliation, were seized upon by the Nazis to the point where one could say that Hitler rose to power on the promise of avenging them. With both al-Qaeda and the Nazis, humiliation, through manipulation but also powerful self-conviction, was transformed into exaggerated expressions of violence. Such psychological transformation from weakness and shame to collective pride and a sense of life-power, as well as power over others, can release enormous amounts of aggressive energy-a dangerous potential that has been present from the beginning of the

War itself is an absolute, its unpredictable violence always containing apocalyptic possibilities. In this case, by militarizing the problem of terrorism, our leaders have dangerously obfuscated its political, social, and historical dimensions. Terrorism has instead been raised to the absolute level of war itself. And although American leaders speak of this as being a "different kind of war," there has been a drumbeat of ordinary war
American "war" on terrorism. INFINITE WAR rhetoric and a clarion call to total victory and to the crushing defeat of our terrorist enemies. When President Bush declared that "this conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others [but] will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing," he was mlsleading in suggesting not just a clear beginning to al-Qaeda's assaults but a decisive end in the "battle" against terrorism. In that same speech, given at a memorial service just three days after 9/11 at the National Cathedral in Washington, he also asserted, "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, not a man given to irony, commented that "the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan." At no time did Bush see his task as mounting a coordinated international operation against terrorism, for which he could have enlisted most of the governments of the world. Rather, upon hearing of the second plane crashing into the second tower, he remembers thinking: "They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war." Upon hearing of the plane crashing into the Pentagon, he told Vice President Cheney, "We're at war." Woodward thus calls his account of the president's first hundred days following 9/11 Bush at War. Bush would later recall, "I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win." With world leaders, he felt he had to "look them in the eye and say, 'You're either with us or you're against us."' Long before the invasion of Iraq -indeed,

War-making can quickly become associated with "war fever," the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience of transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one's own nation, to realize its special destiny and the immortality of its people. In this
even before the invasion of Afghanistan - Bush had come to identify himself, and be identified by others, as a "wartime president." case, the growth of war fever came in several stages: it began with Bush's personal declaration of war immediately after September 11, had a modest rise with the successful invasion of Afghanistan, and then a wave of ultrapatriotic excesses-triumphalism, and the labeling of critics as disloyal or treasonousat the time of the invasion of Iraq.

War fever tends always to be subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroadand later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq. The scope of George Bush's war was suggested within days of 9/11 when the director of the CIA made a presentation called "Worldwide Attack Matrix" to the president and his inner circle, which described active or planned operations of various kinds in eighty countries, or what Woodward called "a secret global war on terror." Early on, the president had the view that "this war will be fought on many fronts" and that "we're going to rout out terror wherever it may exist." Although under consideration long before 9/11, the invasion of Iraq could be seen as a direct continuation of this unlimited war-all the more so because of a prevailing tone among the president and his advisers, who were described as eager "to emerge from the sea of words and to pull the trigger."

The war on terrorism became apocalyptic, then, exactly because it was militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and because it has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil. Bush keeps his own personal "scorecard" for the war in the form of photographs, brief
biographies, and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out if killed or captured. The scorecard, he told Woodward, is always at hand in a desk drawer in the Oval Office .

Targeted as well are those who "harbor [the terrorists], feed them, house them," who are "just as guilty" and "will be held to account." That "Bush doctrine" was at one point extended by a
Defense Department official, who spoke of "ending states who sponsor terrorism." Any group or nation designated as terrorist or terrorist-supporting could thus be targeted by the war on terrorism. The looseness of that "war" was made clear when, on the day after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld raised the question of invading Iraq. It turned out that a plan to do just that had been contemplated ever since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and Rumsfeld, in advocating "going against terrorism more broadly than just al-Qaeda," was raising the possibility that America should seize the opportunity offered by

9/11 to mount such an attack. There was much subsequent discussion about whether Iraq, being the more "target-rich" adversary, was superior to Afghanistan as the war's first enemy. There was certainly an assumption that "the US would have to go after Saddam at some time if the war on terrorism was to be taken seriously." There were references, at first vague and later insistent, to alleged connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but it did not seem to matter so much that these connections could never be established. WAR AND REALITY The amorphousness of the war on terrorism was such that a country like Iraq, with a murderous dictator who had surely engaged in acts of terrorism in the past, could on that basis be treated as if it had major responsibility for 9/11. There was no evidence at all that it did. But in the belligerent atmosphere of the overall war on terrorism, by means of false accusations and emphasis on the evil things Saddam Hussein had done (for instance, the use of poison gas on his Kurdish minority), the administration

The war on terrorism, then, took amorphous impulses toward combating terror and used them as a pretext for realizing a prior mission aimed at American global hegemony. The attack on Iraq reflected the reach not only of the "war on terrorism" but of deceptions and manipulations of reality that have accompanied it. In this context, the word "war" came to combine metaphor (as in the "war on poverty" or "war on drugs"), justification for "preemptive" (preventive) attack, conventional military combat, and assertion of superpower domination. Behind such planning and manipulation can lie
succeeded in convincing more than half of all Americans that Saddam was a key player in 9/11. dreams and fantasies hardly less apocalyptic or world-purifying than those of al-Qaeda's leaders ... For instance, former CIA Director James Woolsey, a close associate of Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, spoke of the war against terrorism as a Fourth World War (the Third being the Cold War between the United States and the USSR). In addressing a group of college students, he declared, "This Fourth World War, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War." That kind of apocalyptic impulse in war-making has hardly proved conducive to a shared international approach. Indeed, in its essence, it precludes genuine sharing. While Bush has said frequently that he preferred to have allies in taking on terrorism and terrorist states worldwide, he has also made it clear that he did not want other countries to have any policy-making power on this issue. In one revealing statement, he declared, "At some point, we may be the only

Americans are the globe's anointed ones and that the sacred mission of purifying the earth is ours alone. The amorphousness of the war on terrorism carries with it a paranoid edge, the suspicion that terrorists and their supporters are everywhere and must be preemptively attacked lest they emerge and attack us. Since such a war is limitless and infinite-extending from the farthest reaches of Indonesia or Afghanistan to Hamburg, Germany, or New York City, and from immediate combat to battles that continue into the unending future-it inevitably becomes associated with a degree of megalomania as well. As the planet's greatest military power replaces the complex world with its own imagined stripped-down us-versus-them version of it, our distorted national self becomes the world. Despite the Bush administration's constant invocation of the theme of "security," the war on terrorism has created the very opposite-a sense of fear and insecurity among Americans, which is then mobilized in support of further aggressive plans in the extension of the larger "war." What results is a vicious circle that engenders what we seek to destroy: our excessive response to Islamist attacks creating ever more terrorists and, sooner or later, more terrorist attacks, which will in turn lead to an escalation of the war on terrorism, and so on. The projected "victory" becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending "Fourth World War" and a mythic cleansing- of terrorists, of evil, of our own fear. The American military apocalyptic can then be said to partner with and act in concert with the Islamist apocalyptic. APOCALYPTIC
ones left. That's okay with me. We are Americans." In such declarations, he has all but claimed that AMERICA p117 America is "anointed" ... We have our wrong tendencies toward an apocalyptic which make us susceptible to the contagion of apocalyptic violence and quick to respond to such violence in kind. Relevant here is George Bush's polarization of the world into good and evil, his concept of the "axis of evil" to describe three nations considered antagonistic, and his stated goal of ridding the world of evil. In the mindset of the president and many of those around him, our actions in the world, however bellicose and unilateral, are assumed to be part of a sacred design, of "God's master plan" (in Bob Woodward's

The most dire measures are justified because they have been taken to carry out a divine project of combating evil. This Christian fundamentalist mindset blends with and 3, intensifies our military fundamentalism. Together they have given rise to
paraphrase). a contemporary American version of apocalyptic violence. The events of 9/11 did not create this combination but did enlarge it exponentially. American apocalypticism is fed by the rhetoric of a president whose conversion to evangelical Christianity- administered by Billy Graham, America's leading evangelist-saved him from alcoholic self-destruction. Graham's son, Franklin, remains close to administration leaders, and has a tendency to be a bit more extreme than his father. When he recently called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion," the White House quickly dissociated itself from that view and he was forced to apologize, but he may well have been saying something widely believed by Christian fundamentalists, including some in the administration. (During the first Gulf War, when asked by Commanding General Norman Schwarzkopf to stop encouraging American troops to distribute Arabic-language New Testaments in Saudi Arabia, violating Saudi law and an American promise, Franklin Graham's answer was, "I'm also under orders, and that's from the king of kings and the lord of lords. ") The "predominant creed " of the Bush White House, "where attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory, either," has been "the culture of modern evangencalism.

Security/Targeting K- Terrorism Specific Alternative

OUR ALTERNATIVE IS TO THINK TERRORISM CONTEMPLATION IN THE FACE OF TERRORISM RUPTURES THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE OF KNEW JERK RESPONSES AND DEMONIZATION THROUGH COMING TO TERMS WITH THE ONTOLOGICAL ANXIETY THAT LIES AT THE HEART OF THE THREAT OF TERROR Zingale and Hummel, 2008 (Nicholas, teaches environmental finance, corporate change, and public policy and administration at Cleveland State University and the University of Akron, and Ralph, Institute for Applied Phenomenology in Science and Technology, Disturbance, Coping, and Innovation: A Phenomenology of Terror, Administrative Theory and Praxis, Vol. 30, No. 2) Contemplation, according to Heidegger, can be a step toward re- vealing our experience that human beings have a world, whose loss must be made good. However, Heidegger is also critical of mere contemplation. This mode of being has at times been perverted to a mere staring at disconnected parts of a problem from which no sudden mira- cle of reconfiguring reality can be expected. In fact, mere staring has served science in the past as the basis for traditional ontology that treats as normal the modern abyss between the individual and his or her world (Heidegger, 1977; Dreyfus, 1991, p. 83). But, in moments of insight, contemplation can be helpful, freeing our view of the world as grasped by mere self-interest or mindless defense of tradition. In terror attacks, we are brought face-to-face with the po- tential loss of the world as we know itworld being defined as the whole of meaning structures with which we surround ourselves. In that world, we used to comfortably live. Now, its loss obtrudes into our daily life, just as a missing tool by its absence obtrudes into our work. We now may confront the fact that our world used to be a tool for hiding our sense of nothingnessand therefore we now see the threatened disappearance of that tool as a loss that obtrudes into world, blocking our ability to get on with life and work (Heidegger, 1927/1962, pp. 233 & 189; Dreyfus, 1991, p. 179). Worldliness [or worldedness] obtrudes itself (Dreyfus, 1991 p. 178).3 A challenge to our way of life and workwhether by violent terror attacks or, more insidious, global- ismforces us to confront our absorption in routine coping practices of our construction of reality. An obvious question arises at this point: Is contemplation practical under conditions of terror? Even considering this question as worthy of being asked moves us out of the dead-end of passively enduring terror, and opens us up to recovering human potential. Phenomenology not only shows it can be practical and timely; the approach resists reflexive knee-jerk response that prematurely defines the object: matters at hand, states of affairs . We wait for the object to respond in its own terms to our active felt sense for what it means in a larger context. Phe- nomenology suggests that the more you surrender to the pressure for instant action, the less you are allowing the situation to speak for itself. Correcting an imbalance of making out of things what you want them to be, phenomenology counterposes a letting things be what they can be. Aiming to get clear on an objector matter or state of affairsby ad- dressing it in its own terms, the possible turn toward contemplation reveals an opportunity for a moment of clarityresoluteness in a time of chaos. According to Heidegger, resoluteness is not a deliberate action. It is our willingness to allow an opening of a situation into which we had locked ourselves. The essence of resoluteness (Ent-schlossenheit) lies in the opening (Entborgenheit) of human Dasein (being) into the clearing of being, and not at all in the storing up of energy for action (Drey- fus, 1991, p. 318). Resoluteness leads to knowing, in a special felt sense, what you need to do at the time it needs to be done. In Ent-schlossenheit (literally, disclosure), there is a moment of transformation from fleeing to reso- luteness. Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, calls it the Augenblick: see- ing the whole at a
glance or in the twinkling of an eye (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 321). For Heidegger it is a new kind of sight: We see or sense a total Gestalt of how matters stand for us. We make a lightning jump from inauthenticity, which copies the behavior of others, to authenticity (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 321). We fully

we take the situa- tion for what it is: free of all personal interests, societal preferences, and cultural norms. Human potential is optimized and solutions offer them- selves without restrictions. Imagine freeing yourself of misconceptions by allowing what you make of the situation to become true to the situa- tion and true to your potential to act, and then acting to be resolute, to be authentic.NORMALCY Let us take seriously the possibility that war is the natural and permanent state since, just as in thunderstorms, one war is just receding as another already thunders in the nearing. Conventional thinking would call the period in between peace, as Hobbes already derisively notes. But peace implies a return to normalcy, forgetting that where one war ends, another is already beginning, which leaves no space in the middle. The relation between war and peace is reversed by Hobbes experience: War either coming or goi ng is the norm. Peace is what we call our im- mersion in routine that overlays our consciousness of thundering un- pleasantness. Terror threatens outright death for some, but the real targets are the many who observe others being killed. Terror threatens our ability to continue mindlessly with routine practices in life and work and to feel secure in our heretofore unquestioned beliefs. Normal Terror Anxiousness is a mood of discomfort in our culture. It is an
become ourselves in this moment, this NOW between past and future. In the here and now,

uncomfortableness or un-fittingness with our environmentsocial norms. We are all absorbed in maintaining a reality that is stable. When stability is shaken, we come to terms with the finiteness of ourselves and our world. Because a terrorist act unsettles our daily lives, we are forced to confront both our socially contrived insecurities as well as our existen- tial anxieties. According to Dreyfus interpretation of Heidegger, anxi- ety represents a total disturbance of the whole. It reveals the groundlessness of the world (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 179). Terror sweeps away normalcy. The opposite of terror, we might say, is routine coping with the world. But it would be even more precise to say that extreme terror is simply an amplification or enlargement of daily disruptions and distur- bances in the social force. Such terror threatens to disrupt all our ways of dealing with life and work. It breaches our faith in the meaning of life on the wide cultural stage. It exposes a nullity usually papered over by science and convention, but now faced in contemplation. Contemplation is the method described by Heidegger of revealing new ways of being in the world. This process looks away from individ- ual subjects and toward a state of being (Befindlichkeit). In this state, we find ourselves inspired to insight into our own solutions without try- ing to merely theorize what is seen, but instead contemplating the cur- rent state of being in context. It is an opportunity for new knowledge and know-how to emerge (Hummel, 2004, 2006; Zingale, 2007). According to Heidegger, contemplation is a process that allows an individ- ual, though no longer involved, to become fully engaged in an imaginative playing out of the problem by removing preconceived bar- riers, such as axioms, while opening up spaces of opportunities (Drey- fus, 1991). Providing references or pointers to a newly settled, authentic self, terrorism actually provides an opportunity. It points to ways to confront our inauthentic selves. This position is supported by Hubert Dreyfus working with Jane Rubin: Once one stops demanding mean- ing and imposing stereotypes, ones facticity will always provide a Situa- tion in which there are unique possibilities for action (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 323). As such, terror requires our collaboration to complete its course by disrupting coping. Whether willingly or involuntarily, consciously or un- consciously, we sustain terrorism when we become locked into social norms, even after everyday coping practices fail, and we are forced to think or even contemplate the fragility of daily life. Contemplation not only removes us from the acuity of the situation, it serves to create openings for our sense of being in the world and a way of finding our place in the world. It confronts an enabling of existing norms to en frame the meaning of a situation. So, even in the midst of such acts of disruption eliciting anxiousness, we can give terror a turn from its inten- tion and use it to reveal a path to authenticity. Understanding terror in this sense reminds us that hope avoids foreclosure when we remain open to our inexhaustible ability to freely create. At that point we have a choice: We can take terrorism as evidence that there is something terribly wrong with us and our world or, as the being that knows it is here (Dasein), we can see terror as a call that evokes our own nullity. In that case, through the anxiety it provokes, we see ourselves as beings unwilling to face the threat laid bare by be- ing anxious: namely, the threat of being nothing and nobody.

Security/Targeting K- AT: Ontological Focus Kills Politics

ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONING IS NECESSARY TO NON-VIOLENT FORMS OF ACTIVISMWE ARE A PREREQUISITE Joronen, 20010 , (Mikko, Dept of Geography and Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, U of Turku, The Age of Planetary Space: On Heidegger, Being, and Metaphysics of Globalization, pg 223) In spite of the revolutionary sense of power-free-letting-be, our role as the ones who let being to make its transformation poses number of questions concerning our part in this radical turning from the ontological violence to the other beginning of abyssal being. What is exactly our relation to the finitude of being? Should we only wait for the end of the prevailing mode of being and thus hope a new sending of being? At least Heideggers comment in his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview about only god (i.e. a new sending of being) being capable of saving us seems to imply this, apparently leaving little room for human activism
(Heidegger 1976:107; see also Schatzki 2007:32). Hence, is our part just to question the prevailing unfolding and so to wait for the new sending, the other beginning, the new arrival of being? First of all, it is crucial to recognize that waiting for the

world-historical turning is not inactivity but a revolution that turns power-free thinking into praxis. It is a non-violent revolution, which can take many forms of activism such as disobedience and protests. In fact,
Fred Dallmayr even compares this praxis of non-violent resistance with the paths of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001:267). Altogether, as Malpas writes, there is no reason why the world-historical turning of being cannot be waited

through political activism, as long as such activism avoids being taken up by a machinational mode of unfolding and thus remains non-violent and aware of its limitedness and finitude (Malpas 2006:300; see also Irwin
2008:170, 188189)

Security/Targeting K- AT: Realism/Science for International Relations

THE CONFLATION OF NATURAL AND HUMAN SCIENCES IN THE FORM OF REALISM RESULTS IN GENOCIDE Burke, 2007 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Theory and Event, 10.2, Muse) We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer
who, wrote Edward Said: ..envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East -- human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance.62 This

desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with an intractable and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the development of technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical terms most powerfully during and
after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Ren Descartes, who all combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a nave faith in the goodness of invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the understanding. With this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet

Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method that moved progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics formed the
been attempted'.63 In a similar move, ideal image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'.65 Such doctrines of mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of systems analysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied the

Yet this new scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded by the science could never be translated into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy. 66 Bacon thought
most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic bomb. of the new scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new power that would enable the creation of a new kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the new Indies' -- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and pre-Newtonian cultures -- Bacon set out what was at stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked, 'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god unto man'.68 We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a new fire from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation of the Fall of Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by our disputes or magical ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69 There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this statement -- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's own making. This

truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without injuring or afflicting any'.70 And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the new method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed some of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -- would be the product of drives for national security and militarisation. Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass -- brought in their wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery; navigation, slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical science would be ambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature as much as its utilisation.

INEVITABILITY CLAIMS DENY THE WILL AND CREATE A AHISTORICAL POLITICS THAT BECOME SELF-PROPELLINGTHIS ARBITRARY MOMENT OF REJECTION IS CRUCIAL TO RECLAIMING ETHICS AND THE POLITICAL Brincat, 2009 (Shannon, U of Queensland, Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in IR theory, Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 581-609)
Mannheim does not, of course, explicitly implicate realism as part of the dominant ideology as his work was not concerned with the field of IR theory specifically. However, by showing that those forms of thought that support the status quo and which tend to denigrate as utopian any ideas that seek to alter it are ideologies, the logical inference can be drawn that realism constitutes such an ideology within Mannheims typology a position which the arguments of Cox, Ashley and others in the Third Great Debate support.40 For Mannheim, what is touted as utopian is that which is

judged so by those representatives of the given order and whether they consider the idea to be unrealisable.41 So while ideology and utopia are both clearly incongruous with reality, the point to take from Mannheim is that it is the representatives of the given order who serve the privileged function of determining what is considered utopian and ipso facto possible or impossible in world politics. We can see part of this role being assumed subsequently by specific realist and neo-realist theorists in the discipline the aptly named doorkeepers to borrow from Blieker42 who alone determine what approaches are to be labelled as utopian in the pejorative sense, to be thus excluded from the agenda of IR proper. Mannheim clearly warned us of the dangers of the dominance of ideologies. For him, such domination would mean the complete disappearance of all reality transcending doctrines from political study and ultimately lead to a matter-of-factness, a decay of the human will and a static state of affairs. The paradox would result that while humanity would have achieved a high degree of rational mastery in the world, it would be left without any ideals or the will to shape history.43 Nevertheless, Mannheim held out hope for the capacity of humanity to become aware of the necessity of wilfully choosing our course and emphasised the need for an imperative (a utopia) to drive us onward. For him, it is only when we know what

our interests are and make a transition towards them, that we are in a position to inquire into the possibilities of the present situation, and thus to gain our first insight into history .

REALISM STIFLES CHANGE BY FOCUSING ON THE STATUS QUOTHE AFF IS KEY TO RECLAIM THE POSSIBILITY OF CHANGE IN IR Brincat, 2009 (Shannon, U of Queensland, Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in IR theory, Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 581-609)
Sometime in the shadowy inter-war years saw the demise of utopianism as a viable aspect of IR theory. E.H. Carr gave the date of utopianisms actual death in the events of 1931,24 and while that may or may not be accurate, one of the many casualties of

World War II was the utopian imaginary and its replacement with what Levitas has describ ed as an antiutopian utopianism a political sphere that represses and obscures images of the good life, effectively removing them from consideration.25 One reason why IR theory has shown only the most sedentary flickers of a transformative capacity is, I contend, because of this dismissal of the utopian tradition near to the disciplines inception in the debates between realism and liberal internationalism. Carrs so-called devastating
attack on utopianism contained in the opening salvo of The Twenty Years Crisis has been the widely accepted as the coup dtat of all utopian thought in IR.26 In the aftermath of this First Great Debate, it was the methodology of realism that prevailed having irrefutably discredited its alternative. Since then, lik e Alice in Wonderland, IR theory has had little practice in imagining

what it considers impossible things. For all its sensibilities, mainstream IR simply cannot see beyond the lens of its own looking-glass, where what is possible is deemed impossible, where what is in principle alterable is cast with permanence. That is, if the dominant approach to the field cannot believe what it considers impossible and the immutability thesis of realism holds that any form of progressive change constitutes such an impossibility27 then not only is all imagination of betterment expunged from disciplinary knowledge but so too is any conceptualisation of change at all. In this way, realism asphyxiates thought in IR because of its inability to imagine anything other than what is.28 As shall be seen however, the
philosophical grounds on which the forced exile of utopianism from IR was compelled are not as unassailable as is so widely assumed. Carr dismissed utopianism on the epistemic ground that it was abstract and metaphysical, and on the normative ground that the utopianists desire for justice and perfection could rupture the ordered fragility of the international status quo.29 In distinction,

realism sought to compel IR theorists to reflect only on empirical, non-ideal features of the world system, and to thus constrain the political imagination to present conditions alone. Yet these core realist assumptions suffer from two fatal contradictions. The first is the ontological problem that pertains to the relative position of different actors within the world system that would give different considerations to what is deemed objectively possible and desirable in world politics. What is considered impossible for the realist may be considered possible (and necessary) for peripheral groups who have long-term aims for the

transformation of political power and community.30 The second contradiction relates to the false logic inherent to Carrs assumption of impossibility any estimation of the possibility or impossibility of utopian transition is not a prima facie ground for dismissing utopianism altogether. There can be no logical certainty deducible from a subjective estimate of what is considered possible, nor does Carr substantiate what it is exactly that makes utopianism impossible, other than vague references to the superiority of a scientific approach.31 This view completely excludes the powerful ideational role that the utopian imagination can have at the level of will formation of agents in inspiring change. Moreover, such an argument only concerns the probability of change and one could contend that the material/productive basis of society today provides far more potential for positive transformations towards utopia than has hitherto existed in history.

Security/Targeting K- AT: Rational Choice

MUST QUESTION THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF RCT MacDonald, 2003 (Paul K., Columbia U., Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: THe Competing epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4, November) Despite the presence of these two philosophical foundations, RC theorists generally have avoided detailed discussions of the relation between epistemology and their theories. Most RC theorists seem to consider epistemology a distraction from the more important task of building and testing individual models. Contrary to this dismissive attitude towards epistemology, I maintain that a focus on epistemology is crucial for understanding the scope, purpose, and possibilities of RCT in political science. Specifically, there are three reasons why political scientists should explicitly and clearly articulate their understanding of the philosophical foundations of RCT theory. First, understanding the epistemological foundations of RCT helps clarify what is at stake in existing debates concerning different theoretical claims made by RC theorists about the nature of the rationality assumption, self-interest, and the relations between individuals and structures. Second, a clear grasp of epistemology illuminates inconsistencies in current defenses of RCT in political science. Finally, a focus on epistemological foundations facilitates debate about the desirability and feasibility of achieving the rational choice project, a universal theory of political behavior that is based on the rationality assumption RATIONALITY DOES NOT DESCRIBE HUMAN CHOICE MacDonald, 2003 (Paul K., Columbia U., Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: THe Competing epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4, November) Rationality. A significant body of evidence demonstrates that human beings rarely behave purposively, consistently, and with the goal of maximizing their expected utility. Many sociologists, for example, question the notion of purposive choice, arguing instead that a large portion of human behavior is the result not of purposive calculation but rather of social roles that define appropriate behavior (Bourdieu 1990, 5055; Nadel 1957). Similarly, many social psychologists challenge the notion of consistent preferences and utility maximization, pointing out that human beings rarely possess consistent preferences (Halpern and Stern 1998; Hogarth and Reder 1986; Sen 1979), engage in satisficing behavior rather than optimization (March 1978; Simon 1982), and routinely make cognitive errors in calculation (Tversky
and Kahneman 1974, 1986; cf. Frank 1990)..

RATIONAL CHOICE CANNOT BE UNIVERSALIZED MacDonald, 2003 (Paul K., Columbia U., Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: THe Competing epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4, November) In addition to minimizing inconsistencies within the advocacy of RCT, a focus on epistemology helps clarify issues about the scope of RCT in political science. Specifically, instrumental-empiricism and scientificrealism both articulate different views on the possibility of the RC project a theory of human social behavior based upon the universality of the rationality assumption. Because RC theorists have not paid explicit attention to the various possible epistemological foundations of RCT, however, the feasibility and desirability of the RC project have not been clearly articulated. Indeed, while many RC theorists believe the rationality assumption would be a good foundation for a universal social theory, neither instrumentalist-empiricism nor scientific-realism proves to be an adequate epistemology for this task. An instrumentalist-empiricist account emphasizes the generalizability of ontological assumptions and therefore appears conducive to the creation of a unified social theory, yet this epistemology does not maintain that universal social theories are even possible or desirable.

Conversely, although scientific-realism provides an appropriate foundation for the construction of a unified social theory, it places a premium on the accuracy of the theorys ontological assumptions, thereby creating an empirically circumscribe d RCT.

Because neither of the possible epistemological foundations can sustain the RC project, I contend that it is unattainable and should be abandoned in its universalistic form.

SELF-INTEREST IS EITHER TOO OBJECTIVE TO BE ACCURATE OR TOO AD HOC TO BE USEFUL MacDonald, 2003 (Paul K., Columbia U., Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: THe Competing epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4, November) Those in favor of thin-subjectivist preferences contend that their theory is the more realistic conception of self-interest because most individuals value wildly different things. In addition, by allowing actors to value emotional states, these theorists claim to explain a large portion of human behavior that may at first glance seem nonrational, such as altruism. In contrast, supporters of thickobjective preferences argue that by focusing on ends that are objective, material, and external to the actors and do not vary within the population, theorists can generate hypotheses that are clear, testable, and widely generalizable. By assuming typical value among all actors, a thick-objectivist account of selfinterest reduces the need to assign preferences to actors in an ad hoc and undertheorized manner and, thus, increases the chance that TC theories can be easily subjected to empirical scrutiny in many domains.