Ocean Borders K/PIC CFJMP

7wk
Miles Gray
Jessica Jiang

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TEXT: <<plan>>, replace oceans with ocean.
Classifying the spatial body of water as separate oceans ultimately
reinforces European and Western spatial organization. The
affirmative attempts to compartmentalize space as it serves their
means that spills over internationally.
Lewis 99. (Martin W. Lewis, Professor of global historical geography at Stanford University.
Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No.2, Oceans Connect (Apr., 1999), pp. 188 214. Dividing the
Ocean Sea. JSTOR. MMG.
The conventional nature of oceanic divisions is perhaps more obvious than that of
continents, for the simple reason that all of the worlds oceans, unlike all of the
continents, are interconnected by broad passageways . Yet atlases, almanacs,
encyclopedias, and other standard sources of geographical information invariably
present an assuringly exact depiction of each oceans areal extent . In Goodes World Atlas,
for example, we are informed that the Pacific covers 63,800,000 square miles, as if it
were an unambiguously bounded body that one could simply measure (Goode 1990, 250).

Where the Pacific ends and the Indian or Atlantic Ocean beginsa far from obvious matteris rarely addressed in such sources. Yet
different geographical reference works evidently employ different boundaries, for as they disagree profoundly about how large the
Pacific actually is. The World Almanacs Pacific, a precise-sounding 64,186,300 square miles (Famighetti 1997, 593), is almost
400,000 square miles larger than that of Goodes, and that of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with marginal seas included, is more
than 5 million square miles larger still (Mero 1989, 25:125). At one level, such ambiguity is of little account. Adding or subtracting a
few million square miles from or to the Pacific is hardly a pressing matter. Most geographers would probably contend that such
numbers are merely vague approximations anyway, reflecting somewhat arbitrary divisions of the boundless sea. And despite the
discrepancy regarding the size of the Pacific, global agreement on maritime divisions is actually striking . The same oceans

and seas, given the same names (albeit often in translation) and bounded, more or
less, at the same places, are recognized across most of the globe. Political
considerations occasionally intrude at the level of nomenclature : Koreans insist that the body
of water to their East is the Eastern Sea and not the Sea of Japan, and Indonesians sometimes refer to the body of water to their
west as the Indonesian Ocean rather than the Indian Ocean. Such disputes, however, are rare; in general

, local names

have yielded global conventions . The resulting global concord in geographical naming and bounding is
tremendously useful, for it facilitates the exchange of information and aids the nascent movement to provide some form of
international governance for the marine world. But although it is useful to divide the seas into
relatively well demarcated and internationally recognized units, such a maneuver
is problematic to the extent that it disguises the conventional nature of their
construction. The maritime realm can be, and has been, divided in different ways,
yielding units that are nonetheless just as logically constitutedand just as faithful
to the underlying patterns of the physical worldas those presently on our maps .
Entertaining alternative views of the ocean and its subdivisions allows us to see
the world afresh, revealing patterns and connections that may be obscured in our
standard worldview . The current taken-for-granted system of maritime spatial classification did not, in fact, emerge in
broad outlines until the 1800s and did not assume its full-blown form until the twentieth century. In earlier times, especially
during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, radically different notions of sea
space prevailed. By examining changed in the Western oceanic imagination, I seek
to show not only that alternative views are possible but that such alternative
visions can conceivably shed light on certain geographical patterns and processes

that are obscured by our constricted and naturalistic assumptions about maritime
space. Three major variations in the conceptualizations of sea space can be seen over the centuries. First is the manner
in which the oceanic realm as a whole has been divided into its major constituent
units, now called oceans. Second is the changing way in which the hierarchy of oceanic divisions and subdivisions
has been arrayed: Seas, for example, are now considered constituent units of the larger
oceans, but this has not always been the case. Third is the matter of nomenclature,
the changing names assigned to the (more or less) same bodies of water. Although
naming is seemingly the least complex issue at hand, it can have significant
political and ideological ramifications ; the demise of the Ethiopian Ocean in the nineteenth century, for
example, perhaps reflects the denigration of Africa that occurred with the rise of racist pseudoscience (Bernal 1987).

Borders K

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Viewing the ocean as a series of interconnected bodies territorializes
the ocean through lines of division. This reinforces Eurocentric
control over the oceans as the West ultimately controls the lines of
divisions in the ocean to serve capitalist ends.
Steinberg 99. (Philip E. Steinberg in 1999, Ph.D. Clark University 1996. Lines of Division,
Lines of Connection: Stewardship in the World Ocean. Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2,
Oceans Connect (Apr., 1999), pp. 254-264. JSTOR.) MMG.
Historians of marine governance frequently assert that

the modern history of social regulation in the

world ocean may be read as one of alternating currents for and against division
and territorial enclosure (Colombos 1967; Gold 1981; O'Connell 1982; Anand 1983). On one hand, these scholars
note, events and proclamations such as Hugo Grotius's 1608 The Freedom of the
Seas, the nineteenth-century "free-seas" policy imposed under Pax Britannica, and
the non territorial self-regulation practiced by the maritime-transport industry in
the twentieth century represent attempts at constructing the ocean as a frictionfree void wherein nascent colonial empires and enterprising merchants could
establish lines of connection with far flung terrestrial territories, production
sites, and markets . On the other hand, as interaction with the ocean has intensified over time, the ocean itself
has come to be perceived as a space of resources , whether the resource is that of connection or
something more material, such as fish or minerals. Because the modern system of competitive
capitalist production governed by multiple, sovereign states encourages
territorialization, or spatial enclosure, as a means of commodifying and
guaranteeing rents from resources, the modern era has been characterized by a
number of proclamations and events that generally are perceived as drawing lines
designed to foster the enclosure, possession, and management of ocean space.
Among the notable events were the 1493 Papal Bull, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, John Selden's 1635 Of the Dominion; or,
Ownership of the Sea, the Truman Proclamations of 1945, and various provisions of the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea,
including both its regime of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZS) and its regime for management of the International Seabed Area.

The contradictory tendencies in modern-era marine governance-both the tendency

to enclose ocean space with lines of division and the tendency to construct it as a
friction-free surface characterized by lines of connection-may be viewed as
reflecting the ebb and flow of contradictory tendencies in the spatiality of
capitalism (Steinberg g999b). In this article I focus less on the changes that have characterized the modern-era regime than on
its continuity, from the late fifteenth century through the present. In particular, assert that in the modern era the
drawing of lines in ocean space-whether lines of division or lines of connectioncan be seen as attempts to steward the ocean as a space that, on one hand, is
immune to territorial incorporation into individual states or the system of states
but that, on the other hand, is susceptible to social intervention in pursuit of
specific goals. To develop this point, I begin with a careful reading of what is generally taken as a particularly extreme act of
line drawing in modern marine history, the 1493 Papal Bull and the 1494T reality of Tordesillas. These documents affirm a norm of

marine stewardship that falls somewhere between the construction of the sea as a
space amenable to enclosure and its construction as a protected space of
connection immune to social actors' exertions and desires . Next I assert that this norm

of stewardship has been a constant feature of European marine governance, from the
law of the Roman Mediterranean through the most recent proposals for sustainable development in the face of marine pollution and

declining global fish stocks. I conclude by suggesting that scholars and practitioners who design ocean-governance schemes
recognize the flexibility inherent in the stewardship norm while acknowledging that stewardship is but one possible norm available
for guiding ocean governance.

Lines may be drawn-or erased-in order to promote a range of

social alternatives in global ocean space.

Ocean spatiality perpetuates, ocean imperialism, unilateral

interventionism, manipulation, and domination of the Third World.
Steinberg 01. (Phillip Steinberg, Ph.D. Clark University. The Social Construction of the
Ocean, Published by the Cambridge University Press in 2001. Page 24-25.) MMG

Articulation theory informs this study of the social construction of the ocean-space in two ways, one general and one more specific.
Like world-systems theorists, articulation theorists suggest that the spatiality of the modern world, far

from being contingent to fundamental capitalist processes, is a necessary

component of capitalism. Locations of partial incorporation play an essential role
in reproducing capitalism . While this theory does not directly address ocean-space, it raises the possibility that
ocean-space, as another area that lacks definitive capitalist processes but serves a
crucial role in the global economy, is in some manner a necessary and unique
"place" within the capitalist-dominated world economy . More specifically, the articulationists show
how First World Capitalists enter a non-capitalist region and selectively buttress
elements of the non-capitalist social formation so that the region, when integrated
into the global trading system, is of exceptional service to the capitalists who
dominate the world economy. Even as capitalists transform a Third World region so as to be compatible with First
World interests, selective non-capitalists characteristic of the region are emphasized
both in reality and in representation. This selective emphasizing of non-capitalist,
"non-First World" characteristics both serves to facilitate domination and to
justify it . In the narrative presented here, an analogous process is revealed: Firs World capitalists have
constructed the ocean in a manner that selectively reproduces and emphasizes its
existence as a space apart from land-based capitalist society . This construction has
been adjusted over time to serve specific stages of capitalism, much as the
techniques of imperialism have shifted over time from plantations and trading
posts to colonies to post-colonial domination . Yet through all the different definitions and social
constructions of ocean-space, the ocean consistently has been a creation of capitalism even as it has
lacked some of the capitalism's essential characteristics, just as the Third World continually has been (re)constructed to serve
capitalism even as it has remained immune from the labor system that is paradigmatic of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed,

in both the Third World and the ocean, the designation of these spaces as
"incomplete" (or "less developed") justifies further intervention and
manipulation.

The alternative is to reimagine the lines of division in the ocean as an

act of rejection of Ocean stewardship and territorialization.
Steinberg 99. (Philip E. Steinberg in 1999, Ph.D. Clark University 1996. Lines of Division,
Lines of Connection: Stewardship in the World Ocean. Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2,
Oceans Connect (Apr., 1999), pp. 254-264. JSTOR.) MMG.
Just as

this discussion suggests that we think twice before accepting that lines drawn
across ocean space necessarily divide, it also suggests that we rethink the entire
dichotomy of division and connection in the context of the broader norm of
marine stewardship. Stewardship historically has been exercised by various entities, including the state, the church,
commercial interests, and the populace at large. At different times the norm of stewardship has been

operationalized by one actor over all known ocean space, by individual actors in
their discrete, parceled domains, and collectively by a community of actors . It has
been implemented for a range of ends, from military mobility to the conservation
of the ocean's living resources. Finally, a consideration of marine stewardship-and
the lines that often enable it-should remind us that stewardship is not necessarily
the only, or best, means of governing ocean space and of preserving its function as
a space of connection, a thriving ecosystem, a space of individual or collective
escape from terrestrial hardships, or a resource for human survival. Other societies have
developed ocean governance systems outside the stewardship paradigm, from those that have viewed the sea as fundamentally
possessible, like land space, such as the island societies of Micronesia, to those that have viewed the sea as a pure space of
connection insulated from exertions of social power by land-based entities, like those of the societies bordering the Indian Ocean,
prior to the arrival of Europeans (Steinberg 1996b). Stretching the commonly accepted boundaries of

what is possible in ocean governance, some scholars have suggested that the
expansion of individual states' territories to encompass the entirety of ocean space
is likely (Zacher and McConnell 1990; Ball 1996). Others have proposed that the entire ocean be bounded as one political unit
and its social function redefined. These scholars assert that the attitude of the world community toward the ocean must go beyond
one of stewarding the sea so that it is available for human use to one in which the sea is actively possessed and used by the entirety of
the world community so that it may serve global needs and reduce social inequality on land (Van Dyke, Zaelke, and Hewison1 993;B
orgese1 998). Whatever the precise lines drawn across the sea, and whatever goals

these lines are designed to serve, a line in ocean space, like ocean space itself, does
more than simply divide the terrestrial and spaces that "matter. Geographers increasingly
are turning to the sea to improve their understanding of the primarily terrestrial social and physical systems that affect, and are
affected by, humanity (Steinberg 1999c).

By drawing lines across the sea, geographers not only

assert divisions and connections; they also impose a social imprint . Oceans may
connect or divide, or they may be im-plicated in more radical strategies for the social organization of space that lie outside
the norm of state stewardship that traditionally has guided social intervention in marine space. By rethinking the
relationship of the ocean to land, to society, and to marine resources, geographers
can contribute to a new era of marine-and global governance.

Links

Research/Science
The scientific managerialism that characterizes ocean development
reflects a desire to regulate and control the unpredictable
Bear et al. 11(Christopher Bear Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, and Jacob Bull
Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Water matters: agency, flows, and frictions, Environment and Planning A (2011),
vol. 43, pp. 2261-2266 // JJ)

Recent work in human geography and beyond has critiqued the tendency for water
tohave been approached from a predominantly engineering, economic, or
managerial(Swyngedouw, 2004, page 8) perspective. By far the most extensive and influential work to date has
been carried out by political ecologists inspired by neo-Marxist approaches, such as Swyngedouw, Kaika, and Gandy. Swyngedouws
(1999) seminal work demon-strated that water is not merely managed and is not external to the

manifestation ofpower relations: in Spains modernization process...the intertwined transformations of nature

and society are both medium and expression of shifting power positions thatbecome materialized in
the production of new water flows and the construction of new waterscapes (page
460). Similarly for Gandy (2004, page 369),water has always been closely intertwined with the flow of capital. Throughout this
work, water is a resource in which social relations are embedded (Budds, 2009, page 420, original emphasis). For the past few
years, the dialectical approaches to water promoted by Swyngedouw et al have been the dominant influence on its conceptualisation
(Loftus, 2011); while these authors are strongly influenced by the relational approaches of Latour and Haraway, the focus

tends to be on how water is socialised, rather than waters active, agential,

affective roles. As such, Loftus (2011) comments on the relative paucity of studies driven by actor-network theory and
other relational ontologies.Recent studies, emerging from a variety of empirical and spatial
foci, have engagedwith the implications of a more symmetrical approach to water,
especially throughacknowledging waters agential properties. The first strand of work has
studied theways in which humans come to know and understand water and how
waters behaviourdoes not always match these understandings. Developing directly from the
political ecology tradition, Linton (2008) and Budds (2009) have studied the ways in which hydrological science
conceptualises water as behaving in a consistent, uniform and rational manner
(Budds, 2009, page 420). As such, their work has highlighted themessiness of water, in terms
of both form and flow; it does not neatly conform to abstract models but moves in
often unexpected ways with unpredictable consequences. The most familiar
model, the hydrological cycle, is, therefore, a way of representing water that was
constructed in, rather than revealed through, scientific practice (Linton, 2008, page 631);
it is especially

a way of making water visible...for the purpose of accounting for, and

controlling it (page 636).

I-Law
Common laws attempts to carve up ocean space form the basis for
imperialist expansion and militarization
Mitropoulos 12(Angela Mitropoulos writes on border policing and class composition, Contract and Contagion: From
Biopolitics to Oikonomia, Minor Compositions: a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avantgarde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life (2012), pp. 100-102 // JJ)
In any case, it is little wonder that both Balibar and Montag, in reading Spinoza to this point, begin to think about the transAtlantic slave trade. There is, very simply, no way to think of sexual economies without speaking, also, of the organisation of race,
though the connection is less metonymic or homologous than that they are both crucial to the inscriptions of genealogy, the
legitimate transmission of property through name. More curious is Hardts argument that the Left should not abandon the claim
to identifying its legacy in the Jeffersonian tradition. Not quite a dismissal of the criticisms of Jefferson, Hardt nevertheless sets
aside their specificity his ownership of slaves, his unacknowledged sexual relationship with one of those slaves, his drive for
westward expansion that extended plantation slavery and usurped Native American lands37 as if they are not all about the
authentication of inheritance, legacy, legitimate filiation. The ostensible performativity of gender and sexuality redefined by
Hardt and Negri as proof of the productive power of the multitude finds its limit-point and fundament in genealogical conditions
of political legibility, it would seem. Undoubtedly, Jefferson can seem progressive. He defended inter-racial sex. But it is not
simply that, for Jefferson as for others, the distinction between the masters legal and bastard children (and its authorisation of
property) remained intact. More significantly, for Jefferson racial mixing amounted to modernisation that is: the cultivation of
properly American gender roles among natives and slaves.38 Put another way: the household (reproductive) architecture of a
Jeffersonian domestic economy required common laws experimental inclination and its scalable contracts. In the frontier,
sovereignty and canonical law gave way to fraternal democracy and common law. This empire was constituted,

above all, by its movement across the unpredictable environment of the frontier,
and it was the confluence of the household and frontier finance which served as
its most effective machinery of intensive and extensive elaboration. Moreover,
contrary to understandings of empire which imagine it almost entirely through a
continental European model of domination or homogenisation, the empire that
pushed through frontier spaceswas forged by oceanic expansion and common
law , by a very specific mix of military strategy and legal form .Rule Britannia
borrowed from piracy (and made legitimate pirates of some) in order to secure its
rule of the waves. Common law, with its reliance on case law, unfolds through a
subtle play between precedent and approximation or, put another way, common
law navigates power through repetition and variation. The frontier furnished the household as the
elaboration of an architectural and intimate dynamic through which limits were escaped and restored. Situated across the hyphen
between politics and economics (which is to say: as the means by which law makes markets), in the frontier, the household
attained a plasticity and portability that confound European understandings of empire and flight. But it is the heteronormative
household that determined, through precedent and approximation in common laws unfolding, the extent to which property,
contract and credit were recognized, considered as heritable and therefore guaranteed across time. It is this conjuncture perhaps
since William Blackstone articulated empires horizon as that of an increasingly incorporeal

hereditament through which grand ends are sought by steadily pursuing

that wise and orderly maxim, of assigning to every thing capable of ownership a
legal and determinateowner 39 at the moment of its greatest ontological uncertainty.

Mapping
The map and the military blueprint are one and the same the
practice of cartography enables imperialism and exploitation
Craib 9(Raymond B. Craib Associate Professor in the Department of History, Cornell University, Relocating cartography,
Postcolonial Studies (2009), vol. 12 no. 4, pp. 481-490, http://history.arts.cornell.edu/relocating%20cartograhy.pdf // JJ)
The summation is a powerful and important one: empires and nation-stateshave for too long been

homogenized and constructed as monolithic and hegemonic enterprises, running under

their own momentum and composed ofan array of equally complicit bureaucrats, officials and scientists. Yet weshould not
lose sight of the fact that the object of attention is still primarily, if not solely, the
structure of power identified as the impetus to the cartographicprocess in the first
place, an issue to which I will return again shortly.The third critical intervention was the questioning
of the narrative ofemancipation and progress associated with the European
Enlightenment andmodernity, extending to the history of cartography the postcolonialcritiques of the standard Whiggish narratives of science, progress,
andmodernity. Here the issue was less about agents than the very
foundationalcategories upon which a narrative of Western European
exceptionalism andprogress had been built and which functioned as
justifications, intellectualexculpations, for the exercise of power and imperial
expansion.

TakingFoucault to his logical conclusion, European explorers, mapmakers, and scientists were neither heroes

nor villains but relatively irrelevant to anarrative that sought to draw our attention (not unjustly) to the

fundamentalways in which historically and geographically specific practices and

forms ofrepresentation were inextricably entwined with changing conceptions
ofproperty, the rise of capitalist relations, new forms of enclosure
andclassification, and the expansion of state power.

Development
Ocean development policy relies on the stratification of the ocean as a
conduit for trade and state power
Steinberg 98(Philip E. Steinberg - Department of Geography, Florida State University, The maritime mystique:
sustainable development, capital mobility, and nostalgia in the world ocean, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
(1999), vol. 17, pp. 403-426 // JJ)
Analyzing these factors, Bunker and Ciccantell (1995; forthcoming) have suggested that the one distinct characteristic of this early
period of capitalism was that the primary means for capital accumulation was control of trade, or channeled circulation, and they
have suggested that the era be renamed the age of transport capitalism. It follows that in a system in which

economic power was based upon controlling discrete channels of trade, the
surface upon which much of this trade was carried out (the ocean) would emerge
as a site for exercising power and implementing state violence. Thus, the control of
trade routes rapidly became conflated with political domination and military
might, and the deep seas became constructed as a 'force-field' for exercising these
forms of power (Mollat du Jourdin, 1993), and innovations in the means forcrossing its
expanse were among the driving forces in modern technological progress (HugilU
1993). Even as the sea became an essential arena for the gathering and expression of social power, nascent international law clearly
placed the ocean outside the realm of state territoriality. Incorporation of ocean space within the borders of the state could
interfere with its function as a circulation surface, and during this era circulation was the dominant means by which states
accumulated wealth. Thus, although the 1493 Papal Bull and the 1494 Treaty of Tordcsillas are often described as dividing the seas
between Spain and Portugal (sec Gold, 1981, page 35; Grotius, 1916, pages 37-38), a careful reading reveals that these documents
were specifically worded to avoid any implication that the seas were to be partitioned. Rather, each state was granted

exclusive policingpowers in its respective region of the sea (Steinberg, 1996a, page 176- 183).
By constructing the ocean as a space where states competed for influence and use,
but not for outright possession, the mercantilist-era ocean-space regime
preserved both the interstate competition and the channeled circulation that were
essential attributes of the era's political-economic system. With the Industrial
Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century, the spatiality ofcapitalism underwent a
transformation, as did the social perception and regulation of the sea. Although the
dominant use of the seatransportation of commodities across its surface
remained constant with the previous era, its perceived significance in the context of political economy
changed markedly. At the root of this transformation in political economy were a host of new opportunities for investing in land
space. Following from these opportunities, the industrial era's rationalist 'development discourse'

justifiedthe reification of developable places and denigrated the spaces between.

According to the discourse, all societies were to 'develop' themselves by identifying what they produced best and directing
investment toward production of that good. Through the applicationof reason to investment

decisions, a society could progress (Sachs, 1992; Watts, 1993). Development was to occur in
'territories'units of land space that could be bounded, governed, planned for,
and 'emptied' and 'filled' according to generalizable rules of profit maximizatio n
(Sack, 1986; Steinberg, 1994). The development of a placethrough the rational application of
spatially fixed investmentswas equated with enlightenment, progress, and
civilization.

Our attempts to impose sovereignty upon the ocean through

development policy will inevitably fail
Mirzoeff 9(Nicholas Mirzoeff visual culture theorist and professor in the Department of Media, Culture and
Communication at New York University, The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality from Slavery to Katrina, Culture, Theory,
and Critique (12/21/2009), vol. 50 no. 2, pp. 289-305 // JJ)

Enabled and sustained by Atlantic world slavery, sovereign marine power turned
the oceans into divisions known as territorial waters, the high seas, rights of
passage and the right to trade that shaped imperial experience and cost many lives
in the process. Beginning with the reckoning of longitude in 1759, newly accurate charts, maps,
navigation tables and depth soundingsof the seascape were the rendition of
imperial boundaries, expansions andclaims that, as Marx and Engels highlighted in The Communist
Manifesto,engendered a global Free Trade.Marine biopower emerged in the nineteenth century as a limit and resource for settler colonies and the circulation of
industrial capital. It was the product of human interaction with the
marineenvironment, the attempts to govern and profit from that exchange, and
theresulting subjectivities. As an instrument of global modernity,
marinebiopower at once sustains circulation in the networks of power and
indicatesits periodic episodes of crisis. The present crisis of neoliberal circulation has now become
interactive with the climate crisis to produce dizzying exchanges between real and metaphorical floods and sea levels. This
regime has created and sustained its own order of seeing, which I will call immersion. Immersed subjectivity has no outside but
is constituted by the cosmographic circulation between nature and culture, the West and its Empire, and the land and the sea. This
secular cosmogram also contains maps the crisis of circulation below the line, or under water (a phrase used today to refer to a
property whose mortgage exceeds its market value). My concern here is to sketch (in necessarily preliminary and abbreviated
terms) a geneal-ogy of this marine biopower, using tools derived from W. J. T. Mitchells understanding of the imperial landscape,
empire and objecthood, and picture theory. I pay special attention to its immersive crises of circulation, first via the intersection of
John Ruskins criticism with Joseph Turners marine paint-ing; then at its present moment of intensification by means of Spike
Lees four-hour film-document of Katrina When the Levees Broke: A Requiem for New Orleans (2006). One

effect of

this biopolitical production has been to render the sea invisibly natural . As one recent
Turner exhibition catalog has claimed:

In contrast to landscape, which centuries of human

activity changes irrevocably, the sea remains the same whatever may happen
upon it

(Hamilton 2003: 2). So

much, then, for land reclamation, sea walls, canals,

piers, wrecks, fishing, dredging, pollution, carbon-dioxide generated acidification

of the water, and the possible changes to thermohaline circulation induced by
climate change. Given the obviousness of such refutations, it becomes clear that there is a remarkable
investment (in all senses, whether economic,psychoanalytic, or emotional) in the
imagining of the marine as elemental,primordial and unchanging, a dialectical
corollary to the biopoliticalstruggles over land.

Aquaculture
The expansion of aquaculture industry carves the ocean into
neocolonial plantations of fish and biomass
Helmreich 7(Stefan Helmreich Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Blue-green Capital,
Biotechnological Circulation and an Oceanic Imaginary: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy, BioSocieties (2007), vol. 2, pp. 287302 // JJ)
Falkowski poured cold water on the usual PR for marine biotechnology, which emphas- izes the unique bounty of the sea while also
trading on a romantic, conservationist sentiment. But much as Falkowski might wish otherwise, marine biotech is difficult to
disentangle from such sentiment. The Maryland center is founded on such views; their mission statement argues that the

tools of biotechnology allow researchers to clone ... genes, reproduce them, and
pro-duce desired substances in the laboratory, leaving the organisms where they
belongin theenvironment. 6 Anthropologist Sylvia Yanagisako has argued that capitalist enterprise
fundamentallyinvolves sentiment.Economic action, including capital
accumulation, firm expansion, anddiversification, she writes, is constituted by
both deliberate, rational calculation and by sentiments and desires (2002: 21; see also
Paxson, 2006). After Falkowskis talk, scientists persisted in speaking about biotech in ways infused with sentiment. 7 One
remarkable instance came in a presentation about floating blue-green algae plantships. Inthis talk, an elder statesman of
marine biology in Hawaii, Patrick Takahashi, wed

thepromise of blue-green algae to a wide-open,

unexploited ocean ecology. He offered a preview of a proposal he would later deliver to the Intergovernmental
Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO:The next frontier is the open ocean. Largely not owned by any
nation, nutrient-rich fluids at 4 degrees Celsius are available 1000 meters below the 20 degree latitude band surface. Just in this
natural solar collector region, if only one part in ten thousandof the insolation can be

converted to useful energy, the needs of society would be satisfied.... Picture, then,
a grazing plantship ... supporting a marine biomass plantation with next
generation ocean ranches.... Then consider several hundred, no, thousands of
these productive platforms. Current international law dictates that each, under
certain circumstances, can legally become a nation. Imagine the United Nations in the 22 nd
century.... European seafaring nations might again consider colon- ization, this time in the
open ocean, where there are no obvious downsides, such as the sociological problems that came with the era after Columbus. One
cannot guesswhat Greenpeace might do, but there are no native populations, not
even whales, aspermanent residents in the middle of the ocean. (2003)Takahashis
vision reaches into the extraterritorial sea to realize its apotheosis: an
oceanbrought within colonial range through humanitys planktonic emissaries, a
chlorophyllicremix of the Blue Revolution, the promotion of fish farms in the
Third World as scaled-upfood resources (named, forgetfully, it would seem, after
the much criticized Green Revolutionof the 1970s [see Stonich and Bailey, 2000]). Takahashi himself,
a man of Japanese descent born and raised on Hawaii, fashioned himself as a culture broker with Japanese attendees of the
meeting, an up-to-date Pacific Rim subject. Takahashis dream is a perfect example of what Harvard Business Review
authorsW.Chan Kim and Rene e Mauborgne in 2004 called a blue ocean strategy, a set of tactics for tapping into and creating
uncontested market space. Kim and Mauborgne imagine this blue business ethos through the figure of the uninhabited ocean and
contrast it to a red ocean strategy, which sees competitors battling bloodily, tooth and tentacle, for limited space. 8 Blue

oceans are, of course, a riff on blue skies, zones of research or investment with
no immediate applications, which may or may not come down to earth in the
future. 9Blue skies are notional spaces for such blue-ocean dreams as Takahashis
plantations without politicsaquafarms populated by generative phytoplanktonic
biomasshis invitation to Europe to restage its colonial past in a solar-powered
sea of sociological emptiness.

Generic Ocean Lines/Spatiality

Viewing the ocean as a series of interconnected bodies territorializes
the ocean through lines of division. This reinforces Eurocentric
control over the oceans as the West ultimately controls the lines of
divisions in the ocean to serve capitalist ends.
Steinberg 99. (Philip E. Steinberg in 1999, Ph.D. Clark University 1996. Lines of Division,
Lines of Connection: Stewardship in the World Ocean. Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2,
Oceans Connect (Apr., 1999), pp. 254-264. JSTOR.) MMG.
Historians of marine governance frequently assert that

the modern history of social regulation in the

world ocean may be read as one of alternating currents for and against division
and territorial enclosure (Colombos 1967; Gold 1981; O'Connell 1982; Anand 1983). On one hand, these scholars
note, events and proclamations such as Hugo Grotius's 1608 The Freedom of the
Seas, the nineteenth-century "free-seas" policy imposed under Pax Britannica, and
the non territorial self-regulation practiced by the maritime-transport industry in
the twentieth century represent attempts at constructing the ocean as a frictionfree void wherein nascent colonial empires and enterprising merchants could
establish lines of connection with far flung terrestrial territories, production
sites, and markets . On the other hand, as interaction with the ocean has intensified over time, the ocean itself
has come to be perceived as a space of resources , whether the resource is that of connection or
something more material, such as fish or minerals. Because the modern system of competitive
capitalist production governed by multiple, sovereign states encourages
territorialization, or spatial enclosure, as a means of commodifying and
guaranteeing rents from resources, the modern era has been characterized by a
number of proclamations and events that generally are perceived as drawing lines
designed to foster the enclosure, possession, and management of ocean space.
Among the notable events were the 1493 Papal Bull, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, John Selden's 1635 Of the Dominion; or,
Ownership of the Sea, the Truman Proclamations of 1945, and various provisions of the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea,
including both its regime of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZS) and its regime for management of the International Seabed Area.

The contradictory tendencies in modern-era marine governance-both the tendency

to enclose ocean space with lines of division and the tendency to construct it as a
friction-free surface characterized by lines of connection-may be viewed as
reflecting the ebb and flow of contradictory tendencies in the spatiality of
capitalism (Steinberg g999b). In this article I focus less on the changes that have characterized the modern-era regime than on
its continuity, from the late fifteenth century through the present. In particular, assert that in the modern era the
drawing of lines in ocean space-whether lines of division or lines of connectioncan be seen as attempts to steward the ocean as a space that, on one hand, is
immune to territorial incorporation into individual states or the system of states
but that, on the other hand, is susceptible to social intervention in pursuit of
specific goals. To develop this point, I begin with a careful reading of what is generally taken as a particularly extreme act of
line drawing in modern marine history, the 1493 Papal Bull and the 1494T reality of Tordesillas. These documents affirm a norm of

marine stewardship that falls somewhere between the construction of the sea as a
space amenable to enclosure and its construction as a protected space of
connection immune to social actors' exertions and desires . Next I assert that this norm

of stewardship has been a constant feature of European marine governance, from the
law of the Roman Mediterranean through the most recent proposals for sustainable development in the face of marine pollution and
declining global fish stocks. I conclude by suggesting that scholars and practitioners who design ocean-governance schemes
recognize the flexibility inherent in the stewardship norm while acknowledging that stewardship is but one possible norm available

for guiding ocean governance.

Lines may be drawn-or erased-in order to promote a range of

social alternatives in global ocean space.

The delineation of borders among ocean space represents a colonial

imposition of biopolitical sovereignty, regulating the entry of
acceptable bodies at the expense of unacceptable ones
Randell-Moon 13(Holly Randell-Moon Lecturer in Communication and Media studies at the University of Otago,
New Zealand, What if the ground beneath our feet turns out to be the sea?, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies (2013), vol. 9 no.
1 // JJ)
In the books first two chapters, Perera argues that insularity is the unique gift the colonizers bring to the land (37) and traces the
ways the island in western epistemologies does the work of demarcation,

producing order between land and ocean (38). The declarative colonial act establishing this order for
Australia was through fiction of terra nullius, land belonging to nobody (see Reynolds 1996), which constructed a landmass as
empty and ready for filling with settlers, convicts and migrants. Later explorers would chart and map out the precise boundaries
of this landmass that was to constitute Australia. As Perera points out, these early colonisers encountered

signs of non-indigenous migrants and visitors to the island, suggestive of a

different spatialised configuration of land, ocean and peoples, but chose to ignore
them in the colonial imaginary of discovery. The insular boundary-marking and
closing off of these oceanic networks established a two-fold spatial and carceral
order that expelled foreign bodies outward, by regulating the entry of non-white
British subjects to the country, and enclosed Indigenous peoples more closely
within clearly demarcated national borders (27). As a result, and in the Australian case, the
island and territorial nation-state are mutually reinforcing political formations
grounded in the same spatial and geopolitical order (39). The separation of land
and sea plays an epistemological as well as geopolitical role within modern
sovereign conceptions of the nation-state. Continental insularity conferred on the British settlers and later
Anglo-Australians a particular way of seeing Australia, in relation to itself and the rest of the world. These ways of seeing manifest
themselves in Australian cultural and literary tropes around sea change, the beach and the oceanic sublime, which present these
spaces as alternatively restorative and terrifying but nevertheless underpinned by the security of inland cultural and political
economies (46). In the dominant white cultural imaginary, to go into the sea from the

land is to encounter affective and aesthetic difference. In a similar vein, antipodal discourses which
construct Australia as isolated and vulnerable to its wide oceanic expanse (see Blainey 1966) remove from view the web of
geopolitical empires and economies that tightly control the countrys borders and its place in the global world order. The

privilege of encountering Australias borders as a form of sea change, antipodal

isolation or oceanic sublime are put into sharp relief when compared to the
asylum seekers who die with the water surrounding Australia in their lungs. This
entanglement of bodies, borders and water is understood by Perera, via Giorgio Agamben (1998)
and AchilleMbembe (2003), as the enactment of sovereign forms of biopower that foster

the lives of subjects who fall within the paradigms of a citizenship anchored to
continent whilst neglecting those unfortunate enough to fall outside these legalspatialised frameworks.

Chapters 3 and 4 analyse what Perera refers to as the season of boats (55), a period

during the early part of the last decade that saw the Howard governments increasingly

militaristic

management of asylum seekers alongside a seemingly compassionate response to

natural disasters, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, across the region. Recalling Western
literary and aesthetic tropes about the oceanic sublime, Perera incisively writes, the bare life located in
dangerous geographies lack the ability to sublimate their environments and are
condemned to an external, disposable victimhood from which only superior
powers of reason, and the scientific, medical and economic power it entails, can
attempt to rescue them (81).

Oceans
Classifying the spatial body of water as separate oceans ultimately
reinforces European and Western spatial organization. The
affirmative attempts to compartmentalize space as it serves their
means that spills over internationally.
Lewis 99. (Martin W. Lewis, Professor of global historical geography at Stanford University.
Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No.2, Oceans Connect (Apr., 1999), pp. 188 214. Dividing the
Ocean Sea. JSTOR. MMG.
The conventional nature of oceanic divisions is perhaps more obvious than that of
continents, for the simple reason that all of the worlds oceans, unlike all of the
continents, are interconnected by broad passageways . Yet atlases, almanacs,
encyclopedias, and other standard sources of geographical information invariably
present an assuringly exact depiction of each oceans areal extent . In Goodes World Atlas,
for example, we are informed that the Pacific covers 63,800,000 square miles, as if it
were an unambiguously bounded body that one could simply measure (Goode 1990, 250).

Where the Pacific ends and the Indian or Atlantic Ocean beginsa far from obvious matteris rarely addressed in such sources. Yet
different geographical reference works evidently employ different boundaries, for as they disagree profoundly about how large the
Pacific actually is. The World Almanacs Pacific, a precise-sounding 64,186,300 square miles (Famighetti 1997, 593), is almost
400,000 square miles larger than that of Goodes, and that of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with marginal seas included, is more
than 5 million square miles larger still (Mero 1989, 25:125). At one level, such ambiguity is of little account. Adding or subtracting a
few million square miles from or to the Pacific is hardly a pressing matter. Most geographers would probably contend that such
numbers are merely vague approximations anyway, reflecting somewhat arbitrary divisions of the boundless sea. And despite the
discrepancy regarding the size of the Pacific, global agreement on maritime divisions is actually striking . The same oceans

and seas, given the same names (albeit often in translation) and bounded, more or
less, at the same places, are recognized across most of the globe. Political
considerations occasionally intrude at the level of nomenclature : Koreans insist that the body
of water to their East is the Eastern Sea and not the Sea of Japan, and Indonesians sometimes refer to the body of water to their
west as the Indonesian Ocean rather than the Indian Ocean. Such disputes, however, are rare; in general

, local names

have yielded global conventions . The resulting global concord in geographical naming and bounding is
tremendously useful, for it facilitates the exchange of information and aids the nascent movement to provide some form of
international governance for the marine world. But although it is useful to divide the seas into
relatively well demarcated and internationally recognized units, such a maneuver
is problematic to the extent that it disguises the conventional nature of their
construction. The maritime realm can be, and has been, divided in different ways,
yielding units that are nonetheless just as logically constitutedand just as faithful
to the underlying patterns of the physical worldas those presently on our maps .
Entertaining alternative views of the ocean and its subdivisions allows us to see
the world afresh, revealing patterns and connections that may be obscured in our
standard worldview . The current taken-for-granted system of maritime spatial classification did not, in fact, emerge in
especially
during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, radically different notions of sea
space prevailed. By examining changed in the Western oceanic imagination, I seek
to show not only that alternative views are possible but that such alternative
visions can conceivably shed light on certain geographical patterns and processes
that are obscured by our constricted and naturalistic assumptions about maritime
space. Three major variations in the conceptualizations of sea space can be seen over the centuries. First is the manner
in which the oceanic realm as a whole has been divided into its major constituent
units, now called oceans. Second is the changing way in which the hierarchy of oceanic divisions and subdivisions
broad outlines until the 1800s and did not assume its full-blown form until the twentieth century. In earlier times,

has been arrayed: Seas,

for example, are now considered constituent units of the larger

oceans, but this has not always been the case. Third is the matter of nomenclature,
the changing names assigned to the (more or less) same bodies of water. Although
naming is seemingly the least complex issue at hand, it can have significant
political and ideological ramifications ; the demise of the Ethiopian Ocean in the nineteenth century, for
example, perhaps reflects the denigration of Africa that occurred with the rise of racist pseudoscience (Bernal 1987).

Cartography/Ocean Mapping
The map and the military blueprint are one and the same the
practice of cartography enables imperialism and exploitation
Craib 9(Raymond B. Craib Associate Professor in the Department of History, Cornell University, Relocating cartography,
Postcolonial Studies (2009), vol. 12 no. 4, pp. 481-490, http://history.arts.cornell.edu/relocating%20cartograhy.pdf // JJ)
The summation is a powerful and important one: empires and nation-stateshave for too long been

homogenized and constructed as monolithic and hegemonic enterprises, running under

their own momentum and composed of an array of equally complicit bureaucrats, officials and scientists. Yet weshould not
lose sight of the fact that the object of attention is still primarily, if not solely, the
structure of power identified as the impetus to the cartographicprocess in the first
place, an issue to which I will return again shortly.The third critical intervention was the questioning
of the narrative ofemancipation and progress associated with the European
Enlightenment andmodernity, extending to the history of cartography the postcolonialcritiques of the standard Whiggish narratives of science, progress,
andmodernity. Here the issue was less about agents than the very
foundationalcategories upon which a narrative of Western European
exceptionalism and progress had been built and which functioned as
justifications, intellectual exculpations, for the exercise of power and imperial
expansion.

Taking Foucault to his logical conclusion, European explorers, mapmakers, and scientists were neither heroes

nor villains but relatively irrelevant to a narrative that sought to draw our attention (not unjustly) to the

fundamentalways in which historically and geographically specific practices and

forms ofrepresentation were inextricably entwined with changing conceptions
ofproperty, the rise of capitalist relations, new forms of enclosure
andclassification, and the expansion of state power.

Trade Routes/Ocean Zoning (Military Zoning)

<<Trade routing>> or <<zoning>> is a form of cartography used to
impress human social constructs on the Ocean to territorialize and
divide the ocean for human ownership. This creates the upmost form
of bordering and otherization as the divisions of the Ocean create
inside outside power relations.
Ryan 13. (Barry J. Ryan, School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Keele

University. Zones and routes: Securing a western Indian Ocean. Page 2-4.
http://www.academia.edu/4953272/Zones_and_Routes_Securing_a_western_Indian_Ocean?
login=milesgray365@gmail.com&email_was_taken=true&login=milesgray365@gmail.com&em
ail_was_taken=true. ) MMG We do not endorse the gendered and/or ableist language in this
card.
There are two basic forms used to govern wide open spaces: zoning and routing .
Both involve the institutionalization of lines drawn upon relatively abstract space .
This paper demonstrates that the power relations in strategic spaces, such as the Indian
Ocean, flow through spatial and temporal mechanisms of governance . Certainly, temporal
forms of governance are the more commonly experienced form in operation on the sea. Thus, as Paul Virilio (2005) would remind
us, within the history of ocean travelling is the drive for ever increasing speeds and

the rise of globalization. The development of these routes documents our move
from oar power to wind power and from steam power to jet propulsion
engineering from it taking months to cross a body of water to a matter of days, to
a matter of hours. Moreover, their development documents our move from eighteenthcentury British packet ships sending diplomatic mail to the hubs of its Empire to
the real-time speed of instant communication. It should also be noted that, besides shipping
routes and the network of undersea cables on the seabed, the routes at issue also
refer to the highways above ocean space where commercial and military aircraft
fly. Routes therefore facilitate the hypermobility of all open spaces . The mathematics of
patterns and navigation and the resultant algorithms that govern traffic in cities are also used on sea space and in airspace.
Consequently, it is the lines, or the routes that this speed creates on the surfaces of

oceans, that focus the mind of security professionals . In terms of Deleuze and
Guattari s (2008) conceptual analysis of open space, routes produce smooth
space for capital flows . For Harold Mckinder, the military geopolitical strategist, routes embody the mobilities of
power (Mackinder, 1904). Zones on the other hand, tend to politicise this constant conveyor
belt of military and commercial mobility. Ideally, without interrupting or slowing
down the perpetual circulations on the highways of the sea, the demarcation of a
zone assigns a human value on a space through which things pass. Zones striate space,
according to Deleuzeand Guattari (2008). In other words where routes free space, zones fix space. Whereas routes reveal the wake of
historical processes, zones are projections for future uses of thesea. Routes corrode distance, binding time together with space.
Zones, alternatively, shape space, creating geometrical diagrams whose boundaries seek to produce commer-cial, environmental or
state objectives. Fernand Braudel s (1972) study of the Mediterranean led him to conclude that we comprehend the sea as the sum
total of its human routes.

Describing a human space in terms of its routes is the oldest form

of cartography . On what we now call the Indian Ocean, routes evolved to guide men safely and swiftly across a great
apolitical expanse of void. The first Europeans to land in India utilised this pre-modern cosmology. Four Portuguese carracks
commanded by Vasco de Gama in May 1498 were thus able to follow a vernacular monsoon trade wind system to sail from Malindi,
Kenya to Calicut, on the western coast of India. These were ancient routes along winds that blow from the northwest in winter and
from the southwest in summer, facilitating intensive cultural and commercial movement around the Arabian Sea and East Africa.
For 4000 years trade flowed along the regular east west trade winds which also flow back and forth along the Equator, while
further south, winds and currents facilitated triangular trade between the Cape, the Australian west coast and north to the Spice

Islands. Whereas Indian and Arab navigators understood the sea in terms of danger and distance (purely as routes), the European
saw it as a territory (Steinberg, 2001, pp. 41 52). The Portuguese named the Indian Ocean having constructed it as a politico-naval
unit particularly suited to their colonial ambitions to exploit India. The ocean s size, its resemblance to a large landlocked gulf
and its chokepoints 2 (from a European perspective) contributed to it becoming a space dominated by Portuguese, Dutch East India
Company, French and British colonial tensions. These powers mapped and took control of the 30 straits and channels in, and
adjoining, the Indian Ocean and the principal seaways from Aden and the Persian Gulf to Karachi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Singapore
and onwards to East Asia. The Strait of Hormuz and Bab-al-Mandeb represented the most important link between the Arabian Sea
and the Persian Gulf for the transfer of oil. From the East the most strategically important route became the Malacca Strait, being
the shortest, cheapest and most convenient link between the Indian and Pacific Oceans (Misra, 1986, pp. 8 9). Therefore the
Indian Ocean, when conceptualised first as a distinct human unit and so-named by Europeans, during the Cold War by the Soviet
Union and the USA as a strategic unit, or by the United Nations as zone of peace (Kumar, 1984),represents zoning and
appropriation on a global scale. Within any zone, there lies an assemblage of human strategic

interrelationships and tensions, cordoned off for political, military and

commercial management. Consequently, zones are almost entirely a construct of
modern human consciousness. They are the maritime equivalent of property
claims, and thus bring to sea space a territorializing, land- based rationality . It is
beyond the remit of this article to trace their operation in pre-modernity, but certainly from modernity s first encounter with sea
space there has been a preoccupation with hypostatising smooth blue space.

This is how the use of the sea

Zones and routes is governed: and being entirely a product of human devices, it
relates to what Schmidt identified as the new nomos of global governance. In this
sense ordering is spatial and is a function of bordering, a process of instituting an
inside and an outside . Nomos is term derived from the Greek that describes the written law and the unwritten habits
and customs, a common sense, or a truth, that has fomented through historical redistributions of political and economic power
(Foucault, 2013). Schmitt (2003, p. 67)describes it as: The Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent
measures, for the first land appropriation understood as the first partition and
classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution, is nomos . From the
moment the sheer vastness and potentiality of ocean space was realised, humankind began drawing lines on
maps, to divide and distribute it. Schmidt has located the beginning of such global linear thinking to the era of
Vasco Gama, when in 1492Pope Alexander VI established a line from the North to the South Pole, 100 miles west of 145 the meridian
of the Azores and Cape Verde. This division of the earth was revised slightly to become the partition del mar ocano , under the
Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, 370miles west of Cape Verde. The earth to the west would be Spanish and to the east would be open to
Portuguese occupation. The successors to these boundaries were amity lines, which were traced either along the equator or the
Tropic of Cancer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Along these lines European public law ended and the lawless zone of the
New World commenced (Schmitt, 2006). Within these zones seigniorial states granted themselves the freedom to exercise power
without recourse to international law. Maintaining the freedom of the High Seas, necessary for

war and free trade, mandated the emergence of the three mile limit; a
measurement of the distance in the late eighteenth century of European coastal
batteries. This limit marks the first form of coastal zoning, and the germ of contemporary zoning strategies to protect state
interests from the freedom of the global capital. Therefore one can point out that oceanic spatial order and the power it could
generate for sovereign states was from the outset bound to technologies of war and the spirit of commerce.

Exploration
Viewing the ocean as something to be explored underlines bordering
and territorializes space as the ocean is viewed as an obstacle between
the us and what we want to discover justifies otherization and
biopower over the ocean.
Steinberg 9. (Philip E. Steinberg, Department of Geography, Florida State University.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99. 2009, pp. 467495 C 2009 by
Association of American Geographers. http://mailer.fsu.edu/~psteinbe/garnet-psteinbe/Annals
%20Offprint2.pdf. ) MMG
This article is an attempt to explain an apparent paradox of modern territoriality. On the one hand, the

concept of
territory has a foundational role in the structure of modern society. According to
conventional narratives of state territoriality, inhabitable land is divided into autonomous,
sovereign units that ostensibly form the fundamental basis for ones citizenship
and identity. Each of these territories, in turn, is controlled by a government that
secures its boundaries, plots the land within, organizes it, and coordinates the
production of value from its human and natural resources (Gottman 1973). Geographers who
have studied the history of territoriality stress that t his equation of social space (and individual
identity) with bounded territory is a distinctly modern conception (Soja 1971; Sack 1986).
On the other hand, even as the territorial state was becoming the normative social institution , these territorially
defined social units were turning away from spatially fixed, terrestrial
homeplaces. Although scholars differ over precisely when the modern system of
sovereign, territorial polities came into being, most would agree that the process
was roughly concurrent with the age of exploration and the era of merchant
capitalism that followed (ca. 15001800 ), an era that was characterized not just by
intensified territorialization , but also by a revolution in transportation (Vance 1990;
Hugill 1993). The discovery of new lands to bound and govern was made possible only
by the discovery of the ocean as a space of connection and an arena of mobility
(Parry 1974; Biagini and Hoyle 1999; Bender 2006). Indeed, during this era, Europes prevailing global image
changed from one in which the world was viewed as an integrated landmass of
discrete places, surrounded by a practically insignificant bordering ocean, to one
in which boundable space was pushed to the margins as the world came to be
perceived as dominated by a world-ocean (or oceans) punctuated by islandcontinents (Cosgrove 2001). In other words, even as the concept of boundable space (territory)
was becoming essential for political organization, maritime spaces that resisted
bounding were moving to the center of modern cosmology.
half of this era ,

Similarly, especially during the first

projections of power onto space focused on claiming rights of access to

routes rather than direct control over swaths of overseas territory (Brotton 1998; Mancke
1999; Steinberg 1999a, 2001; Gillis 2007). Linked with this historical paradox regarding the formation of the state systemthat the
territorial state emerged concurrent with the deterritorialization of political economy and the geographical imagination are the
paradoxes about the processes of territoriality in the contemporary world that are expressed in the quotations that began this article:
We live in a world in which we affirm borders by crossing them (Clifford 1997;
Rubenstein 2001); we construct myths of stable societies defined by bounded
territories by living in a world of movement outside those territories (Carter 1996); and we
establish the locational grounding for our lives in those territories through techniques established for moving across the putatively
placeless sea (which, in turn, make reference to another abstract space: the sky; Bohannan 1964). Each of these statements suggests

the frailty of the binary oppositions embedded in the sociospatial logic of the

sovereign, territorial state: oppositions between inside and outside; between unit
and system; between land and sea; between fixity and movement; and between
experienced place and relative, abstract space.

MH370
The search for MH370 is an attempt at controlling the ocean through
human appropriation and exploration the affirmative views the
ocean as a hostile, all-encompassing void that asphyxiates human life,
that leads to imperial domination of the ocean, endless materialism,
and capitalist commodification of natural resources.
Gordillo 14. (Gaston Gordillo, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British
Columbia. Except from The Oceanic Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space.
http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-oceanic-void.html. ) MMG

The main protagonist in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane has
been the elusive and intensely mobile oceanic space that satellites, planes, and
ships have been meticulously scrutinizing in search for the planes debri s, thus far to no
avail. For four weeks, the surveillance technology that is often very precise in locating objects anywhere on the planet has been
struggling to pierce through the opacity of this huge mass of water that, in permanently moving, recurrently makes itself unreadable.

This is a vast liquid space whose ambient thickness and intensity is in a permanent
state of becoming: folding, shifting, arching, twisting; always in motion, always
displacing its volume across vast distances, always indifferent to the life forms
enveloped by its mobile flows. Ten days after the plane's disappearance, satellites pinpointed on the oceanic surface
relatively large objects, over twenty meters long, that looked like debris from the plane. One day, however, the debris seemed to be
here; the next day, it seems to be five hundred kilometers away. Always on the move, the ocean carries anything floating on it
elsewhere, particularly in the turbulent waters of the southern Indian ocean. A few days later, satellites and planes detected
hundreds of smaller objects scattered over wide areas. But when finally reached by ships, these objects turned out to be part of the
vast amounts of ordinary debris drifting in oceanic space, the surplus of the imperial forms of connectivity that thousands of ships
loaded with commodities leave behind in the oceanic void, turned into the most decisive channel of global capitalism. The global

panopticum has been disoriented by this mobile, textured, multi-layered spatiality

of the ocean, which makes itself even more opaque by getting entangled with the
detritus of globalization. So many transnational and imperial resources have been put
in the search that debris from the plane may eventually be found. Had the plane fallen on firm land, however, the global
panopticum of satelites and drones that control the atmosphere, and therefore look at the planet from high above, would have
already located the debris. But the plane fell into a liquid vortex that swallows up most of the

heavy objects that fall into it. This is liquid matter that, because of its physical properties, lets the force of gravity
pull those objects down toward a dark abyss that the naked human body confronts as a physical environment devoid of solid ground
and breathable air: the oceanic void. We know that the ocean covers two thirds of the planets surface. But what type of

space is the ocean? One way to begin answering this question is to look at those
areas where the spatiality of the ocean meets that of islands and continents. The
material counterpoint between both types of spaces is apparent and seemingly self-evident. On the one hand, the beaches,
mountains, or human-made buildings that define the coastline and emerge from above the oceanic surface constitute the type of
spaces where the vast majority of humans are born, live, and die. These geographies are defined by a

multiplicity of textures and forms but share the solid spatiality that has sustained
humans as land creatures adapted over millions of years to breath, eat, move, and
reproduce on firm land in direct contact with the atmosphere . On the other hand, beyond the
coastline, the body confronts a qualitatively different space: fluid, mobile, liquid. This is a space whose multiplicity is subsumed to
the physical properties of water: an incompressible fluid that is permanently in motion because its molecules can move relative to
each other, adapting to the shape of its container, the Earths surface, and to the forces of the atmosphere. Shorelines, in short, are
among the most dramatic thresholds in human experiences of space: the point where the consistency and materiality of space
abruptly changes and the body faces the beginning of a liquid world with flows, rhythms, and properties that are not those of land.
But "coastlines," Steve Mentz reminds me, is not the right name the entanglement between these two spatial ecologies, which I
prefer to see as material sets, inseparable from each other yet distinct and singular. I would add: the material name for this
threshold is edge. Coastlines are those areas where space folds to reveal the edge of a truly immense liquid void, planetary in scope
and nature. As I argue in Rubble, one of the most extraordinary sections in Badiou's book on Deleuze, The Clamor of Being, involves
his discussion of the intense private exchanges that they had over several years through personal letters. One concept stood out in
my reading of Badiou: one that he and Deleuze approved of as part of their shared constellation: "on the edge of the void." Badiou
says that Deleuze interpreted the edge of the void as the intersection between the territory and the process of deterritorialization, the

dissolution of the territory in the event. On

the edge of the oceanic void, the dissolving vector of

deterritorialization is the event of the ungrounding created by a liquid world.
Humans have long navigated and used oceanic space with high degrees of
expertise and sophistication. Many feel at home there, at ease in that liquid, untameable world. But they do so as
land creatures whose anatomy and physiology have evolved to move and breathe on firm ground . The liquid space of
the ocean can very quickly envelop and asphyxiate the human bodies that venture
in it without flotation devices. It is in this precise physical sense that the human
body confronts the ocean as a void: as liquid matter that does not halt the pull of gravity toward the heart of the
planet the way firm land does and that, in sinking the body in a fluid devoid of breathable air, negates and interrupts land-based
forms of mobility and territoriality. This liquid space, in short, imposes on humans a

challenging spatiality that can be socially used but cannot be fully controlled, for it
follows its own, powerful rhythms. These rhythms are created by forces mobilized by a planet in motion: by the
rotation of the Earth around its axis and around the sun, by the cyclical exposure of the ocean and the atmosphere to the heat of the
sun, by the gravity of the moon, as well as by the friction between tectonic plates, which occasionally shake the depths of the ocean to
create tsunamis. This vortex is far from being empty: it is inhabited by a pure multiplicity of intensities in motion and by a large
biomass. But the ocean is a void in the physical sense of the term, simply because alone in the ocean we drown in an instant,
bringing to light what we tend two take for granted: our bodily ontology as land creatures who breath air. In this essay, I argue that

Deleuze provides us concepts that are particularly important to examine the liquid
spatiality of oceanic space, such as becoming, fold, multiplicity, intensity, singularity, difference, repetition, eternal
return, virtual, actual, and smooth and striated space. It is especially in the analysis of the repetitive,
rhythmical, and ever-fluid spatiality of the ocean that Deleuzes philosophy reveals
its power to illuminate our understanding of space in its immanence,
independently of human appropriations but also in relation to them . My analysis is in
dialogue with authors like John Protevi and Levi Bryant, who also draw on Deleuze to think the material becoming and gravitational
forces of non-human made objects and forces. And as Protevi argues, the becoming of water is particularly amenable to Deleuze's
philosophy (Life, War, Earth, p. 45). Yet my analysis also goes beyond Deleuze because it puts him in dialogue with Alain Badiou by
subsuming the becoming of oceanic space to a figure of negativity such as the void . This may
seem like a counterintuitive move, given Deleuzes well-known hostility toward the negative and his public disagreements with
Badiou. Yet I see their thinking as creatively entangled in multiple ways, and for starters I understand the void not as a

figure of spatial emptiness but rather, drawing from Badiou, as a figure of pure
multiplicity: that is, a multiplicity that is non-representable . The oceans spatiality
forms an immense void not because it is empty but, on the contrary, because it is a
positive presence that is a productive and disruptive multiplicity of intensities,
singularities, and rhythms: a vortex that voids (interrupts, negates, disrupts) the
spatiality of human mobility on firm land. My analysis of oceanic space draws from recent efforts in the
humanities to examine geo-physical forces in terms of their own materiality and rhythms, without reducing them to their social
appropriations by human societies. The literature on the social construction of nature played an important role in undermining the
dualism between society and nature and in showing that society is not external to nature. Yet this perspective often

reduces nature to the passive, malleable background upon which active, humancentered forces operate. Phillip Steinbergs The Social Construction of the Ocean is the best book devoted to analyzing
the geography of the oceans. Steinberg shows with great detail and sophistication how human societies have made
use of and conceptualized the ocean in different historical periods and in different
parts of the world. He demonstrates that far from being a space empty of
sociality, the ocean has been socialized at multiple levels and is a crucial
component of global currents of trade and relations of territorial power . And while the
book does not examine how the liquid nature of oceanic space escapes human coding , Steinberg
leaves the door open for a non-constructivist view of the ocean when he writes, at the end of his book, that this remains an important
and pending question: that in being a space of nature, some crucial dimensions of oceanic space are not reducible to their social
uses, most notably the fact that the sea never stops moving (p. 210) In his essay, I take this ever-mobile nature of oceanic space as
my starting point. This is also a dimension that Steinberg's most recent work on oceanic spatiality is exploring (as the conversation
we have in the comments below make clear). But I prefer to view the ocean not as a space of nature but as a spatial set within the
terrain of planet Earth. As several authors have noted, the notion of nature is too loaded with transcendental connotations to be
salvaged as a useful analytic concept, even if we add the usual disclaimers about the need to overcome the society-nature dualism.

This problem is clear in the very idea that the ocean is a natural space, for this
implies that places made by humans are not natural, thereby reintroducing the
distinction between society and nature that is publicly disavowed. Terrain is the absolute

temporal materialization of what we abstract as "nature." Seas, mountains, roads, rivers, cities, farms, bridges, forests: they are the
type of singularities that envelope our ever-fleeting bodies as part of the terrain of planet Earth. As I have argued here, I see terrain
as involving all existing, three-dimensional material forms (human made or not) that are constitutive of space as we know it: that is,
the tangible space of this world.

This analysis of the ocean as a spatial set within the terrain

implies a materialist, object-oriented, and affective lens but more importantly a

geometric eye and perception . This is why a theory of terrain demands a Spinozian sensibility built in critical
dialogue with the two last philosophical titans of the world: Deleuze and Badiou. The starting principle of a theory of terrain is that
of its pure material multiplicity. This means that the materiality of the terrain is not homogenous, but the opposite. Spinoza argued
that the body is made up of hard, soft, and liquid elements: bones, flesh, and blood. Likewise, the planetary terrain is defined by a
multiplicity of physical densities and textures, involving hard, soft, gaseous, and liquid elements engaging in different degrees of
temperature. The ocean is certainly the largest expression of liquid space on Earth. Comprising over two-thirds of the surface of the
planet, the oceanic void has been one of the most powerful and determining spatial forces in human history. Its most defining
feature is that, for the human body, it creates the generalized ungrounding we call drowning. The history of imperial
and capitalist expansion into the totality of the planet has revolved, to a great
extent, around technological efforts to counter this ungrounding created by the
eternal, ever-mobile becoming of liquid space.

[shorter version] The search for MH370 represents an attempt to

survey and delineate the ocean, but the mobile nature of oceanic
space ensures failure that turns case
Gordillo 4/3(GastnGordillo Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, The Oceanic
Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space, Opaque Planet: Outline of a Theory of Terrain, Space and Politics: Essays on the
spatial and affective pulse of politics (4/3/2014),http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-oceanic-void.html // JJ)

The main protagonist in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane has
been the elusive and intensely mobile oceanic space that satellites, planes, and
ships have been meticulously scrutinizing in search for the planes debris, thus far to no avail. For four
technology that is often very precise in locating objects anywhere on the planet has been
struggling to pierce through the opacity of this huge mass of water that, in
permanently moving, recurrently makes itself unreadable. This is a vast liquid space whose
weeks, the surveillance

ambient thickness and intensity is in a permanent state of becoming: folding, shifting, arching, twisting; always in motion, always
displacing its volume across vast distances, always indifferent to the life forms enveloped by its mobile flows. Ten days after

the plane's disappearance, satellites pinpointed on the oceanic surface relatively

large objects, over twenty meters long, that looked like debris from the plane. One
day, however, the debris seemed to be here; the next day, it seems to be five
hundred kilometers away. Always on the move, the ocean carries anything floating
on it elsewhere, particularly in the turbulent waters of the southern Indian ocean. A few days later, satellites and planes
detected hundreds of smaller objects scattered over wide areas. But when finally reached by ships, these objects turned
out to be part of the vast amounts of ordinary debris drifting in oceanic space, the
surplus of the imperial forms of connectivity that thousands of ships loaded with
commodities leave behind in the oceanic void, turned into the most decisive
channel of global capitalism. The global panopticum has been disoriented by this
mobile, textured, multi-layered spatiality of the ocean , which makes itself even
more opaque by getting entangled with the detritus of globalization. So many transnational
and imperial resources have been put in the search that debris from the plane may eventually be found. Had the plane
fallen on firm land, however, the global panopticum of satelites and drones that
control the atmosphere, and therefore look at the planet from high above, would
have already located the debris. But the plane fell into a liquid vortex that swallows
up most of the heavy objects that fall into it. This is liquid matter that, because of its physical properties,
lets the force of gravity pull those objects down toward a dark abyss that the naked human body confronts as a physical environment
devoid of solid ground and breathable air: the oceanic void.

Impacts

Imperialism
Ocean spatiality perpetuates ocean imperialism, unilateral
interventionism, manipulation, and domination of the Third World.
Steinberg 01. (Phillip Steinberg, Ph.D. Clark University. The Social Construction of the
Ocean, Published by the Cambridge University Press in 2001. Page 24-25.) MMG

Articulation theory informs this study of the social construction of the ocean-space in two ways, one general and one more specific.
Like world-systems theorists, articulation theorists suggest that the spatiality of the modern world, far

from being contingent to fundamental capitalist processes, is a necessary

component of capitalism. Locations of partial incorporation play an essential role
in reproducing capitalism . While this theory does not directly address ocean-space, it raises the possibility that
ocean-space, as another area that lacks definitive capitalist processes but serves a
crucial role in the global economy, is in some manner a necessary and unique
"place" within the capitalist-dominated world economy . More specifically, the articulationists show
how First World Capitalists enter a non-capitalist region and selectively buttress
elements of the non-capitalist social formation so that the region, when integrated
into the global trading system, is of exceptional service to the capitalists who
dominate the world economy. Even as capitalists transform a Third World region so as to be compatible with First
World interests, selective non-capitalists characteristic of the region are emphasized
both in reality and in representation. This selective emphasizing of non-capitalist,
"non-First World" characteristics both serves to facilitate domination and to
justify it . In the narrative presented here, an analogous process is revealed: Firs World capitalists have
constructed the ocean in a manner that selectively reproduces and emphasizes its
existence as a space apart from land-based capitalist society . This construction has
been adjusted over time to serve specific stages of capitalism, much as the
techniques of imperialism have shifted over time from plantations and trading
posts to colonies to post-colonial domination . Yet through all the different definitions and social
constructions of ocean-space, the ocean consistently has been a creation of capitalism even as it has
lacked some of the capitalism's essential characteristics, just as the Third World continually has been (re)constructed to serve
capitalism even as it has remained immune from the labor system that is paradigmatic of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed,

in both the Third World and the ocean, the designation of these spaces as
"incomplete" (or "less developed") justifies further intervention and
manipulation.

Territoriality reinforces political and imperial otherization using

ocean space as a tool for hierarchical control and domination.
Steinberg 01. (Phillip Steinberg, Ph.D. Clark University. The Social Construction of the
Ocean, Published by the Cambridge University Press in 2001. Page 24-25.) MMG
With the rise of pre-modern civilizations, territoriality

took on new functions appropriate to the

social structure of these societies. Territoriality began to be used by the ruling
classes to define which people and resources belonged under their control and to
define exactly what the relationship of control should be. Territoriality was used to
create and enforce hierarchical social relations within the society. Limiting certain
peoples access to certain spaces came to serve as a means toward the end of
reproducing social hierarchy. Territories were constructed as molds for other social relationships, not necessarily
pertaining to the direct relationship between people and place. Additionally, territoriality began to be used for

classification purposes: whether one lived within a societys territory and whether
one controlled (owned) a portion a portion of that territory had social implications transcending
land-use and land access issues. The development of territoriality continues with the advent of
capitalist and modernity. Already under hierarchical civilizations, territoriality occasionally had been utilized to reify
impersonal bureaucratic relationships ant to obscure sources of power. These uses of territoriality became
more prevalent and more refined under capitalism . Most significant, though, was the way in which
territoriality under capitalism became constructed in such a way as to support the
concept of abstract, "emptiable" space: The repealed and conscious use of territory
as an instrument to define, control, and mold a fluid people and dynamic events
leads to a sense of abstract, emptiable space. It makes community seem to be artificial; it makes the future
appear geographically as a dynamic relationship between people and events on the one hand and territorial molds on the other. And
it makes space seem to be only contingently related to events... A modern use of territory is based most of

all upon a sufficient political authority of power to match the dynamics of

capitalism: to help repeatedly move, mold, and control human spatial organization
at vast scales...Territory becomes conceptually and even actually emptiable and this presents space as both a real and emptiable
surface or stage on which events occur. (Sack 1986: 78, 87)

Genocide + Violence
Territoriality justifies genocide and violence as preservation of
sovereignty and power.
Mbemb and Rendall 2K. Joseph-Achille Mbembe: He obtained his Ph.D. in History at

the University of Sorbonne in Paris, France, in 1989. He subsequently obtained a D.E.A. in

Political Science at the Institut dEtudes Politiques. Steven Rendall studied philosophy and
chemistry at San Francisco State University, the College of Notre Dame and UC Berkeley. At the
Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa.
http://publicculture.org/articles/view/12/1/at-the-edge-of-the-world-boundaries-territorialityand-sovereignty-in-africa. MMG
From a philosophical point of view, globalization

might be compared with what Heidegger

called the gigantic (das Riesige). For among the characteristics of the gigantic as
he understood it were both the elimination of great distances and the
representationproducible at any timeof daily life in unfamiliar and distant worlds. But the gigantic was for him above
all that through which the quantitative became an essential quality. From this point of view, the time of the gigantic was that in
which the world posits itself in a space beyond representation, thus allocating to the

incalculable its own determination and unique historical character .1 If at the

center of the discussion on globalization we place the three problems of spatiality,
calculability, and temporality in their relations with representation , we find ourselves
brought back to two points usually ignored in contemporary discourses, even though Fernand Braudel had called attention to them.
The first of these has to do with temporal pluralities, and, we might add, with the subjectivity that makes these temporalities
possible and meaningful. Braudel drew a distinction between temporalities of long and very long duration, slowly evolving and less
slowly evolving situations, rapid and virtually instantaneous devia-tions, the quickest being the easiest to detect.2 He went on to
emphasizeand this was the second pointthe exceptional character of what he called world time (le temps du monde). For him,
time experienced in the dimensions of the world had an exceptional character insofar as it governed, depending on the period and
the location, certain spaces and certain realities. But other realities and other spaces escaped it and remained alien to it.3 The
following notes, although they adopt the notion of long duration and relativize the airtightness of the distinctions mentioned above,
nonetheless differ in several respects from Braudels theses. They are based on a twofold hypothesis. First, they assume that
temporalities overlap and interlace. In fact, Braudels postulate of the plurality of temporalities does not by itself suffice to account
for contemporary changes. In the case of Africa, long-term developments, more or less rapid deviations, and long-term temporalities
are not necessarily either separate or merely juxtaposed. Fitted within one another, they relay each other; sometimes they cancel
each other out, and sometimes their effects are multiplied. Contrary to Braudels conviction, it is not clear that there are any zones
on which world history would have no repercussions. What really differ are the many modalities in which world time is
domesticated. These modalities depend on histories and local cultures, on the interplay of interests whose determinants do not all
lead in the same direction. The central thesis of this study is that in several regions considered wronglyto be on the margins of
the world, the domestication of world time henceforth takes place by dominating

space and putting it to different uses. When resources are put into circulation, the
consequence is a disconnection between people and things that is more marked
than it was in the past, the value of things generally surpassing that of people . That
is one of the reasons why the resulting forms of violence have as their chief goal
the physical destruction of people (massacres of civilians, genocides, various
kinds of killing) and the primary exploitation of things . These forms of violence
(of which war is only one aspect) contribute to the establishment of sovereignty
outside the state, and are based on a confusion between power and fact , between public
affairs and private government.4 In this study, we are interested in a specific form of domestication and
mobilization of space and resources: the form that consists in producing
boundaries, whether by moving already existing ones or by doing away with them,
fragmenting them, decentering or differentiating them. In dealing with these questions, we will
draw a distinction between Africa as a place and Africa as a territory. In fact, a place is the order according to which elements are
distributed in relationships of coexistence. A place, as Michel de Certeau points out, is an instantaneous configuration of positions. It

implies a stability. As for a territory, it is fundamentally an intersection of moving

bodies. It is defined essentially by the set of movements that take place within it. 5
Seen in this way, it is a set of possibilities that historically situated actors constantly resist or realize.6 Over the past two centuries
the visible, material, and symbolic boundaries of Africa have constantly expanded and contracted. The structural

character of this instability has helped change the territorial body of the continent.
New forms of territoriality and unexpected forms of locality have appeared . Their
limits do not necessarily intersect with the official limits, norms, or language of states. New internal and external actors, organized
into networks and nuclei, claim rights over these territories, often by force. Other ways of imagining space and

territory are developing. Paradoxically , the discourse that is supposed to account

for these transformations has ended up obscuring them. Essentially, two theses ignore each
other. On one hand, the prevailing idea is that the boundaries separating African states were created by colonialism, that these
boundaries were arbitrarily drawn, and that they separated peoples, linguistic entities, and cultural and political communities that
formed natural and homogeneous wholes before colonization. The colonial boundaries are also said to
have opened the way to the Balkanization of the continent by cutting it up into a
maze of microstates that were not economically viable and were linked more to
Europe than to their regional environment. On this view, by adopting these distortions in 1963 the
Organization of African Unity (OAU) adhered to the dogma of their intangibility and gave them a kind of legitimacy. Many of the
current conflicts are said to have resulted from the imprecise nature of the boundaries inherited from colonialism. These boundaries
could not be changed except in the framework of vigorous policies of regional integration that would complete the implementation of
defense and collective security agreements.7

Alts

Ungrounding
The alternative is to unground ourselves use the ballot to affirm the
multiplicity of Earths terrains
Gordillo 4/3(GastnGordillo Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, The Oceanic
Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space, Opaque Planet: Outline of a Theory of Terrain, Space and Politics: Essays on the
spatial and affective pulse of politics (4/3/2014),http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-oceanic-void.html // JJ)
My analysis of oceanic space draws from recent efforts in the humanities to examine geo-physical forces in terms of their own
materiality and rhythms, without reducing them to their social appropriations by human societies. The literature on the social
construction of nature played an important role in undermining the dualism between society and nature and in showing that
society is not external to nature. Yet this perspective often reduces nature to the passive, malleable background upon which
active, human-centered forces operate. Phillip Steinbergs The Social Construction of the Ocean is the best book devoted to analyzing
the geography of the oceans. Steinberg shows with great detail and sophistication how human societies have made

use of and conceptualized the ocean in different historical periods and in different
parts of the world. He demonstrates that far from being a space empty of sociality, the
ocean has been socialized at multiple levels and is a crucial component of global
currents of trade and relations of territorial power . And while the book does not examine how the
liquid nature of oceanic space escapes human coding, Steinberg leaves the door open for a non-constructivist view of the ocean when
he writes, at the end of his book, that this remains an important and pending question: that in being a space of nature, some
crucial dimensions of oceanic space are not reducible to their social uses, most notably the fact that the sea never stops moving (p.
210) In his essay, I take this ever-mobile nature of oceanic space as my starting point .
This is also a dimension that Steinberg's most recent work on oceanic spatiality is exploring (as the conversation we have in the
comments below make clear). But I prefer to view the ocean not as a space of nature but as a

spatial set within the terrain of planet Earth . As several authors have noted, the notion of
nature is too loaded with transcendental connotations to be salvaged as a useful
analytic concept , even if we add the usual disclaimers about the need to overcome the society-nature dualism. This
problem is clear in the very idea that the ocean is a natural space, for this implies that places made by humans are not natural,
thereby reintroducing the distinction between society and nature that is publicly disavowed. Terrain is the absolute temporal
materialization of what we abstract as "nature." Seas, mountains, roads, rivers, cities, farms, bridges, forests: they are the type of
singularities that envelope our ever-fleeting bodies as part of the terrain of planet Earth. As I have argued here, I see terrain
as involving all existing, three-dimensional material forms (human made or not)
that are constitutive of space as we know it: that is, the tangible space of this
world. This analysis of the ocean as a spatial set within the terrain implies a
materialist, object-oriented, and affective lens but more importantly a geometric
eye and perception. This is why a theory of terrain demands a Spinozian sensibility built in critical dialogue with the two
last philosophical titans of the world: Deleuze and Badiou. The starting principle of a theory of terrain is
that of its pure material multiplicity. This means that the materiality of the terrain
is not homogenous, but the opposite. Spinoza argued that the body is made up of hard, soft, and liquid
elements: bones, flesh, and blood. Likewise, the planetary terrain is defined by a multiplicity of
physical densities and textures, involving hard, soft, gaseous, and liquid elements
engaging in different degrees of temperature. The ocean is certainly the largest
expression of liquid space on Earth. Comprising over two-thirds of the surface of the planet, the oceanic
void has been one of the most powerful and determining spatial forces in human
history.Its most defining feature is that, for the human body, it creates the
generalized ungrounding we call drowning. The history of imperial and capitalist
expansion into the totality of the planet has revolved , to a great extent, around
technological efforts to counter this ungrounding created by the eternal, evermobile becoming of liquid space.

Ontological Repositioning
The alternative is to recognize our bodily ontology as land creatures
use the ballot to affirm the fact that we will never be able to
understand or control the ocean
Gordillo 4/3(GastnGordillo Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, The Oceanic
Void: The Eternal Becoming of Liquid Space, Opaque Planet: Outline of a Theory of Terrain, Space and Politics: Essays on the
spatial and affective pulse of politics (4/3/2014),http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-oceanic-void.html // JJ)
We know that the ocean covers two thirds of the planets surface. But what type of space is the ocean? One way to begin answering
this question is to look at those areas where the spatiality of the ocean meets that of islands and continents. The material
counterpoint between both types of spaces is apparent and seemingly self-evident. On the one hand, the beaches, mountains, or
human-made buildings that define the coastline and emerge from above the oceanic surface constitute the type of spaces where the
vast majority of humans are born, live, and die. These geographies are defined by a multiplicity of textures and forms but share the
solid spatiality that has sustained humans as land creatures adapted over millions of years to breath, eat, move, and reproduce on
firm land in direct contact with the atmosphere. On the other hand, beyond the coastline, the body

confronts a qualitatively different space: fluid, mobile, liquid. This is a space

whose multiplicity is subsumed to the physical properties of water: an
incompressible fluid that is permanently in motion because its molecules can
move relative to each other, adapting to the shape of its container, the Earths
surface, and to the forces of the atmosphere. Shorelines, in short, are among the
most dramatic thresholds in human experiences of space: the point where the
consistency and materiality of space abruptly changes and the body faces the
beginning of a liquid world with flows, rhythms, and properties that are not those
of land. But "coastlines," Steve Mentz reminds me, is not the right name the entanglement
between these two spatial ecologies, which I prefer to see as material sets,
inseparable from each other yet distinct and singular. I would add: the material name for this
threshold is edge. Coastlines are those areas where space folds to reveal the edge of a truly immense liquid void, planetary in scope
and nature. As I argue in Rubble, one of the most extraordinary sections in Badiou's book on Deleuze, The Clamor of Being, involves
his discussion of the intense private exchanges that they had over several years through personal letters. One concept stood out in
my reading of Badiou: one that he and Deleuze approved of as part of their shared constellation: "on the edge of the void." Badiou
says that Deleuze interpreted the edge of the void as the intersection between the territory and the process of deterritorialization, the
dissolution of the territory in the event. On the edge of the oceanic void, the dissolving vector of

deterritorialization is the event of the ungrounding created by a liquid

world.Humans have long navigated and used oceanic space with high degrees of
expertise and sophistication. Many feel at home there, at ease in that liquid, untameable world. But they do
so as land creatures whose anatomy and physiology have evolved to move and
breathe on firm ground. The liquid space of the ocean can very quickly envelop
and asphyxiate the human bodies that venture in it without flotation devices. It is
in this precise physical sense that the human body confronts the ocean as a void: as
liquid matter that does not halt the pull of gravity toward the heart of the planet the way firm land does and that, in sinking the body
in a fluid devoid of breathable air, negates and interrupts land-based forms of mobility and territoriality.

This liquid

space, in short, imposes on humans a challenging spatiality that can be socially

used but cannot be fully controlled, for it follows its own, powerful rhythms.
These rhythms are created by forces mobilized by a planet in motion : by the rotation of
the Earth around its axis and around the sun, by the cyclical exposure of the ocean and the atmosphere to the heat of the sun, by the
gravity of the moon, as well as by the friction between tectonic plates, which occasionally shake the depths of the ocean to create
tsunamis. This vortex is far from being empty: it is inhabited by a pure multiplicity of
intensities in motion and by a large biomass. But the ocean is a void in the
physical sense of the term, simply because alone in the ocean we drown in an
instant, bringing to light what we tend two take for granted: our bodily ontology
as land creatures who breath air. In this essay, I argue that Deleuze provides us concepts

that are particularly important to examine the liquid spatiality of oceanic space,
such as becoming, fold, multiplicity, intensity, singularity, difference, repetition,
eternal return, virtual, actual, and smooth and striated space.It is especially in the
analysis of the repetitive, rhythmical, and ever-fluid spatiality of the ocean that
Deleuzes philosophy reveals its power to illuminate our understanding of space in
its immanence, independently of human appropriations but also in relation to them. My analysis is in dialogue with authors
like John Protevi and Levi Bryant, who also draw on Deleuze to think the material becoming and gravitational forces of non-human
made objects and forces. And as Protevi argues, the becoming of water is particularly amenable to Deleuze's philosophy (Life, War,
Earth, p. 45). Yet my analysis also goes beyond Deleuze because it puts him in dialogue with Alain Badiou by subsuming the
becoming of oceanic space to a figure of negativity such as the void. This may seem like a counterintuitive move, given Deleuzes
well-known hostility toward the negative and his public disagreements with Badiou. Yet I see their thinking as creatively entangled
in multiple ways, and for starters I understand the void not as a figure of spatial emptiness but rather, drawing from Badiou, as a
figure of pure multiplicity: that is, a multiplicity that is non-representable. The oceans spatiality forms an

immense void not because it is empty but, on the contrary, because it is a positive
presence that is a productive and disruptive multiplicity of intensities,
singularities, and rhythms: a vortex that voids (interrupts, negates, disrupts) the
spatiality of human mobility on firm land.

Ocean Materiality
The alternative is to recognize the agency of the ocean use the ballot
to affirm the materiality of water
Bear et al. 11(Christopher Bear Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, and Jacob Bull
Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Water matters: agency, flows, and frictions, Environment and Planning A (2011),
vol. 43, pp. 2261-2266 // JJ)
A second strand of work focuses on the specific space of the sea . This follows Steinbergs
(2001) pioneering work, which moved geographers engagement with the sea beyond its status as a surface to be crossed and
aspace outsidesociety (page 207). This theme was taken forward by Lambert et al (2006, page 482), who argue that

the sea

should be treated as something with a lively and energetic materiality of its

own . Similarly, Peters (2010, page 1265) argues that the texture, the currents and thesubstance
of the water impact contemporary social and cultural uses of the sea. Central to
such work is the notion of multidimensionality: the sea has depth, which has
implications for how humans engage with the variety of lifeforms that inhabit
it(Bear and Eden, 2008; Peters, 2010). These themes of agency and materiality have been taken forward in recent work on rivers
and urban drainage. Bull (2009), for example, shows how water is active in narratives of masculinity. Eden and Bear (2011),
meanwhile, study how anglers attempt to catch fish that they often cannot see through the waters surface;

watersmateriality demands that they develop understandings of how fish are

affected by flow,temperature profiles, different vegetation, and channel
morphology. Communicationand interaction between species are thus mediated
by water (see also Bull, 2011a). From a different perspective, Jones and Macdonalds (2007) paper on Glasgows proposed
new drainage system portrayed water as unruly. For them, water can be concep-tualised in terms of
flows and movement through the city, with the management of water being
concerned with attempting to script that continued performance (page 535). Here, we
see a politics played out not around water, but through water and often driven by
water. Water is an agent and its materiality matters .The authors in this theme issue develop these
ideas, focusing especially on thematerial qualities of water and its transformative
potential. As such, they look at howwater moves, at how its rhythms shape lives, and at
tensions between making spacefor water and allowing water to find its place. They
also do not view water simplyas H 2 O, showing how it flows through multiple
spaces, materially and discursively,and how it flows in and out of different
meanings.

Jolly Roger
The alternative is to affirm the symbol of the Jolly Roger use the
ballot to break down the striated space of the ocean
Kuhn 10(Gabriel Kuhn Ph.D. in philosophy with a specialty in poststructuralism, University of Innsbruck, Life Under the
Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy, PM Press (2010), pp. 59-61 // JJ)

**Modified for gendered language edited text in brackets

The eventual rejection of any national allegiance marks the biggest differ- ence between the golden age pirates and the buccaneers
who preceded them.Among the golden age pirates, the anti-national notion becomes

stron-ger, not least in the adoption of the Jolly Roger as their truly
transnationalsymbol. Some golden age pirates might have indeed no longer
thought ofthemselves as English or Dutch or French but as pirates, and as
people without a nation. 18 When formulated categorically, however, the following assumptions still appear
problematic: Pirates doubly defied the national-ist logic first by forming themselves of the outcasts of all nations (mix- ing
together the seafarers of all countries, as suggested earlier), and second by attacking vessels regardless of the flag flying at the
mainmast, making all nations and their shipping equal prey. 19 First, the composition of golden age pirate crews appears not to
have differed all that much from those of buccaneer crews. Anglo-American sailors, in fact, appeared particularly dominant now. If
the analysis of David Cordingly is to be believed, then of the 700 known pirates who were active in the Caribbean between 1715 and
1725, almost all came from the English-speaking Atlantic and Caribbean basin. Englishmen accounted for the majority, at 35
percent; 25 percent were American, 20 per- cent came from the West Indies, 10 percent were Scottish, and 8 percent were from
other seafaring countries, such as Sweden, Holland, France, and Spain. 20 Some historians even suggest that the Cross of St.
George was still flown on occasion, alongside the Jolly Roger (and not as a decoy as many other flags were). 21 Second, pirate
captains and crews were certainly not beyond national prejudice, especially with respect to the Spanish. Bartholomew Roberts and
his crew, for example, were said to hate men from Bristol (I dont know why) as much as they do the Spaniards. 22 Roberts
apparently also held a grudge against the Irish, 23 not to mention the hatred towards folks from Barbados and Martinique
documented on his flag that marked two skulls ABH, a Barbadians head, and AMH, a Martinicans head, respectively. At the
same time, it is without doubt true that in a world increasinglydominated by the nation-state
system, it became an issue of first importance that pirates had not any
Commission from any Prince or Potentate, 24 andthat they posed a significant
threat to the nation-stateboth confirmed bytheir reputation as banditti of all
nations and the fact that legal scholars have called piracy the first international
crime. 26 There are also examples ofpirate crews that seem to have truly
transcended national rivalries. Neville Williams tells us that the crew of Augustino Blanco, a Spanish pirate who
operated from the Bahamas for twenty years, consisted of English, Scots, Spaniards, Portuguese, mulattos and negroes. 27
Furthermore, we must notforget the symbolic significance of a free-roaming

community under a non-nation-state flag, especially in light of the ever increasing

regulation of migra-tion and border control. The golden age pirates obvious
defiance of any suchnotions must stand as a powerful reminder of how things
ought to be, and asan unrelenting protest against conditions that force millions of
people everyyear to cross borders under hazardous circumstances. Many of these
peopledo not survive these crossingssome of them drown in the very waters
thatthe golden age pirates once proudly roamed. By taunting the nation-state,
thegolden age pirates expressed a simple truth: namely, that it signified nothingwhat
part of the World a man[person] livd in, sohe[they] Livd well.

Deconstruction
The alternative is to deconstruct the map use the ballot to reveal the
dissonance between reality and representation
Harley 89(J.B. Harley geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham, Liverpool, Exeter
and WisconsinMilwaukee, Deconstructing the Map, Cartography (Spring 1989), vol. 26 no. 2, pp. 1-20 // JJ)

**Modified for ableist language edited text in brackets

The pace of conceptual exploration in the history of cartographysearching for alternative ways of understanding mapsis slow.
Some would say that its achievements are largely cosmetic. Applying conceptions of literary history to the history of cartography, it
would appear that we are still working largely in either a 'premodern,' or a 'modern' rather than in a 'postmodern' climate of thought.
[2] A list of individual explorations would, it is true, contain some that sound impressive. Our students can now be directed to
writings that draw on the ideas of information theory, linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, phenomenology, developmental theory,
hermeneutics, iconology, marxism, and ideology. We can point to the names in our footnotes of (among others) Cassirer, Gombrich,
Piaget, Panofsky, Kuhn, Barthes and Eco. Yet despite these symptoms of change, we are still, willingly or unwillingly, the prisoners
of our own past.My basic argument in this essay is that we should encourage an epistemological shift

in the way we interpret the nature of cartography. For historians of cartography, I believe a
major roadblock to understanding is that we still accept uncritically the broad
consensus, with relatively few dissenting voices, of what cartographers tell us
maps are supposed to be. In particular, we often tend to work from the premise
that mappers engage in an unquestionably 'scientific' or 'objective' form of
knowledge creation. Of course, cartographers believe they have to say this to remain credible but historians do not have
that obligation. It is better for us to begin from the premise that cartography is seldom
what cartographers say it is.As they embrace computer-assisted methods and
Geographical Information Systems, the scientistic rhetoric of map makers is
becoming more strident. The 'culture of technics' is everywhere rampant. We are told
that the journal now named The American Cartographer will become Cartography and Geographical Information Systems. Or, in a
strangely ambivalent gesture toward the nature of maps, the British Cartographic Society proposes that there should be two
definitions of cartography, "one for professional cartographers and the other for the public at large." A definition "for use in
communication with the general public" would be "Cartography is the art, science and technology of making maps": that for
'practicing cartographers' would be "Cartography is the science and technology of analyzing and interpreting geographic
relationships, and communicating the results by means of maps." [3] Many may find it surprising that 'art'

no longer exists in 'professional' cartography. In the present context, however,

these signs of ontologicalschizophrenia[dissonance] can also be read as reflecting an
urgent need to rethink the nature of maps from different perspectives. The
question arises as to whether the notion of a progressive science is a myth partly
created by cartographers in the course of their own professional development. I
suggest that it has been accepted too uncritically by a wider public and by other
scholars who work with maps. [4] For those concerned with the history of maps it
is especially timely that we challenge the cartographer's assumptions. Indeed, if
the history of cartography is to grow as an interdisciplinary subject among the
humanities and social sciences, new ideas are essential. The question becomes
how do we as historians of cartography escape from the normative models of
cartography? How do we allow new ideas to come in? How do we begin to write a cartographic history as genuinely
revisionist as Louis Marin's 'The King and his Geometer' (in the context of a seventeenth century map of Paris) or William
Boelhower's 'The Culture of the Map' (in the context of sixteenth-century world maps showing America for the first time)? [5] These
are two studies informed by postmodernism. In this essay I also adopt a strategy aimed at the deconstruction of the map. The notion
of deconstruction [6] is also a password for the postmodern enterprise. Deconstructionist strategies can now be found not only in
philosophy but also in localized disciplines, especially in literature, and in other subjects such as architecture, planning and, more
recently, geography. [7] I shall specifically use a deconstructionist tactic to break the

assumed link between reality and representation which has dominated

cartographic thinking, has led it in the pathway of 'normal science' since the
Enlightenment, and has also provided a ready-made and 'taken for granted'

epistemology for the history of cartography. The objective is to suggest that an alternative
epistemology, rooted in social theory rather than in scientific positivism, is more
appropriate to the history of cartography. It will be shown that even 'scientific' maps are a
product not only of "the rules of the order of geometry and reason but also of the
"norms and values of the order of social ... tradition." [8] Our task is to search for
the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the presence of
powerand its effectsin all map knowledge. The ideas in this particular essay owe most to writings by
Foucault and Derrida. My approach is deliberately eclectic because in some respects the theoretical positions of these two authors
are incompatible. Foucault anchors texts in socio-political realities and constructs systems for organizing knowledge of the kind that
Derrida loves to dismantle. [9] But even so, by combining different ideas on a new terrain, it may

be possible to devise a scheme of social theory with which we can begin to

interrogate the hidden agendas of cartography. Such a scheme offers no 'solution' to an historical
interpretation of the cartographic record, nor a precise method or set of techniques, but as a broad strategy it may
help to locate some of the fundamental forces that have driven map-making in
both European and non-European societies. From Foucault's writings, the key revelation has
been the omnipresence of power in all knowledge, even though that power is
invisible or implied, including the particular knowledge encoded in maps and
atlases. Derrida's notion of the rhetoricity of all texts has been no less a challenge. [10] It demands a search for metaphor and
rhetoric in maps where previously scholars had found only measurement and topography. Its central question is reminiscent of
Korzybski's much older dictum "The map is not the territory" [11] but deconstruction goes further to bring the issue of how the map
represents place into much sharper focus.Deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the

map"in the margins of the text"and through its tropes to discover the silences
and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the image. We begin to
learn that cartographic facts are only facts within a specific cultural perspective.
We start to understand how maps, like art, far from being "a transparent opening
to the world," are but "a particular human way of looking at the world." [12] In pursuing
this strategy I shall develop three threads of argument. First, I shall examine the discourse of cartography in the light of some of
Foucault's ideas about the play of rules within discursive formations. Second, drawing on one of Derrida's central positions I will
examine the textuality of maps and, in particular, their rhetorical dimension. Third, returning to Foucault, I will consider how maps
work in society as a form of power-knowledge.

Reimagination
The alternative is to reimagine the lines of division in the ocean as an
act of rejection of Ocean stewardship and territorialization.
Steinberg 99. (Philip E. Steinberg in 1999, Ph.D. Clark University 1996. Lines of Division,
Lines of Connection: Stewardship in the World Ocean. Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2,
Oceans Connect (Apr., 1999), pp. 254-264. JSTOR.) MMG.
Just as

this discussion suggests that we think twice before accepting that lines drawn
across ocean space necessarily divide, it also suggests that we rethink the entire
dichotomy of division and connection in the context of the broader norm of
marine stewardship. Stewardship historically has been exercised by various entities, including the state, the church,
commercial interests, and the populace at large. At different times the norm of stewardship has been
operationalized by one actor over all known ocean space, by individual actors in
their discrete, parceled domains, and collectively by a community of actors . It has
been implemented for a range of ends, from military mobility to the conservation
of the ocean's living resources. Finally, a consideration of marine stewardship-and
the lines that often enable it-should remind us that stewardship is not necessarily
the only, or best, means of governing ocean space and of preserving its function as
a space of connection, a thriving ecosystem, a space of individual or collective
escape from terrestrial hardships, or a resource for human survival. Other societies have
developed ocean governance systems outside the stewardship paradigm, from those that have viewed the sea as fundamentally
possessible, like land space, such as the island societies of Micronesia, to those that have viewed the sea as a pure space of
connection insulated from exertions of social power by land-based entities, like those of the societies bordering the Indian Ocean,
prior to the arrival of Europeans (Steinberg 1996b). Stretching the commonly accepted boundaries of

what is possible in ocean governance, some scholars have suggested that the
expansion of individual states' territories to encompass the entirety of ocean space
is likely (Zacher and McConnell 1990; Ball 1996). Others have proposed that the entire ocean be bounded as one political unit
and its social function redefined. These scholars assert that the attitude of the world community toward the ocean must go beyond
one of stewarding the sea so that it is available for human use to one in which the sea is actively possessed and used by the entirety of
the world community so that it may serve global needs and reduce social inequality on land (Van Dyke, Zaelke, and Hewison1 993;B
orgese1 998). Whatever the precise lines drawn across the sea, and whatever goals

these lines are designed to serve, a line in ocean space, like ocean space itself, does
more than simply divide the terrestrial and spaces that "matter. Geographers increasingly
are turning to the sea to improve their understanding of the primarily terrestrial social and physical systems that affect, and are
affected by, humanity (Steinberg 1999c).

By drawing lines across the sea, geographers not only

assert divisions and connections; they also impose a social imprint . Oceans may
connect or divide, or they may be im-plicated in more radical strategies for the social organization of space that lie outside
the norm of state stewardship that traditionally has guided social intervention in marine space. By rethinking the
relationship of the ocean to land, to society, and to marine resources, geographers
can contribute to a new era of marine-and global governance.

Critical Cartography
The alternative is to engage in a critique of cartography use the
ballot to recognize mapping as a partisan product of power relations
Crampton and Krygier 6(Jeremy W. Crampton Department of Geography, Georgia State University, John
Krygier Geography and Geography, Ohio Wesleyan University, An Introduction to Critical Cartography, ACME: An International
E-Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 4 no. 1, pp. 11-33, http://www.acme-journal.org/vol4/JWCJK.pdf // JJ)

The theoretical critique of cartography addresses post-war

academiccartographys search for ever better and more veridical representations
of a pre-existing reality. But instead of participating in this search, critical
cartographyassumes that maps make reality as much as they represent it. Perhaps John
Pickles expresses this best when he says: instead of focusing on how we can map the subject
[we could] focus on the ways in which mapping and the cartographic gaze have
coded subjects and produced identities (Pickles 2004: 12). Pickles rethinks mapping as the
production of space, geography, place andterritory as well as the political
identities people have who inhabit and make up these spaces (Pickles 1991, 1995). Maps
are active; they actively construct knowledge, they exercise power and they can be
a powerful means of promoting social change .Increasing attention was paid to how maps inscribe
power and support the dominant political structures. Woods The Power of Maps (1992) was particularly significant in this regard.
It was both a major institutional exhibition at the Smithsonian and a best-selling book (a Book of the Month selection). It exerted a
considerable influence on academics and non-academics through its argument that maps expressed interests that
are often hidden. Its populist message that thoseinterests could be made to work
for others was a manifesto for many counter-mapping projects. Turnbull (1993) for example
includes the story of a map ofAborigine Dreaming trackways in the Great Victoria Desert .
Although made by a westerner this map was accorded great significance by the Aborigines, and it wassuccessfully
used in a land dispute.The standard historiography of critical cartography is that it developed during the 1980s and
early 1990s in opposition to post-war epistemologies of mapping (Schuurman 2000; Schuurman 2004). Often this account cites
the theoretical writings of Brian Harley (see for example, Harley 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1990b, 2001; Harley and Zandvliet 1992) or
critiques of GIS (Openshaw 1991; Pickles 1991; Taylor 1990). And in fact this is not incorrect; that time period did see a stimulating
sense of engagement with the implications of cartographicalknowledges. However, as we shall see in Section Four, they are part of a
longer critique.Brian Harleys papers introduced the ideas of power, ideology

andsurveillance, arguing that no understanding of mapping was complete

withoutthem. These ideas were new to the discipline, if not to geography (Edney has pointed out that Harley was well read
in radical human geography, (Edney 2005a).Rejecting the binary oppositions until then dominant
in cartography, such asart/science, objective/subjective, and
scientific/ideological, Harley sought to situate maps as social documents that
needed to be understood in their historical contexts. Harley then argued that mapmakers
were ethically responsible for the effects ofthese maps (Harley 1990a). In this way he could explain
the dominance ofseemingly neutral scientific mapping as in fact a highly partisan
intervention, oftenfor state interests.

The alternative is to engage in critical cartography use the ballot to

reconceptualize mapping as performative
Manoff 14(EinatManoff urban designer and a scholar-activist whose research focuses on participatory methods and
theories, Ph.D. student in the Environmental Psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
Destabilizing the Map through Critical Cartography and Resistance, The People, Place, and Space Reader (2014),
http://peopleplacespace.org/frr/destabilizing-the-map-through-critical-cartography-and-resistance // JJ)

Maps play a principal role in the representation and comprehension of spatial

knowledge. They are tools created with particular skill, technology, language and

method for the purpose of recording and reproducing space. Maps, therefore, have
forever been embedded in spatial politics. In late 1960s, in congruence with the field of geographys
paradigmatic shift towards humanistic geography, maps and mapmaking re-surfaced as sites open for
critical investigation, and again emerged as a tool of interest in the 1990s and
2000s with the enhanced offerings of geographic information systems (GIS). This list of
readings traces the theoretical strands in critical cartography that destabilize the map (and
the mapping process) as tools of colonialization , and follows research that utilizes maps as critical and
applied methodologies that enhance social justice work. Critical geographers challenge the supposition
that maps are objective representations of real space and work to problematize
maps as sites of power-knowledge (Harley 1989; Monmonier 1991; Perkins 2003; Wood 1992). J. B. Harleys
influential essay deconstructing the map (1989) discusses maps as being as much a commentary on the social structure of a
particular nation or place as it is on its topography. Drawing from post structural theory, Harley

interrogates the

hidden agendas of cartography and disputes the scientific positivism that is

associated with them. Influenced by Foucault, he suggests maps be read as diagrams of
socio-spatial power, embedded in the skill, knowledge and command of its
associated academic disciplines.Cognitive mapping, also known as mental
mapping, refers to the ways in which people comprehend, learn, remember,
record and articulate their experiences in the physical environment , and this work is
elaborated in Section 2 of The People, Place, and Space Reader, Human Perception and Environmental Experience. When
we differentiate between maps as objects and mapping as process or a practice, a
space opens up. This space allows us to think of maps as performative. Jeremy
Carmptons work (2009) is helpful in charting out the possibilities that arise out of mapping and performativity and provides a good
overview of contemporary MapArt projects and their interdisciplinary work (see also Cosgrove 2008). An important part of the
performative aspect of maps is their use in protests, social media and popular commentary, especially through web-based political
activism and amateur mapping. There is increased activity in these areas and a great political potential for maps in resistance.
Critical cartography challenges the role of mapping in spatial politics as official
documents of power and colonialization. At the same time, these readings
recognizes maps as efficient modes of representation of spatial complexities and
highlights maps interesting shift into critical thinking. The epistemological
troubling of maps as representations of power-knowledge created a set of new
mapping practices to be used in empirical research and in broader strategies for
advocacy and justice work (Crampton and Krygier 2006). A set of these new practices called
counter-mapping, refers to the map-making process in which communities
challenge the states formal maps, appropriate its official techniques of
representation, and make their own alternative maps. Nancy Peluso first introduced the term
through her work with indigenous Indonesian communities. They used counter-maps to claim rights to natural resources and
contest existing state-run systems of management and control (1995). Although counter-mapping is not a

new phenomenon, its reemergence as a critical practice is credited to the rise of

place-based social movements, to the growing use of participatory research methodologies in the social sciences
participatory action research (PAR), in particular (Kosek 1998).

Framework

2NC
Interpretation: The Affirmative must justify the characterizations and
representations in the 1AC before they can weigh the aff.
Prefer our interpretation:
A. Its predictable: You should be able to justify how you
characterize the ocean on an ocean topic.
B. Its fair: The representations and characterizations of the 1AC
are key negative ground, we shouldnt have to only talk about
hypothetical policies.
C. Its key to critical education: Without discussions of
characterizations we are doomed to misrepresentations and bad
decision making.
Critical theoryespecially critical geographyis the most pragmatic
form of scholarship and melds different types of education.
Arias 10. (Santa Arias, Associate Professor at the University of Kansas. Rethinking space: an
outsiders view of the spatial turn. February 6, 2010.
http://amitay.haifa.ac.il/images/9/90/Arias_2010_rethinking_space.pdf) MMG

A point of convergence between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences

has been provided by critical theory, particularly the ideas of the Frankfurt School, French poststructuralists,
and many other philosophers who have sought to show the multiple meanings of space and the play of social relations across
geographic surfaces as they pertain to language, identity, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and power. Without doubt, critical

theory has become the backbone of the cross-disciplinary dialogue that has
enriched, diversified, and provided a theoretical apparatus to academic
scholarship. At the forefront of interdisciplinary research are the complexities, silences, and problematic relationship
between interpreters (i.e., readers, artists, viewers), texts, and the worlds they represent. With the works of Lefebvre, Foucault,
Lacan, and Derrida, as interpreted by critical human geographers, the entrance of spatiality into other fields has allowed for lateral
mappings that resulted, in my view, of a more nuanced understanding of the relationships of history and geography.2

Spatiality is interdisciplinary by nature and it has impacted other disciplines

beyond history, such as religion, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, education,
media studies, and literature and cultural studies, to name just a few. Critical

geographers have provided the tools to challenge historicist approaches that view
space as a given entity, inert and naturalized, in order to engage in an
interpretative human geography . Jonathan Murdoch (2006) outlines the important influence of
poststructuralism in geography in order to understand its focus on power and social relations and networks and spatial
entanglements: It is a way of shifting spatial imaginaries so that new forms of geographical practice come into being. From a poststructuralist perspective, no longer should geographical practitioners be detached from heterogeneitythey should be subsumed
within the complexities and multiplicities of various kinds (197).

Questions of epistemology come before policymaking and directly

determine its success.
IIDA 06. (Akira IIDA, Professor, College of Law, Nihon University. February 2006. Cognitive
Issues in Policy Making. https://www.mof.go.jp/pri/research/discussion_paper/ron133e.pdf. )
MMG
In any policy making exercise, whether it is about matters of economic, social or
political problems, both domestic and international, such as diplomatic relations
or national defense, there are various cognitive issues that affect the design and
implementation of the policy . Without correct cognition of the actuality and
history regarding the problems in question, or without correct cognition of the
problems that might arise in the process of the policy implementation, the policy
making exercise is bound to fail. Yet, in the history of economics, sociology or the study of the diplomacy or of
national defense, philosophical inquiry about cognitive issues in policy making has been very poor. More specifically, on one hand,

epistemologists have hesitated to go into this kind of inquiry, since policy making
always embraces questions of values or other subjective judgments, and hence,
objectivity is not assured. On the other hand, the attention of the economist, sociologist, or analysts on diplomacy and
national defense has focused on the analysis of relationships among the economic, social, diplomatic or defense factors, while
neglecting the cognitive issues in policy making itself. Policy makers should have far better knowledge

in this area, but they have paid scarce attention to it, despite their policy failures,
caused by their failures to recognize the factors that really mattered in the case in
question.

More Framework Cards

Simulation fails, methodological criticism key to examine discursive
foundations and critique spatiality.
Leonardo 03. CSU Long Beach. Resisting Capital: Simulationist and Socialist Strategies.
http://gse3.berkeley.edu/faculty/ZLeonardo/ResistingCapital.pdf MMG
I have argued that critical

theory must work through the distortions of capital. As such, the

act of reading becomes not only an exercise of representation, but a potentially
transformative event (Freire 1993). Throughout this essay, I assessed the viability of both simulationist and socialist
theories as modes of explanation for the postmodern condition. In addition, I evaluated their capacity to intervene into or resist
with meaningful strategies relations of capital. Finally, the essay critiqued simulationism and socialism for their praxiological value.
Clearly, Baudrillards simulation theory of the hyperreal represents a unique innovation in social theory that challenges any
universalist, transcendental explanation of the social. En route to its unpredictable ends, simulation theory pronounces the death
of certain modernist themes, like production and depth, both of which link with Marxist discourse. Despite these formidable
challenges to socialist epistemology, simulation theory falls short of a sustainable position

because it denies the possibility of systematic opposition since this would be

tantamount to admitting that a system is currently in place. Socialist societies may not obliterate
oppression once and for all, but a historical materialist critique is a process that attends to
the conditions of exploitation as they historically appear . In a time of real as well as theoretical
crisis, the promises of Marxism remain a potential, not a guarantee. It is not only attentive to language, but
the language of concrete people. It takes discourse seriously but also constructs a
discourse for transformation of reality. Despite the possibility that it may never realize a practical condition
free of contradictions, Marxism is a discourse committed to ending human exploitation. In our current formation, Marxisms
incessant critique of capitalism makes it one of the most stable threats in the unstable conditions of postmodernity.

Use the ballot to reclaim social pedagogyskills and knowledge are

force multipliers for inequality unless we prioritize resistance in
educationits your academic responsibility
Giroux, cultural studies prof, 5Global Television Network Chair in English and

Cultural Studies at McMaster University, selected as the Barstow Visiting Scholar for 2003 at
Saginaw Valley State University, named as Distinguished Scholar at multiple institutions, Ph.D.
(Henry, Fast Capitalism, 1.2 2005, Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the
Challenge of Neoliberalism, RBatra)
In opposition to these positions, I want to reclaim a tradition in radical educational theory and cultural studies in which pedagogy as a critical practice
is central to any viable notion of agency, inclusive democracy, and a broader global public sphere. Pedagogy

as both a language
of critique and possibility looms large in these critical traditions, not as a
technique or a priori set of methods, but as a political and moral practice . As a political
practice, pedagogy is viewed as the outgrowth of struggles and illuminates the
relationships among power, knowledge, and ideology, while self-consciously, if not self-critically,
recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and what
knowledge and identities are produced within particular sets of social relations . As a
moral practice, pedagogy recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers, and others teach cannot be abstracted from what it
means to invest in public life, presuppose some notion of the future, or locate oneself in a public discourse. The

moral implications
of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibility as intellectuals for the public cannot be
separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social
relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer up to students as
well as colleagues. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, creating
those public spaces for engaging students in robust dialogue, challenging them to
think critically about received knowledge and energizing them to recognize their own power as

individual and social agents. Pedagogy has a relationship to social change in that it
should not only help students frame their sense of understanding, imagination,
and knowledge within a wider sense of history, politics, and democracy but should
also enable them to recognize that they can do something to alleviate human
suffering, as the late Susan Sontag (2003) has suggested. Part of this task necessitates that cultural studies theorists and educators anchor their
own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing and greviously
incomplete forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is rejecting the assumption that theorists can understand social problems without contesting
their appearance in public life. More specifically, any

viable cultural politics needs a socially committed

notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of
the good society. Zygmunt Bauman (2002) is right in arguing that "if there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much
chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves" (p. 170). Cultural studies' theorists need to be more forceful, if not more

committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic

societies are never too just, which means that a democratic society must constantly
nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of
citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in shaping the material
relations of power and ideological forces that affect their everyday lives. Within
the ongoing process of democratization lies the promise of a society that is open to
exchange, questioning, and self-criticism, a democracy that is never finished , and one
that opposes neoliberal and neoconservative attempts to supplant the concept of
an open society with a fundamentalist market-driven or authoritarian one. Cultural
studies theorists who work in higher education need to make clear that the issue is not whether
higher education has become contaminated by politics, as much as recognizing
that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. At the same time, they can make
visible their opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to a set of skills to
enhance one's visibility in the corporate sector or an ideological litmus test that
measures one's patriotism or ratings on the rapture index. There is a disquieting refusal in the contemporary academy to raise
broader questions about the social, economic, and political forces shaping the very terrain of higher educationparticularly unbridled market forces,
fundamentalist groups, and racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups within relations of academic power. There is also a general
misunderstanding of how teacher

authority can be used to create the pedagogical conditions

for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into the trap of simply indoctrinating
students. For instance, many conservative and liberal educators believe that any notion of critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its

politics and engages students in ways that offer them the possibility for becoming criticalwhat Lani Guinier (2003:6) calls the need to educate
students "to participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through taxes, made their education possible"
leaves students out of the conversation or presupposes too much or simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While such educators believe in
practices that open up the possibility of questioning among students, they often refuse to connect the pedagogical conditions that challenge how and
what students think at the moment to the next task of prompting them to imagine changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its
democratic possibilities. Teaching students how to argue, draw on their own experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about why they
should engage in these actions in the first place. How the

culture of argumentation and questioning relates

to giving students the tools they need to fight oppressive forms of power , make the world a

more meaningful and just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility is missing in contemporary, progressive frameworks of education. While no
pedagogical intervention should fall to the level of propaganda, a pedagogy which attempts to empower critical citizens can't and shouldn't try to avoid
politics. Pedagogy

must address the relationships between politics and agency,

knowledge and power, subject positions and values, and learning and social
change while always being open to debate, resistance, and a culture of questioning .
Liberal educators committed to simply raising questions have no language for linking
learning to forms of public minded scholarship that would enable students to consider the important
relationship between democratic public life and education, or that would encourage students pedagogically to enter
the sphere of the political, enabling them to think about how they might participate in a democracy by taking what they learn into

new locations and battlegroundsa fourth grade classroom, a church, the media, a politician's office, the courts, a campusor for that matter taking on
collaborative projects that address the myriad of problems citizens face on a local, national, and global level in a diminishing democracy. In spite of the
professional pretense to neutrality, academics in the field of cultural studies need

to do more pedagogically than

simply teach students how to argue and question. Students need much more from their educational experience.
Democratic societies need educated citizens who are steeped in more than the skills of argumentation. And it is precisely this
democratic project that affirms the critical function of education and refuses to
narrow its goals and aspirations to methodological considerations. As Amy Gutmann (1999)
argues, education is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of
agency, the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of power, and is a

precondition for creating informed and critical citizens who act on the world . This is
not a notion of education tied to the alleged neutrality of the academy or the new conservative call for "intellectual diversity" but to a vision of pedagogy
that is directive and interventionist on the side of producing a substantive democratic society. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from
training. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical approaches that
strip critical and democratic possibilities from what it means to be educated. Cultural studies theorists and educators would do well to take account of
the profound transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central element of cultural politics. In part, this means once
again recognizing, as Pierre Bourdieu (2003) has insisted, that the

"power of the dominant order is not just

economic, but intellectuallying in the realm of beliefs "(p. 66), and it is precisely within
the domain of ideas that a sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public
realm. Such a task suggests that academics and other cultural workers actively
resist the ways in which neoliberalism discourages teachers and students from becoming critical
intellectuals by turning them into human data banks. Educators and other cultural workers need to build alliances
across differences, academic disciplines, and national boundaries as part of broader efforts to develop social movements in defense of the public good
and social justice. No small part of this task requires that such groups make visible the connection between the war at home and abroad. If the growing
authoritarianism in the U.S. is to be challenged, it is necessary to oppose not only an imperial foreign policy, but also the shameful tax cuts for the rich,
the dismantling of the welfare state, the attack on unions, and those policies that sacrifice civil liberties in the cause of national security.

Opposing the authoritarian politics of neoliberalism, militarism, and

neoconservatism means developing enclaves of resistance in order to stop the incarceration of a

generation of young black and brown men and women, the privatization of the commons, the attack on public schools, the increasing corporatization of
higher education, the growing militarization of public life, and the use of power based on the assumption that empire abroad entails tyranny and
repression at home. But resistance needs to be more than local or rooted in the specificity of particular struggles. Progressives need to develop national
and international movements designed to fight the new authoritarianism emerging in the United States and elsewhere. In part, this means revitalizing
social movements such as civil rights, labor, environmental, and anti-globalization on the basis of shared values and a moral vision rather than simply
issue-based coalitions. This

suggests organizing workers, intellectuals, students, youth, and

others through a language of critique and possibility in which diverse forms of
oppression are addressed through a larger discourse of radical democracy, a
discourse that addresses not only what it means to think in terms of a general
notion of freedom capable of challenging corporate rule, religious
fundamentalism, and the new ideologies of empire , but also what it might mean to link freedom to a shared
sense of hope, happiness, community, equality, and social justice. Democracy implies a level of shared beliefs, practices, and a commitment to build a
more humane future. Politics in this sense points to a struggle over those social, economic, cultural, and institutional forces that make democracy
purposeful for all people. But this

fundamentally requires something priora reclaiming of the

social and cultural basis of a critical education that makes the very struggle over democratic politics meaningful
and understandable as part of a broader affective, intellectual, and theoretical investment in public life (Couldry 2004).

Borders and place come before and determine politics where we

locate political authority is a prerequisite to political engagement
Walker 9 [RBJ, Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria,
Canada, After the Globe, Before the World, p 33-35]

The list of challenges to established political conventions is undoubtedly long. It offers ample potential for scholarly squabbles and
public debates about sequencing and priorities. It certainly exceeds the analytical competence of established disciplinary traditions
of scholarship, not least because established scholarly disciplines are already overcommitted to specific sequences and priorities. It
feeds multiple disputes about the interpretation of information and the specific ontological, epistemological and axiological
commitments these interpretations should stimulate. Specific claims sometimes lead to sophisticated conceptual and empirical
innovation; though they also lead to disputes about the grounds on which conceptual and empirical sophistication might now be
judged. Sometimes such claims generate wild speculation, righteous indignation, and desperate affirmations of entrenched
theoretical traditions; though they also intensify suspicions that the grounds on which we have come to think about both tradition
and radical possibility are now precisely what is being called into question. Most significantly, claims about specific

trends and problems generate further claims about the limitations of established
forms of political authority, especially about the always uncertain relationship
between various practices of power and the territorially located institutions and
procedures through which deployments of, and responses to, power are
understood to be legitimate. Whether in relation to narratives about new or intensified trends and dangers, or to
contestations over basic principles that have long been taken for granted, claims that we need to be more
imaginative in our ability to work together (as the political animals of the polis, as Aristotle would put it, as
participants in some community as we tend to put it now) increasingly run up against the multiple ways
in which our authoritative expressions of political engagement are firmly located
in a particular somewhere: within and between the spatial boundaries of modern
states. 7 To imagine some other way of being political, it is often assumed, is also to

imagine future possibilities without the benefit of those boundaries , those lines of
both discrimination and relation that have shaped our most basic assumptions
about what it means to be modern political subjects capable of responding to
specific challenges or to more general structural and historical transformations .
This is what gives such disconcerting force to claims that we need to reimagine where and what political
life might be. To articulate suspicions that political life often fails to take place
where it is supposed to take place is to generate multiple questions about how to
engage with whatever politics is supposed to be from those places within which it
is supposed to occur. To contemplate the implications of various claims about the speed, acceleration and temporal
contingency of contemporary political practices is to generate questions about how such practices can be contained and organized
within the spatial boundaries of a particular somewhere. To claim that the boundaries of the modern

state and the modern system of states are being displaced is to provoke
uncertainty about where we are or what we might be as political subjects . To
suspect that contemporary political life exceeds the instrumental and/or
imaginative capacities of modern subjects conceiving themselves to be citizens of a
particular somewhere is to raise doubts about our capacity to think about the
prospects for liberty, equality, security and democracy, and thus about how we
might still claim to be both members of a particular community and participants in
some more broadly defined community, perhaps even one encompassing the
entirety of humankind. To contemplate the possibilities of resistance or
emancipation in relation to claims about the failings of the modern state, or to envisage
plans for updating the United Nations so as to meet demands for fairer and more effective forms of governance, or to make claims
about the significance of social movements that are somehow new, a civil society that is somehow global, or forms of violence that
require still more violence, is to come up against many well defined boundaries, whether

understood as physical borders or as other, less tangible forms of limitation: limits

in space, limits in time, and limits in our capacity to imagine where and what we
are in space and in time. Most disturbingly, to try to respond to claims that the problems
of our age are worldwide in scope, involving complex economic, ecological and
cultural processes that exceed the grasp of established political authorities, is to
generate profound doubts about our capacity to engage with a world that has
already been excluded as the necessary condition under which modern political
authority has been constituted in the formalized spaces of abstractly sovereign
jurisdictions. Consequently, it is now scarcely possible to engage with contemporary
political life without some sense that we risk speaking in terms that have lost much
of their grip not only upon important empirical events but even more so upon the
theoretical principles through which we are encouraged to make sense of and
respond to empirical events. While many specific problems or trends attract
pragmatic responses requiring little attention to conceptual coherence or to
grandiose notions of spatiotemporality, once these responses impinge on
established principles of political authority, responsibility, liberty, equality,
security and democracy upon the principles through which we have come to
understand the possibilities and limits of a politics of modern subjects enabled
within and between modern sovereign states the spatiotemporal organization of
what counts as a coherent and acceptable form of political life quickly become of
great controversy. In the meantime, ambitious one-liners are thrown around as once merely speculative concepts are
puffed up for the talk shows, the best-seller lists, the quick sound-bites and the executive summaries. Claims about
globalization, postmodernity, a conflict of civilizations, a coming anarchy, a third
way, a risk society, a tipping point or a new empire blind us in a momentary glare,
and then fade as complexities impinge and contingencies are brought to order . The
stories we are told about contemporary transformations vary enormously. Anyone who claims to know how to offer a reasoned
scholarly judgement about what they add up to is certainly tempting the fates. Nevertheless, in my judgement it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that our capacity to know how to engage with political possibilities because we know where those possibilities are to
be engaged is in serious trouble. Much of this trouble arises in those contexts that we call the international: that strange and very
puzzling place in which we are encouraged to imagine ourselves engaged in a politics that encompasses, or might one day

encompass, the entire world; as if a politics both enabled by and sustaining the ambitions of specifically modern subjects could ever
encompass the entire world from which such subjects have been separated as the necessary but impossible condition under which
they can celebrate their liberties, equalities and securities.

Focus on discourse and representations is key in the context of our

criticism threat construction and the securitization of national
identities legitimize violent intervention in the name of United States
hegemony critical analysis is necessary.
Slater, 2004 [David Slater, Emeritus Professor of Political Geography, &
Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of
London, Geopolitics and the Postcolonial: Rethinking North-South Relations,
Blackwell Publishing Ltd]
In the light of Olneys dictum, it can be noted that an

expansion of spatial power or the establishment

of a new spatial-political order needs a justification, an ensemble of ideas and
concepts that can provide a moral and cultural foundation. Moreover, in the context of relations with
other societies, and specifically in the Americas, remembering Jeffersons notion of the United States
having a hemisphere to itself, the construction of a geopolitical identity included the positing
of difference as inferiority and danger. The outside world contained threats to
security and to the diffusion of mission. The perceived threat of disorder and chaos to
the rule of the emerging American Empire could be taken as an example of the key
relation between the perception of threat and the geopolitics of intervention to
maintain a sense of security. It can be argued here that any discussion of threats to order
and stability must be linked to discourses of identity and difference. What exactly is being

threatened? What are the discourses or regimes of truth that are immanent in the power relations that seek to preserve order? In the
case of nineteenth-century US power, the spread of progress and a civilizational mission were

predominantly envisaged as being rooted in a specifically American destiny.

There were the pressures of economic expansion, but the USAs representation of
itself to the world, the construction of a project of leadership (backed by the capacity and willingness to deploy force)
was crucial to any understanding of the geopolitics of interventionism. Threats
and perceptions of disorder are predicated on governing visions which are one
expression of the complex intersections of power and cultural representation. But
these visions are also a reflection of a hegemonic ambition. Further, in a context that is
international, where the intersubjectivity that is a pivotal part of power relations stretches
across national boundaries, and therefore national cultures , and where the attempt to
develop a hegemonic project comes up against nationalist opposition, one kind of
counter-geopolitics, the resistance to imperial persuasion, has been strikingly resilient, even if it has never been the only
tendency, as will be mentioned below. What needs to be remembered, as I shall suggest below, is that in any account of
the power/discourse intersection, the effectiveness of counter-discourses or
counter-representations to Empire ought to be included as a significant part of the
analysis.

Discourse comes first shapes and sustains power relations

Herod, Tuathail, and Roberts 98 Andrew Herod is Associate Professor of Geography
at the University of Georgia, Athens. Gearoid O Tuathail is Associate Professor of Geography at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Susan M. Roberts is Assistant Professor of Geography and
member of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky. An Unruly World?:
Globalization, Governance and Geography February 20, 1998 page 32-34

These tenets (Lakoff 1987) lead to a view of the world that is very different from the purified and purifying Joshua discourse, which we might call, after
Jowitt (1992) and Serres (1995a), the

"Genesis discourse." It is a view of the world in which

"borders are no longer of fundamental importance; territorial, ideological and

issue boundaries are attenuated, unclear, and confusing"

(Jowitt 1992: 307). It is a view of the world in

which knowledge has become an archipelago of islands of epistemic stability in a sea of disorder, fluctuations, noise, randomness and chaos. Whereas
in the Joshua discourse order is the rule and disorder is the exception, in the Genesis discourse disorder is the rule and order the exception and, as a
result, "what becomes more interesting are the transitions and bifurcations, the long fringes, edges, verges, rims, brims, auras, crenellates, confines . . .
all the shores that lead from one to another, from the sea of disorder to the coral reefs of order" (Latour 1987a: 94-5). Obviously,

such a view
has a number of consequences, of which two are particularly significant. First, the
favored epistemological stance is, to use Wittgenstein's (1978) feline phrase, "not
empiricism yet realism." That may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is, in fact, an argument for a
limited but not total form of relativism which argues that individuals understand
the same domain of experience in different and inconsistent ways and that this is a
necessary condition of knowledge (Diamond 1991). Since even the most disinterested of analysts is engaged in social
projects any a priori claim to epistemological privilege is impossible. Second, knowledge is no longer seen as a
form of empire-building in which "a powerful critique is one that ties, like a bicycle wheel, every point of a periphery to one of the

center through the intermediary of a proxy. At the end holding the center is tantamount to holding the world" (Latour 1987a: 90). At best, knowledge is,
in Lakoff's (1987) phrase, "radial." That is: THE RISE OF SOFT CAPITALISM central truths are true by virtue of the directness of fit between the
preconceptual structure of experience and the conceptual structure in terms of which the sentence is understood. But most of the sentences we speak
and hear and read and write are not capable of expressing central truths; they are sentences that contain concepts that are very general or very specific
or abstract or metaphorical or metonymic or display other kinds of 'indirectness' relative to the direct structuring of experience. Not that they need to
be any less true, but they aren't central examples. (Lakoff 1987: 297) Discourses

produce power relations. Within

them, stories are spun which legitimate certain kinds of constructs, subject
positions, and affective states over others. The myths and fables of the Joshua discourse were particularly powerful.
Specifically, four of these myths and fables did serious work in producing a particular kind of world which is now so often called "modern" that we no
longer realize the cultural specificity of the description or the strength of the investments we have placed in it. The first of these myths was an old
Enlightenment "chestnut" the myth of total knowledge. Somehow - though we don't have this facility yet we could get to know everything that is
going on. Every movement of an ant and every rustling of a leaf could be tracked and explained. Every human culture could be laid open to inspection
and documentation. Every practical skill could be analyzed down to its last detail and then transcended. This myth was supported by a second: that the
world was set up in such a way as to allow this that the world was an ordered, homogeneous, quantitatively different multiplicity. The world was
defined by oneness, consistency and integrity which, in turn, acted as an ideal terrain on which purified theoretical orders could operate and permeate.
The third myth was of a material world which could be separated out from the world of the imagination, from the world of symbols and semiotics.
There was no sense, therefore, of a world in which materials are interactively constituted, in which "objects, entities, actors, processes - all are semiotic
effects" (Law and Mol 1995: 277). The fourth myth was one of individuality. This was the idea that knowledge comes from the operation of a God-like
gaze which emanates from an individual focal point. Human capacities, therefore, could be framed as being the result of an innate endowment that
every individual received at the point of conception. There was, in other words, no grasp of the individual as being a modulated effect (Thrift 1991), of
human capacities as arising out of: emergent properties of the total developmental system constituted by virtue of an individual's situation, from the
start, within a wider field of relations including most importantly, relations with other persons. In short", social relations, far from being the mere
resultant of the association of discrete individuals, each independently 'wired up' for co-operative or enthusiastic behaviour, constitute the very
ground from which human existence unfolds.

Mechanics/ATs

AT: Permutation
The permutation functions with an us-them system; only the alt can
solve stepping outside of the social construction of ocean
compartmentalization is key to breaking down spatial barriers.
Steinberg 9. (Philip E. Steinberg, Department of Geography, Florida State University.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99. 2009, pp. 467495 C 2009 by
Association of American Geographers. http://mailer.fsu.edu/~psteinbe/garnet-psteinbe/Annals
%20Offprint2.pdf. ) MMG
Theorists within and beyond the discipline of geography increasingly realize that
boundaries are not simply lines that enclose and define territories. Boundaries also
regulate and are reproduced by acts of movement. Movement, beyond and across, as well as
within a bounded territory, serves to reproduce the territory that is being bounded. It follows
that to understand the history of a territorial entity one must go beyond tracing
the spatially fixed activities that occur within that territory or the discursive
strategies through which the territory is made to appear natural. One must also trace
the acts of movement that occur within, across, and outside the territorys boundaries and the
designation of specific spaces of movement as beyond territorial control. In short, one cannot
understand the construction of inside space as a series of territories of fixity,
society, modernization, and development without simultaneously understanding
the construction of outside space as an arena of mobility that is deemed
unsuitable for territorial control.

The permutation fails squo state action is grounded in IR

orthodoxies that reinforce spatial territorialization and European
domination. Rethinking current geopolitics must happen first.
Fitzpatrick 08. John Edmond Fitzpatrick, University of Queensland. The Atlantic peace:
European expansion overseas and the international system/ international society dialectic.
2008. http://www.polsis.uq.edu.au/OCIS/Fitzpatrick.pdf. MMG
In conventional IR language, this

paper attempts a rethinking of IR orthodoxies about the

intersection between the historical evolution and the geographical expansion of
the modern international system. Before approaching the English school, therefore, I take up an important
contribution to the critical IR debate by an historical geographer John Agnews 1999 article on mapping political power beyond
state boundaries.6 Agnew starts with several problems in the conventional

understanding of the geography of political power: notably its timeless

conception of statehood and its assumptions about a fundamental opposition
between domestic and foreign affairs in the contemporary world. He then
proposes a more flexible way of approaching the problem, based on the historical
interplay of four different models or patterns of historical spatialities of power . The
first and oldest model is that of an ensemble of worlds: a pattern of scattered cultural areas or civilisations with limited
communication and interaction between them. Though each area has fuzzy external boundaries, each also nurtures a sense of a
profound difference beyond its own boundaries without any conception of the particular character of other areas. Time is cyclical or
seasonal with dynasties and seasons replacing one another in natural sequence. Political power is largely

internally-oriented and directed towards dynastic maintenance and internal

order. Its spatiality rests on a strongly physical conception of space as distance to
be overcome or circulation to be managed. The second model, also old but

becoming widespread only in the era of European overseas expansion, is that of a

field of forces. This is the geopolitical model of states as rigidly defined territorial
units in which each state can gain power only at the expense of others and each has total control over its own territory. It is akin
to a field of forces in mechanics in which the states exert force on one another and the outcome of the mechanical contest depends
on the populations and resources each can bring to bear All of the attributes of politics, such as rights, representation, legitimacy,
and citizenship, are restricted to the territories of individual states . The presumption is that the realm of

geopolitics is beyond such concerns. Force and the potential use of force rule
supreme beyond state boundaries. Time is ordered on a rational global basis so
that trains can run on time, workers can get to work on time, and military forces
can coordinate their activities.7 The third model is the hierarchical network
essentially a world economy organized along core/semi-periphery/periphery lines
- which begins its rise through the 19th century in and around the framework
provided by the state system (i.e. the then dominant field of forces). The fourth is that of an integrated world
society, which acquires real significance only in the late-20th century and which - like the hierarchical network - will not be
considered further in this paper. Figure 1 reproduces Agnews basic mapping of the long-term historical interplay of these four
spatialities of power, with some significant changes to his internal periodization of the post-1500 era, and with my Atlantic peace
era shaded in to the right of the diagram.8 This representation highlights the paradoxical

proposition foreshadowed in the introduction about the progress of Atlantic

European expansion by the early 19th century: on the one hand, it was rapidly
breaking down the relative isolation of the large territorial cores in the premodern ensemble of worlds and definitively establishing a near-global field of
forces; on the other, it was simultaneously implanting a new system of mutuallyrecognized soveriegnties outside Europe, in which vast areas were being
'domesticated' by one or other Atlantic power, and effectively removed from at least the military arena of
that same global field of forces.

Complete Negativity is key- only through imagining political praxis

can we create change
Vaughn-Williams 9 ( Nick, IR MA @ university of Warwick IR PhD @ Aberystwyth, Border
Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power pg 137-38)

Prima facie, Agamben seems to lead in somewhat pessimistic, even despairing, directions. Indeed, his diagnosis of the relationship
between politics and life, analysis of the production of bare life in zones of indistinction, and prognosis that we are all virtually
homines sacri imply a bleak picture of the possibility for contestation, change and, in short, politics. For this reason, Andreas
Kalyvas argues that Agamben's portrayal of the unstoppable march to the camp is totalistic [], and though it is concerned with
politics and its eclipse, it is itself quite un-political.15 William Connolly arrives at a similar conclusion: Agamben [] carries us
through the conjunction of sovereignty, the sacred, and biopolitics to a historical impasse.16 In an interview in 2004, however,

Agamben replied to his critics: I've often been reproached for (or at least
attributed with) this pessimism that I am perhaps unaware of. But I don't see it
like that. There is a phrase from Marx, cited by Debord as well, that I like a lot: the
desperate situation of society in which I live fills me with hope . I don't see myself
as pessimistic.17 By now a growing number of scholars have identified a more
positive moment in Homo Sacer. On Jenny Edkins's view, a bleak assessment of Agamben's work, such as that
reached by Kalyvas and Connolly, overlooks a significant facet of Agamben's work, where he
seeks to propose an alternative to, and indeed a contestation of, sovereign
biopolitics.18 Central to Agamben's thinking about ethicalpolitical praxis and
resistance against sovereign biopolitics is his conception of the subject (p.137) as an
interval or remainder between what he refers to as practices of subjectification and de-subjectification.19 According to Agamben, the
biopolitical terrain of global politics can be understood as a kind of desubjectification machine: it's a machine that both scrambles
all the classical identities and [] a machine that [] recodes these very same dissolved identities.20 For Agamben it is

possible to think through the potential for resistance by rendering the machine
inoperative on its own terms.21 Agamben's thought does not lead to nihilism or
passivity but calls for the radical invention of new practices: a movement on the
spot, in the situation itself.22 In The Time That Remains [2005], Agamben gives the example of St Paul's
negotiation with the Jewish law that divides Jews and non-Jews. Agamben is interested in the way in which, instead of applying a
universal principle to argue against this sovereign cut, Paul intervenes by taking the law on on its own terms. According to Agamben,
Paul does this by dividing the division itself: by introducing a further division between the Jew according to the flesh and the Jew

according to the spirit. This division of the division means that, instead of a simple separation between Jews/non-Jews, there are
now Jews who are not Jews, because there are Jews who are Jews according to the flesh, not the spirit, and [non-Jews] who are
[non-Jews] according to the flesh, but not according to the spirit.23 Consequently, a remainder is produced that renders the
applicability and operativity of the law ineffective: a new form of subject that is neither a Jew nor a non-Jew but a non-non-Jew.24

Applying this logic to contemporary conditions, Agamben places his hope for a
kind of minority politics in this form of unworking of the system or biopolitical
machine from within: One should proceed in this way, from division to division,
rather than by asking oneself: What would be the universal communal principle
that would allow us to be together?To the contrary. It is a matter, confronted with the divisions introduced by
the law, of working with what disables them through resisting, through remaining rsister, rester, it's the same root.25

Elsewhere, Agamben links the move to render the system inoperative with notions
of profanation, meaning to violate or transgress, and play .26 He illustrates the logic of
profanation through play with the (p.138) example of the cat that plays with the ball of string as if it were a mouse. The game frees
the mouse from being cast as prey and at the same time the predatory activity of the cat is shifted away from the chasing and killing
of the mouse: and yet, this play stages the very same behaviours that define hunting.27 With this example Agamben seeks

to demonstrate the profanatory potential in play as a means of creating a new use

of something by deactivating an old one. The ultimate call is to subvert the given
machine or apparatus according to its own logic: to wrest from the apparatuses
from all apparatuses the possibility of use that they have captured.28

AT: Utopian Alt

Utopian theory key to creating real solutions and motivating change.
Lwy 05. Michael Lwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is
emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS and lectures at the cole des hautes
tudes en sciences sociales. CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM VOLUME 16 NUMBER 2.
What Is Ecosocialism? P.20. MMG
Utopia? In its etymological sense (nowhere), certainly. However, if

one does not believe, with Hegel, that

everything that is real is rational, and everything that is rational is real, how
does one reflect on substantial rationality without appealing to utopias ? Utopia is
indispensable to social change, provided it is based on the con- tradictions found in reality and on real social
movements. This is true of ecosocialism, which proposes a strategic alliance between reds and greensnot in the narrow sense
used by politicians applied to social-democratic and green parties, but in the broader sense between the labor movement and the
ecological movementand the movements of solidarity with the oppressed and exploited of the South.

Aff Answers

Rejection of State Bad

The alts rejection of the states makes it seem stronger than it actually
is. This dooms the alt to reproduce the hierarchal structures we
critique.
Guattari and Rolnik, schitzoanalysts, revolutionaries, 1986
[Felix and Suely, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, p. 120-121]
Comment: It's good that you mentioned those homosexuals who worked within the system as lawyers and succeeded in shaking it
up. Here, everyone looks down on the institutional part. Guattari: That's silly. Comment: They think that dealing

with the institutional side is reformism, that it doesn't change anything. As far as they're
concerned, the institutions should be ignored because only one kind of thing is worthwhile, anarchismwhich I question deeply . I
think it's very naive, as you yourself say, to ignore the state on the basis that "it's useless,"
or "it oppresses us," and therefore to leave it aside and try to do something totally
from outside, as though it might be possible for us to destroy it like that. Suely Rolnik:
This malaise in relation to institutions is nothing new; on the contrary, the feeling is particularly strong in
our generation which, since the 1960s, has taken institutions as one of its main
targets. But it's true that the malaise has been especially pronounced in Brazil over the last few years, and in my view this must
have to do with an absolutely objective (and obvious) fact, which is the hardness of the dictatorship to which we were subjected for
so long. The rigidity of that regime is embodied in all the country's institutions, in one way or another; in fact, that constituted an
important factor for the permanence of the dictatorship in power over so many years. But I think that this

antiinstitutional malaise, whatever its cause, doesn't end there: the feeling that the
institutions are contaminated territories, and the conclusion that nothing should
be invested in them, is often the expression of a defensive role. This kind of
sensation is, in my view, the flip side of the fascination with the institution that
characterizes the "bureaucratic libido." These two attitudes really satisfy the same need, which is to use the
prevailing forms, the instituted, as the sole, exclusive parameter in the organization of oneself and of relations with the other, and
thus avoid succumbing to the danger of collapse that might be brought about by any kind of change. Those are two styles

of symbiosis with the institution: either "gluey" adhesion and identification ( those
who adopt this style base their identity on the "instituted"), or else repulsion and counteridentification
(those who adopt this style base their identity on negation of the "instituted," as if there were
something "outside" the institutions, a supposed "alternative" space to this world ).
Seen in this light, both "alternativism" and "bureaucratism" restrict themselves to
approaching the world from the viewpoint of its forms and representations, from a
molar viewpoint; they protect themselves against accessing the molecular plane,
where new sensations are being produced and composed and ultimately force the
creation of new forms of reality,. They both reflect a blockage of instituting power, an impossibility of surrender
to the processes of singularization, a need for conservation of the prevailing forms, a difficulty in gaining access to the molecular
plane, where the new is engendered. It's more difficult, to perceive this in the case of

"alternativism," because it involves the hallucination of a supposedly parallel

world that emanates the illusion of unfettered autonomy and freedom of creation;
and just when we think we've got away from "squareness" we risk succumbing to it again, in a more disguised form. In this respect, I
agree with you: the institutions aren't going to be changed by pretending that they don't exist. Nonetheless, it's necessary to add two
reserves. In the first place, it's obvious that not every social experimentation qualified by the

name of "alternative" is marked by this defensive hallucination of a parallel world .

And secondly, x it's self-evident that in order to bear the harshness of an authoritarian regime there is a tendency to make believe
that itdoesn't exist, so as not to have to enter into contact with sensations of frustration and powerlessness that go beyond the limit
of tolerability (indeed, this is a general reaction before any traumatic experience). And in order to survive, people try in so far as
possible to create other territories of life, which are often clandestine.

Permutation
We must approach borders with pragmatism they are inevitable and
sometimes necessary
Agnew No Date (John Agnew Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Borders on the
mind: re-framing border thinking, Ethics & Global Politics, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/downloads/856/258.pdf // JJ)
Be that as it may, it is implicit in this understanding that borders can serve a number of

vital socio-political purposes. One is straightforwardly instrumental: borders help

clearly demarcate institutional and public-goods based externality fields. If spending on
infrastructure projects (education, highways, etc.), for example, must necessarily be defined territorially, as Michael Mann has
argued, and the revenues raised concomitantly, then borders are necessary to define who is eligible and who is not to share in the
benefits of the projects in question. 21 Thus, absent territorial restrictions on eligibility, cross-

border movements of people would undermine the essentially contractual

obligations that underpin both state infra- structural power and the autonomous
role of the state that depends on it. So, liberal conceptions of borders can be less
inchoate than frequently alleged, if understood solely in terms of defense of rights
in property, but only if refocused on the provision of public goods rather than on
the protection of private property. 22 Less liberal or instrumental in character are
the ways in which borders help focus on the question of political identity. This has four
aspects to it. The first and most traditional is the claim to sovereignty and its realization since the
eighteenth century as a territorial ideal for a people endowed with self-rule. Typically,
all struggles to extend and deepen popular rule, associated usually with such terms as democracy, have been bound up with the
sovereignty ideal. Who shall rule around here? has been the rallying cry across all political revolutions. Thus, recently, Jeremy
Rabkin has defined sovereignty as the authority to establish what law is binding ... in a given territory. 23 From this viewpoint,
laws can only be enforced when the institutional basis to that law is widely accepted. It depends on popular acceptance and
agreement to allow coercion in the absence of compliance.

begin and it must end somewhere.

Intuitively, the reach of institutions must

This is a fairly conservative understanding of political identity. Beyond it

lie several other versions of how political identity is served by borders. One is that identities

themselves, our
self-definitions, are inherently territorial. Contrary to a liberal sense of the isolated self, from this
perspective all identities are based on kinship and extra-kinship ties that bind people
together overwhelmingly through the social power of adjacency. From clan and
tribe to nation, group membership has been the lever of cultural survival. Rather
than merely incidental, borders are intrinsic to group formation and
perpetuation. Thus, a self-defined political progressive such as Tom Nairn can speak openly of a social nature that
requires belonging and can be chosen and self-conscious, which can result in people coming to feel more strongly*and less
ambivalently*about their clan, football team or nation, than about parents, siblings and cousins who directly helped to form them.
24 Many nations today are still actively in pursuit of their very own state with its very own borders. 25 Kurds rioting in Turkey and
Tibetans protesting Chinese rule are only two of a myriad of recent examples. Elsewhere, there is a revival of spatially complex
forms of citizenship, as in Spain and the United Kingdom, where people can simultaneously belong to several polities differentially
embedded within existing states. 26 Of course, this was once quite common all over Europe.

Some degree of borders are necessary we should focus on the

shifting nature of territorial borders rather than trying to abolish
them altogether
Elden 11 (Stuart Elden professor of political geography at Durham University, Territory without Borders, Harvard
International Review (8/21/2011), http://hir.harvard.edu/archives/2843 // JJ)

What does it mean to speak of territory without borders? Let me say immediately
that this is not the same as the borderless world argument, nor in agreement with
the idea that geography no longer matters. While borders are less important in

some places, such as within much of Europe, in others they continue to be crucial .
The US-Mexico border, the external border policing of Europe, and the Israeli wall
in the West Bank are only the most striking examples of the continual importance
of borders. I am not suggesting that we should comprehend the modern world
through a lens that understands globalization as de-territorialization. Indeed, it is
the concomitant processes of re-territorializationthe constant making and
remaking of territoriesthat should perhaps be more of the focus in our empirical
and political studies. Nor am I using the phrase as a way of describing modes of political organizations such as
Schengenland, which seeks to dispense with border controls. Schengenland has indeed been described as a territory without
borders; it would be more accurate to describe it as an area with uneven borders. While it is true that mobility in
Schengenland is much easier for those individuals whose status is good and whose papers are in order, mobility is restricted and
strictly monitored through transnational security and policing for those who fail to meet these characteristics.

Deconstruction cannot be confined to one method or the movement

will fail
Vaughn-Williams 9 ( Nick, IR MA @ university of Warwick IR PhD @ Aberystwyth, Border
Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power pg 146-47)

Derrida is notoriously hesitant to define deconstruction because any attempt at

such a definition would be ironic. In his Letter to a Japanese Friend, Derrida writes: What
deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction ? Nothing of
course!70 More accessible accounts of the basic moves of deconstructive thought can be found in Positions [1981] and
Limited Inc. [1988]. Derrida insists that (p.147) a deconstructive strategy or way of reading always
involves a double and simultaneous movement: Deconstruction cannot be
restricted or immediately pass to a neutralization: it must, through a double
gesture, double science, a double writing put into practice a reversal of the
classical opposition and a general displacement of the system . It is on that
condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the
field of oppositions it criticizes and that is also a field of non-discursive forces. 71

An outright rejection of borders fails. Reframing our concepts of

borders in terms of effects is crucial to cultivate a politics attentive to
lived experience
Agnew 8

(John, Department of Geography, UCLA, Borders on the mind: re-framing border thinking
Ethics & Global Politics Vol. 1, No. 4, 2008)
Fourthly, and finally, policing borders still has a powerful normative justification in the
defense of that territorial sovereignty which serves to underpin both liberal and
democratic claims to (Lockean) popular rule. Now such claims may frequently be empirically fictive,
particularly in the case of imperial and large nation-states, but the logic of the argument is that, absent effective
worldwide government, the highest authority available is that of existing states .68
How such states police their borders, of course, should be subject to transparent and open regulation. But why it is popularly
legitimate to engage in policing functions in the way they are carried out cannot simply be put down to mass docility in the face of
an omnipotent (because it is omniscient) state apparatus. National populations do worry about their

borders because their democracy (or other, familiar, politics) depends on it. The border is a
continuing marker of a national (or supranational) political order even as people, in Europe at
least, can now cross it for lunch.69 The problem here is that democratic theory and practice is not yet
up to dealing with the complexities of a world in which territories and flows must
necessarily co-exist. If one can argue, as does Arash Abizadeh, that the demos of democratic theory is in principle
unbounded, this still begs the question of who is foreigner and who is citizen in a world that is still practically divided by
borders.70 As Sofia Nasstrom puts the problem succinctly: it is one thing to argue that globalization

has
opened the door to a problem within modern political thought, quite another to

argue that globalization is the origin of this problem.71 Until political community is redefined in
some way as not being coextensive with nation-state, we will be stuck with much of business as usual. Currently then, given
the strong arguments about what borders do and the problems that they also
entail, a more productive ethic than thinking either just with or just against them
would be to re-frame the discussion in terms of the impacts that borders have;
what they do both for and to people. From this perspective, we can both recognize
the necessary roles of borders and the barriers to improved welfare that they
create. In the first place, however, this requires re-framing thinking about borders away from the emphasis on national
citizenship towards a model of what Dora Kostakopoulou calls civic registration.72 Under this model, the only condition for
residence would be demonstrated willingness to live according to democratic rule plus some set requirements for residency and the
absence of a serious criminal record. Such a citizenship model requires a reconceptualization of territorial space as a dwelling
space for residents and, thus, a move away from the nationalist narratives which cultivate the belief that territory is a form of
property to be owned by a particular national group, either because the latter has established a first occupancy claim or because
it regards this territory as a formative part of its identity.73 In a world in which wars and systematic violations of human rights
push millions to seek asylum across borders every year, this rethinking is imperative.74 In the second place, and by way of
example, from this viewpoint it is reasonable to prefer global redistributive justice to open borders. To put it bluntly, it is

better to shift resources to people rather than permitting people to shift

themselves towards resources.75 Currently much migration from country-to-country is the result of the desire
to improve economic well-being and enhance the life-chances of offspring. Yet, people often prefer to stay put,
for familial, social, and political reasons, if they can. There seems no good basis,
therefore, to eulogize and institutionalize movement as inherently preferable to
staying put. If adequate mechanisms were developed to stimulate development in situ, many people who currently move
would not. Not only people in destination countries associate their identities with territory. Using the standard of a
decent life, therefore, can lead beyond the present impasse between the two
dominant views of borders towards a perspective that re-frames borders as
having both negative and positive effects and that focuses on how people can both
benefit from borders and avoid their most harmful effects. In political vision as in everyday
practice, therefore, borders remain as ambiguously relevant as ever, even as we work to enhance their positive and limit their
negative effects.

Imagining multiple genealogies of place-based practices challenges

the current epistemology of dominance and subalternity.
Escobar 2001

(Arturo, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Culture sits in
places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization Political Geography 20)
It might seem paradoxical to assert that the identities that can been as emerging in the culturalenvironmental domain today might
simultaneously be attached to place and most open to what remains unimagined and unthought in biological, cultural, and
economic terms. These identities engage in more complex types of mixing and dialectics

than in the most recent past. The dynamic of place, networks, and power at play
today in many ambits suggests that this is the case. Subaltern strategies of
localization still need still to be seen in terms of place ; places are surely connected and constructed
yet those constructions entail boundaries, grounds, selective connection, interaction, and positioning, and in some cases a renewal
of history-making skills. Connectivity, interactivity an positionality are the correlative

characteristics of the attachment to place (Escobar, 1999b,c), and they derive greatly from
the modes of operation of the networks that are becoming central to the strategies of localization advanced
by social movements (and, of course, by capital in different ways). Networks can be seen as apparatuses for the production of
discourses and practices that connect nodes in a discontinuous space; networks are not necessarily

hierarchical but can in some cases be described as self-organizing, non-linear and

non-hierarchical meshworks, as some theorists of complexity think of them at
present (De Landa, 1997). They create flows that link sites which, operating more like
fractal structures than fixed architectures, enable diverse couplings (structural, strategic,
conjunctural) with other sites and networks. This is why I say that the meaning of the
politics of place can be found at the intersection of the scaling effects of networks
and the strategies of the emergent identities. As Rocheleau put it eloquently, this calls for an interest in
the combination of people-in-place and people-in-networks, and the portability (or not) of peoples ways of being-in-place and

being-in-relation with humans and other beings (D. Rocheleau, personal communication). It has been said that the ideas

and practices of modernity are appropriated and reembedded in locally-situated

practices, giving rise to a plethora of modernities through the assemblage of
diverse cultural elements, and that often times this process results in counter-tendencies and counter-development,
defined as the process by which multiple modernities are established (Arce & Long, 2000: 19). The challenge for
this constructive proposal is to imagine multiple modernities from multiple
directions, that is, from multiple genealogies of place-based (if clearly not place-bound)
practices. It is at this level that the postdevelopment moment is of relevance , at
least in some recent reinterpretations of the concept. For Fagan (1999), for instance, the construction of a postdevelopment politics must start with a consideration of material struggles and the
cultural politics around them, critically engage with dominant development
discourse by acknowledging its problems, and imagine transformation strategies
fully cognizant of how cultural production is associated with power. Reconstituted development workers, researchers, and
activists might thus begin to outline a more substantial post-development strategy. More than an anti-development movement,

this strategy point at the construction of post-development scenarios that

incorporate a pedagogical orientation towards change. A movement towards the defense of place
might well be an element in this strategy. This defense is of course not the only source of hope and change, but an important
dimension of them. The critique of the privilege of space over place, of capitalism over non-capitalism, of global cultures and
natures over local ones is not so much, or not only, a critique of our understanding of the world but of the social theories on which
we rely to derive such understanding. This critique also points at the marginalization of

intellectual production on globalization produced in the peripheries of the

world (Slater, 1998). The critique, finally, is an attempt to bring social theory into line
with the views of the world and political strategies of those who exist on the side of
place, non-capitalism and local knowledge and effort to which anthropologists and ecologists are
usually committed. Dominance and subalternity, as Guha (1988) forcefully demonstrated, are complex
social and epistemological phenomena. Those frameworks that elide the historical
experience of the subaltern and that participate in the erasure of subaltern
strategies of localization can also be said to participate in the prose of
counterinsurgency. Conversely, if it is true that politically enriched forms of difference are always under construction,
there is hope that they could get to constitute new grounds for existence and significant rearticulations of subjectivity and alterity
in their economic, cultural and ecological dimensions. In the last instance, anthropology, political geography and
political ecology can contribute

to re-state the critique of current hegemonies as a

question of the utopian imagination: Can the world be reconceived and
reconstructed from the perspective of the multiplicity of place-based practices of
culture, nature and economy? Which forms of the global can be imagined from
multiple place-based perspectives? Which counter-structures can be set into place to make them viable and
productive? What notions of politics, democracy and the economy are needed to release the effectivity of the local in all of its
multiplicity and contradictions? What role will various social actors including technologies old and new have to play in order
to create the networks on which manifold forms of the local can rely in their encounter with the multiple manifestations of the
global? Some of these questions will have to be given serious consideration in our efforts

to give shape to the imagination of alternatives to the current order of things.

Totalizing rejections of globalization fail the reappropriation space

is necessary for any challenge to borders
Escobar 2001

(Arturo, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Culture sits in
places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization Political Geography 20)
Let us start with a enlightening critique of capitalocentrism in recent discourses of globalization. This critique is
intended to enable us to free up the space for thinking about the potential value of
other local models of the economy in ways that also apply to models of nature or
development. Geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson present a powerful case
against the claim, shared by mainstream and left theories alike, that capitalism is the hegemonic, even
the only present form of economy, and that it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. In this view, capitalism

has been endowed with such dominance and hegemony in these theories, that it has become
impossible to think social reality differently, let alone to imagine capitalisms suppression. All other
realities (subsistence economies, biodiversity economies, Third World forms of resistance, cooperatives and minor local
initiatives, the recent barter and solidarity economies in various parts of the world, etc.) are thus seen as opposite,
subordinate, or complementary to capitalism, never as sources of a significant
economic difference. Their critique applies to most theories of globalization and even of postdevelopment, to the extent
that the latter situate capitalism at the center of development narratives, thus tending to devalue or marginalize possibilities of
noncapitalist development (Gibson-Graham, 1996: 41). By criticizing capitalocentrism, these authors

seek to liberate our ability for seeing noncapitalisms and building alternative
economic imaginaries9. This reinterpretation challenges the inevitability of
capitalist penetration that is assumed in much of the literature on globalization:
In

the globalization scriptonly capitalism has the ability to spread and invade. Capitalism is presented as inherently spatial and
as naturally stronger than the forms of noncapitalist economy (traditional economies, Third World economies, socialist
economies, communal experiments) because of its presumed capacity to universalize the market for capitalist commodities
Globalization according to this script involves the violation and eventual death of other noncapitalist forms of economyAll
forms of noncapitalism become damaged, violated, fallen, subordinated to capitalismHow can we challenge the similar
representation of globalization as capable of taking the life from noncapitalist sites, particularly the Third World? (GibsonGraham, 1996: 125, 130) From this perspective, not everything that emerges from

globalization can be said to conform to the capitalist script; in fact, globalization and
development might propitiate a variety of economic development paths; these could be theorized in terms of postdevelopment in
such a way that the naturalness of capitalist identity as the template of all economic identity can be called into question (GibsonGraham, 1996: 146). They could also be conceived of, as Mayfair Yang does in her farsighted application of Gibson-Graham to the
changing and multiple Chinese economies, in terms of the hybridity of economies; what she means by this is that many of todays
economic formations in China are composed of both capitalist and a whole array of non-capitalist forms. With this reinterpretation,
Yang challenges us to entertain the idea that indigenous economies do not always get ploughed

under with the entrance of capitalism, but may even experience renewal and pose
a challenge to the spread of capitalist principles and stimulate us to rethink and
rework existing critiques of capitalism (Yang, 1999: 5). What is certain is that we no longer seem to be
sure about what is there on the ground after centuries of capitalism and five decades of development. Do we even know
how to look at social reality in ways that might allow us to detect elements of
difference that are not reducible to the constructs of capitalism and modernity?
The role of ethnography has of course been particularly important in this respect.
In the 1980s, a number of ethnographies documented active and creative resistance to capitalism and modernity in various
settings10. Resistance by itself, however, is only suggestive of what is going on in many communities, stopping short of showing
how people actively continue to create and reconstruct their lifeworlds and places. Successive works characterized the local
hybridized models of the economy and the natural environment maintained by peasants and indigenous communities. The
attention paid, particularly in Latin American anthropology and cultural studies, to cultural hybridization is another attempt at
making visible the dynamic encounter of practices originating in many cultural and temporal matrices, and the extent to which
local groups, far from being passive receivers of transnational conditions, actively shape the process of constructing identities,
social relations, and economic practice (see Escobar, 1995 for a review of this literature). These lines of inquiry have reached
sophisticated levels in the provision of nuanced accounts of the encounter between development, modernity, and local culture in
postcolonial settings (see, for instance, Gupta, 1998; Arce & Long, 2000). These bodies of literature, however, are yet to be related
systematically to the project of rethinking place from the perspective of practices of cultural, ecological, and economic difference
among Third World communities in contexts of globalization and postcoloniality. This link might enable researchers to foreground
the political aspects of their critique, not infrequently rendered intractable by the emphasis on the heterogeneity, hybridity,
localization, and differentiation of forms and practices. If the goal of Gibson-Graham was to provide an

alternative language a new class language in particular for addressing the economic
meaning of local practices, and if the goal of the postdevelopment literature is
similarly to make visible practices of cultural and ecological difference which
could serve as the basis for alternatives, it is necessary to acknowledge that these
goals are inextricably linked to conceptions of locality, place, and place-based
consciousness. Place is central to issues of development, culture and the
environment and is equally essential, on the other, for imagining other contexts for thinking
about the construction of politics, knowledge and identity. The erasure of place is a reflection of
the asymmetry that exist between the global and the local in much contemporary literature on globalization, in which the global is
associated with space, capital, history and agency while the local, conversely, is linked to place, labor, and tradition as well as
with women, minorities, the poor and, one might add, local cultures11. Some feminist geographers have attempted to correct this
asymmetry by arguing that place can also lead to articulations across space, for instance through networks of various kinds
(Chernaik, 1996); this leaves unresolved, however, the relation between place and location, as well as the question of boundaries.

More fundamental perhaps in Dirliks analysis are the consequences of the neglect

of place for current categories of social analysis such as class, gender, and race (and
we should add the environment here), which make such categories susceptible of becoming
instruments of hegemony. To the extent that they are significantly sundered from place in discourses of
globalization and deterritoralization, contemporary notions of culture do not manage to escape this predicament, for they tend to
assume the existence of a global power structure in which the local occupies a necessarily subordinate position. Under these
conditions, is it possible to launch a defense of place in which place and the local do not derive their meaning only from their
juxtaposition to the global? A first step in resisting the marginalization of place, continuing with
Dirliks exposition, is

provided by Lefebvres notion of place as a form of lived and

grounded space and the reappropriation of which must be part of any radical
political agenda against capitalism and spaceless and timeless globalization. Politics,
in other words, is also located in place, not only in the supra-levels of capital and space. Place, one might add, is the location of a
multiplicity of forms of cultural politics, that is, of the cultural-becoming-political, as it has become evident with rainforest and
other ecological social movements12.

AT: Alt

Cedes the Political

ALT FAILS even an active refusal cedes the political
Redfield 5 [Peter, Ph.D. Anthropology at UC Berkeley, professor of Anthropology at UNC

Chapel Hill, Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis, Cultural Anthropology 20(3)] ***MSF =
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders)
Here the context of MSFs ethic of refusal comes most sharply into focus. The groups insistence
on a politics of witnessing combined with its abstention from taking a directly
political role stems from an unwillingness to accept the extended state of
emergency within which it generally operates. Simply to denounce situations would achieve no
immediate humanitarian ends and to endorse political agendas would potentially sacrifice the present needs of a population for the
hope of future conditions. But to maintain formal neutrality at all times without protest

would mimic the classic limitations of the Red Cross movement that the founders of
MSF originally rejected. Confronted with such a range of unsatisfying options while still being committed to
humanitarian values, MSFs ideological strategy is to claim a position of refusal in the
form of action taken with an outspoken, troubled conscience.
The practical application of this approach varies according to the situation. In truly exceptional circumstances
MSF has found itself forced out or has chosen to withdraw . For example, during the highly
televised Ethiopian famine of 198485, the French section was forced to leave after
accusing the regime of using both famine and relief aid to effect a forced
resettlement policy. During the dark Rwandan spring a decade later, MSF publicly
proclaimed its helplessness with a bitter, angry refrain: you cant stop genocide
with doctors. The French section both denounced the political complicity of its national government and issued its first
call for some form of military intervention to halt the slaughter. Upset at the flagrant manipulation of aid by the perpetrators of
genocide in the aftermath, MSFFrance subsequently pulled out of the Rwandan refugee

camps in Zaire and Tanzania at the end of 1994 and then condemned the new
Rwandan regime for the forcible repatriation and massacre of Hutu refugees. Although other MSF sections
followed different strategic lines of action amid heated debate, they all eventually withdrew from the camps
by the end of 1995, publicly protesting the continuing political situation within them. Most recently and
poignantly, the organization withdrew from Afghanistan following the murder of five
members of a team from MSFHolland in 2004. After more than two decades of continuous presence,
the organization felt that the altered political circumstances of U.S.-led coalition efforts to
administer a post-Taliban reconstruction had eliminated the humanitarian
space necessary for its operations.

Race Turn
Critical geography cannot effectively combat race whiteness is too
inscribed in the study
Price 2010 [Patricia L. Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida

International
University, At the crossroads: critical race theory and critical geographies of race in Progress
in Human Geography 34(2) page 156 ]
Critical geographic studies of whiteness are not, however, without their own critics. Alastair Bonnett (1996), for instance, makes the
(problematic) assertion that the tendency to focus on blackness or whiteness is a particularly American obsession that does not
reflect the subtler reality of race in other places. Yet there is very little intentionally comparative critical geographic research on race,
such that Bonnetts claim is difficult to substantiate empirically. What is perhaps more troubling and

easier to document is the remarkably persistent whiteness of geographys

practitioners. According to some, the popularity of white studies in geography may
in fact simply reflect the whiteness of geographers, and as such constitute a zone of
racial solipsism, or worse, a comfort zone rather than a space of truly critical
engagement with racism (let alone anti-racism; Pulido, 2002; Mahtani, 2006). The
prominence of white studies in geographic studies of race may in fact not simply
reflect but also unwittingly act to reinforce white dominance in geography (Nash,
2003).

Cutting

Notes
New alt possibility view the liquid nature of the ocean as it escapes
human coding.