Gonzaga Debate Institute 2011 Mercury Conspiracy Theory


Conspiracy Analysis Shell



Download 1.23 Mb.
Page60/70
Date20.04.2018
Size1.23 Mb.
#45567
1   ...   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   ...   70

Conspiracy Analysis Shell


***Continued***

Unlike conventional threats, however, the UFO threatens humans’ capacity to decide those threats, and so cannot be acknowledged without calling modern sovereignty itself into question. To what extent that would be desirable is a large normative question which we have bracketed here.77 But taking UFOs seriously would certainly embody the spirit of self-criticism that infuses liberal governmentality and academia in particular, and it would, thereby, foster critical theory. And indeed, if academics’ first responsibility is to tell the truth, then the truth is that after sixty years of modern UFOs, 628 Political Theory human beings still have no idea what they are, and are not even trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all, and cast doubt on the structure of rule that requires and sustains it.
Governmentality and totalizing control over regimes of truth forms the basis of oppressive state power

Marshall, University of Auckland - Emeritus Professor School of Education, 95

(James D, Foucault And Neo-Liberalism: Biopower And Busno-power, http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/marshall.html)



Foucault also develops the notion of governmentality as the art of government or, as it is sometimes referred to, the "reason of state." This notion "refers to the state, to its nature and to its own rationality." He sees the technologies of domination and the self as being the techniques used "to make of the individual a significant element for the state." By "government" Foucault should be understood as meaning something close to "the conduct of conduct." This is a form of activity which attempts or aims at the conduct of persons; it is the attempt to shape, to guide, or to affect not only the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute people in such ways that they can be governed. In Foucault's work this activity of governance could cover the relations of self to self, self to others, relations between institutions and social communities, and the exercise of political sovereignty. Governmentality is obtained not by a totalizing deterministic or oppressive form of power, but by bio-power directed in a totalizing manner at whole populations and, at one and the same time, at individuals so that they are both individualized and normalized. Here one locates the human sciences and their "truths," and the institutions or disciplinary blocks (including education) in which these truths have been developed, played, and continue to play, a crucially important role.
Unchallenged sovereign power makes extinction possible

Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology, Berkeley, 84

(Paul, The Foucault Reader, p. 260)



It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.

Challenges Space Imperialism


UFO discourse challenges US space imperialism

Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges - Professor of Political Science, 98

(Jodi, Aliens in America pg. 19-20)



The American articulation of outerspace together with technology and democracy incorporates an uneasy mix of colonialist, nationalist, and globalist ideals. Until the space program, the United States rarely presented itself explicitly as a colonial power, although expansionism has been integral to its self-understanding.51 By reiterating the expansive fantasy of the wild, lawless West, the metaphor of a "frontier" tapped into earlier notions of American exceptionalism.52 Indeed, this very exceptionalism, the success of America's democratic experiment, was to be revealed and proven by breaking the laws of gravity, escaping the confines of Earth, conquering space itself. As America reached out into this "new frontier," the rhetoric of outposts, settlements, colonies, and colonization became part of the public language of outerspace. This language is fitting in that "space tech­nology and communications," as Elayne Rapping points out, "make pos­sible new extensions of American imperialism, both cultural and military."53 Once linked to a growing critique of the excesses of the military-industrial complex, to increased attention to the histories and situations of Native Americans, and to continued struggle in former colonies throughout Africa and Asia, such colonial rhetoric disrupts the space program's smooth presentation of democratic freedom.

The UFO discourse resists official "space frontier" rhetoric. NASA re­deployed American frontier myths of a wild, open West, one vacant, empty, and ready to be settled. Ufology challenges the assumed vacancy of outerspace and thereby intervenes critically in narratives of national iden­tity.54 It demands that NASA, the government, the military, and the au­thorities who act in America's name, allow for the possibility that, in space, we are the aliens.




Download 1.23 Mb.

Share with your friends:
1   ...   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   ...   70




The database is protected by copyright ©ininet.org 2024
send message

    Main page