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New use cases stemming from 5G networks will reduce U.S. carbon footprint by up to 330.8 MMtCO2e — the equivalent of removing 72 million passenger vehicles from the road, report projects

WASHINGTON, D.C.; Jan. 26, 2022 – 5G connectivity will play a significant role in enabling the U.S. to meet the Biden Administration’s climate change goals, with 5G-enabled use cases projected to make up to a 20% contribution toward the country’s carbon emission reduction targets by 2025, according to a new Accenture (NYSE: ACN) study commissioned by CTIA, the wireless industry association.

Such dogmatism appears as well in the effort to circumscribe speech that injures, excites, threatens, and offends. Whether it is the censorship of particular kinds of representation or the circumscription of the domain of public discourse itself, the effort to tighten the reins on speech undercuts those political impulses to exploit speech itself for its insurrectionary effects. The intellectual opposition to questions that destabilize a sense of reality seems a mundane academic case in point.

To question a term, a term like "the subject" or "universality," is to ask how it plays, what investments it bears, what aims it achieves, what alterations it undergoes. The changeable life of that term does not preclude the possibility of its use. If a term becomes questionable, does that mean it cannot be used any longer, and that we can only use terms that we already know how to master? Why is it that posing a question about a term is considered the same as enacting a prohibition against use? Why is it that we sometimes do feel that if a term is dislodged of its prior and known contexts, that we will not be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves? What kind of guarantee does this effort to refer the speech act back to its originating context exercise, and what sort of terror does it forestall? Is it that in the ordinary mode, terms arc assumed, terms like "the subject" and "universality," and the sense in which they "must" be assumed is a moral one, taking the form of an imperative, and like some moral interdictions, a defense against what terrifies us most? Are we not paralyzed by a fear of the unknown future of words that keeps us from interrogating the terms that we need to live, and of taking the risk of living the terms that we keep in question?

**changed language -denoted by strikethrough and/or brackets

Third, my proposal accounts for the fact that appropriated uses may eventually extend to out-groups. Anderson and Lepore envision this very extension, but for mysterious reasons: why should an embargo admit escape clauses, and why should it open to out-groups? The hope that an embargo may, in time, soften the offensive potential of slurs seems even more mysterious to me: silentists’ drastic prohibitions cannot but emotionally charge expressions banned from the language.28 In my view, on the contrary, highly controlled conditions and selected speakers create contexts making the out-groups’ open and public dissociation from derogatory contents (expressed or conveyed) self-evident. Just think of the academic community, which was first to start using the term ‘queer’ in ways authorized by the homosexual community, or white kids using ‘nigga’ toward each other -where their respect for the hip-hop culture is made manifest by a way of dressing, walking and talking.29

My final clarification is to say that language is not a problem that needs fixing. Instead, I prefer to think of it-with apologies to Susan Sontag (1978)--as a sort of contagious symptom of an underlying disease. Treating language will not make the anthropocentric-resourcist ideology and its behavioural, economic and structural manifestations go away. Thus language change alone would be nothing more than greenwashing. But language is a sign of something wrong and it is a way to get the people concerned to think about the issues. The recognition of patterns in the language we use to talk about environmental issues can only help us to better understand how those discourses shape actions. With that in mind, I now turn to my taxonomy.

However, Butler also argues that the daily, repeated use of words opens a space for another, more empowering kind of performance. This alternative performance, Butler insists, can be "the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an original subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open" (p. 38). To think of words as having an "open" future is to recognize that their authority lies less in their historical than in their present uses; it is to acknowledge that people can revise the meaning of words even as we repeat them; it is to embrace the notion that the instability of words opens the possibility that we can use them to (re)construct a more humane future for ourselves and others. Because words can be revised, Butler contends that it would be counterproductive simply to stop using terms that we would deem injurious or oppressive. For when we choose not to use offensive words under any circumstance, we preserve their existing meanings as well as their power to injure. If as teachers, for instance, we were simply to forbid the use of speech that is hurtful to LGBT students we would be effectively denying the fact that such language still exists. To ignore words in this way, Butler insists, won't make them go away. Butler thus suggests that we actually use these words in thoughtful conversation in which we work through the injuries they cause (p. 1.02). Indeed, Butler insists that if we are to reclaim the power that oppressive speech robs from us, we must use, confront, and interrogate terms like "queer." We must ask how such terms affect both the speaker and the subject, what the purpose of their use is, and how their meaning can be altered to empower those whom they name. Thus, as Butler helps us see, language is violence, but only if we allow it to be. She encourages us to believe that words can take on new meanings-ones which forbid stasis, challenge our habits, and open the possibility that teachers and students might be able to create spaces for learning in which everyone feels safe.

Changing the language we use to talk about nonhuman nature is not a solution. As I suggested, language is not the problem. Rather, it seems more like a contagious symptom of a deeper and multi-faceted problem that has yet to be fully defined. Resourcist language is both an indicator and a carrier of the pathology of rampant ecological degradation. Furthermore, language change alone can end up simply being a band-aid solution that gives the appearance of change and makes the problem all the less visible. In a recent article on feminist language reform, Susan Ehrlich and Ruth King (1994) argue that because meanings are socially constructed, attempts at introducing nonsexist language are being undermined by a culture that is still largely sexist. The words may have shifted, but the meanings and ideologies have not. The real world cure for the sick patient matters more than the treatment of a single symptom. Consequently, language change and cultural change must go together with social-moral change. It is naive to believe either that language is trivial, or that it is deterministic.

The sounds of silence are several in poverty research. Whereas many welfare policy analysts are constrained by economistic- herapeutic-manage- na1 discourse, others find themselves silenced by a politics of euphemisms. The latter suggests that if only the right words can be found, then political change will quickly follow. This is what happens when a good idea goes bad, when the interrogation of discourse collapses into the valorization of terminological distinctions.' Recently, I attended a conference of social workers who were part of a network of agencies seeking to assist homeless youths. A state legislator addressed the group and at one point in the question-and-answer pe- riod commiserated with one professional about how the by then well- accepted phrase children at risk ought to be dropped, for it is pejorative. The legislator preferred children under stress as a more "politically correct" euphemism. Much discussion ensued regarding how to categorize clients so as to neither patronize nor marginalize them. No one, however, mentioned the reifying effects of all categorization, or how antiseptic language only exacerbates the problem by projecting young people in need onto one or another dehumanizing dimension of therapeutic discourse.' No one sug- gested that although isolated name changes may be a necessary part of political action, they are insufficient by themselves. No one emphasized the need for renamings that destabilize prevailing institutional practices.' In- stead, a science of renaming seemed to displace a politics of interrogation. A fascination with correcting the terms of interpersonal communication had replaced an interest in the critique of structure. A comfort in dealing with discourse in the most narrow and literal sense had replaced an interest in the broader discursive structures that set the terms for reproducing organized daily life. I was left to question how discourse and structure need to be seen as connected before reflection about poverty can inform political action.' The deconstruction of prevailing discursive structures helps politi- cize the institutionalized practices that inhibit alternative ways of con- structing social relations.5 Isolated acts of renaming, however, are unlikely to help promote political change if they are not tied to interrogations of the structures that serve as the interpretive context for making sense of new terms.' This is especially the case when renamings take the form of euphemisms designed to make what is described appear to be consonant with the existing order. In other words, the problems of a politics of renaming are not confined to the left, but are endemic to what amounts to a classic American practice utilized across the political spectrum.' Homeless, wel- fare, and family planning provide three examples of how isolated in- stances of renaming fail in their efforts to make a politics out of sanitizing language. Reconsidering the Politics of Renaming Renaming can do much to indicate respect and sympathy. It may strategi- cally recast concerns so that they can be articulated in ways that are more appealing and less dismissive. Renaming the objects of political contesta- tion may help promote the basis for articulating latent affinities among disparate political constituencies. The relentless march of renamings can help denaturalize and delegitimate ascendant categories and the constraints they place on political possibility. At the moment of fissure, destabilizing renamings have the potential to encourage reconsideration of how biases embedded in names are tied to power relations." Yet isolated acts of renam- ing do not guarantee that audiences will be any more predisposed to treat things differently than they were before. The problem is not limited to the political reality that dominant groups possess greater resources for influenc- ing discourse. Ascendant political economies, such as liberal postindustrial capitalism, whether understood structurally or discursively, operate as insti- tutionalized systems of interpretation that can subvert the most earnest of renamings." It is just as dangerous to suggest that paid employment exhausts possi- bilities for achieving self-sufficiency as to suggest that political action can be meaningfully confined to isolated renamings.'° Neither the workplace nor a name is the definitive venue for effectuating self-worth or political intervention." Strategies that accept the prevailing work ethos will con- tinue to marginalize those who cannot work, and increasingly so in a post- industrial economy that does not require nearly as large a workforce as its industrial predecessor. Exclusive preoccupation with sanitizing names over- looks the fact that names often do not matter to those who live out their lives according to the institutionalized narratives of the broader political economy, whether it is understood structurally or discursively, whether it is monolithically hegemonic or reproduced through allied, if disparate, prac- tices. What is named is always encoded in some publicly accessible and as- cendent discourse." Getting the names right will not matter if the names are interpreted according to the institutionalized insistences of organized society." Only when those insistences are relaxed does there emerge the possibil- ity for new names to restructure daily practices. Texts, as it now has become notoriously apparent, can be read in many ways, and they are most often read according to how prevailing discursive structures provide an interpretive context for reading diem. 14 The meanings implied by new names of necessity overflow their categorizations, often to be reinterpreted in terms of available systems of intelligibility (most often tied to existing institutions). Whereas re- naming can maneuver change within the interstices of pervasive discursive structures, renaming is limited in reciprocal fashion. Strategies of containment that seek to confine practice to sanitized categories appreciate the discursive character of social life, but insufficiently and wrongheadedly. I do not mean to suggest that discourse is dependent on structure as much as that structures are hegemonic discourses. The operative structures reproduced through a multitude of daily practices and reinforced by the efforts of aligned groups may be nothing more than stabilized ascendent discourses." Structure is the alibi for discourse. We need to destabilize this prevailing interpretive context and the power plays that reinforce it, rather than hope that isolated acts of linguistic sanitization will lead to political change. Interrogating structures as discourses can politicize the terms used to fix meaning, produce value, and establish identity. Denaturalizing value as the product of nothing more than fixed interpretations can create new possibilities for creating value in other less insistent and injurious ways. The discursively/structurally reproduced reality of liberal capitalism as deployed by power blocs of aligned groups serves to inform the existentially lived experiences of citizens in the contemporary postindustrial order." The powerful get to reproduce a broader context that works to reduce the dissonance between new names and established practices. As long as the prevailing discursive structures of liberal capitalism create value from some practices, experiences, and identities over others, no matter how often new names are insisted upon, some people will continue to be seen as inferior simply because they do not engage in the same practices as those who are currently dominant in positions of influence and prestige. Therefore, as much as there is a need to reconsider the terms of debate, to interrogate the embedded biases of discursive practices, and to resist living out the invid- ious distinctions that hegemonic categories impose, there are real limits to what isolated instances of renaming can accomplish. Renaming points to the profoundly political character of labels. Labels oper- ate as sources of power that serve to frame identities and interests. They predispose actors to treat the subjects in question in certain ways, whether they are street people or social policies. This increasingly common strategy, however, overlooks at least three major pitfalls to the politics of renaming." Each reflects a failure to appreciate language's inability to say all that is meant by any act of signification. First, many renamings are part of a politics of euphemisms that conspires to legitimate things in ways consonant with hegemonic discourse. This is done by stressing what is consistent and de-emphasizing what is inconsis- tent with prevailing discourse. When welfare advocates urge the nation to invest in its most important economic resource, its children, they are seek- ing to recharacterize efforts on behalf of poor families as critical for the country's international economic success in a way that is entirely consonant with the economistic biases of the dominant order. They are also distracting the economic-minded from the social democratic politics that such policy changes represent." This is a slippery politics best pursued with attention to how such renamings may reinforce entrenched institutional practices." Yet Walter Truett Anderson's characterization of what happened to the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s has relevance here: One reason it is so hard to tell when true cultural revolutions have occurred is that societies are terribly good at co-opting their opponents; something that starts out to destroy the prevailing social construction of reality ends up being a part of it. Culture and counterculture overlap and merge in countless ways. And the hostility, toward established social constructions of reality that produced strikingly new movements and behaviors in the early decades of this century, and peaked in the 1960s, is now a familiar part of the cultural scene. Destruction itself becomes institutionalized." According to Jeffrey Goldfarb, cynicism has lost its critical edge and has become the common denominator of the very society that cynical criticism sought to debunk .21 If this is the case, politically crafted characterizations can easily get co-opted by a cynical society that already anticipates the politi- cal character of such selective renamings. The politics of renaming itself gets interpreted as a form of cynicism that uses renamings in a disingenuous ashion in order to achieve political ends. Renaming not only loses credibility but also corrupts the terms used. This danger is ever present, given the limits of language. Because all terms are partial and incomplete characterizations, every new term can be invalidated as not capturing all that needs to be said about any topic? With time, the odds increase that a new term will lose its potency as it fails to emphasize ne-glected dimensions of a problem. As newer concerns replace the ones that helped inspire the terminological shift, newer terms will be introduced to ad- dress what has been neglected. Where disabled was once an improvement over handicapped, other terms are now deployed to make society inclusive of all people, however differentially situated. The "disabled" are now "physi- cally challenged" or "mentally challenged?' The politics of renaming pro- motes higher and higher levels of neutralizing language." Yet a neutralized language is itself already a partial reading even if it is only implicitly biased in favor of some attributes over others. Neutrality is always relative to the prevailing context As the context changes, what was once neutral becomes seen as biased. Implicit moves of emphasis and de-emphasis become more visible in a new light. "Physically" and "mentally challenged" already begin to look insufficiently affirmative as efforts intensify to include people with such attributes in all avenues of contemporary life.24 Not just terms risk being corrupted by a politics of renaming. Proponents of a politics of renaming risk their personal credibility as well. Proponents of a politics of renaming often pose a double bind for their audiences. The politics of renaming often seeks to highlight sameness and difference si- multaneously.25 It calls for stressing the special needs of the group while at the same time denying that the group has needs different from those of anyone else. Whether it is women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the disabled, or even "the homeless:' renaming seeks to both affirm and deny difference. This can be legitimate, but it is surely almost always bound to be difficult. Women can have special needs, such as during pregnancy, that make it unfair to hold them to male standards; however, once those differ- ent circumstances are taken into account, it becomes inappropriate to as- sume that men and women are fundamentally different in socially signifi- cant ways .21 Yet emphasizing special work arrangements for women, such as paid maternity leave, may reinforce sexist stereotyping that dooms women to inferior positions in the labor force. Under these circumstances, advocates of particular renamings can easily be accused of paralyzing their audience and immobilizing potential sup- porters. Insisting that people use terms that imply sameness and difference simultaneously is a good way to ensure such terms do not get used. This encourages the complaint that proponents of new terms are less interested in meeting people's needs than in demonstrating who is more sophisticated and sensitive. Others turn away, asking why they cannot still be involved in trying to right wrongs even if they cannot correct their use of terminology," Right-minded, if wrong-worded, people fear being labeled as the enemy; important allies are lost on the high ground of linguistic purity. Euphemisms also encourage self-censorship. The politics of renaming discourages its proponents from being able to respond to inconvenient infor- mation inconsistent with the operative euphemism. Yet those who oppose it are free to dominate interpretations of the inconvenient facts. This is bad politics. Rather than suppressing stories about the poor, for instance, it would be much better to promote actively as many intelligent interpretations as possible. The politics of renaming overlooks that life may be more complicated than attempts to regulate the categories of analysis. Take, for instance, the curious negative example of "culture?' Somescholars have been quite insis- tent that it is almost always incorrect to speak about culture as a factor in explaining poverty, especially among African Americans .211 Whereas some might suggest that attempts to discourage examining cultural differences, say in family structure, are a form of self-censorship, others might want to argue that it is just clearheaded, informed analysis that de- mphasizes cul- ture's relationship to poverty.29 Still others suggest that the question of what should or should not be discussed cannot be divorced from the fact that when blacks talk publicly in this country it is always in a racist society that uses their words to reinforcetheir subordination. Open disagreement among African Americans will be exploited by whites to delegitimate any challengesto racism and to affirm the idea that black marginalization is self-generated.3° Emphasizing cultural differences between blacks and whites and exposing internal "problems" in the black community minimize how "problems" across races and structural political-economic factors, including especially the racist and sexist practices of institutionalized society, are the primary causes of poverty. Yet it is distinctly possible that although theories proclaiming a "culture of poverty" are incorrect, cultural variation itself may be an important issue in need of examination." For instance, there is much to be gained from contrasting the extended-family tradition among African Americans with the welfare system of white society, which is dedicated to reinforcing the nuclear two-parent family.32 A result of self-censorship, however, is that animportant subject is left to be studied by the wrong people. Although ana- lyzing cultural differences may not tell us much about poverty and may be dangerous in a racist society, leaving it to others to study culture and poverty can be a real mistake as well. Culture in their hands almost always becomes "culture of poverty."" A politics of renaming risks reducing the discussants to only those who help reinforce existing prejudices.

Second, biopower understood in its Foucauldian formulation as power over life and the species’ body is not the exclusive attribute of the state, but can be achieved anywhere by any organization through information gathering and data-management processes and tools. Indeed, in light of the current transformations occurring in the space of mobility as well as in the nature and the location of regulative powers, we witness a new modality of (bio)power. As societies become more dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs) there is a change in power, intensity and scope. Becoming more and more hybrid, power deterritorializes and connects dots which are not in the first place designed to beconnected. Moreover, power is now exercised in non-traditional locations like datawarehouses, software, airline and phone companies. The actual holders of power are not exclusively states but private organizations like Google where information about billions of people is offered to everybody as material 38 for processing and assessing without limitation, hierarchical order and precise location. Hence the emergence of a new way of managing individuals, their life and living: an electronic and digitized (bio)power which is more open-ended, flexible and embedded in domestic life as opposed to the classical territorialized biopower of the nineteenth century which was the attribute of first the sovereign and then the market. This chapter shows how basic biological features of human beings such as their unchangeable body parts, their biometric features, behaviors and everyday life activities like moving, traveling, communicating and connecting, have become objects of surveillance. It will examine how surveillance becomes a biopolitical security and power technology and how its regulatory measures transform it into a technology of certainty (Ceyhan 2008) which is supposed to compensate for the loss of confidence generated with the transformations of late modernity. As Bauman contends in his series of books on “liquids,” the transformations of modernity generated new challenges for individuals and societies and also a loss of confidence on traditional regulative forces and institutions which are no longer capable of serving as a frame of reference for human action.

Initially biopolitics was influenced by reformist ideas because it was inspired— even partially—both by the Socialist movement and the newly emerging feminist movement. When, in 1869, Francis Galton wrote the first treatise on social eugenics entitled The Hereditary Genius, he was clearly influenced by liberal individualism. The aim was the total, harmonious development of the individual and improvement of the living conditions of the working population. Eugenics appeared as a mixture of social protection, of benevolent coercion and of rhetoric, a strategy for institutionalising social protection, welfare in all countries. Thus biopolitics sought to maximise the health and well being of the population by offering new living and working conditions, overseeing the hygiene practises of individuals and promoting the right conditions for healthier living through town planning, control of epidemics and endemic illnesses, as well as by improving the conditions of work in industry. Furthermore this public health and hygiene programme sought to instil habits that would improve both the physical and moral health of each individual through public education, family involvement, and by state intervention in the field of the most common social areas of health disease. Many disciplines took care of public health. Social medicine was the most important of those disciplines. It was the outcome of a close union between the conquests of experimental sciences, such as medicine and of sociological disciplines. The targets of such ‘beneficial and harmonic unity’ were social diseases where ‘medicines, hygienists, lawyers and economists should come together’.9

A voluntaristic view: crowds and masses as a challenge to the biopolitics In the late 19th century a new vision of society emerged that challenged the optimistic view of theories of evolution, which envisaged slow, almost imperceptible improvements within society through state policies. Biopolitics played a crucial role in this reformist approach to controlling the balanced development of all parts of social organism, an approach that accorded with the views of both liberal democrats and moderate socialists. The conflict between ‘necessarism’ and voluntarism was crucial at this stage in the development of biopolitical strategies. While necessarism was based on the awareness of regularities that support economic evolution, voluntarism asserted that economic relationships depended on human will and human consensus. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the voluntaristic view of nationalism was developed by a number of writers who sought to influence public opinion and consensus by using a new rhetorical style. They encouraged intellectuals and the reading public to rebel against reason, rationality, positivism, erudition, materialism, democracy and historical method: such things must be spurned. The cult of the superman, leader, ‘duce’, of a small and aristocratic elite, gradually usurped the place of positivist utilitarian individualism. The new individualism was heroic and marked by virtue, in the sense that individuals had to sacrifice their interests to broader national values. Only a true genius, a leader, a dictator would be able to embody the mystic soul of the nation. Such a person would be the true manager, the mind behind the higher goals of the collective organism. Italian nationalists based their thinking on ‘elite theories’ elaborated by Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto who inspired nationalists to argue that only aristocracies are able to decode the ‘obscure (unknown) destiny’ of the nation and transform it into political action. The nation is an organism that lives and develops within its own boundaries, its qualities being determined by those who have gone before.

The traditional socialist program of nationalizing industry aim to subject the economy to public control. But nationalization sorely disappoint expectations; public ownership did not make nearly as much difference as soc had anticipated. In an ironic twist, conservative advocates of privatization among the few in the West who are still convinced of the decisive importance changing the locus of ownership. But it is not only nationalized industry that want transferred to the private sector. In the United States, that would scarce amount to a significant program. The original contribution of American proponents of privatization is that they would like to privatize the full gamut of public assets and services, including many forms of public provision, such as public schools, national parks, public-transport infrastructure, and prisons, whose origins and rationale fall comfortably within the ambit of the classical liberal state privatization. They believe they have found a sovereign remedy against all ailments to the body politic, good for stimulating economic growth, improving the efficiency of services, slimming down the state, and expanding individual freedom, including the opportunities of disadvantaged minorities, too.

In a dismal world where trade-offs and compromises prevail, we rarely up with so happy a possibility of simultaneously making the economy larger, government smaller, and virtually all of us better off. Then why has privatization made so little headway in the United States? Opposition, the conservative comes from the same groups whom they identify as responsible for public programs: self-interested politicians, public employees, and beneficiaries with stakes in public expenditure. The picture of our political life that the conservatives propose is a bloated, parasitic public sector blocking the bustle and growth of a more freely flowing private economy.

The Founding Fathers understood that it was not uncommon for political leaders to turn on their own people. Hitler, Stalin and Mao showed there is no limit as to how far some leaders will go. Even in rather civil, democratic regimes, it is common to see leaders far more concerned with their own power than the common good. This is why the Founders tried to design a system that would limit government — particularly the federal government, which was given very few tasks and powers. As is widely and correctly understood, when government directly manages an activity, it often does it poorly because of the lack of competition and accountability, and because governmental activities often become politicized — delivering inferior service at high cost.

The solution to this problem is to keep as many activities in the private sector as possible. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher began a massive privatization of the British economy more than three decades ago, which enabled economic renewal. Many other countries followed suit; however, the global effort has waned in recent years. Now, when stagnation has re-emerged, part of the solution is again privatization.

Consisting of four parts, the syntax in Empty Words increasingly breaks down until, by its conclusion, there are no discernable words: “eeeaeh geirrds sn iendtngtch – h t” (66). Such a total break with communication makes Empty Words difficult to interpret to say the least, as Cage presents the reader with an unreadable text. This question of how to read Empty Words likewise presents a question for biopolitics. How can one manage and administer a text that remains illegible and fails to communicate?

Cage, then, seems to offer an alternative to the biopolitical use of language, and such alternatives were the subject of more than one lecture at the SchizoCulture conference. On the first day of the conference, Lyotard delivered a lecture in French while two graduate students translated. His talk addressed the strategies of a “weaker language.” According to Lyotard, countercultural and political groups since the 60s attempted to attack or resist a major or national language from the outside. Yet, as one graduate student translated, such an exterior approach “is what the masterly position asks for,” since “it is a complement the masterly discourse must and intends to conquer.” (Schizo-Culture: The Event 83). Lyotard instead suggests that “one should imagine a strategy without exteriority,” which will “use the rule of that discourse itself by including meta-statements inside its own” discourse (84).

As Deleuze points out here, the fascism to be feared is not the Nazi-like fascism but rather the everyday microfascism spread everywhere. This fascism on the level of the everyday finds expression in a number of simple examples, suggest: ‘the anger that we feel when someone cuts in front of us in traffic on the drive to work, when they don’t wait for us to get off the elevator before trying to get on, JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 3 when they don’t replace the paper in the communal printer’ (Mohammed, 2020, p. 203). Importantly, Adkins (2015) notes a crucial difference between macropolitical and micropolitical fascism that makes the latter much more intensive and pervasive in everyday life: ‘[M]olar organization [of fascism] is more calcified; it describes the relations among discrete objects. Molecular organization is more fluid; it describes the relations among flows or intensities’ (p. 131). Evans and Reid (2013), commenting on Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts on microfascism, put it even more forcefully: ‘Relations, fundamentally understood, in all their endless variations simply are fascist. Life, as well, is, [. . .] fascist. There is always the desire for power underwriting life’ (p. 1).

James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” originally penned to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, eventually became known as the “Negro National Anthem.” The first stanza, which serves as the epigraph for this chapter, reflects the joy and hope of African Americans even though, as indicated in the stanza’s final line, “victory” remains elusive and the struggle for liberty continues. Johnson himself later took on the role of a national organizer for the NAACP. Yet, Johnson’s poem suggests that hope is not guaranteed. The second stanza revisits the days of slavery: “Bitter the chast’ning rod/Felt in the days when hope unborn had died” (Johnson 1900, 768–769). Johnson’s work vividly captures the tension between hope and despair that characterizes the African American experience shaped by slavery. This dialectical struggle between hope and despair similarly influenced the gay community’s responses to the AIDS crisis (a poignant example can be found in Shilts 1988/2007, 356–357). This ongoing struggle underpins my interpretation of Foucault’s work. I propose that this hope is central to what Foucault described as his “hyper- and pessimistic activism” (DE326.1, 232). As Foucault explains, “if everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do” (DE326.1, 231–232). Without hope, why would we engage in any activity at all?

I have sought to demonstrate that this hope resonates throughout Foucault’s work. It is even apparent in the concluding lines of Discipline and Punish, where Foucault presents a seemingly bleak depiction of our society: “In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration,’ objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle” (1975ET, 308). After this portrayal of humanity as bodies trapped in an intricate system of incarceration, how should we interpret the final phrase (indeed, the main clause) of this sentence: “we must hear the distant roar of battle”? I believe it signals hope: this grim depiction is not meant to induce despair but to mobilize efforts for an approaching battle—one that could bring about new ways of relating to others and to ourselves. Foucault’s initial ethical focus in 1976 was on viewing these bodies and their pleasures as sites of resistance against these imprisoning forms of power.

The lesson is that in legal reasoning there is no escape from moral and political choice. If things have gone according to plan, time conveniently runs out, and the class is dismissed on that note.

* * * * *

Kant sets the course for a pragmatic vision of the future – any future – as an indispensable foundation for social action in service of its realization, against thinkers who posit it merely speculatively or dispense with it altogether. The future looms not as a constitutive threat but as a regulative postulate for orienting practical reason, a vital albeit revisable guide for the creation of a better world. For Kant, one may hope for that to which one actively aspires. Appropriately pluralized and brought down to earth, as it were, we may in like fashion hope for unattained utopias, for possibilities blocked in the past that may still in time become real as well as for the prospect of a brighter tomorrow wrought by action in concert.

Kant laid the groundwork for this perspective, but he was not alone in taking it. Writ small, the sort of generative prophetic hope he suggests appears mundanely in William James’s observation that there are instances ‘where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming’; ‘faith in a fact’, he emphasizes, ‘can help create that fact’ (James, 1979, p. 29, italics in original). Politics, and any collective endeavour for that matter, is an archetypal domain of such hope, for ‘[w]herever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the pre-cursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned’ (James, 1979, p. 29). James’s example is of passengers acting in concert to foil a train robbery; scaled up, democratic participation likewise requires a provisional trust in the capacities of one’s fellow citizens for responsible participation.

Our participants sensed design thinking pedagogy as enabling alternative mindsets and developing empathic, creative, and innovative thinking skills. In this way, design thinking pedagogy can potentially address gaps in traditional legal education by supporting students to move beyond the constraints of rational thinking and legal reasoning and to avoid more litigious and adversarial approaches (Haapio et al., 2021). Design thinking also offers a valuable methodology for interdisciplinary creative work, by enabling multi-professional teams to establish common ground and perspectives (Lindberg et al., 2010, p. 35).

Legal education has largely operated outside of the affective domain, a ‘catch-all phrase’ for aspects of behaviour including: Self-concept, motivation, interests, attitudes, beliefs, values, self-esteem, morality, ego development, feelings, need achievement, locus of control, curiosity, creativity, independence, mental health, personal growth, group dynamics, mental imagery, and personality. (Martin & Briggs, 1986, p. 12)

4. How Is the Practice of Astronomy Impacted by Increased Satellite Numbers?

Attempts to preserve the ‘right to dark skies’ is a cause that has unified both professional astronomers and Indigenous Peoples in recent times based on the fact that astronomy is essentially impossible to practice in certain areas due to the light pollution from large cities and urban areas (Ruggles 2009, p. 14). However, the preservation of the night sky for the purpose of astronomy is no longer threatened just by Earth. As Venkatesan et al. succinctly describe, “[t]he proliferation of Low Earth orbit satellites (LEOsats) at altitudes less than 2000 km threatens our millennia-old ability to observe, discover and analyse the cosmos from the surface of the Earth” (Venkatesan et al. 2020, p. 1043), alluding to the impact and interference that satellites are posing to the practice of astronomy.

On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence, head of the National Space Council, outlined plans for creating the “Space Force” that President Donald Trump envisions as a space-dedicated military branch, complete with space warfighters and weapons, by the year 2020. Back in June, Trump explained the Space Force by using the language of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision which ruled that racial segregation was constitutional, giving states and municipalities the authority to enact Jim Crow laws. "We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal, it is going to be something so important,” Trump said. He just as easily could have said, “The Space Force will be a branch of the military, like the Air Force,” but he did not. Trump is far from the first or only person to use the language of colonization to make a pro-space venture argument. Elon Musk famously describes his plans for a Martian settlement as a “colony,” and a long lineage of space pundits, politicians, and thinkers invoke the history of colonizers and colonization in order to frame the future of humanity in space. During a July 25 hearing of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness titled “Destination Mars – Putting American Boots on the Surface of the Red Planet,” subcommittee head, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said that he believes that the first trillionaire on earth will make their money from space exploration. “I don’t know who it will be, and I don’t know what they will discover, or what they will accomplish,” Cruz said. “But I think it is every bit as vast and promising a frontier as the New World was some centuries ago.” “You could argue that the effort to colonize space is likely to involve new forms of inequality: shifts in tax revenues and administrative priorities devoted to that,” said Michael Ralph, a professor of anthropology at NYU. “As opposed to [supporting] other social institutions that benefit people like health care, education, infrastructure.” Earning money in space is an exciting prospect for a far-right, pro-business, anti-regulation politician like Cruz, and he explicitly associated it with European countries having colonized the Americas. Starting in the late 1400s, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal funded missions to the Americas in order to gather natural resources that would power up their economies. By stealing the land that made this resource extraction possible, colonizers used genocide, enslavement, biological weaponry, and warfare and that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of indigenous people living in the “New World.” The concept of race, and therefore racism, was invented as a way of justifying their violence and legitimizing a hierarchy of race-divided labor. Based off of what we know right now, the Moon and Mars are devoid of life, so this colonizing language is not actually putting other beings at risk. But, there is the risk that the same racist mythology used to justify violence and inequality on earth — such as the use of frontier, “cowboy” mythology to condone and promote the murder and displacement of indigenous people in the American West — will be used to justify missions to space. In a future where humans potentially do live on non-earth planets, that same racist mythology would carry through to who is allowed to exist on, and benefit from, extraterrestrial spaces. On Earth, and in the United States specifically, the ideal of a merit-based society has been used to justify race-blind hiring policies that fail to account for, say, the implicit bias against black or Asian-sounding names, or the legacy of segregation, which continues to make children of color more vulnerable to attending underfunded schools. Narratives of “law and order” have also been used to justify racial profiling and harsher prison sentences for people of color than for white people who commit the same crimes. Not nearly enough work has been done here on Earth to ensure that these structural inequalities wouldn’t carry through. “Those narratives do carry specific implications about how people living on other worlds might be structured,” Lucianne Walkowicz, the current Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, told The Outline. Walkowicz organized the Decolonizing Mars Conference that took place on June 27 as well as a public follow-up event planned for September, to discuss how colonial language is shaping our potential future in space. “Space is not just built for nothing, it’s built for people.” When we think about humanity’s potential to exist on other planets, it’s important to consider who won’t have access to space, in part due to a total lack of concern over these issues by people who are able to access it. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos intends to make space a place for the rich to use for adventure leisure, and SpaceX/Tesla founder Elon Musk has proposed that a Martian “colony” can save a selection of humanity from the collapse of civilization in some World War III scenario. Granted, right now, these are just words from billionaires who want to excite the public about their business ventures. But they suggest that if the economically and socially vulnerable are priced out of a life-saving journey from Earth, it is a justifiable loss. “All of these things that are said off the cuff [by billionaires] have some implications that are concrete and count some people in, and some people out,” Walkowicz said. Part of that concern is fueled by the fact that Cruz and Pence have presented the path to settling space as one that will be privately funded, but lead by the U.S. government. In the Destination Mars subcommittee meeting, Cruz said, “At the end of the day, the commercial sector is going to be able to invest billions more in dollars in getting this job [of getting to Mars] done.” In his Thursday remarks regarding the Space Force, Pence also implied that celestial territories would be treated as private property (even though owning private property in space is explicitly illegal per the Outer Space Treaty, which the U.S. and dozens of other nations signed in 1967). “While other nations increasingly possess the capability to operate in space, not all of them share our commitment to freedom, to private property, and the rule of law,” Pence said. “So as we continue to carry American leadership in space, so also will we carry America’s commitment to freedom into this new frontier.” This approach to public-private partnerships directly mirrors colonist practices. For instance, the British East India Company violently colonized parts of India on behalf of the company, but over time, ownership of the stolen land shifted to Great Britain. While these risks feel a part of a far away future, in the present, idealizing colonization as a positive, replicable aspect of American history speaks to an unsettling indifference from leaders about the violent history of colonization. And by referencing historical events that victimized people of color, leaders paint a vision of the future in which people of color continue to be excluded, Walkowicz said that the social and economic legacy of colonization is ignored. By using narratives of adventurism and heroics, white Americans were able to convince other white Americans that they were not only entitled to steal and conquest land and persons, but that it was their destiny. Ralph said to The Outline that this mythology remains central to the way Americans conceptualize their history and culture. “Colonization is portrayed as a heroic conquest,” Ralph said. “These practices are framed as central to American identity, essential to governance, politics, and all major social institution. But not depicted as a colonizing that is one caused by violence, displacement, dispossession.” Even when people aren’t explicitly referring to settlements in space as “colonies,” they still use the rhetoric of colonizing the New World and the American frontier, which erases the stories of and violence against the people of color who lived and ranched in the region. But how did this language start being used in the first place? Presidents have also used frontierism and colonialism to get white citizens behind their agenda. When President John F. Kennedy announced his intention to bring Americans to the Moon in 1962, he paraphrased one of the earliest colonists on the North American continent. “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage,” Kennedy said. Bradford was the governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony at the time of the Pequot War. In an overnight attack, British colonizers massacred four hundred soldiers, non-soldiers, and children. Bradford later described the act of genocide as a Christian victory. “...victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God,” Bradford wrote, “who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.” Although Kennedy did not characterize his vision for the Moon as creating a “colony” specifically, the association he wanted to create is clear: The Moon is the next version of the New World, the next frontier for American conquest. In his speech, Kennedy continues that men like Bradford teach us that “man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.” However, if “man” is a stand-in for “white colonizers,” “knowledge and progress” unabashedly brushes over the lives of indigenous persons and people of color that were lost in their quest to “explore.” It’s a profusely sanitized version of reality. “It’s fascinating that a term like ‘colonizing’ can be seen in neutral terms when it can’t exist without violence and dispossession,” Ralph said. It can’t exist without violence to establish a political hierarchy. Every colonial project is about managing populations, subjugating people, extracting resources.” But Kennedy was not the first person to use of colonizing language in the context of space. John Wilkins, one of the first people who ever theorized about humanity’s future in space, wrote “A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet” back in 1638, where he argued that the Moon will be a place for human habitation in the future. Although it was a piece of science fiction theorization at the time, Wilkins justified his argument by saying that God created the Earth and stars for people to use in his honor. Colonizers are adventurers, Wilkins argues, whose ideals are worth replicating on other planets. “The invention of some other means for our convenience to the Moon cannot seem more incredible to us, than this did at first to them, to be discouraged in our hopes of the like success,” Wilkins wrote, admitting that any mission to the moon would be far in the future. “We have not now any [Sir Francis] Drake, or Columbus, to undertake this voyage, or any Daedalus to invent a convenience through the air.” Sir Francis Drake was a slave-trader, and of course, Christopher Columbus is responsible for the genocide of almost 3 million people on the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). As space travel has become more technologically feasible, science-fiction writers have speculated about how a space society would actually function. Arthur C. Clarke envisioned that “colonial” would be a dirty word in space in his 1954 book Earthflight: “And to do [enter Solar politics], one had to go to Earth; as in the days of the Caesars, there was no alternative. Those who believed otherwise or pretended to — risked being tagged with the dreaded word ��colonial.’” For Clarke, colonialism was equated with privilege in a space society, not because of racism and violence on Earth. Later in the novel, Clarke doesn’t hesitate to compare travelling between planets, and the nobility of doing so, with British colonizers travelling between continents in earlier centuries. Adilifu Nama, a professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University who has written about the representation of race in science fiction, said that science fiction movies and books during the 1950s and 1960s often included narratives of invasion from alien lifeforms directly alongside conceptualizations of existing in other worlds. These anxious science fiction narratives became popular during the Civil Rights Movement. “We had [an] invasion emerging [during the Civil Rights Movement] of black folks invading these once pristine white spaces: with public transportation, public schools, and eventually particular neighbourhoods and black folks having access to better, more upscale neighbourhoods,” Nama said. “So there is also this invasion society around racial purity, and the tensions of science fiction can be read not only as Cold War anxieties, but racial anxieties about the other.” Ralph said to The Outline that the Space Race of the 1950s and 60s shouldn’t be seen as purely a nationalist competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union: it was also a distraction from the Civil Rights Movement. “A lot of what we think of as the Space Race was the US and Russia competing as rivals for supremacy in space back in the 1950s, but also that movement was about civil rights and the struggle for justice for Americans,” Ralph said. “In a way, you could argue that space exploration has historically been used to shift public attention away from the struggle of social justice.” According to Walkowicz, that people dip into the violent, racist history of colonialism and gloss over their language using a sense of adventure provided by the American frontier is no coincidence. “The people for whom the American frontier myth were constructed, who were primarily white men, also now have the narrative of space,“ Walkowicz said. “And because tech is so incredibly non-diverse, and has been so slow to change even in those small ways in which it has, I think a lot of those narratives go unquestioned.” The people with the power to make a future in space possible, such as Trump, Pence, and Cruz, or the money to actually get us there, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are the same people who have and will always benefit from systemic racism and the potential economic glory from new economic ventures. Ralph noted that prioritizing space travel undermines funding for sustainable forms of energy like wind and solar, and efficient ways to construct affordable houses and schools. It also has direct economic implications for the people who rely on any number of federally-funded social programs in the U.S.

But we cannot forget the concept of terra nullius and how our exploration of the stars has real effects on Indigenous landscapes here on Earth. We also cannot forget about forms of space exploration that may not be explicitly tied to military means. Doing so deprives us of another lens through which to view the tensions between settler and Indigenous views of space and to which end is useful. Indeed, even reinscribing of Indigenous space towards ‘peaceful’ settler space exploration have very real consequences for Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous spaces. Perhaps the most prominent example of the fractures between settler space exploration and Indigenous peoples is the on-going controversy surrounding the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, on the island of Hawaii. While an extremely detailed description of the processes of construction on the TMT and the opposition presented to it by Native Hawai’ians and their allies is beyond the scope of this essay, and in fact is already expertly done by a number of scholars[ii], the controversy surrounding TMT is a prime example of the logics presented towards ‘space’ in both Earth-bound and beyond-Earth contexts by the settler colonial state as well as the violence that these logics place upon Indigenous spaces, such as Mauna Kea, which in particular already plays host to a number of telescopes and observatories (Witze, 2020). In particular, astronomers such as Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Lucianne Walkowicz, and others have taken decisive action to push back against the idea that settler scientific advancement via space exploration should take precedence over Indigenous sovereignty in Earth-space. Prescod-Weinstein and Walkowicz, alongside Sarah Tuttle, Brian Nord and Hilding Neilson (2020) make clear that settler scientific pursuits such as building the TMT are simply new footnotes in a long history of colonial disrespect of Indigenous people and Indigenous spaces in the name of science, and that astronomy is not innocent of this disrespect. In fact, Native Hawai’ian scholars such as Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar strike at the heart of the professed neutrality of sciences like astronomy: One scientist told me that astronomy is a “benign science” because it is based on observation, and that it is universally beneficial because it offers “basic human knowledge” that everyone should know “like human anatomy.” Such a statement underscores the cultural bias within conventional notions of what constitutes the “human” and “knowledge.” In the absence of a critical self-reflection on this inherent ethnocentrism, the tacit claim to universal truth reproduces the cultural supremacy of Western science as self-evident. Here, the needs of astronomers for tall peaks in remote locations supplant the needs of Indigenous communities on whose ancestral territories these observatories are built (2017: 8). As Casumbal-Salazar and other scholars who have written about the TMT and the violence that has been done to Native Hawai’ians (such as police actions designed to dislodge blockades that prevented construction) as well as the potential violence to come such as the construction of the telescope have skillfully said, when it comes to the infringement upon Indigenous space by settler scientific endeavors tied to space exploration, there is no neutrality to be had—dispossession and violence are dispossession and violence, no matter the potential ‘good for humanity’ that might come about through these things. Such contestations over outer space and ethical engagement with previously unknown spaces will continue to happen. Outer space is not the first ‘final frontier’ (apologies to Gene Roddenberry) that has been discussed in settler logics and academic spaces. In terms of settler colonialism, scholars have written about how Antarctica was initially thought of as the ‘perfect’ settler colony—land that could be had without the messy business of pushing Indigenous people off of it (see Howkins 2010). Of course, we know now that engagement with Antarctica should be constrained by ecological concern—who is to say that these concerns will be heeded in ‘unpopulated’ space? What can be done to push back against these settler logics?