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Page 1: Gregory pierce

Into the Paucity of Anxious Isolation: Time-Space Appropriation

and the Liberalization of Suffering

Gregory Pierce

PhD Candidate in Human Ecology

LUCID PhD Program

Lund University, Sweden

Is she vulnerable?

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The Catchall of ‘Capacity Building’ • Model of increased ACCESS to the “cutting-edge”

– Innovations of infrastructure & hardware & expertise

– Trainings in best practices (software & equipment)

• Assumes increased technology & expertise will bring a cornucopia of . . . – Sustainable global development (for all people)

– Reduced disaster risk & Increased resilience

– Reduced poverty & Increased economic growth

• Progress = Better access to the best innovations – Tech such as space-based applications (UN-SPIDER)

– Managerial expertise to increase social order

• Main frame of major players in development/DRM – WB, USAID, ICIMOD, ADPC, ADB, etc.

Note how such logic always has innovation flowing from the global North to the South

. . . Why is this the case?

: Extreme abundance, richness

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THE CATCH to the Catchall of ‘Capacity Building’

• We live in a zero-sum world! – Access has never been the problem;

– DISTRIBUTION has always been the problem.

• What is believed thru the cornucopian model of global development… – Instrumental goals = Sustainable Development & Disaster

Risk Reduction/Resilience

– Ultimate goal = Poverty Reduction (through Economic Growth)

• Pursuit of such goals is a Mystification . . .

– Of the social relations of exchange that undergird the ACCESSS model of „capacity building‟

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World Systems Analytic Grounded in Political Ecology

• Political Ecology focuses on “ecological distribution conflicts” in developing world settings (Martinez-Alier).

• Examination of the distributional networks of the capitalist world system . . .

– Identifies interconnections between societal processes and environmental change.

– Clarifies how social relations of exchange are obscured in market-based economic models.

• REVEALS . . . asymmetrical exchanges are built into the structures of these global capitalist networks.

• Such exchange asymmetries fix the direction of the arrow of aid in pursuit of ever-elusive built capacity.

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Time-Space Appropriation

• Efficiencies of developed nations have been “achieved at the expense of . . . human time and natural space elsewhere in the world” (Hornborg).

– Asymmetrical exchanges btwn core & peripheral areas undergird today‟s development dichotomies.

– Basic inequalities obscured by equivalencies of value through money pricing in market economics.

• In disaster industry: T-S Appropriation occurs in the “commodities” necessitated by the access model

– From basic relief packages to high-tech satellites

– Industrially produced, privatized & market-based

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Perhaps the Cruelest Irony of the MWS

• Environmental Load Displacement (ELD)

– Capacity building ever more necessary (partly) due to the thermodynamic cycle of “embodied aid”.

1. “Spent” energy potential of peripheral areas –Extracted resources & labor time (that enable)

–Core accumulations: (physical) capital, (socio-political) capacity, (thermodynamic) potential

2. Transferred back to those peripheral areas ( )

3. In the entropy of the finished industrial products that now constitute the bulk of “tech transfers” – Always framed as core areas‟ generosity or charity in

times of suffering (“a gift from the American people”).

–Technocratic reconstitution of areas as VULNERABLE Through simple attribution of these areas as

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That environmental load displacement is an inextricable part of the appropriation of time-space that shapes the conditions that enable

developed nations to transfer material technologies & scientific expertise to

developing areas in order to build capacity in those areas with the instrumental goals of sustainable development & risk reduction

(resilience) & the ultimate goal of alleviating poverty should rightly give pause to all who

in their blithe passions continue to pursue unquestioningly such iniquitous distributions.

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Why Does This Disturb Me So?

• Asymmetries of exchange through capitalist chains have been described for over 40yrs.

• Begs the question:

What are the benefits of such unequal exchanges?

– Beyond simple profiteering, that is (Klein 2007)

One possible answer . . . (Has to do with her)

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The Deontological Liberalism of Dispossession by Accumulation

• Socio-cultural divestment follows subjugation to normative frames of liberal self-interest.

– Deontological (i.e. duty- or rights-based) ethics

– Liberty thru ownership; equality thru rights

• Gives rise to Dispossession by Accumulation

– Anastrophe & complement of Harvey‟s AbyD

– DbyA is meant to draw attention to . . .

• How CB is framed apolitically („morally right‟)

• How CB conceals the logic of developmentalism

– Disordered governance & puerile social structures

– “capacity building” mystifies market evolutionism

Accumulation by Dispossession characterizes how neoconservative policies calculatedly centralize power and wealth in the hands of a few by divesting the public of its common pool of wealth and property.

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Dispossession by Accumulation • Greatest domination comes in gaining “the consent

of the dominated to their domination.” (Godelier)

– Framing of the power relations that are structured into aid networks as „neutral acts of charity‟ stifles discontent.

• Dispossession by Accumulation suggests . . . – How ascendance of liberal framing increasingly

masks role of ELD in upsurge of “disaster” events.

• Unequal effect on econ & tech „developing‟ areas

• Within MWS, systematic even if unwitting

– How humanitarianism, in its blind urgency, is complicit.

• Model of access to the technocratic cutting-edge

• Thru industrial goods/expertise of DRM model

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DbyA is Appropriation of the Experience of the Experience of Time & Space (T-S)

• T-S compressions of capitalist efficiencies force alterations to the experience of being-in-the-world

– In how meaning is struck (standardized/universalized)

– In the experience of the experience of such BEING-IN

• Here, time & space is also “saved” but at the expense of time & space elsewhere in the world

– Inversion of cultural appropriation . . . more horrific

– Experience of instead of the mere embodiment of (T-S)

• For those subjected, a wrenching, disorienting loss

– “No more and no less than a transformation of subjectivity” (Kleinman 1998)

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Into the Paucity of Anxious Isolation . . .

• Suffering not compellingly related to vulnerability

• „Vulnerability‟ – an autonomist account of a settled self „acting‟ on a separated, future stage of a world. – Hinges on a deonotological framing of morality.

– Markedly Western in moral focus on the singular, metaphysical fates of self-possessed individuals.

• But Suffering is always a social experience. – Existential, not analytical or expository.

• „Death tolls‟ quantify singular experiences of being, which are always qualitative, intersubjective.

– Emotion is the individual experience of the intersubjectivity of world-(still)-in-formation.

– Not a composite but a conjunctive ontology . . .

This is the paucity of anxious isolation!

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The institutional violence that characterizes the current global political economy is

perhaps most disquieting, therefore, not in our upholding of DRM models like that of

access, the catch of which is that the catchall of “capacity building” is deeply anchored to

the zero-sum appropriations of unequal exchange, but in our endless complicity in

effecting so wrenching a loss as is rendered by the liberalization of suffering, and in the

measure of our response to it.

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Into the Paucity of Anxious Isolation . . .

Are we not the ones who are vulnerable?

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Thank you!

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No, thank you!