We cant save lives without apprehending the value of lives Butler 09 (Judith, Professor of comparative literature @ U.

of Berkeley; Frames of War; published 2009, hhs-ab If we take the precariousness of life as a point of departure, then there is no life without the need for shelter and food, no life without dependency on wider networks of sociality and labor, no life that transcends injurability and mortality.'
We might then analyze some of the cultural tributaries of military power during these times as attempting to maximize precariousness for others while minimizing precariousness for the power in question. This differential distribution of precarity is at once a material and a

perceptual issue, since those whose lives are not "regarded" as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death." It would be difficult, if not impossible, to decide whether the "regard"or the failure of "regard"leads to the "material reality" or whether the material reality leads to the failure of regard, since it would seem that both happen at once and that such perceptual categories are essential to the crafting of material reality (which does not mean that all materiality is reducible to perception, but only that perception carries its material effects). Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a
feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life that is not precarious except, of course, in fantasy, and in military fantasies in particular. Political orders, including economic and social institutions, are designed to address those very needs without which the risk of mortality is heightened. Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection. In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices. Of course, not all violence issues from the nation-state, but it would be rare to find contemporary instances of violence that bear no relation to that political form. This book considers the "frames" of warthe ways of selectively carving up experience as essential to the conduct of war. Such frames do not merely reflect on the material conditions of war, but are essential to the perpetually crafted animus of that material reality

Utilitarianism is the founding discourse of genocide. It hides the sovereign decision of who lives and who is killed behind a legitimating discourse of a universal notion of the good life. The problem is that those in power, those who profit decide the good life and violently impose it on the population. Narkunas 07 [J. Paul, Prof. @ CUNY, Theory and Even, 10:3, 2007]

The statistics may expedite, however, a form of "cultural natural selection" or "survival of the statistically fit/correct" through sustained development of evermore meticulous statistical analysis. Culture functions thereby through an epistemological norm that measures its origins and telos through statistics. The epistemological norm takes an ontological quality due to a certain nominalism, a process that reductively grasps representation and epistemology as the final limit of analysis. Culture relies on a set of mutually accepted
sets of a larger species. To use Heideggerian language by way of Kant, the

and institutionalized protocols, what Raymond Williams called a "structure of feeling," in order to take particular forms and practices as exhibiting the work of cultures, giving representation or form to the world. To believe in cultures suggests the need to take for granted the pre-determined state of the world or universe as a form, whereby cultures are

agent presumes the frame [Gestell] of the world in the production of the world as a picture, with the ability to render the world as an object of reflection.15 As Heidegger acknowledged, the human is one such frame that is challenged by changes in technology; the human

sciences provide the epistemological material to fill the human frame with a coherent picture [bild], while paradoxically also unraveling its field of experience in world through technological standardization.16 The human differentiates itself from animals

and other forms of life by being thrown into a particular culture and acquiring the specific national language of its community to communicate with others in this community. This creates a horizon for thinking the species ontologically as a being within a culture. A human can not be without a culture to inhabit as the expression of this being. However, the reduction of human ontology to its statistical representation by UNESCO's recognized cultural processes creates a statistical being. Life

not only becomes statistical, but also enframed within epistemological schema. The World Culture Reports measure culture through normalizing human practices
political and economic practices that become the mythological origin of global humans as useful objects. Utility

that are useful, calculating thereby in a self-sustaining fashion the limits of life - human and otherwise - through rationalized culture. The WCRs define forms of life within particular geographies, and bestow intelligibility to disparate

becomes the moral and ethical register for thinking humans as a form of use value, suggesting the need to consider the moral and ethical legacy of utilitarianism. Jeremy
Bentham's and Mill's moral philosophy of utilitarianism offers an important corrective to the transcendent scope of Kantian ethics and the hope of the categorical imperative - act as if your actions were universally equivalent.17

Rather than a set of guiding transcendent moral principles and duties humans naturally have and or follow, utilitarianism proposes an immanent and historical model of "means" with the understanding that eventually human ethics would be universalized through

equalization ("ends"). Indeed, utility acknowledges a radical temporality and specific historical and immanent conditions for establishing or thinking utility as "...a theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded..."18 For utilitarianism, happiness is purportedly the sole end of all human action at once limited or unlimited, individualizing and massifying. To understand human ends, Bentham proposed in his utilitarianism the "greatest happiness principle" to shore up "good" human practices in defining utility: "that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness...or...to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness."19 Mill would extend a more precise if similarly ambiguous definition: "Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure."20 Utilitarianism

was invested in the idea of creating subjects through character, of establishing a common consensus or notion of what pleasure and thereby happiness could encompass by what was rendered visible: ...utility would enjoin,
first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes...a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual modes of action.21 Rather than a virtual theological a priori on the good or overarching principles (moral law) of Kantian ethics, utilitarianism indicates a historical process to establish useful principles of happiness through the standardization of character rendered within the sensible world. Any

notion of incoherent force or power in effectuating this character would seemingly be evacuated due to a normative claim to democratic or equalizing desires in establishing the universal character of utility through acts and beliefs made manifest and true. Karl Marx in Capital, Volume One

acknowledged the universalizing danger of utilitarianism in describing Bentham: "If I had the courage of my friend Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius by way of bourgeois stupidity...with the driest naivet he assumes that the modern petty bourgeois, especially the English petty bourgeois, is the normal man. Whatever is useful to this peculiar kind of normal man, and to his world, is useful in and for itself. He applies this yardstick to the past, the present and the future."22 Marx identifies Bentham's establishment of universals in time and from specific practices of the bourgeois Englishman that are then generalized as part and parcel of a universal human condition, what he describes elsewhere as the great civilizing mission of capital in socializing humans. Bentham - whom Foucault once described as more important to the history of philosophy than Kant or Hegel and depicted Bentham as the primary figure of the disciplinary society through

the machinery of panopticism - normalized humans through the production of souls as a mechanism of power that straddles the visible and invisible worlds.23 UNESCO proposes a more recent incarnation of these techniques by conceiving human life
ontologically through utilitarian mechanisms of usefulness and maximizing happiness for bourgeois global elites or the "global human." The "global human" is knowable through its ability to generate value for the marketplace or for nationstates, or in other words its capacity to generate value by recognizing humans as commodities.24 Specific cultures may only enter into the (global) "being human" when they add value for the market, when they work efficiently. In short, forms of human culture exist because of a pragmatic value. Rather than arbitrary and contingent variables of humans that connect to an inherent or universal being, they demonstrate their value because they have "proven" to be effective,

just, or ethical. Needless to say, this is not an ontological fact of being human, but the naturalization of a regime of value as ontology, whereby humans have being or life when they represent value. Adding value marks the limits of humanity, when the object of the idea is profit, a danger of what I call utilitarian humanism. This is my central claim: Rather than commodities as objects of utility deployed by humans, human practices and traditions offer a similar scale of use for humans as commodities to "sustain development." 25 Human actions or creations, as well as humans in their very ontology, could offer for UNESCO a virtually limitless production of new forms of sustainable subjectivities within the generalized structure of the "global human." UNESCO's WCRs respond to inhuman forces of globalization in the economy and statecraft by reasserting an ontological notion of the human as utilitarian.26 Through my above engagement with the WCRs and diagnosis of the dangers of life conceived as utility, I want to stress how culture is not only a site of resistance, self-reflection, and form of being, but an epistemological system of identification and containment in creating the global human as utilitarian. Despite terms like creative diversity and pluralism, culture has value and use for maximizing happiness and pleasure, and reducing pain, creating a system of organization to expedite those regimes of value, while offering the "performance" of emancipation within categories of use. The specific attributes of the particular culture, race, or ethnicity, however, are less important than their contributions, their value, to understanding the "total human system" recognized through cultural and human attributes that embody utilitarian value. Specific cultural formations can then heighten the efficiency of the global human system. A utilitarian humanism

To summarize up to this point: Utilitarian humanism can be identified via two separate mechanisms: 1. A useful and productive human will have culture. 2. Certain cultures are more useful than others; therefore, cultures of expedience should thrive. Utilitarian humanism may function, thereby, in governmental fashion, deciding the limits of the community. Instead of the citizen, state, culture, or nation, the very limit of the species and life becomes the governmental horizon of judgment. Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer uses the work of Michel Foucault on biopower to argue convincingly that the sovereign decision of who or what can be regarded as a form of life that is protected by law (in the community or nomos) is reconfigured to define what a human is and can be, where life exists.27 For Agamben
emerges from "a reserve of knowledge and experience about good and useful ways of doing things" (WCR 1998, 18). "naked life" is "life that can be killed but not sacrificed." Unrecognized through humanist or Enlightenment political categories and therefore unprotected by classical political theory and legal mechanisms, life is read instead through the biological functions of the species as still pre-differentiated energy.28 His diagnosis indicates how naked life resides in a zone of indistinction, permitting the potential for new forms of politicization or forms of life that can be executed, tortured, or merely put to death without any legal recourse. Borrowing from Foucault he describes how certain

forms of life are made to live and others let die. In contradistinction to trauma and abjection

theorists on life like Judith Butler, Agamben expounds that not all "naked life" exists de facto in a state of abjection. He does not claim that naked life is merely expendable and needs to be reformed into classical political categories, like liberal democracy. Naked life does not reside in a politicized category of the human; it's neither democratic, republican, socialist, nor totalitarian, but stands in for energy or potentialities - acategorical thinking for

because it is unrecognized through cultural or political modes of life, naked life may be seized for practices deemed utilitarian and useful,
possibilities of life. Nevertheless, which is the new measure of (sustainable) happiness for all life. Indeed, could culture, as a free floating mechanism of value that describes a

purported human way of life, be rendered an attribute for the market to judge certain populations as life "worth living," and others unrecognized through culture or utilitarian categories as not quite living or the

unliving? UNESCO exemplifies one institution that may, wittingly or unwittingly, render such "governmental" decisions on what life is worth living, and turn naked life, unrecognized as cultural or useful, into expendable life. Naked life could shuffle between a form of value worth living or one that must reform itself into useful cultural classifications or die, but never as a form of existence that could live without value measured culturally in potentia or in reserve.29 UNESCO's utilitarian humanism, by establishing a certain ontic faith in culture, innocently decides who lives and dies in the global system. How might cultural critics and theorists, witting or unwitting, contribute to this project? UNESCO's exemplary faith in consensus, legitimation, and the debate of reason rely on habitual strategies for conceptualizing cultures as benevolent systems of utilitarian management to cultivate humans and establish continuity between past, present, and future. For example, Arjun Appadurai and Katerina Stenou in the 2000 WCR argue for "sustainable pluralism" within nation-states and across and among states: "Sustainable pluralism thus defines a situation in which a finite number of culturally diverse groups are organized to relate so that each has maximum opportunity to reproduce its identity and to evolve creatively over time."30 Different identities, races and ethnicities can turn into objects of knowledge that eventually are made "knowable" through the tracking of different cultural identities and histories, and deposited into the archive of knowledge to facilitate what Appadurai and Stenou call the "political economy of dignity." By multiplying possibilities for the imagination and the capacities of "art as an archive of possible forms," the "political economy of dignity" will flourish.31 Specific members of each race and ethnicity should, thereby, maintain visibility by creating an archive that can be rendered knowable, a cultural history and knowledge that has been pre-scripted for them by their forebears. This mode of synthesis, though pluralistic, may only recognize differences, however, by their relationship to

the cultural whole (how they differ from a cultural identity or forms of knowledge) or human whole, what I call above the global human system. In other words, forms of culture-practice and knowledge emerge through the synthesis of disparate elements around an identity that repeats and becomes institutionalized but sustainable, a dangerous effect of which is "utilitarian humanism." Attractive slogans like "sustainable development,""sustainable pluralism," or Appadurai's other arguments for "globalization from below" must avoid becoming slogans that merely reassert hegemonic articulations of power by questioning their techniques of incorporation. If humans can only achieve selfconsciousness (in themselves and for themselves) through culture, they could realize themselves emerging as culture in reserve: "utilitarian humanists." "Global

humans" are forms of life that are worth living because they follow the market or cultural consensus of utilitarian humanism."Other" humans are expendable, but they must not be sacrificed callously; that would be waste. Rather, the market and cultural consensus adjudicate biopolitical decisions, making "humanitarian" gestures for cultural humans to contribute through creatively demonstrating how their culture has value, even if it entails bringing conditions that will result in their being killed slowly and systematically, albeit all-too-sustainably. In a similar vein, life that is not defined along UNESCO's humanistic or cultural frame could be "made to die." The market and global institutions, often armed with righteous intentions, exercise decisions on who lives or dies, and produce populations that are expendable because they have not sufficiently adapted to the "global human consensus." Armed with a self-righteous benevolence
that cannot conceive of its technical prowess in killing without sacrificing, UNESCO and the United Nations can label "other" cultural practices as inefficient at best, but also construe them as terrorist, antagonistic, and/or enslaving because of their incompatibility with the cultural whole. In the process, despite claims and calls for openness, adaptability, pluralism, and so forth, UNESCO increasingly polices the human community, regulating and extirpating any disturbance in the utilitarian image of the human it institutionalizes as cultural.