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Westwood Debate 2009-2010 FoucaultRekha of 70

Foucault K

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2NC Link Wall ...................................................................................... 6

2NC Helen Xtn ..................................................................................... 7

2NC Dean Xtn ...................................................................................... 8

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Link- Social Services ......................................................................... 10

Link- Social Services ......................................................................... 11

Link- Welfare ..................................................................................... 12

Link- Welfare ..................................................................................... 13

Link- Welfare Discourse .................................................................... 14

Link- Medicine ................................................................................... 15

Link- Medicine ................................................................................... 16

Link- Medicine ................................................................................... 17

Link- Health Education ..................................................................... 18

Link- Education ................................................................................. 19

Link- Education ................................................................................. 20

Link- Education ................................................................................. 21

Link- Education ................................................................................. 22

Link- No Child Left Behind ................................................................ 23

Link- Native Americans ..................................................................... 24

Link- Abortion ................................................................................... 25

Link- Abortion ................................................................................... 26

Link- Drug Rehab .............................................................................. 27

Link- Community Care ....................................................................... 28

Link- Psychiatry ................................................................................. 29

Link- Terrorism ................................................................................. 30

Link- Economy ................................................................................... 31

Link- Ethics/Obligation ...................................................................... 32

Link- Governmentality ....................................................................... 33


Link- Apoc Rhetoric ........................................................................... 34

Impact- Extinction ............................................................................. 35



Impact- Freedom ............................................................................... 38

Impact- Root Cause of War ................................................................ 39

Impact- Racism .................................................................................. 40

Impact- VTL ....................................................................................... 41

Impact- Holocaust ............................................................................. 42

Impact- Rights ................................................................................... 43

Alt Solvency ....................................................................................... 44

Alt Solvency ....................................................................................... 45

Alt Solvency ....................................................................................... 46

AT: Framework .................................................................................. 47

AT: Framework .................................................................................. 48

AT: Framework .................................................................................. 49

AT: Framework .................................................................................. 50

AT- Framework: “Truth” .................................................................... 51

AT: Ind Axn No Solve ......................................................................... 52

AT: No Alt .......................................................................................... 53

AT: Perm Do Both .............................................................................. 54

AT: Perm ............................................................................................ 55

AT: We’re A Good Version ................................................................. 56

AT: Can’t Change Power .................................................................... 57

AT: Biopower Inevitable .................................................................... 58

AT: Biopower Good ............................................................................ 59

AT: Dickenson/Democracy Solves ...................................................... 60


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First, the affirmative’s social program functions by controlling and gathering knowledge about individuals while disguising the subtle, yet dangerous forms of power it wields over all life Ilpo Helen, 2k (Department of Sociology at University of Helenski, Finland, Welfare and its Vicissitudes, Acta Sociologa, p.60)

Dean uses the catch-phrase ’government through processes’ to describe governmentalization of the state, which refers to the fragmentation tendency of the modern state power and politics. The liberal welfare state has an inclination to disperse into various practices . or rather assemblages, defined by particular objectives of government, special expertise and knowledge/power formations. They

form a kind of texture of institutions, projects and processes aiming to conduct the conduct of living human beings. In general, this fabric state has adopted a peculiar position both outside and

inside ’society’. The political authority regulates and intervenes in the relations and processes of society as an outside agent . However, the action taken by the agents of state authority happens and takes effect inside society, which means that ’socio-economic’ relations and processes set the fundamental conditions for the policy-making and actions of the state. The borderline character of the contemporary state is aptly described as a night watch, frugal in nature. However, if the aspect of bio-power and the prefix welfare are emphasized, a chemical metaphor might be even more appropriate. The positivity of the governmentalized state lies in its functioning as a catalyst for ensuring, fostering and directing vitality - forces and potentials of ’life’ - of and in society. The transformation of the state has engendered the paradox of modern political

reason. The working of liberal and welfarist government is thought to be essentially self-demarcating: this very character implies, however, that the power of the state is limitless , total (cf. Schmitt [1933] 1958). Due to the basic principle that the state should secure human life and respect its natural course and multiplicity, the instances of political rule need to have contact with every possible phenomenon and condition of human life. Good government requires comprehensive knowledge of the various phenomena of life, of individuals, groups and relations ’in society’, as well as opportunities and capacities to affect, regulate and intervene in any biological, psychological and social phenomenon or process of life, both actual and possible. The total nature of the modern state lies in this potential. Foucault considered modern bio-political reason as demonic, because it mixes totalizing traits with individualizing ones. Regarding the latter aspect, the idea of

governmental practices as pastoral power is crucial. The pastoral aspect of contemporary ’government over life’ is related to the personal care and guidance provided by the welfare services to secure and foster the health and well-being of individual members of society. According to Foucault, this aspect derives from the power of the pastor in early Christian congregations and the Catholic Church. The task of the pastor was to look after the spiritual condition not only of his flock as a whole, but also of its individual members. To carry out this task he needed thorough knowledge of every member of his parish. In the regimes of welfare, this personal caring for and knowing about the members of the flock has been secularized, politicized and dispersed among numerous expertises and institutions. The demonic character of liberal and welfarist government is inherent in the very potentiality of pastoral power to be total. The pastoral aspirations turn the basic elements and subtleties of individual and collective life, existence and experience into political matters, and submit them to sophisticated regimes of government and to complex forms of knowledge and expertise. Moreover, all this is linked to the authority of the state .


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The affirmative’s extension of state control over individual life legitimizes the annihilation of entire populations with mass genocides and nuclear weaponsMitchell Dean, 2001 (Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Demonic Societies: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty”, Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, p. 55-58)

Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in the first volume of the History of Sexuality that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled "Right of Death and Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of government is thus between one that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life. Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken down. The right of death can also be understood as "the right to take life or let live"; the power over life as the power "to foster life or disallow it." Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign power by Its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped down mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and sovereignty is not one of a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include what had earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his enemies but to disqualify the life—the mere existence—of those who are a threat to the life of the population, to disallow those deemed "unworthy of life," those whose bare life is not worth living. This allows us, first, to consider what might

be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 136—37). In Foucault's account, biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of war: it provides it with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations. Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. The same state that takes on the duty to enhance the life of the population also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons of this process of the

power to put whole populations to death. We might also consider here the aptly named biological and chemical weapons that seek an extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in which they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable. Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of

one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killing—whether by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits holocausts upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the Utopia to be achieved. There is a certain restraint in

sovereign power. The right of death is only occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence wars will be waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern 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" (1979a: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more notice: "massacres become vital." There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity between the power over life and the power to take life characteristic of biopower. The emergence of a biopolitical racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which this homogeneity always threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be approached as a fundamental mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995: 84—85). For Foucault, the primary function of this form of racism is to establish a division between those who must live and those who must die, and to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion and techniques of population had given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new linkage among population, the internal organization of states, and the competition between states. Darwinism, as an imperial social and political program, would plot the ranking of individuals, populations, and nations along the common gradient of fitness and thus measure eflicienqp6 However, the series "population, evolution, and race" is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the "white races" or of justifying colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates and the abnormals in one's own population and prevent the further degeneration of the race. The second and most important function for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that "it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life" (Stoler 1995: 84). The life of the

population, its vigor, its health, its capacities to survive, becomes necessarily linked to the elimination of internal and external threats. This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the injunctions of the eugenic project: identify those who are degenerate, abnormal, feeble*minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to forced sterilization: encourage those who are superior, fit, and intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but mere existence and disqualify their propagation: encourage those who can partake of a sovereign existence and of moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a positive justification for the right to kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism, however, we need to take into account another kind of denouement between the biopolitical management of population and the exercise of sovereignty. This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and democratized form founded on the liberty of the juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further element of sovereignty, its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault 1979a: 148). For Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in blood—as a reality and as a symbol—just as one might say that sexuality becomes the key field on which biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised through repression and deduction, through a law over which hangs the sword, when it is exercised on the scaffold by the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through alliance, "blood was a reality with a symbolic function." By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigor, fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality" (Foucault 1979a: 147). For Foucault (1979a: 149—50), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated "the oneiric exaltation of blood," of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an immensely cynical and naive fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the detailed administration of the life of the population and the


regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and education.' Nazism generalized biopower without the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of right, but it could not do away with sovereignty.

Instead, it established a set of permanent interventions into the conduct of the individual within the population and articulated this with the "mythical concern for blood and the triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into the eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the themes of the purity of blood and the myth of the fatherland. In such an articulation of these elements of sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the administration of life and the right to kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It has become a necessary relation. The administration of life comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and therefore war, will be exercised at the level of

an entire population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life of other races becomes necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of other races is only one face of the purification of one's own race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other part is to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of death and total destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an "absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state and an absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are superimposed and converge on the Final Solution. With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through the Jews, all the other races, for whom the Jews were the symbol and the manifestation.

This includes, in one of Hitler's last acts, the order to destroy the bases of bare life for the German people itself "Final Solution for other races, the absolute suicide of the German race" is inscribed, according to Foucault. in the functioning of the modern state (232).

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Our alternative is to assume the role of specific intellectuals within the round by rejecting the notion of disciplinary power rooted in the affirmative’s project. Only by constant problematization of the way the affirmative harnesses governmentality can we open up a new space of contestation. David Owen, 1994 (Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at University of Southampton, Morality and Modernity, p. 208-210)

The ‘universal’ intellectual, on Foucault’s account, is that figure who maintains a commitment to critique as a legislative activity in which the pivotal positing of universal norms (or universal procedures for generating norms) grounds politics in the ‘truth’ of our being (e.g. our ‘real’ interests). The problematic form of this type of intellectual practice is a central concern of Foucault’s critique of humanist politics in so far as humanism simultaneously asserts and undermines autonomy. If, however, this is the case, what alternative conceptions of the role of the intellectual and the activity of critique can Foucault present to us? Foucault’s elaboration of the specific intellectual provides the beginnings of an

answer to this question: I dream of the intellectual who destroys evidence and generalities, the one who, in the inertias and constraints of the present time, locates and marks the weak points, the openings, the lines of force, who is incessantly on the move, doesn’t know exactly where he is [they are] heading nor what he [they] will think tomorrow, for he is too attentive to the present (PPC p. 124) The historicity of thought, the impossibility of locating an Archimedean point outside time, leads Foucault to locate intellectual activity as an ongoing attentiveness to the present in terms of what is singular and arbitrary in what we take to be universal and necessary. Following from this, the intellectual does not seek to offer grand theories but specific analyses, not global but local criticism. We should be clear on the latter

point for it is necessary to acknowledge that Foucault’s position does entail the impossibility of ‘acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits’ and, consequently, ‘we are always in the position of bargaining again’ (FR p. 47). The upshot of this recognition of the partial character of criticism is not, however, to produce an ethos of fatal resignation but, in so far as it involves a recognition that everything is dangerous, a ‘hyper and pessimistic activism’ (FR p. 343). In other words, it is the very historicity and particularity of criticism which bestows on the activity of critique its dignity and urgency. What of this activity then? We can sketch the Foucault account of the activity of critique by coming to grips with the opposition he draws between ideal critique and real transformation. Foucault suggests that the activity of critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are but rather of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, uncontested modes of thought the practices we accept rest (PPC p.154)


The genealogical thrust of this critical activity is ‘to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident is no longer accepted as such’ for ‘as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible’ (PPC p. 155). The urgency of transformation derives from the contestation of thought (and the social practices in which it is embedded) as the form of our autonomy, although this urgency is given its specific character for modern culture by the recognition that the humanist grammar of this thought ties us into the technical matrix of biopolitics. The specificity of intellectual practice and this account of the activity of critique come together in the refusal to legislate a universal determination of ‘what is right’ in favour of the perpetual problematization of the present. It is not a question, for Foucault, of invoking a determination of who we are as a basis

for critique but of locating what we are now as the basis for reposing the question ‘who are we?’ The role of the intellectual is thus not to speak on behalf of others (the dispossessed, the downtrodden) but to create the space within which others can speak for themselves. The question remains, however, as to the capacity of Foucault’s work to perform this crucial activity through an entrenchment of the ethics of creativity as the structures of recognition through which we recognize our autonomy in the contestation of determinations of who we are.

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We’ll isolate four links:

1. Power over life— The aff’s method of keeping people alive with welfare programs puts all of life in the hands of the state – this also gives the state the authority to annihilate entire populations

2. Surveillance—Welfare programs let the state monitor and gather information about individuals; this knowledge gives the state power to subjugate people

3. Ideal Body—Social services are rooted in the normalization of society. The aff’s attempt to make everyone healthy and productive, is a means of subjectification used to make people tools of the state

4. Masking—The plan is a seemingly charitable deed that serves as a guise for the state’s insidious power over individuals


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The welfare project of the affirmative is a seemingly benevolent cover up of disciplinary power. Programs that are made to help poor people allow a unique form of information gathering about individuals—since knowledge is intimately related with power, the state thus controls all life—That’s Helen 2k


2NC Dean Xtn

Limitless power in the hands of the state allow it to wage arbitrary wars, massacre sections of the population, and justify the use of nuclear weapons. Since the governmentality of the aff that functions on the levels of the populations, it also makes the annihilation of entire populations possible. That’s Dean ’01.


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Our alternative is the only way to come to grips with disciplinary power and its dangerous potential by intellectually rejecting biopolitics—we must locally indict the logic of power and locate its weak spots; only then can we create true resistance – That’s Owen ‘94


We can never be cognizant of our freedom without being disciplinarily subjugated—only by continually challenging biopolitical notions are we able to open a space of resistanceLeslie Paul Thiele, 1990 (Professor of Political Science at University of Florida, September, American Political Science Review, 84:3, “The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault’s Thought”, Jstor)

Freedom, Foucault maintained, must be understood as resistance to the impositions of power, as the antimatter of power. Freedom is less a state of being, characterized traditionally by the absence of repression, domination, and exploitation than a kind of activity in the nexus of

opposing forces. Resistance cannot exist without power any more than power can exist without resistance. Freedom emerges as the product of this symbiotic relationship.

What glimpses of freedom are available to us in local and specific acts of insurrection and insubordination, however, are to be attained only after a sobering reevaluation of the potency, productivity, and limitless domain of power/knowledge. The alternative to such sobriety is to remain in thrall to the opiate belief in absolute emancipation. Then, in the delusory struggle for such unlimited freedom, one would unwittingly reinforce one’s attachment to the stratagems of power/knowledge, as frenzied movements

of a newly captured fly only serve to entangle it hopelessly in the spider’s web. Recognition of one’s entanglement in the webs of power/knowledge, Foucault’s defenders maintain, is a form of liberation in itself.


Link- Social Services

Social services are a means of disciplinary power used to normalize the populationLaura Epstein, 1999 (Professor of Social Work at University of Chicago, Columbia University Press New York, Reading Foucault for Social Work, “The Culture of Social Work,” p. 8-9)

Modern social work is perceived by its practitioners and by the public as social science. It has strived to acquire the characteristics of science. Its history and discourse are packed with the language and analytic processes of social science. However, it is not usually recognized that social work is a major social institution that legitimates the power contained in modern democratic capitalist states. Since the English, French, and American revolutions, governments have come to believe that in order to govern, state power must be grounded on broad public support, that it should be democratic (Foucault 1980; Wolin 1988). In democracies public order is achieved by many different means, overt coercion being one-but the last resort. Totalitarianism is outlawed. The modern state must normalize the citizenry and organize large, urban, and diverse populations into workforces that can adequately staff the public and private enterprises that maintain the performance of the economy, preserve civil order and the welfare of the citizens, fend off aggressors, and pursue the political aims of the state in the world order. The state needs the academy, the professions, and the arts to steer the enterprise and mold, guide, and teach the minds. The human or social sciences are the backbone of the technologies that have emerged as instruments by which the state can govern with minimal coercion, or, when coercion is employed-as is the case of young black American men subjected to immense amounts of incarceration-human science offers ways to support, ameliorate, disguise, and justify the state's carceral machinery. Social work collaborates with other occupations, mainly the "helping disciplines," all of which together manage the population. Social work is the Janus-faced one. To accomplish its purposes social work must dominate its clients, although in theory and in its manner of

interpersonal relations with clients it puts forward a democratic egalitarian manner. However,

to be effective, to show results, it must influence people, motivate them to adopt the normative views inherent in the intentions of social work practice. It must produce an effect without force, without command, indirectly. It must not be authoritative. It must enable its clients to be transformed, to adopt normative ways and thoughts voluntarily. Doublespeak is characteristic of twentieth-century communication in all walks of life, in all corners of social interaction. In social work noninfluential influencing is its communicative art, its specialty. It has evolved complex rationales and methods for appearing to sew together influencing and not influencing, without the seams showing too much. A polished style evolved to conceal this basic dissonance within social work. For example, it is common to state the intentions of social work as helping people to accommodate to the status quo and as challenging the status quo by trying to bring about social change. This dissonance is intrinsic to the nature of social work, to its essence.

Social programs are biopolitical manifestations of the state that create the dichotomy between “normal” and “abnormal” behavior Jerry Floersch, 2002 (Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Book Review – “Reading Foucault for Social Work”, http://msass.case.edu/faculty/jfloersch/foucaultreview.html)

As one might expect from a volume influenced by Foucault, this one, Reading Foucault for Social Work, has a conspicuous and recurring theme: social work and social welfare literature and practice are far

from being socially neutral or limited to technical interventions; they are deeply implicated in the construction of power relations ¦" (p. 151). Though this is not new to the criticism of social work, we learn new methods for keeping the discussion alive through Foucault's contribution to interrelated debates about knowledge, power, domination, normalization, and social practice. Foucault's signature term, bio-power, encapsulates his thought and provides a point of departure for most of the volume. Modern governments, for example, use bio-power to control, regulate, and routinize everyday social relations; typically, however, this is not accomplished through techniques,

knowledge, and classificatory schemes that give emphasis to the heavy-handed and power-over. Bio-power refers, instead, to the myriad ways that dominant discourses on gender, sexuality,

ethnicity, and work, become taken-for-granted, normalized, and internalized, so that the

http://msass.case.edu/faculty/jfloersch/foucaultreview.html


individual desires to be the kind of subject dictated by the dominant discourse. The chief technique of bio-power is a group of practices called "dividing practices" that work to place social work clients either inside a normal circle of behavior, or outside, within a circle of abnormal behavior. The common tools of social work bio-power are the examination, the intake, or assessment; the making of a "case"; surveillance and follow-up (see Chapter Nine by Ken Moffat); and, of course, therapy (see Chapter Seven by Catherine E.

Foote and Arthur W. Frank). The hoped-for effect of deploying bio-power in social work is the production and reproduction of normalized client subjectivities. For example, we learn from Carol-Anne O'Brien (Chapter Six) that gay and lesbian youth often feel marginalized by heteronormative practices in social service agencies. Moreover, most social work literature on youth sexuality contributes to the reproduction of a heterosexual marriage discourse. Foucault argues that modern social institutions set the political, legal, and social conditions (called governmentality) for creating subject positions like the married, heteronormative male (see Chapter Three by Adrienne S. Chambon). When such discourses are effectively reproduced, the "male" comes to desire or want to become the masculine, married man; here, bio-power is internalized.

Link- Social Services

Social services function to manage the population through bureaucratic and discursive practicesLaura Epstein, 1999 (Professor of Social Work at University of Chicago, Columbia University Press New York, Reading Foucault for Social Work, “The Culture of Social Work,” p. 13-14)

Foucault's central theme is the study of the processes by which society and the helping professions normalize people (1984a). He studies transgression ("deviance" in American usage). A philosopher by training who ended up holding a chair in social history, Foucault undermined the liberal humanist conviction that technology is intrinsically alien to the study of the human sphere (1980). Foucault's position is that the determining feature of modern human sciences and the helping professions is that they are constituted by their technologies of intervention: by observation, measurement, assessment, and administration (1984b). In other words, the

human sciences consist of techniques and practices brought into existence in order to discipline, regulate, administer, and arrange all the population of human individuals.

The power of the human sciences comes from all the institutions, acts, and discourses occurring in the course of creating and managing these regulatory apparatuses. The knowledge generated in the human sciences is the product of practices developed in the course of and in order to operate these systems. Foucault's work is a study and analysis of the details of practice. He makes no conventional distinctions between the theory and practice of the helping disciplines, rolling the two into one.

The state’s method of governmentality by providing social services is an extension of disciplinary power Benjamin Muller, 2004 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Macquarie University, “Globalization, Security, Paradox: Towards A Refugee Biopolitics”)

According to Michel Foucault, "biopolitics" is about the intervention and regulatory controls of populations. (16) Foucault argues that "diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations" marks the beginning of an era of "bio-power." (17) Bio-power introduces a critical element of Foucault's "governmentality": the relation between security, territory, and population. (18) Bio-power serves to politicize what Giorgio Agamben refers to as "bare life," making biological existence political. (19) As the passage above poignantly states, biopolitics is a specifically modern form of politics where the biological existence of humanity is politicized, and the veil between the public and private is pushed aside.

The administration or "governmentality" of the management of life through (bio)technologies of health care, education, housing, passports, etc., places various "spaces of existence" into the realm of the sovereign's power. As Foucault clearly


demonstrates in his genealogy of the prison, the modern technique of punishment employs "disciplinary power" or techniques of coercion in order to train or correct "the body," which is in dramatic contrast to previous approaches that involved the ritualistic marking of the body through terror and torture. (20) In summary, biopolitics marks the modern move from the sovereign power over death, to the sovereign power over life, which is bio-power. This has very important administrative and "governmental" implications.

Link- Welfare

Welfare’s attempt to “help” poor people is a disciplinary means of subjugation that gives the state the right to all lifeMitchell Dean, 2002 (Professor of Sociology at MacQuarie University Sociology, “Life and Death Beyond Governmentality”, Cultural Values, p.126-127)

This point about the multiform character of ensembles of rule can be quite easily made in relation to the ethos of welfare. In what does this ethos seek? From Foucault (1981, 2001), it is about an effort to maximize the security of the population and the independence of its members. This entails balancing the labor of forming a community of responsible, virtuous and

autonomous citizens with a pastoral care of their health, their needs and their capacities and means to live. The ethos of welfare is a potent admixture of rights and obligations, freedom and coercion, liberty and life. It is formed through practices of freedom by

which citizens are formed and form themselves. Yet these are located within a web of sovereign powers by which subjects are bound to do certain things. These include the use of deductive

and coercive powers of taxation, of systems of punishment, detention, expulsion and disqualification, and of compulsion in drug rehabilitation, child support, immunization and workfare

programs, etc., for the achievement of various goals of national government. More fundamentally, these sovereign powers consist in decisions as to what constitutes a normal frame of life, and hence of what constitutes public order and security , and when such a situation obtains (Schmitt 1985b: 9). Today there are various rationalities of the government of the state that attempt to provide a means of deciding this normal frame. Among communitarians, such as Etzioni (1996), this normal frame is decided upon by the shared moral values of communities. Among sociologists such as Anthony Giddens (1998) and Ulrich Beck (2000), this normal frame is defined by the processes that lead to a new kind of institutionally negotiated individualization and cosmopolitanism. Among new paternalists, such as Lawrence Mead and his associates (1986, 1997), it is decided by the views of the citizenry made known by their representatives in the Congress. There is an agreement between all three groups that, however we decide the content of this normal, everyday frame of life, at least certain populations can be invited, expected and, indeed, obligated,to follow it. As Giddens puts it (1998: 37), We need more actively to accept responsibilities for the consequences of what we do and lifestyle habits we adopt. The theme of responsibility, or mutual obligation, was there in old-style social democracy, but was largely dormant, since it was submerged within the concept of collective provision. We have to find a new balance between individual and collective responsibilities today. Fifty years ago, T. H. Marshall smuggled in sovereign


notions of rights to justify the pastoral character of the welfare state in his classic essay, Citizenship and Social Classo (1963). Today, welfare reform, and its instruments of workfare, emphasizes the converse of rights, obligations, when it demands the transformation of the individual as a condition of the exercise of a pastoral and indeed paternalist care. Both cross the threshold between the political-juridical order of sovereignty and pastoral government of conduct. For Marshall, pastoral care is a function of social rights; for new paternalists, communitarians and Third Way social democrats, sovereign instruments bind those receiving pastoral care to paternally defined collective obligations. Summing up this part of the argument, government, understood as the conduct of conduct, is one zone or field of contemporary power relations. To understand those relations we need to take into account heterogenous powers such as those of sovereignty and biopolitics. The exercise of power in contemporary liberal democracies entails matters of life and death as much as ones of the direction of conduct, of obligation as much as rights, as decisions on the fostering or abandonment of life, on the right to kill without committing homicide, as well as of the shaping of freedom and the exercise of choice. Nevertheless, having distinguished this heterogenous field of power, there are key thresholds that are crossed in which these distinctions begin to collapse. Sovereign violence, its symbols and its threat, is woven into the most mundane forms of government. The unemployed, for example, are to transform themselves into active job-seekers or participate in workfare programs under the sanction of the removal of the sustenance of life. In contemporary genetic politics and ethics, too, we enter thresholds where it becomes unclear whether we are in the presence of the powers to foster life or the right to take it. The biopolitical, the sovereign, the governmental, begin to enter into zones of indistinction.

Link- Welfare

Welfarism is a form of authoritative control meant to curb behavior considered deviant from the normPeter Miller and Nikolas Rose, 2008 (Professor of Management Accounting at the London School of Economics, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Governing the Present, p. 72-74)

The English example illustrates three key features of welfarism. The first concerns the relations between political rationalities and the formation of networks of government. As a political rationality, welfarism is structured by the wish to encourage national growth and well being through the promotion of social responsibility and the mutuality of social risk . This rationality was articulated in a number of different ways. The Beveridge Report was framed in terms of a kind of contract between the State and its citizens, in which both parties had their needs and their duties. The state would accept responsibility to attack the 'five giants of Want, Disease, Idleness, Ignorance and Squalor' through a nationalised health service, a commitment to full employment and a social insurance system which would prevent the social demoralization and other harmful effects of periods of want by redistributing income across the life cycle. In return, the citizen would respect his or her obligations to be thrifty, industrious, and socially responsible. The Labour Party, on the other hand, articulated this rationality in terms of the


just and equal treatment for each and for all, to be realized by planned, rationalised and universal state dispensation of security, health, housing and education.

The rationality of welfarism was programmatically elaborated in relation to a range of specific problematizations: the declining birthrate; delinquency and anti-social behaviour ; the problem family; the social consequences of ill health and the advantages conferred by a healthy population; and the integration of citizens into the community. These were not novel problems, but in the post-war period they were to be problematized by a multitude of official and unofficial experts and, crucially, were to be governed in new ways. The key innovations of welfarism lay in the attempts to link the fiscal, calculative and bureaucratic capacities of the apparatus of the state to the government of social life . The social devices of the pre-war period

consisted of a tangle of machinery for the surveillance and regulation of the social, familial and personal conduct of the problematic sectors of the population. The personnel, procedures, techniques and calculations that made up these devices were attached to specific locales and organizations: the courts, the reformatories, the schools and the clinics. Welfarism sought to articulate these varied elements into a network and to direct them in the light of centralised calculations as to resources, services and needs. However, welfare was not a coherent mechanism that would enable the unfolding of a central plan. The networks were assembled from diverse and often antagonistic components , from warring Whitehall departments to peripheral and ad hoc agencies. This was no 'state

apparatus', but a composition of fragile and mobile relationships and dependencies making diverse attempts to link the aspirations of authorities with the lives of individuals . Assembling and maintaining such networks entailed struggles, alliances and competitions between different groups for resources, recognition and power. The problem posed for the next thirty years, for those aspiring to form a 'centre' from which the welfare apparatus could be governed, was one of regulating those who claimed discretionary powers because of their professional or bureaucratic expertise.

Link- Welfare Discourse

Modern welfare discourse is a disciplinary approach predicated off of medical institutions pinning blame on the poorSanford Schram, 2006 (Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, “Welfare Discipline: Discourses, Governance, and Globalization”, p. 143-144)


Today, the age old perversity thesis is being reincarnated in highly technocratic ways for the new forms of governance. Today, welfare policy discourse understands reliance on public assistance in highly medicalized terms by borrowing metaphors from other service domains that end up locating the causes of poverty and welfare dependency in the individual and her or his personal deficiencies. Today, welfare policy discourse medicalizes welfare dependency in the name of facilitating the disciplining practices that Michel Foucault calls

“governmentality” whereby state power is disseminated through the social institutions of civil society to further promote pratices of self-discipline as needed by the emerging social order. The medicalization of welfare dependency is fast becoming a major administrative focus under the new welfare reform regime instituted in the 1990s. It is as if the aphasia of welfare discourse prevents us from confronting the trauma of poverty. We use euphemistic substitutes like welfare dependency to paper over our complicity in perpetuating other people’s destitution, while simultaneously shifting the blame from the structure of society to the individual behavior of those who are forced to live in poverty. With this old aphasic shift taking new form, welfare dependency becomes the center of our discursive terrain about how in the contemporary parlance of our therapeutic culture to treat recipients for their diseased condition of dependence on welfare. Welfare use beyond the shortest periods of time as a form of transitional, aid as say when a single mother relies on welfare while working through a divorce, is now considered an abuse. In other words, welfare use beyond a few months is now welfare abuse, signaling the need to undergo treatment to overcome one’s dependency on welfare. The dependency metonymy is a displacement for other terms that, for political reasons, people cannot use. So in aphasic fashion, welfare use, welfare receipt, and the especially verbotem welfare taking are being replaced by welfare dependency.

The discursive practices of welfare create an exclusionary system based on the stigmatization of individuals who the state deems as useless to societySanford Schram, 2006 (Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, “Welfare Discipline: Discourses, Governance, and Globalization”, p. 39-40)

If the welfare state is in crisis today, then it is a crisis that is in large part one of discourse. It is a crisis-mongering discourse of globalization that creates the insistence that capitalist societies must learn to live beyond the welfare state. The dissemination of American-style discourse has given increased emphasis to welfare dependency as connoting a stigmatized condition that makes an individual a deviant and the society as a whole less productive, less efficient, and less able to compete globally. Legitimate reasons for needing public assistance are increasingly hard to articulate in such a discourse, and the positive benefits to one’s family and society are as well. In Europe, the discourse of welfare dependency has given birth to a preference for an active welfare state where receipt of public assistance is seen as passive and negative. Labor activation policies are being implemented in country after country to counteract the alleged deleterious effects to both the individual and society. The metaphors of active and passive operate in the globalizing discourse of welfare dependency to reinscribe hierarchies of privilege and positions those in need of public assistance as less worthy until they become active and are inserted into the labor force. In the new discourse of the active welfare state, there is the risk that work at any job will become the only legitimate solution to one’s alleged passivity. A discourse of labor activation enrolls the unemployed in seeking inclusion in the society on terms that reinscribe their subordination as those who need to be disciplined if they are to ever achieve self-sufficiency. In this way, welfare reform can give rise to new forms of governance for regimenting subordinate populations to the emerging social order in an era of globalization.


Link- Medicine

The medical system is rooted in surveillance of entire populations and subtle power structures that prescribe “healthy” practicesDenise Gastaldo, 1997 (Professor at University of Toronto, “Is Health Education Good For You? Rethinking Health Education Through the Concept of Bio-Power”, Foucault, Health, and Medicine)

The body became the focus of analysis as an individual entity; it was no longer an indissociable and collective entity, like a population (Foucault 1991: 136-7). Viewing this process from a social constructionist perspective, the individual body was ‘invented’ at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Many power techniques have since been developed to make the body docile so that it can be ‘subjected, used, transformed, and improved’ (Foucault 1991: 136). Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982: 153-4) state that some form of control over the body is found in all societies. However, the employment of disciplinary power divides the body into parts and trains it, with the objective of making the parts and the whole more efficient. This happens in a subtle and continuous way, in a web of micro-powers, each including the use of space, time and everyday practices. The body has been turned into an object of knowledge. In order to govern the population, knowledge is gathered on each individual body. For the first time, the future of society is related not only to the number of citizens and family organization but to the use each person makes of sex (Foucault 1990: 26). Knowledge about populations also acquired a distinct perspective in the eighteenth century. Governments recognized that dealing with populations required different strategies to those used for handling individuals. The health, illness, death and birth of populations were emerging as economic and political issues. These issues are directly related to the labour force, economic growth and distribution of wealth. In the last two centuries, population has become the target of statistical analysis and intervention measures have been designed aimed at sub-groups and the population as a whole (Foucault 1990: 146).In order to manage the population, every individual should be reached by techniques of power. The control of the social body through life demands a whole new set of strategies. For example,

the practices of examining bodies, asking questions about habits and other private issues, the prescription of behaviours and drugs would not be easily accepted in health without similar experiences in other sites of social life. Foucault (1991: 28) argues that the ‘body politic’ relies on communication routes that construct bodies as objects of knowledge. Confession, for instance, is an important communication strategy that has been used to circulate knowledge about individual bodies. Confession, as well as the therapeutic practice of medicine, bridges the micro-physics and macro-physics of power because they link individual bodies to the social body. People are supposed to reveal their sins to their parents, to the priest, to the judge, to the doctor, to the teacher. Gordon (1991:4-5) suggests that bio-power is the link between micro and macro; it is ‘a politics concerned with subjects as members of a population, in which issues of individual sexual and reproductive conduct interconnect with issues of national policy and power’.The link between the individual and the population does not mean that bio-power is a general system of domination of a group that permeates the whole social body. It is also not a set of mechanisms that guarantee control of citizens by the state (Foucault 1990: 92). Rather, bio-power is a subtle, constant and ubiquitous power over life. It is exercised through a set of power techniques, but two basic forms can be identified as the poles of this ‘line of power’. In Foucault’s terminology, they are the ‘bio-politics of the population’ and the ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’. Bio-politics is the pole of bio-power that employs regulatory controls and interventions to manage the population (Foucault 1990: 139). The biological processes that are generated by the collection of

individuals are directly linked to economic and social issues. For example, an epidemic may abruptly attack the labour force of a region; an increase in life expectancy implies the extension of health care and social support to elderly people. Social policy is a visible strategy to handle collective processes concerned with the life and health of the population. Other invisible power techniques, such as the expansion of the domain of the health system into private life, collaborate to gather information and to establish what is considered normal and pathological. Anatomo-politics at the other pole, focuses on the body as a machine (Foucaul 1990: 139). Docility and usefulness are identified by Foucault as ways to integrate the body into economic and social life. In order to achieve this, the operation of disciplinary power pervades relations in


families, schools, hospitals, work, etc. In the case of medicine, the effect of discipline is for the

therapeutic space to become a political space. Individuality has been constructed based on symptoms, disease, or lifestyle; control over these processes is at the core of medical care (Foucault 1991: 144). The political space that health care and policy constitute is an important site for the exercise of disciplinary power. Focusing on individual bodies or on the

social body, health professionals are entitled by scientific knowledge/power to examine, interview and prescribe ‘healthy lifestyles. The clinical gaze is omnipresent and acceptable because its objective is to promote health- as well as to promote a disciplinary society.

Link- Medicine

Medicine is a social tool used to define “normal” state of being- the aff is an exercise in power struggle as the “medical professionals” derive their legitimacy from subjugating impoverished peopleDeborah Lupton, 1997 (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Cultural Risk Research at Charles Sturt University, Australia, “Foucault, Health, and Medicine”, “Foucault and the Medicalisation Critique”)

Supporters of the medicalisation critique have generally identified a central paradox: medicine, as it is practiced in Western societies, despite its alleged lack of effectiveness in treating a wide range of conditions and its iatrogenic side-effects, has increasingly amassed power and influence. They

contend that social life and social problems had become more and more ‘medicalised’, or viewed through the prism of scientific medicine as ‘diseases’. Critics such as Irving Zola

(1972) and Eliot Freids0n (1970) argued that medicine had begun to take on the role of social regulation traditionally performed by religion and the law. One of the most vociferous advocates of the medicalisation critique was Ivan Illich (1975), who contended that rather than improving people’s health, contemporary scientific medicine undermined it, both through the side-effects of medical treatment and by diminishing lay people’s capacity for autonomy in dealing with their own health care.The notion that individuals should not have their autonomy constrained by more powerful others is central to the ideals of the medicalisation critique. In concert with

liberal humanist ideals, critics argue that becoming ‘medicalised’ denies rational, independent human action by allowing members of an authoritative group (in this case the medical

profession) to dictate to others how they should behave. There is a concern evident in the literature on medicalisation about the ‘dependency’ that contemporary scientific medicine is seen to encourage. As this would suggest, the term ‘medicalisation’ is generally used in the sociological literature in a pejorative manner: to be ‘medicalised’ is never a desirable state of being. As such, ‘medicalisation’ is positioned as something which should be resisted, in favour of some degree of ‘de-medicalisation’. Proponents of the critique generally take an overwhelmingly negative view of members

of the medical profession, seeing doctors as attempting to enhance their position by presenting themselves as possessing the exclusive right to define and treat illness,

thereby subordinating the opinions and knowledges of lay people. This increasing power of scientific medicine, it is contended, has detrimental effects for traditionally disempowered and exploited social groups by deflecting questions of social inequality into the realm of illness and disease, there to be treated inappropriately by drugs and other medical therapies.

The affirmative’s endorsement of the medical system is an underhanded attempt to preserve social oppression of the poor by rendering them docile to doctors


Deborah Lupton, 1997 (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Cultural Risk Research at Charles Sturt University, Australia, “Foucault, Health, and Medicine”, “Foucault and the Medicalisation Critique”)

Proponents of the medicalisation critique call attention to the notion that patients in general, because of

the lack of medical knowledge, are placed in the position of vulnerable supplicants when they seek the attention of doctors, with consequently little opportunity to challenge doctors’ decisions. This is particularly the case, they argue, for members of the working class and other socio-economically disadvantaged groups whose lack of power is further entrenched through their interactions with powerful doctors who seek to maintain the social status quo. Research carried out exploring the doctor-patient relationship from this perspective

has tended to focus on the ways that the medical consultation facilitates the power of doctors over patients and supports capitalist ideologies. For example, in his analysis of the ‘micro-politics of medicine’, the Marxist sociologist Hower Waitzkin (1984) looked at the verbal encounters between doctors and patients with the intention of identifying the features of the encounter that ‘medicalise’ and ‘depoliticise’ the social structural dimensions of ill health. Waitzkin argued that ‘The medical encounter is one arena where the dominant ideologies of a society are reinforced and where individuals’ acquiescence is sought (1984: 339). In addition to those writers interested in class struggle, the medicalisation critique has been taken up with enthusiasm by feminist critics of medicine (for example, Ehrenreich and English 1974). Feminist critics have viewed the medical profession as a largely patriarchal institution that used definitions of illness and disease to maintain the relative inequality of women by drawing attention to their weakness and susceptibility to illness and by taking control over areas of women’s lives such as pregnancy and childbirth that were previously the domain of female lay practitioners and midwives.

Link- Medicine

Medicine controls people by using death as a looming threat—the state is able to maintain full control over individual behaviorAlan R. Petersen, 1997 (Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Murdoch University, “Foucault, Health, and Medicine”, p. 100-101)

All this is not to argue that Foucault and his followers would necessarily dispute the notion that contemporary societies are subject to great influence from scientific medicine. Quite the contrary: while they may not use the term 'medicalisation', one of their central contentions is that society is medicalised in a profound way, serving to monitor and administer the bodies of citizens in an effort to regulate and maintain social order as well as promoting good health and productivity. Medical knowledge and practice serve to differentiate between social groups, to identify and propose means of addressing inequities in health and social advantage. Medicine and health have become central to the notion of the 'normal' person because, in part, medicine: has come to link the ethical question of how we should behave to the scientific question of who we truly are and what our nature is as human beings, as life forms in a living system, as simultaneously unique individuals and constituents of a population. Medicalisation is evident in the ways in which warnings about health risks have become common events. People are constantly urged to conduct their everyday lives in order to avoid potential disease or early death. As a result, "Sociologically speaking, everyone lives under the medical regime, a light regime for those who arc not yet patients, stricter according to how dependent on doctors one becomes* (dc Swaan 1990: 57). This is particularly the case for older people and the chronically ill, in relation to improvements in longevity and medical treatment for acute illnesses. Where once, for instance, physical activity might have been undertaken for the purposes of 'character formation', 'experiencing nature* or 'the pleasure of functioning*, it is now often understood as a medical activity, undertaken for the purposes of good health


Link- Health Education

Health education necessitates total state control of individual bodies under the guise of empowerment Denise Gastaldo, 1997 (Professor at University of Toronto, “Is Health Education Good For You? Rethinking Health Education Through the Concept of Bio-Power”, Foucault, Health, and Medicine)

Health education is also subjugation. Many health education practices involve the imposition of ‘truths’ about health, in which the patient loses control of her or his own body. Instead of choice, the patient experiences the government of her or his body or family

from outside. Health education can also mean control because it extends the clinical gaze over the population. Health education covers most of the issues related to life, and is put into practice by a network of professionals, from social workers to psychologists. This double view of health education is based upon the idea that total autonomy and liberation are not possible for any human being. According to Foucault’s theory, no educational process can only liberate because at the same time it disciplines bodies. Therefore, health education is seen here as both empowerment and subjugation.Health education is normally taken for granted as being a good practice. Practices and policies suggest that health education has not been challenged in its constituent elements (e.g. confession, self-disclipline, etc.), but has been reformed or transformed in its general strategies of approach – from traditional practices to participatory practices. As bio-politics, health education policies have been disseminating discourses of participation and empowerment. This means that the health system is turning from repressive approaches to constructive approaches to manage the population. As


anatomo-politics, health education is exercised in the promotion of health. Whether healthy or sick, the ‘healthy citizen’ keeps in touch with the national health system because health education activities are for all, preventing disease and promoting health. Therefore, health education, though its capacity of expanding the limits of health practice into the healthy community, is an exercise of power over life.

Health education allows medical professionals to discipline individuals by the construct of a dichotomy between healthy and unhealthy behaviorDenise Gastaldo, 1997 (Professor at University of Toronto, “Is Health Education Good For You? Rethinking Health Education Through the Concept of Bio-Power”, Foucault, Health, and Medicine)

Radical and traditional health education share an underlying notion of empowerment through education or subjugation through ignorance. Both are based on the understanding that human beings are liberated beings unless something oppresses them; empowering them through education is a way to remove the ‘chains’ of oppression – ignorance, lack of political understanding, submissive behaviours, etc. I would argue that both processes, subjugation and liberation, are acknowledged as elements of health education power relations. However they are not the final outcome of these power/knowledge relations. What health education does construct is identity. Health education is an educational experience

that gives professionals and patients/clients elements for building up representations of what is expected from ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’ people. These social roles are reinforced by a complex system of rewards and punishments. Health education is an experience of being governed from the outside and a request for self-discipline. From inside, health education is a constructive exercise of power that improves the medical gaze; through the promotion of health, it circulates everywhere in spheres that are new to bio-medicine.

The state is able to disguise control over the body behind the guise of promoting health educationDenise Gastaldo, 1997 (Professor at University of Toronto, “Is Health Education Good For You? Rethinking Health Education Through the Concept of Bio-Power”, Foucault, Health, and Medicine)

Bio-power refers to the mechanisms employed to manage the population and discipline individuals. In Foucault’s view, biological life is a political event: population reproduction and disease are central to economic processes and are therefore subject to political control. I employ the concept of bio-power to investigate the political dimension of health education in the arenas of health and health promotion. In this century, health has become increasingly important politically as a major point of contact between government and population. With the

establishment of a net of human rights and citizenship practices, the art of government has had to develop more refined strategies in order to maintain control over the population while

avoiding coercive actions. Seen from this perspective, health education can make a contribution to the exercise of bio-power because it deals with norms of healthy behaviours and promotes discipline for the achievement of good health. It is educational in nature because it promotes behaviours that should be adopted by the entire population and interferes with individual choice, providing information to foster ‘healthy’ lifestyles.

Link- Education

The affirmative’s endorsement of schooling is disciplinary power at its finest—students are made to feel liberated within the confines of the state’s control Jan D. Matthews, 2004 (Winter, “Toward The Destruction of Schooling:, p. 21-23)


Schooling is seen as a good thing. Those who are uneducated are seen as lacking something essential to being fully functioning, fully human . From Plato to Comenius to Kant, humanity is something that is imposed upon the young. Even Paolo Freire, a favorite of leftists, believes in a “humanizing pedagogy,” presumably one that makes people more fully human.97 We need to spend less money on the military, more money on schools, say the progressives. Their complete identification (“we”) with the nation-state is utterly pathetic. “Humanitarianism” has saturated the left and the right: everyone is working hard oppressing themselves, all for a better humanity, a better

future. Like George Bush, the progressives don’t want to leave a single child behind.98 In Hebrew there is one word for both “education” and “chastisement.”99 The powerful men of the ancient world were rather clear about what schooling entailed. Today it is of the utmost importance to conceal the role of schooling in society. Submission to authority is always the goal of schooling. The power wielded by authorities–the power to reward and punish, to habituate the individual to desired patterns of thought and action–works to integrate the individual into a hierarchical social order . 19th century prison reformers and progressive school reformers were working to make this integrating function more efficient and more total in its effects. Both groups were humanitarians because they sought to make the individual better adapted (obviously doing her a great service) to a new set of social conditions; society had to be shaped into a different form, re-formed. Society is the main actor, and individuals merely respond. To those who haven’t picked up on this clever phrasing, “society” can be understood as those who have the power to make administrative and legislative decisions. Individuals only act as a part of “society” to the extent that they submit to existent social conditions, and possibly try to influence those who hold positions of power. As John Dewey put it, “through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.”100 At first glance Dewey seems to be saying that education can determine the direction in which society goes, but in fact he says that society shapes itself through education, so education is really not determining anything. In other words, schooling is a technique that society uses. One cannot fault him for such truthfulness. Durkheim

agreed that education is “only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and reproduces the latter in

abbreviated forms. It does not create it.”101 Educators respond to changes in society and make sure their schooling

produces the necessary products. In a Harvard lecture of the 1920’s George S. Counts said the following: “This is not the place to evaluate industrial civilization. . . . Education must come to terms with industrial civilization and discover its tasks in the new age.”102 Educators work within institutional confines, within the confines of their social roles as authorities and slaves (just like the Greek pedagogues) of the powers

that be. Since most educators believe unquestioningly that schools serve a positive function in society, all of their theories of schooling and ideas for reform are likely to reinforce the basic assumption that schools are a good thing . 103 Modern theories of schooling are based on a social ideal of progress. This is basically a conservative ideal in the sense that technological change tends to be irreversible and reform tends to build upon itself, by and large keeping institutional structures and social relations intact. The more things change the more they stay the same. Schools have been steadily expanding (progress) and have been able to reform by accretion.104 The technical basis of modern industry may be revolutionary in the Marxist sense of bringing us closer to revolution within a linear model of historical progress, but is this revolutionary at all? Marx himself praised the essentially “dangerous character” of revolutionists such as “steam, electricity, and the self-acting mule.”105 Attributing such a character to technology is clearly an oversight, more or less incompatible with any revolutionary theory based on the need for an insurrectional rupture with our technological society. Marx’s oversight stems from his failure to adequately identify the relationship between the productive apparatus and the capitalist system that produces it and to fully recognize Capital’s domesticating function. The writings of Jacques Camatte and Fredy Perlman are excellent in expanding upon these themes. In many ways, resistance to the proliferation of the factory system parallels the resistance to compulsory schooling. When a definite loss of autonomy was seen as a new and threatening imposition, radical acts of resistance and sabotage were not uncommon . The industrial system (along with puritanical morality) served to domesticate the exploited, allowing for resistance to be more easily recuperated through institutional channels such as union bargaining and political reformism. What were considered factory virtues are virtually the same thing as school virtues . Discontents who have internalized these virtues aim at tinkering with the repressive apparatus, not destroying it. Modern theories of schooling can be said to begin with Rousseau. Rousseau considered civilization some form of mistake, but he did not oppose it. In his view, society was the source of all evil. He did not, however, see the teacher as part of this “evil,” and consequently gave teachers invaluable advice about how to exercise their supposedly righteous control over their pupils. “Begin then, by studying your pupils more thoroughly, for it is very certain that you do not know them,” he wrote.106 Rousseau gave the following advice in regard to the way teachers should

control their students: “Let him [ the student] believe that he is always in control though it


is always you [the teacher] who really controls . There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.”107 This statement describes much of the philosophy of modern schooling. The institutionalized authority of the teacher is a given. The question is how the teacher can make best use of this authority. Rousseau gave an excellent answer. To think that this somehow encourages the freedom and independence of the student is reasonable, as long as that freedom and independence is exercised within the boundaries set by the authorities . As B.F. Skinner said approvingly, Rousseau “did not fear the power of positive reinforcement.”108 B.F. Skinner was an influential behaviorist psychologist of the mid-twentieth century. His overriding interest was in the control and modification of human behavior–a practice he believed could solve the world’s problems–if only everyone could value efficiency over freedom.

Link- Education

The affirmative’s presentation of education as a means of freedom is actually a biopolitical practice that facilitates ways that an individual can become useful to the state

James Marshall, 1995 (PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Stanford University, “Foucault and Neo-Liberalism: Biopower and Busno-Power”)

Foucault discusses in considerable detail how the requisite techniques and technologies for the exercise of bio-power were developed.6 These can be classified under two headings. First, technologies of domination act essentially on the body, and classify and objectify individuals. They were developed in disciplinary blocks such as the prison, the hospital, and the school. In so far as these objective classifications are adopted and accepted by individuals so their selves are also constituted. Second, in technologies of the self there is the belief, now common in western

culture, that it is possible to reveal the truth about one's self. By telling the truth about one's sexuality, where the "deepest" truth is embedded in the discourse and discursive practices of sexuality, individuals become objects of knowledge both to themselves and to others. But telling the truth is both therapeutic and also controlling. Eventually, according to Foucault, we learn how to do these things to ourselves. He refers to the conjoint effects of these two technologies as governmentality. 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."8 By "government" Foucault should be understood

as meaning something close to "the conduct of conduct."9 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.

Underlying many of the recent educational "reforms," their literature and the new practices

and processes, are notions of freedom and choice. Students, parents, etc. are presumed to be capable of deliberating upon alternatives and choosing between alternative educational programs according to individual needs, interests, and the qualities of

programs. Here it seems to be presumed that it is part of the very nature of being human to want to make continuous consumer-style choices. But the normal notions of autonomy needed to make choices, and the notions of needs and interests, presuppose that such choices are the student's (or chooser's) own, that as choosers they are

independent, and that needs and interests have not been manipulated or imposed in some way upon them. There is also a conjoint claim that the quality of an education constituted by the choices made by a consumer as consumer is superior to that offered to a consumer by the choices and educational decisions made by providers of education.


The school system is a masked power structure that normalizes individuals and calculates students’ value based on disciplinary standards of the stateJohn Ransom, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dickinson College. “Foucault’s Discipline The Politics of Subjectivity”, p.16)

Disciplines do not function through consent- they do not derive their legitimacy or their goals from the individuals who come into contact with them. What disciplinary power does is normalize. As an

example, Foucault points to the invention of the nineteenth-century classroom. Rectangular desks arranged in a rectangle allows for the formation of “a single great table, with many different entries, under the scrupulously ‘classificatory’ eye of the master.” The student’s “progress, worth, character… application, cleanliness and parents’ fortune” would all be reflected in the pupil’s position on the table. As a result, a mass of individuals is dispersed, individualized, and organized. The goal, however, is not to

maintain a static distribution. Instead, a standard of performance is set. Individuals are evaluated and arranged according to that standard but also subjected to exercises that will move them closer to the norm. As students’ performances improve or decline, their position on the “table” changes accordingly.

Link- Education

Education is an accepted form of subjugation that allows the state to assume the role of an all knowing entity that controls society’s reserve of knowledgeGaile Cannella, 1999 (Research Professor at Tulane University, “Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood”, 1:1, The Scientific Discourse of Education: Predetermining the Lives of Others – Foucault, Education, and Children”, p. 4-5)

The acceptance of the scientific discourse of education has lead to the emergence of forms of knowledge and ‘experts’ in that knowledge who are by definition given exclusive rights to speak and act . Even social constructivists have labeled particular forms of

knowledge as more sophisticated, as more informed, as not appropriate for those who are younger. The knowledges of particular groups/individuals are excluded and labeled inferior to others, whether because of being younger, smaller, viewed as having less experience or dependent, less well read, new to a field, and on and on. Reconstructions of knowledge are excluded, as examples – knowledge as struggle, as ambiguous, as nonexistent, as undefinable. Certainly, knowledge is not accepted

from particular groups, especially children who have not reached adolescence. Those who are often identified as the major stakeholders in educational discourse are given no voice, much less equal partnership in the process. Have we involved them in our teacher education

reform efforts? in our educational renewal activities? in our conversations about democracy? We speak of educational reform and collaboration, but that collaboration is only with those who

are adults . As Foucault points out, ‘From the depths of the Middle Ages, a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of men’ (1972, p. 217). The appeal to reason within a discourse provides an additional compelling form of exclusion. This oppositional principle, the claim to ‘reason versus folly,’ legitimates the labeling of discursive formations that do not fit the assumptions of the particular discourse as null, invalid, without intellect, even as relativistic or worthless. The claim to reason and the denial of folly places human activity that does not fall within the realm of particular discourse assumptions in a void, in a vacuum in which no one hears. Again, even within a critique of education as Enlightenment/Modernist scientific discourse, with moves to


democratize schooling, collaboration, and educational renewal, children continue to be accepted as learners, thinkers, and changing human beings who we must educate . To question this assumption is a professional death sentence, a commitment to the asylum of the strange, the demented, and the trouble-maker. The final principle of exclusion is the ‘will to truth’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 218), the true discourse that denies any ties to power because it is ‘true.’ This will to truth shifts as influenced by ‘mutations of science,’ but continues to emerge in new forms. Feminist, critical, and even multicultural critiques have, to some extent, challenged the true discourse, for example the truth of child development as grounded in the ‘true discourse’ of human nature and progress. However, the basic assumptions underlying educational discourse (i.e. educational necessity, the existence of learning, thinking, and human mind, educational advancement, sophisticated knowledge, and the inferiority of childhood) have imposed themselves on us for so long that we do not recognize them as masking forms of power and desire . Although we would challenge regimes

of truth, we function as if these assumptions represent a true discourse . Prohibition, ritual, and exclusive rights to speak serve as rules for exclusion that combined with the principles of reason and the will to truth reinforce and compliment each other in the perpetuation of the dominant form of educational discourse. Institutions, capitalist business practices, even discourses on democratic schooling reinforce our present day acceptance of learning, thinking, education, advancement, privileged knowledge, and human inferiority. Further, disciplinary technologies of education reinforce this discourse by creating human bodies that in the educational attempt to improve themselves, to be useful, become objects to be molded and controlled .

Link- Education

Schools’ methods of classifying, ranking, and ordering students is state imposed disciplinary subjugationJeffrey Roth, 1992 (Director of Research University of Pennsylvania, American Educational Research Journal, “Review: Of What Help Is He? A Review of "Foucault and Education", 29: 4)

The first of these disciplinary technologies is surveillance. Constant observation is made possible through the ordering of bodies in space and time. In schools, the ordering of space is seen in the familiar grid of self- contained classrooms, segregated by age. Time is demarcated precisely into periods and terms. For Foucault, the consequences of partitioning these two coordinates were profound and gave rise to some of his most dazzling leaps of interpretation: Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distribution in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities. ... One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation.9 Another technology allows people to be


traced over time. The written examination, the results of which are entered into a cumulative record (for students and faculty alike), documents an individual's capacity. Examinations measure, classify, and rank. They allow individuals to be compared with others in a group and further individualized into a special case to be treated or rewarded. Counting the number of correct answers on a written examination allows Gaussian statistics

(the properties of the normal curve) to be applied to the results. This quantification makes possible a third disciplinary technology, which Foucault called normalizing judgment. Once a mean or average is established for a distribution of test scores, the measure of central tendency serves as a norm, reference to which allows assignment to be rationally and objectively made to ranks above and below the mean. A quantified norm

both totalizes and individualizes a population. The mean and standard deviation summarize a group's variability, while a distribution of scores can be ordered into percentiles or stanines and individuals assigned a specific rank location. Normalizing a population is itself a move toward homogeneity, pushing to the tails anything idiosyncratic, peculiar, and unfamiliar. I will have more to say about the consequences of standardized measurement in a later section.

Schools are a means of imposing state based exclusion based on class and location—the aff’s attempt to improve this are simply means of masking this logicJacques Donzelot 1999 (Professor of Political Sociology at University of Paris, Columbia University Press New York Reading Foucault for Social Work, “Foucault Roundtable,” p.88)

Previously, things were done with the means available; these were exclusionary practices. Today, a very effective system of confinement exists in the school system. Schools, as we know them, enable people to stay in their assigned places according to the requirements of the system, that is, based on their social origin. Baudelot and Establet's book on the Capitalist School tells the story quite well. It speaks of two networks of schooling: the secondary-and-above network, and the primary and professional network. There may be a third one, the legal-clinical network, a sort of new educational layer that absorbs to a certain degree the old products of exclusion. We could talk of a form of dialectic-although I don't like that word very much-between exclusion and confinement. When things are going well, under conditions of available resources, confinement takes place through the school system. When this is not sufficient, exclusionary means take over. This is the problem as far as I see it. It is no more complicated than that.

Link- No Child Left Behind

NCLB is a practice rooted in the ideology of eugenics—the state’s structural racism in education standards is a biopolitical method of targeting portions of the population as inferior


Nicholas Hartlep, 2008 (M.S.Ed. Doctoral Student Urban Education at University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, “Eugenics in Education: Apologetics for Oppression”)

The eugenic labels presently used in education vary in offensiveness. Albeit tacit at times, the following are a few eugenic-laden labels/practices widely used within the educational arena: (1) “at-risk” student; (2) “special needs” student; (3) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, previously Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965; and (4) the ability tracking of students. The term “at-risk” undermines objectivity and inaccurately labels children in education. What does “at-risk” mean? Furthermore, what is the purpose for its use in the educational arena? The same holds true for the term, “special needs” student. In terms of exceptionality and uniqueness, I would argue that all students are special in some form or fashion. NCLB is eugenically contrived insofar as it causes division and a separation of races as it relates to the achievement gap and the acknowledgement that certain

nonwhite students perform subordinately well when compared to white students. NCLB serves as an apparatus that assuages underrepresented, non-white populations of students’ academic growth/achievement. The tracking of students is a eugenic-laden practice that is founded exclusively upon perceived ability level and, therefore, is not inclusive. Minority students are disserved when educators predetermine their abilities directly or

indirectly. As Winfield testifies: The fact that subsequent generations of educational policy makers have so enthusiastically embraced mechanisms of measurement (testing and dependence on IQ), techniques of tracking and sorting [italics added] (high school tracks, gifted and talented programs), and forms of content presentation (curriculum) that have their conceptual roots in eugenic ideology suggests that the aim of passing the imperative on to the younger generation was successful. (p. 132) Non-whites are harmed and disserved through tracking. The continued use of ability tracking jeopardizes many non-white students and is a eugenic practice presently entertained in the educational corpus.


Link- Native Americans

The government’s compassionate approach to Native American policy is merely a power play intended to continue subjugation and dominance of Native landTaiaiake Alfred, 1999 (Director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria, “Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto”, p. 13)

In the past two generations, indigenous people around the world have broken the rusty cage of colonial oppression and exposed the injustices imposed on them. Brave and powerful leaders have challenged the European’s self-proclaimed right to rule and ruin our nations. Our people have achieved a victory of the mind: the attitudes that sustained our subjugation can no longer be defended. Confronted with the moral and intellectual defeat of its empire in Indian Country, the former oppressor has presented a more compassionate face. Newcomer governments claim to be forging historic new relationships with indigenous nations, relationships based on mutual respect, sharing, sovereignty, and our inherent rights. Economic development, modern treaties, self-government, compacts, revenue-sharing, and co-management have become the watchwords of the ‘post-colonial’ age. But beyond the words, is the promise holding?There have been some improvements. But our reserves are still poor, our governments are still divided and powerless, and our people still suffer. The post-colonial promises cannot ease this pain. The state has shown great skill in shedding the most onerous responsibilities of its rule while holding fast to the lands and authorities that are the foundations of its power.

Redefining without reforming, it is letting go of the costly and cumbersome minor features of the colonial relationship and further entrenching in law and practice the real bases of its control. It is ensuring continued access to indigenous lands and resources by insidiously promoting a form of neo-colonial self-government in our communities and forcing our integration into the legal mainstream. Real control remains in the hands of white society, because it is still that society’s rules that determine our life—not through obviously racist laws, but through endless references to the ‘market’. ‘fiscal reality’, ‘Aboriginal rights’, and ‘public will.’ And it is still the white society’s needs that are met. In this supposedly post-colonial world, what does it matter if the reserve is run by Indians, so long as they behave like bureaucrats and carry out the same old policies? Redefined and reworded, the ‘new’ relationship still abuses indigenous people, albeit more subtly. In this ‘new’ relationship, indigenous people are still bound to another power’s order. The rusty cage may be broken, but a new chain has been strung around the indigenous neck; it offers more room to move, but it still ties our people to white men pulling on the strong end.


Link- Abortion

The family planning initiative of the affirmative allows the state to regulate its notion of the perfect society while justifying other biopolitical measures under the guise of poverty alleviationSanford Schram, 2006 (Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College, “Welfare Discipline: Discourses, Governance, and Globalization”, p. 33-34)

For conservatives, family planning is a stark example of social engineering. Yet, as Linda Gordon notes, Planned parenthood, the dominant organization for providing such services for more than 50 years assiduously sought to ensure that family planning, from contraception to marriage counseling, was seen as consonant with the dominant discourse of family. At various turns this has proven most difficult, particularly when contraception was shown to be at least as important to the unmarried as the married, or when abortion was finally determined to be part of women’s right to privacy. More important, the integration of women’s reproductive rights into family discourse has at times meant the subordination of efforts to achieve gender equality in order to rationalize reproductive freedom as consistent with family values. Family planning is a politically significant misnomer. The term obscures the fact that the most political significant services offered in the name of family planning, such as pregnancy counseling for unmarried teenagers, are often provided when the planning of a family is exactly what does not happen, or is what the young women want to avoid. The better response, however, is not to deny the need for the services implied by family planning, but instead to legitimize them on their own terms. Rather than subordinate the laudable social goal of reproductive freedom, it is better to resist the tendency to tie reproductive freedom to the family ideal. Although there are bound to be moments in any struggle where the tie to dominant discourse may be strategically advantageous, the contradictions that come with achieving reproductive freedom in the name of family suggest that this is a tie that binds retrogressively. Planning is its own misnomer here. Families are often ill-equipped for planning and planning for families is something that many people do poorly, for a variety of reasons that have more to do with the inadequacies of their circumstances than with the people themselves. Poverty, lack of education, youth, and many other factors make some people more dependent on attempts to engage post hoc in retrospective family planning. Family planning often deals with problems of poverty well beyond the family. Yet, perpetuating the profamily orientation within the context of allegedly rational planning would reinforce the idea that family structure was the key to solving the problems of poverty. This same family discourse justifies coercive intervention in other areas of public assistance, including the growing popularity of the idea that welfare recipients should be encouraged or required to submit to contraceptive implants. The dilemma for family planning advocates is how to legitimate their services within the dominant discourse on families without emphasizing family over other, more critical, causes of poverty. While under assault by the right as antifamily, advocates of the Planned Parenthood variety have risked falling prey to profamily rhetoric as a way to eke out some legitimacy for reproductive rights. Family is the all too convenient card for rationalizing many social practices- some good, some reprehensible. It can irresponsibly justify almost all that is done in its name as well as limit consideration of practices that deserve to be affirmed in their own right even if they cannot be justified as serving the allegedly greater good of the family.

Including abortion in rights discourse is a means of normalization of the populationJohn Ransom, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dickinson College. “Foucault’s Discipline The Politics of Subjectivity” pg-161)

An attempt is made to expand the list of basic civil rights (freedom of association, religion, and so on) to include the latest balance of forces in a particular political battle. We tend to distort the


vocabulary of rights to fit the latest episode in the political struggle. Not just a right to

free speech, then, but a right to an abortion; a right to life; a right to clean environment, a job, neighborhood control; and so forth. For Foucault, this exclusive focus on “rights” as the only intelligible way to map opposition in modern society is one which is understandable but which he hopes to work past. Systems of power- disciplines- that have nothing to do with rights but instead function through the creation and normalization of individuals are responded to with a reformulated and ultimately unworkable discourse of rights. As Foucault puts it:What we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at the face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning rights. The “right” to life, to one’s body., to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs,… this “right”-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending- was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty

Link- Abortion

Disciplinary power is the heart of reproductive services—the state has total control over the existence of the populationDeborah Lupton, 1995 (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Cultural Risk Research at Charles Sturt University, Australia, “The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body”, p. 6-7)

The State exercises disciplinary power over the body politic, intent on the documenting and regulating of the health status of populations. The focus on this book, centering as it does on the institution of public health, is on the latter dimension of biopower. Turner has built upon Foucault’s concept of biopower to construct a conceptual framework which categorizes the ways in which the state must deal with bodies in space; the restraint of the populations in time; the regulation of bodies in space; the restraint of the interior body through disciplines; and the representation of the exterior body in social space. Turner goes on to

outline the institutional subsystems which are responsible for these categories: for reproduction, patriarchy; for regulation, panopticism; for restraint, asceticism; and for representation, commodification. The discourses and practices of public health and health promotion attempt to serve all these functions. For example, arguments of health are used to encourage people to have more or less children, to seek health care deemed appropriate by the state when undergoing pregnancy and labor, to desist from or engage in abortion, sterilization or contraception. As I will outline in Chapter, the concern with the reproduction of the labor force at the turn of the twentieth century was a major impetus for the public health movement’s focus upon infant mortality and fertility rates. Systems of regulation are constantly used to survey populations’ health status (the questionnaire is the most obvious example). The latter two ways outlined by Turner in which the state deals with bodies are also highly relevant to the activities of health promotion, in its concern with self-surveillance, discipline and control; for example the discourses valorizing dietary and body weight control in the name of good health first, and good looks, second. It is not only the shape and deportment of the human body that is constructed through the discourses and practices of public health, but also subjectivity, or the ‘inner self’. The concept of subjectivity is central to an understanding of the ways in which people negotiate the imperatives of public health and health promotion. Subjectivity may be defined as a sense of self or self-identity. It is socially constructed through interactions with others; thus we are not born with subjectivity, we acquire it from infancy. Language and discourse are central in the constitution of subjectivities, in a complex relationship with other sources such as sensual embodied experience and the unconscious. Subjectivity is fragmented, highly changeable and dependent on the context. There are numerous, often contradictory ways in which individuals fashion subjectivities. That is


not to argue, however, that individuals have a totally ‘free’ and unrestrained choice of subjectivities. Subjectivity is constructed through and by the articulation of power, for ‘it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals’ (Foucault, 1980b: 98). There are strong structural constraints placed on the range of subjectivities available; for example, individuals born with female genitals are direct from birth in ways both subtle and overt to behave, dress, think, feel and express themselves in ways consonant with current broad understandings and assumptions of femininity. While there may be a number of choices within the range of accepted versions of femininity, these will always be limited.

Link- Drug Rehab

Biopolitics is at the core of drug rehabilitation; the state attempts to normalize individuals by imposing “moral” behavior and drawing arbitrary lines of illegalityPhillipe Bourgois, 2k (Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,“Disciplining Addictions: The Bio-Politics of Methadone and Heroin in the United States”)

This paper draws on Michel Foucault to argue that methadone maintenance, the largest biomedically-organized and federally controlled drug treatment modality in the United States, affecting approximately 115,000 heroin addicts, represents the state’s attempt to inculcate moral discipline into the hearts, minds, and bodies of deviants who reject sobriety and economic productivity. Surprisingly, Foucault has relatively rarely been applied to studying illegal psychoactive drugs or to critiquing the social science and biomedical literatures on the subject (for some exceptions see Bourgois, Lettiere and Quesada 1997; Friedman and Alicea 1995; Moore and Wenger 1995; O’Malley and Mugford 1992; Smart 1984). Foucault’s concepts of 1) biopower, 2) the disciplinary power/knowledge nexus, and 3) the political utility of the specific intellectual offer a means for critiquing the moral imperatives that drive most drug policy under the rubric of quantitative evidence-based science and health promotion. To summarize briefly, Foucault’s term biopower refers to the ways historically entrenched

institutionalized forms of social control discipline bodies. The bio-politics of substance abuse include a wide range of laws, medical interventions, social institutions, ideologies, and even structures of feeling (Ong 1995; Caputo and Yount 1993; Foucault 1982: 208–226;


Williams 1977; Rabinow (ed.) 1984: 258–272). The definition of methadone maintenance as “drug treatment” is a particularly concrete example of biopower at work. The state and medical authorities have created distinctions between heroin and methadone that revolve primarily around moral categories concerned with controlling pleasure and productivity: legal versus illegal; medicine versus drug. The contrast between methadone and heroin illustrates how the medical and criminal justice systems discipline the uses of pleasure, declaring some psychoactive drugs to be legal medicine and others to be illegal poisons. Ultimately, it can be argued that the most important pharmacological difference between the two drugs that might explain their diametrically opposed legal and medical statuses is that one (heroin) is more pleasurable than the other (methadone).

Link- Community Care

Decentralization of care for people with disabilities results in an increased system of monitoring and normalization rooted in biopowerNigel Parton, 1994 (Professor in Child Care Studies at the University of Keele, “’Problematics of Government’, (Post) Modernity and Social Work”, p. 25-26)

What has emerged is a reinterpretation of government which, while heavily influenced by and riven through with neo-liberal principles, has much wider appeal and support. This emerging arena is often

referred to as 'welfare pluralism' (Johnson, 1987) and has a number of features. First, an emphasis on plural provision whereby a greater proportion of social care is provided by voluntary agencies, private organizations and community initiatives. State provision should be minimal and reserved for areas where no-one else is providing. Second, decentralization and a community orientation of the statutory services


themselves. The predominant mode of provision should be community-oriented, implying flatter organizational structures and a different interpretation of professionalism— recognizing that the consumer or user knows best and that informal sources of care should be reinforced and not supplanted wherever possible. Third, the introduction of contractual rather than hierarchical accountability, whereby relationships within and between welfare organizations should be specific and formal and services should be contracted out to voluntary and private agencies wherever possible. Similarly, at the consumer/professional interface the nature of the relationship and the focus of the work should be formally spelt out in a contract which can be subject to regular monitoring and review. Finally, in emphasizing the need for greater monitoring and inspection, the participation of consumers should be central to decision-making and future plans. In the process, the role and practices of managers become crucial. It is managers, as opposed to the professionals, who are seen as the powerful actors in this new network. Managers become the new mediators between the expert knowledge(s), individual and community needs, and the allocation of scarce resources—in effect harmonizing overall objectives and day-to-day practice. More specifically, notions of management frame and supplant the central activities of the professionals

themselves and the forms of knowledge they draw upon. No longer are social workers constructed as therapists or caseworkers, but as care or case managers coordinating and operationalizing care packages, where their knowledge of resources and networks is crucial and where, again, notions of monitoring and review are central. The apparent failure of the social sciences to produce the knowledge and techniques in wide

areas of social life whereby problems and needs could be reduced or ameliorated has resulted in an emphasis on improving multi-agency and multi-disciplinary work. As a consequence, an increasing emphasis in policy and practice has been put upon refining systems, producing procedures and guidance and overhauling intra- and inter-organizational structures . The central skills and activities are concerned with assessment, planning, care management, negotiating, coordinating, using information technology, and operating the law and procedures . Not surprisingly more and more time is spent on administration ; in meetings; on writing reports; and on liaison —rather than on direct work with clients or, as they are now constructed, users and consumers . I am not suggesting that these are new activities and skills for social work, simply that they now constitute the central activities of what it is to be a social worker. In effect social workers are constituted as managers of family life for certain sections of the population. The increased emphasis on management, evaluation, monitoring, and constraining professionals to write things down, is itself a form of government of them , and more crucially, of those with whom they are working. It forces them to think about what they are doing and hence makes them more accountable against certain norms . In the process, power flows to the centre or agent who determines the professionals' inscriptions, accumulates them, analyses them in their aggregate form, and can compare and evaluate the activities of others who are entries in the chart. An increasing emphasis is placed on the production of mission statements, objectives, outcomes, statistics, community care plans, and annual reviews. The management of information itself becomes the central rationale for policy and practice, from those in central government to professionals on the front line.


Link- Psychiatry

Truth-seeking methods like psychiatry are a means of normalization of individuals by prescribing ways of living that model the “ideal society”Nigel Parton, 1994 (Professor in Child Care Studies at the University of Keele, “’Problematics of Government’, (Post) Modernity and Social Work”, p. 14-15)

One of Foucault's central objectives was to provide a critique of the way modern societies regulate and discipline their populations by sanctioning the knowledge-claims and practices of the new human sciences— particularly medicine, psychiatry, psychology and criminology— which provided the opportunity for the emergence of the 'psy' complex (see also Ingleby, 1985, and Rose, 1985). He argued that these new disciplines legitimated new knowledge claims and forms of social regulation which subverted the classical order of political rule based on sovereignty and right. They instituted a regime of power exercised through disciplinary mechanisms and the stipulation of norms for human behaviour. The normal family, the healthy child, the perfect wife and the proper man both inform ideas about ourselves and are reproduced and legitimated through the practices of the 'psy' complex. According to Foucault, from the eighteenth century onwards, these new knowledges increasingly colonized the old powers to such an extent that the more traditional forms of law and judicial rights were transformed. No longer were the crucial decisions taken in the courtroom according to the criteria of judicial rights, but in the hospital, the clinic or the welfare office, according to the criteria of 'normalization'. Even when decisions were taken in the courtroom, these were increasingly colonized by the 'psy' complex according to these same criteria (Foucault,

1977a). Normalizing disciplinary mechanisms which attempt to subject the individual to training require a knowledge of the whole person in their social context, and depend on medico-social expertise and judgements for their operation. They depend on direct supervision and surveillance, and they emphasize the need to effect change in character, attitudes and behaviour in an individualized way. They are concerned with underlying causes and needs and attempt to contribute to the improvement of those being served as well as to social defence.


Link- Terrorism

The threat of terrorism used in the affirmative is a biopolitical tool the state uses to subjugate individualsMiguel De Larrinaga and Mark Doucet, 2007 (ph.D in Political Science, “Global

Governmentality, Biopower and the Human Security Discourse,” p. 10-11,)

The manner in which Western governments, for instance, have been able to label terrorism as a specifically global threat to world order can be understood through such an understanding of sovereign power. Seen from this vantage point, the “global war on terror” and its attendant manifestations in the form of coordinated military operations, counter-insurgency, police, and border measures and intelligence practices in the name of exceptionality lend themselves to a particular global cartography. This mapping

is one that summons, in the borderlands of global order, subjects that are amenable to the sway of a global sovereign power. It is the lives of these subjects rendered as bare, in which create the conditions of possibility for interventions mounted from the vantage point of global sovereign rule. In rendering bare the lives subject to its interventions, global sovereign power operates on the same terrain with the biopower that circulates in the technologies and practices of global governmentalities. In other words, both sovereign power and the complex assemblage of global governmentalities operate in the realm of the biopolitical – i.e. they require lives that are rendered bare. As will be examined later in this paper it is through the human security discourse that we can formulate an understanding of the intimate connections and distinctions between technologies of sovereign power and biopower as they are deployed globally. Within the above context, Empire then becomes for us a way of apprehending forms of power and their complex interrelationships that have this element of globality. 29 In this sense, Empire is “a ‘network power’” that “includes as its primary elements or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers.”


Link- Economy

The aff’s attempt to save the economy is a biopolitical extension of the state’s attempts to inculcate neoliberal values in individuals Trent Hamann, 2009 (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, Foucault Studies, No. 6, “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics”)

In his 1978-1979 course lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics Michel Foucault offered what is today recognizable as a remarkably prescient analysis of neoliberalism. In the thirty years since he gave these lectures their pertinence and value for a critical understanding of contemporary forms of political governance in the United States have grown. As I illustrate below, everyday experiences reflect a neoliberal ethos operative within almost every aspect of our individual and social lives with consequences that are dire for many and dangerous for most if not all of

us. Indeed the central aim of neoliberal governmentality is the strategic social conditions conducive to the constitution of Homo economicus, a specific form of subjectivity with historical roots in traditional liberalism. However, whereas libe-ralism posits ”economic man” as a ”man of

exchange”, neoliberalism strives to ensure that individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient

quantities of ”human capital” and thereby become ”entrepreneurs of themselves”. Neoliberal Homo economicus is a free and autonomous ”atom” of self-interest who is fully responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculation to the express exclusion of all other values and interests. Those who fail to thrive under such social con-ditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves. It is here that we can rec-ognize the vital importance of the links between Foucault’s analyses of governmen-tality begun in the late 1970’s and his interest in technologies of the self and ethical self-fashioning, which he pursued until the time of his death in 1984. His analyses of ”government” or ”the conduct of conduct” bring together the government of others (subjectification) and the government of one’s self (subjectivation); on the one hand, the biopolitical governance of populations and, on the other, the work that individuals perform upon themselves in order to become certain kinds of subjects. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our ”globalized” world, t he effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the specifically neoliberal ”conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent commen-surate forms of critique, ”counter-

conduct” and ethical subjectivation that constitute resistance to its dangers.


Link- Ethics/Obligation

The ethics of the affirmative is a normalizing form of disciplinary power Stephen Hopgood, 2k, (Lecturer of Asian Studies at the University of London, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, “Reading the Small Print in Global Civil Society: The Inexorable Hegemony of the Liberal Self”, 29:1)

In preceding sections, I have argued that liberal notions of interest rely crucially on the inculcation of supportive virtues. However, the modern delegitimation of public pronouncements about private conceptions of the good has relegated these virtues to ‘the small print’. They remain just as much the price of admission, and humanitarian activists remain as determined as earlier missionaries to effect widespread social change though transformations of personal identities. It is merely that ‘virtues’ and ‘right conduct’ , so at odds with the idea of personal choice, now receive minimal publicity, something in

which the international media, so deeply implicated in the expansion of global civil society, cannot help but be complicit. Where once there was talk of the ‘good’, now there is talk of the ‘right’.I have illustrated that this talk of the ‘right’ merely disguises talk of the ‘good’; the latter is the iron fist in the velvet glove. Human rights do not protect identities, they open them up for the process of complete transformation. Acknowledging this fact is vital, at the very least, to creating a space for those critical of liberalism, and those engaged in actual resistance to it, to undermine the natural, truth-like status of human rights claims. If public sphere arguments for creating ‘equality’ in the private sphere—

totalising projects—are to be feared, especially after two centuries of imperialism and totalitarianism, then human rights are just as much part of such a public totalising project, and not, as they appear to be, part of the antidote . It should be no surprise to us now

that humanitarian activists make, and believe deeply in, judgements about what constitutes a good life. It could not be otherwise because human rights are empty; often what activists lack is simply self-awareness. The modern virtues they promote revolve around a conception of appropriate self-hood as an essential freedom from family, culture, tradition, even nation

(these are human not civil rights), of an autonomous and morally self-sufficient person able to pursue self-authored interests.72 This ‘natural’ identity is in fact, as we have seen,


a product of inculcated virtues. It entails, for example, that class inequality, which

confronted Native Americans as it does all colonised (and decolonised) peoples, is seen as a private matter. One thus needs to acquire the proper virtues to succeed in today’s world where globalisation makes market exchange the model for social affairs.

Link- Governmentality

The aff’s program that that gives the state authority over life is the dangerous practice of governmentality—power is politicized and and disseminated among the governmentMike Raco and Rob Imrie, 2k (Professor of Geography at the Universty of Reading, Professor of Geography at Royal Halloway, “Univeristy of London – Environment and Planning”, “Governmentality and Rights and Responsibilities in Urban Policy; v. 32 p. 2187 – 2204)

For Foucault, such ( alleged) transformations in governance direct one's attention to what Hunt and Wickham (1994, page 26) refer to as ``the emergence of new and distinctive mentalities of government or governmental rationality', which involve a calculating pre-occupation with activities directed at shaping, channelling, and guiding the conduct of others.' ' This, then, points towards Foucault's concept of governmentality as a means of analysing, and seeking to make sense of, the alleged transformations to a `rights and responsibilities' framework in government policy. As Foucault (1979, page 20) notes, the object of government is the population, or the development of instruments and techniques which, as Miller and

Rose (1990, page 2) suggest ``module its wealth, health, longevity, its capacity to wage war and to engage in labour.'' The population becomes a domain of regulation and

action or a resource to be fostered, used, and optimised, primarily through the


deployment of disciplinary measures or techniques in the administration of individual people's lives (Dean, 1999, page 20). As Foucault (1979) suggests, political power is developed and implemented through a multitude of agencies and mechanisms not necessarily reducible

to the state. Consequently, ``the analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that

sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of domination are given at the outset'' (page 92).

Link- Apoc Rhetoric

The affirmative’s apocalyptic rhetoric is the tool the state uses to justify any action—resulting in mass annihilationPeter Coviello, 2k, Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College, Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, “Apocalypse From Now On”)

Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed – it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida’s suitably menacing phrase) “remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,” then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an “other” people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished “general population.” This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag’s incisive observation, from 1989, that, “Apocalypse is now


a long running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On.’” The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful . That is, through the perpetual threat of destruction – through the constant

reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse – the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population . No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, “life-administering.” Power , he contends, “ exerts a positive influence on life … [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations .” In his brief comments on

what he calls “the atomic situation,” however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as “managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,” agencies of modern power presume to act “on the behalf of the existence of everyone.” Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating . “If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power ,” Foucault writes, “this is

not because of a recent return to 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.” For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but wit h a

more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without .

Impact- Extinction

Biopolitics’ total control of the population allows for extinctionJames Bernauer, 1990 (Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, “Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics of Thought,” p. 141-142)


This capacity of power to conceal itself cannot cloak the tragedy of the implications contained in Foucault's examination of its functioning. While liberals have fought to extend rights and Marxists have denounced the injustices of capitalism, a political technology, acting in the interests of a better administration of life, has produced a politics that places man's "existence as a living being in question." The very period that proclaimed pride in having overthrown the tyranny of monarchy, that engaged in an endless clamor for reform, that is confident in the virtues of its humanistic faith -- this period's politics created a landscape dominated by history's bloodiest wars. What comparison is possible between a sovereign's authority to take a life and a power that, in the interest of protecting a society's quality of life, can plan, as well as develop the means for its implementation, a policy of mutually assured destruction? Such a policy is neither an aberration of the fundamental principles of modern politics nor an abandonment of our age's humanism in favor of a more primitive right to kill; it is but the other side of a power that is "situated and exercised at the level of life, the species the race, and the large-scale

phenomena of population. The bio-political project of administering and optimizing life closes its circle with the production of the Bomb. "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 a power to guarantee and individuals continued existence. " The solace that might have been expected from being able to gaze at scaffolds empty of the victims of a tyrant's vengeance has been stolen form us by the noose that has tightened around each of our own necks.


Impact- Extinction

Power's drive to control and manage the world creates conditions where individuals are thought of as expendable, which leads to extinctionBoaventura Santos, 2003 (Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and Director of the Center of Documentation on the Revolution of 1974, at the same University., "Collective Suicide?" March 28, 2003 http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php)

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction , committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up b y a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power . This is how it was in colonialism, with

the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in

progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists.This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent

to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and,

therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to he incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian

fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations ", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years.

http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php%5D


Impact- Extinction

Biopower causes extinction, as it re-enforces a kill to save mentality and allows for people to “manage” populations, this in turn will us all.George Kouros, 1997 (Yale Law Graduate, And Holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Emory. “Become What You Are”)

Although the consequences are grave, the administrative practices of biopower go largely unchallenged precisely because they promise the opportunity of vastly improving the quality of life. But a system primarily concerned with technological exigencies of ensuring survival paradoxically is no longer able to assign meaning to the value of life. Life is something to be secured at all costs, and by any means, as the American military motto of "you have to kill to save" during the Vietnam War demonstrates. For Foucault, this technological imperative to secure survival is what brings us closest to the possibility of our own extinction: [T]his formidable power of death ... now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive

regulations. Wars ... are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. 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 existence . . . If genocide is indeed the dream of modern 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. (HS 137) In the interest of optimizing life we find ourselves possessing the capabilities to wipe out all of humanity as we know it. Heidegger, much like Foucault, understands "the atomic situation" as the product of a technological process that seeks to create "a happier human life."8 But he also emphasizes that "precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved" that we face the greatest danger (DT 52). Responding to a chemist's proclamation that "The hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will," Heidegger writes: "We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little" (DT 52). In other words, in the absence of a nuclear holocaust we assume that we have managed to keep technology in hand. Without the sound of an explosion to alert us, we become complacent to the deadliness of our own technological achievements. For example, the chemist's ability to manipulate DNA and genetically screen out undesirable traits, while promising the possibility of a "happier human being," maintains the conditions for a eugenic nightmare.-JC


Impact- Freedom

Disciplinary powers turn humans into machines who act as the tells them too, this eliminates all freedom and justifies mass atrocities.Michael Clifford, 2001 (Professor of Philosophy at the Mississippi State University, "Political Genealogy After Foucault." Routledge Publications, p.48)

The chief function of disciplinary power," says Foucault, "is to 'train.'" Even though the target of disciplinary power is the individual body, with a focus on the smallest gestures, its goal is to train the ndividual to become a productive, contributing unit of a larger force. Discipline is not "simply an art of distributing bodies ... but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine" (DP, 164).

Disciplinary practices are designed to produce a body that can function like a cog in the wheel of a vast machine. We can see this most evidently in the military, where the soldier is but one

element in an armed force, and in industry, where the individual worker is part of a larger workforce. Discipline acts to train the soldier and the worker so that they can work in concerted effort with other individuals and are not just a haphazard, random arrangement of disparate units. The composition of productive forces is also the object of discipline in such institutions as education and medicine, though it is not perhaps as apparent. Disciplinary practices emerged in response to certain economic, social, and demographic changes in society. Increases in population, for example,

influenced the entrenchment of disciplinary techniques in the school system. By the nineteenth century, the school had become "a machine for learning, in which each pupil, each level and each moment, if correctly combined, were permanently utilized in the general process of teaching" (DP, 165). Likewise, the plagues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the general

fear of contagious disease that attended the growing density of urban population, gave rise to a "political dream" of a society in which the movements of all citizens would be monitored, regulated, and controlled. This dream had its material realization, at least partially, in the disciplinary reorganization of hospitals, which became "a mechanism that pins down and partitions; it must provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass..." (DP, 144). It does this, of course, by identifying and isolating individuals, their individual diseases and methods of treatment. Behind this is a political tactic, ostensibly directed toward the health and welfare of society as a whole, but in practice implemented according to a disciplinary regimentation of a broad demographic conglomerate. The dream of a perfectly supervised society in which every individual would be accounted for, in which all activities would be regulated down to the smallest detail, gave rise to a number of disciplinary projects , says Foucault. These ranged from the great confinements in Europe to Jeremy Bentham's ideal model of perpetual surveillance: the panopticon. The panopticon was to be an annular building divided into separate cells into which individuals would be placed. A central observation tower would be able to monitor the activities of the individual at all times. While for the most part only the prison was ultimately modeled on Bentham's design, the principle of constant surveillance would become intrinsic to most modern institutions


Impact- Root Cause of War

Bio-power is the root cause of war and violence between statesMichael Dillon and Julian Reid 2001 (Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Doctoral Student in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster , “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security, and War”, 2001Millennium - Journal of International Studies, pp.39-40)

For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal. 1 [U]ltimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy…In this central and

centralised humanity…we must hear the distant roar of battle.2 Intimately allied with the globalisation of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new and diverse ensemble of power known as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a varied and complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death. Global liberal governance is substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and dynamics of populations so that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life chances. In this great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal forms o f power, of what Michel Foucault called the ‘great economy o f power’ whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once ‘the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged’.3 Foucault called this kind of power—the kind of power/knowledge that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign kind of po wer that threatens death— biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as a form of global biopolitics.4 We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the peculiar ways in which biopower deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent face and, ‘gives to the power to inflict legal punishment a context in which it appears to be free of all excess and violence’.5 Second, we draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the ways in which global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio -economic and cultural net works of bio political relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzean adage concerning the relation between politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war b y other means. We are also concerned, however, to note how the conceptualisation and practice of war itself changes via the very process of its assimilation into, and dialogical relation with, the heart of biopolitical order; and we concentrate on that point in this essay. There is, in addition, a further way in which we seek to extend Foucault’s project.


Impact- Racism

Racism is a core mechanism of biopower—these artificially imposed divisions create perpetual wars and genocideEduardo Mendieta, 2002 (Associate Profess of Philosophy at SUNY at Stony Brook, “To Make Live and Let Die: Foucault on Racism)

This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the

inscription within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I

am quoting: “the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and

in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put

to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrière] function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it , if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.” (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials

colonizers, which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death and torture . As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature.


Impact- VTL

Biopower renders life calculable, and subjects individuals to the state’s whims—kills value to lifeJonathan Inda, 2002 (Department of Chicano Studies at University of California “Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman’s Body”, p. 100-101)

“For a long time ,” Foucault notes, “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (History: 135). For instance, If an external enemy sought to overthrow him, the sovereign could justly wage war, requiring his subjects to fight in defense of the state. So, without directly proffering their death, the sovereign was sanctioned to risk their life. In this

case, he exercised “an indirect power over them of life and death ” (135). However, if someone hazarded to rebel against him and violate his laws, the sovereign could exert a direct power over the transgressor’s life, such that, as penalty, the latter could be put to death. The right to life and death, then, was somewhat dissymmetrical, falling on the side of death: “The sovereign exercised his right to life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring.. The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live” (136). As such,

this type of power , Foucault observes, was wielded mainly as a mechanism of deduction, making it “essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (136). That is, power was fundamentally a right of appropriation—the appropriation of a portion of the wealth, labor, services, and blood of the sovereign’s subjects---one that culminated in the right to seize hold of life in order to subdue it. The power of appropriation or of deduction, Foucault suggests, is no longer the principal form of power in the West. Since the classical age, the mechanisms of power here have undergone a radical transformation. Power now works “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it”; it is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (History: 136). Thus, in contrast to a power organized around the sovereign, modern “power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery if would be able to exercise over them would be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more that the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body” (142-143). In short, political power has assigned itself the duty of managing life . It is now over life that power establishes its hold and on which it seeks to have a positive influence. This power over life, which Foucault calls biopower, is most apparent in the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem in the eighteenth century. This “population” is not simply a collection of individual citizens. We are not dealing , as Foucault notes, with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a composite body “with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation” (History: 25). The “population,” in other words, has its own form of order, its own energy, traits, and dispositions. The management of this “population,” principally of its health, Foucault suggests, has become the primary commitement as well as the main source of legitimacy of modern forms of government: it’s the body of society which becomes the new principle [of political organizations] in the nineteenth century. It is this social body which needs to be protected, in a quasi-medical sense. In place of the rituals that served to


restore the corporeal integrity of the monarch, remedies and therapeutic devices are employed such as the segregation of the sick, the monitoring of contagions, the exclusion of delinquents. (“Body/Power”: 55) The concern of government, then, is to produce a healthy and productive citizenry. Its commitment is to the protection and enhancement of the health of particular bodies in order to foster the health of the composite body of the population. This means, according to Foucault, that “ biological existence” has now come to be “reflected in political existence ” (history: 142). As such, biopower ultimately designates “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations” (143), its main overall concern being the life of the population, that is, of the species body—the body that functions as the foothold of biological processes pertaining to birth, death, health, and longevity. Simply put, the species body and the individual as a simple living being have become what are at stake in a state’s political tactics, marking the politicization of life, turning politics into biopolitics and the state into a biopolitical state.

Impact- Holocaust

Biopower allows for slaughter of whole populations which authorizes a holocaust. Jonathan Inda, 2002 (Department of Chicano Studies at University of California “Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman’s Body”, 98-99)

The political effects of this sort of rhetoric have not been insignificant, for it has given rise to and legitimated numerous efforts to exclude the immigrant from the body politic (e.g., fortification of the border, denial of health care). The logic here is rather simple: since the migrant population threatens the common good, its exclusion or elimination is seen as necessary in order to guard the well-being of the nation. The repudiation of the immigrant is thus justified in the name of protecting the welfare of the social body. One way to interpret these practices of exclusion is in terms of what Michel Foucault called biopower. This term describes a technology of power

whose main concern is “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase e

of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.” (“Governmentality”: 100). The focus of biopower, in other words, is the control of the species body and its reproduction. It is a regulatory power whose highest function is to

thoroughly invest in life in order to produce a healthy and vigorous population. There is an underside to biopower, however, since it is often the case that “entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity….. 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” (history:137). Simply put, then, biopower does not just foster life; it also routinely does away with it in order to preserve it . This means that the counterpart of the power to secure an individuals continued existence is the power to expose an entire population to death (or at least to multiplying its risk of death). It is thus possible under regimes of biopower to simultaneously protect life and to authorize a holocaust. It is in this biopolitical space that I would like to situate the contemporary repudiation of the migrant in the United States . Thus the purpose of this chhpter is to explore how the state, in order to fortify the health of the population, routinely aims to eliminate those influences that are deemed harmful to the biological


growth of the nation, It will show how the exclusion of the immigrant- as well as his/her exposure to the risk

of death—is codified as an essential and noble pursuit necessary to ensure the survival of the social body.. This exclusion will be explored primarily through the states repeated attempts to deny undocumented immigrants access to prenatal care. In other words, the paper will concentrate mainly on the body of the undocumented immigrant woman as an important terrain of strggle, particularly as it pertains to the regulation of her capacity to reproduce.

Impact- Rights

Creation of a political subject justifies the destruction of freedom and elimination of individual rights.Clifford 2001 (Michael Clifford is a professor of philosophy at the Mississippi State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University. "Political Genealogy After Foucault." Routledge Publications, 2001. pg. 34 DC)

What emerges from the discursive practice of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a political subject animated by the spirit of threat. This notion of the political subject lies at the core of liberal democratic theory. Liberal theory is founded, explicitly or implicitly, on a "contractual" model of political subjectivity whose roars can be found, as we have seen, in the beginning years of the Enlightenment. This contractual model is characterized by an essential division between the individual and the State, between discrete subjects and sovereign authority. The political subject in this view is independent and abstract, and is the locus of rights, liberty, and justice. This view pervades the history of liberalism, from John Milton and the Levellers of John Lilburne, through the early contract theorists, the founding fathers, the French philosophes, nineteenth-century social reformers such as John Stuart Mill and T. H. Green, to the present-day political theories of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Even when political theory eschews, or at least places less emphasis on, social contract, as in forms of Kantianism and utilitarianism, there is still the emphasis on respecting the autonomy and rationality of the political subject, a binary division between sovereignty and subjects, and the concern with identifying the limits and


legitimation of power and political obligation. These ideas, which Foucault would recognize as the objects of a discursive practice-autonomy, rights, sovereignty, legitimation, and obligation-presuppose threat: they are invoked in the name of an already-constituted political subject whose rights may be violated, whose freedom may be removed, whose property may be stolen or seized unjustly by a despotic sovereign, whose country may be overthrown by foreign oppressors. Even peace, the ultimate goal of the body politic, is understood as an absence of threat. Take away threat and the modern liberal political subject ceases to make sense.

Alt Solvency

The alternative is key—we must criticize the power structure of the affirmative in order to rupture the “truth” prescribed by the state in all lifeCarol Johnson, 2004 (PhD in Philosophy at Texas Women’s University, “Foucault, Rogerian Argument, and Feminist Standpoint Theory: Intersecting Discourses Concerning Welfare Reform During the 1990s”, p. 24-25)

Responding to critiques of Habermas and others, Thomas Flynn, in “Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault” and “Symposiums Papers: Foucault and the Politics of Postmodernity,” defends Foucault’s method, pointing out that Foucault’s intent was not to provide a “prescription” to resist the pervasive, subjugating apparatuses of government and the system that participates in the social construction of the individual, but rather to offer ways to describe and critique that system (“Truth” 188). According to Flynn, Foucault’s concern was always focused on


the power relationships between those who exercise power and those who submit to it (188). Flynn offers that Habermas rejects Foucault’s claims concerning power relationships because Foucault’s own theory is based on the very ground that he is arguing against, and therefore, “collapses ” on itself (191). Foucault’s relativism is problematic for Habermas, but Flynn argues that Foucault’s purpose was not to provide “principles” to be followed and maintained, but a way of seeing and being in the world that was in constant critique of the historical precepts that constructed the current domains of power and knowledge which in turn construct individuals and the social systems in which they live. Many of the critiques of Foucault’s theory point to his rejection of universalizing and foundational themes underlying much of modernity as well as its lack of clarity as a method of resistance. However, like Sawiki and Flynn, I think Foucault’s methods ask us to rupture those paradigms in an effort to examine discursive relationships as they are presently being executed in everyday life . As far as his failure to provide a method of resistance, I believe with others that this was a deliberate omission—to do so was not his purpose; his purpose was to question and expose relationships of power and how they functioned through discourse, not to remedy them. That is why I combine Foucault’s exploration of truth with the strength of feminist standpoint theory in Chapter V when I seek to identify a ground of resistance in the language of welfare receivers. Although Foucault cautions one to question the use of confession as a form of resistance, he also in his work concerning parrhesia identifies confession as a form of truth telling and possibly a method of self-dialectical enlightenment. Flynn offers Foucault’s own work as a kind of parrhesia, a truth-seeking-telling method (“Truth”). Throughout this study, I use Foucault’s methods as a lens, a sensitivity, and a reminder that today’s social welfare discourse lives not only in partnership with the myriad other discourses and disciplines intersecting and sharing the current noetic field, but also that it lives in the shadow of its own history.

Alt Solvency

The alternative is key—only be engaging in constant questions of criticism can we escape from the grasp of disciplinary power


Trent Hamann, 2009 (Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, Foucault Studies no 6, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics)

Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically new form of governmentality or just a set of variations on classical liberalism, we can certainly recognize that there are a number of characteristics in contemporary practices that are new in the history of governmentality, a number of which I’ve al-ready discussed. Another one of these outstanding features is the extent to which the imposition of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any autonomy that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and moral dis-courses, institutions, and practices. Foucault notes, for example, that in the sixteenth century jurists were able to posit the law in a critical relation to the reason of state in order to put a check on the sovereign power of the king. By contrast, neoliberalism, at least in its most utopian formulations, is the dream of a perfectly limitless (as op-posed perhaps to totalizing) and all-encompassing (as opposed to exclusionary and normalizing) form of governance that would effectively rule out all challenge or op-position. This seems to be the kind of thing that Margaret Thatcher was dreaming about when she claimed that there is “no alternative”. Such formulations of what might be called “hyper-capitalism” seem to lend themselves to certain traditional forms of criticism. However, critical analyses that produce a totalizing conception of power and domination risk the same danger, noted above, of overlooking the some-times subtle and complex formations of power and knowledge that can be revealed through genealogical analyses of local practices. Important for any genealogical analysis is the recognition

that, while there is no ”outside” in relation to power, re-sistance and power are coterminous, fluid, and, except in instances of domination, reversible. There is an echo of this formulation in Foucault’s understanding of go-vernmentality as ”the conduct of conduct”. Governmentality is not a matter of a dominant force having direct control over the

conduct of individuals; rather, it is a matter of trying to determine the conditions within or out of which individuals are able to freely conduct themselves. And we can see how this is especially true in the case of neoliberalism insofar as it is society itself and not the individual that is the direct object of power. Foucault provides examples of this in “The Subject and Pow-er”, in which he

discussed a number of struggles of resistance that have developed over the past few years such as “opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over

the mentally ill, of medicine over the popu-lation, of administration over the ways people live”.

Despite their diversity, these struggles were significant for Foucault because they share a set of common points that allow us to recognize them as forms of resistance to governmentality, that is, ”critique”. Through the examples he uses Foucault notes the local and immediate nature of resistance. These oppositional struggles focus on the effects of power expe-rienced by those individuals who are immediately subject to them.

Despite the fact that these are local, anarchistic forms of resistance , Foucault points out that they are not necessarily limited to one place but intersect with struggles going on elsewhere. Of greatest importance is the fact that these struggles are critical responses to contemporary forms of governmentality , specifically the administrative techniques of subjectification used to shape individuals in terms of their free conduct. These struggles question the status of the individual in relation to community life, in terms of the

forms of knowledge and instruments of judgment used to determine the ”truth” of individuals, and in relation to the obfuscation of the real differences that make individuals irreducibly individual beings. Tying all of these

modes of resistance together is the question “Who are we?” While some might be concerned about exactly who this we is suggested by Foucault, both here and in his discussions of Kant and enlightenment, I think the question is in some ways its own answer. In other words, it

is meant to remain an ongoing critical question that can never be definitively answered, or, as John Rajchman has sug-gested, it is a question that can only be answered by those who ask it and through the process of asking it. In his introduction to The Politics of Truth he writes: The ‘we’ always comes after, emerging only through the on-going light its activi-ties shed on the habits and practices through which people come to govern themselves—and so see themselves and one another. Indeed in this lies precisely the originality of the critical attitude, its singular sort of universality, its distinc-tive relation to ‘today’—to ‘now’, ‘the

present’, l’actuel. This ”critical attitude” that Foucault repeatedly refers to in all of his discussions of Kant

from the 1970’s and 1980’s is inseparable from both his analysis of governmen-tality and his discussions of ethics and the history of the experience of the relation-ship between the subject

and truth. What fascinated Foucault about the ”care of the sel f ” he discovered in Greek and

Roman ethics was the ”spiritual” relationship that existed between the subject and truth. In order to gain access to the truth, that is, in order to acquire the ”right” to the truth, individuals had to take care of themselves by engaging in certain self-transformative

practices or ascetic exercises. Here we find critical and resistant forms of subjectivation where, rather than objectifying them-selves within a given discourse of power/knowledge, individuals engaged in prac-tices of freedom that allowed them to engage in ethical parrhesia or speak truth to power. In modernity , however, following what Foucault identified as ”the Cartesian moment” the principle ”take care of yourself” has been replaced by the imperative to “know yourself” [THS, 1 - 24]. In contemporary life that which gives an individual access to the truth is knowledge and knowledge alone, including knowledge of one’s

self. In this context knowledge of the self is not something produced through the work individuals perform on

themselves, rather it is something given through dis-ciplines such as biology, medicine, and the

social sciences. These modern forms of knowledge, of course, become crucial to the emerging biopolitical forms of govern-mentality. Whereas individuals were once urged to take care of themselves by using self-reflexive ethical techniques to give form to their freedom, modern biopolitics ensures that individuals are already taken care of in terms of biological and econom-ic forms of knowledge and practices. As Edward F. McGushin puts it in his book Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life, Power functions by investing, defining, and caring for the body understood as a bioeconomic


entity. The operation of biopower is to define the freedom and truth of the individual in economic and biological terms. Reason is given the task of comprehending the body in these terms and setting the conditions within which it can be free. ...The formation of the disciplines marks the moment where askesis itself was absorbed within biopolitics.

Alt Solvency

The alt alone is key—we must question the state as specific intellectuals while neither endorsing nor completely rejecting notions of powerTrent Hamann, 2009 (St. John’s University, Foucault Studes no 6, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics, http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2471/2469)

Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that

would subsume particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern ”atti-tude” that can be traced historically as the constant companion of pastoral power and governmentality. As Judith Butler points out in her article “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”,39 critique is an attitude, distinct from judgment, pre-cisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules and ra-tionalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular form of gover-nance. From its earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has al-ways relied upon certain relations to truth: truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz-ing

knowledge of individuals, and truth as a reflective technique comprising general rules, particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination, confessions, inter-views, etc. And

while critique has at times played a role within the art of government itself, as we’ve seen in the case of

both liberalism and neoliberalism, it has also made possible what Foucault calls “the art of not being

governed, or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost” (WC, 45).

Critique is neither a form of ab-stract theoretical judgment nor a matter of outright rejection or condemnation of specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical and agonistic

engagement, re-engagement, or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that have led one to become a certain kind of subject. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault

suggests that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of be-longing and presents itself as a task. Its task amounts to a “historical investigation into the events that have

led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying” (WE, 125). But how can we distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls to ”do your own thing” or ”be all you can be” that stream forth in every direction from political campaigns to commercial advertising? How is it, to return to the last of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault does not simply lend technical sup-port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can distinguish criti-cal acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called ”the Cali-fornian cult of the self” (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed to assist in discovering one’s ”true” or ”authentic” self, or the merely ”cosmetic” forms of rebellion served up for daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand we might also be careful not to dismiss forms of self-fashioning as ”merely” aesthetic. As Timothy O’Leary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of Ethics, Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the modern conception of art as a singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the social, political, and ethical realms, at least as it pertained to his question of why it is that a lamp or a house can be a work of art, but not a life. O’Leary writes: Foucault is less interested in the critical power of art, than in the ‘artistic’ or ‘plas-tic’ power of critique. For Foucault, not only do no special advantages accrue from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but this autonomy unnecessarily restricts our possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault aware of the specif-ic nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously hostile to it. What O’Leary rightly identifies here is Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics of exis-tence that specifically stands in a critical but immanent relation to the ways in which our individuality is given to us in advance through

http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2471/2469


ordered practices and forms of knowledge that determine the truth about us. The issue is not a matter of how we might distinguish “authentic” forms of resistance (whatever that might

mean) from “merely” aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of investigating whether or not the practices we engage in either reinforce or resist the manner in which our freedom—

how we think, act, and speak—has been governed in ways that are limiting and into-lerable. In

short, critical resistance offers possibilities for an experience of de-subjectification . Specifically in relation to neoliberal forms of governmentality, this would involve resisting, avoiding, countering or opposing not only the ways in which we’ve been encouraged to be little more than self-interested subjects of ra-tional choice (to the exclusion of other ways of being and often at the expense of those “irresponsible” others who have “chosen” not to amass adequate amounts of human capital), but also the ways in which our social environments, institutions, communities, work places, and forms of political engagement have been reshaped in order to foster the production of Homo economicus. Endless examples of this kind of work can be found in many locations, from the international anti-globalization movement to local community organizing

AT: Framework

1. Our interpretation for the round is that the negative gets one kritik—solves all of their abuse claims

2. Kritiks key to real world education and engagement—critical theory literature is an important method by which people can learn to question the assumptions behind policies

3. The judge should evaluate our discussion of power before the round—it is a crucial prerequisite to passing policies

Keith Krause, 1996 (Graduate Institute of International Studies at University of Geneva. “Critical Theory and Security Studies” YCISS Occasional Paper Number 33 February 1996 http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP33-Krause.pdf)

These claims have deep philosophic roots, and different scholars would "sign on" to them claims in different degrees, but they pose a sharp contrast to neorealist or neoliberal scholarship in International Relations.14 One convenient way to highlight this contrast is Roxanne Doty's distinction between "how" and "why" questions. The latter are concerned "with explaining why particular decisions resulting in specific courses of action were made," the former with "how the subjects, objects, and interpretive dispositions were socially constructed such that certain practices were made possible."15 Most importantly, "how" questions are logically prior to "why" questions: before particular courses of action can be selected, the range of possible or plausible options has to be constructed, and scholars have to understand the way in which certain options (such as "maintaining reputation," or "gaining prestige") acquire meaning or value. In security studies (as I will discuss below), this involves constructing the nature (and source) of threats, the "object" being secured,


and the possibilities for reinforcing, ameliorating or even overcoming "security dilemmas." Traditional approaches take all of these issues as givens.

AT: Framework

Performative resistance key to solivng—failure to reconceptualize politics furthers the illusion of democratic control and re-entrenches disciplinary powerJessica J. Kulynych, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity, 30:2, p. 315)

The notion of performativity as both identity- or world-creating and as demonstration, is crucial for understanding contemporary political action. Performative resistance does not eliminate power and it is not effected in the name of some subjugated agency, but rather its purpose is disruption and re-creation. It is a reoccurring disruption that ensures an endless reconstitution of power. Disciplinary technologies effect the internalization of norms--a removal from view of the mechanisms that create us as subjects, making our identities self-evident. Resistance brings those norms back into an arena of contestation. By its very existence

resistance ensures resistibility, which is the very thing internalized norms are designed to suppress. In other words, resistance is not undertaken as a protest against the subjugation of a reified

ideal subject, but rather resistance, as the action of thoroughly constructed subjects, reveals the contingency of both subjectivity and subjection. While Chaloupka suggests that the role of the

protestor is "tellingly different" from that of the citizen, I disagree. Often only the act of resistance provides any meaningful sense of "citizenship" in this privatized contemporary world.


As Dana Villa points out, resistance "can be seen as a successor concept to Arendt's notion of political action: where the space for action is usurped, where action in the strict sense is no longer possible, resistance becomes the primary vehicle of spontaneity and agonistic subjectivity."(70)

Performative resistance recognizes disciplinary power, enables action in the face of that power, enables innovation in deliberation, and thus allows us to see the world of

political action differently. Consequently, it is possible, and more meaningful, to conceptualize contemporary participation as a performative rather than a representative action. The failure to reconceptualize political participation as resistance

furthers an illusion of democratic control that obscures the techniques of disciplinary power and their role in global strategies of domination, fundamentally missing the real, although much more humble opportunities for citizens to "take part" in their own "governance." Accepting the idea of participation as resistance has two broad implications that fundamentally transform the participation debate . First, it widens the parameters of participation to include a host of new actors , activities, and locations for political action. A performative concept redirects our attention away from the normal apparatus of government and economy, and therefore allows us to see a much broader range of political actions. Second, it requires that we look anew at traditional participatory activities and evaluate their performative potential.

AT: Framework

Only specific problematization within round can create discursive forms of resistance against the state Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, 2k (“Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency,” Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, 25:1, Ebsco Host)

As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power:


economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is

knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.[ 34 ] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of

human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for

science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological

assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact

both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search f or the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[35]

Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological

assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.[36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well, since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian "biopower" ways.

http://web4.epnet.com.ezproxy.baylor.edu/citation.asp?tb=1&_ug=sid+D3BA589F-E956-47FC-ABE3-DDB899E01F07@sessionmgr4+dbs+aph%2Cf5h+cp+1+3D60&_us=frn+1+hd+False+hs+False+or+Date+fh+False+ss+SO+sm+ES+sl+-1+dstb+ES+mh+1+ri+KAAACBYA00079373+88FF&_uso=hd+False+tg%5B2+-+tg%5B1+-AU+tg%5B0+-+st%5B2+-+st%5B1+-dillon+st%5B0+-Social++Transformation++and++Humane++Governance+db%5B1+-f5h+db%5B0+-aph+op%5B2+-And+op%5B1+-And+op%5B0+-+mdb%5B0+-imh+8C50&cf=1&fn=1&rn=1#bib36




AT: Framework

Their adherence to a bureaucratic structure of argument is a means of being disciplined and manipulated by the stateJessica J. Kulynych, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity, 30:2, p. 315)

While separately both Habermas and Foucault challenge the traditional understanding of participation, their combined insights further and irrevocably extend that challenge. Theoretical focus on the distinctions between Habermas and Foucault has all too often obscured important parallels between these two theorists. Specifically, the Habermas-Foucault debate has underemphasized the extent to which Habermas also describes a disciplinary society. In his descriptions of bureaucracy, technocracy, and system colonization, Habermas is also describing a world where power is productive and dispersed and where political action is constrained and normalized. Habermas, like Foucault, describes a type of power that cannot be adequately characterized in terms of the intentions of those who possess it. Colonization is not the result of conscious intention, but is rather the unintended consequence of a multitude of small adjustments. The gender and racial subtexts infusing the system are not the results of conscious intention, but rather of implicit gender and racial norms and expectations infecting the economy and the state. Bureaucratic power is not a power that is possessed by any individual or agency, but exists in the exercise of decisionmaking. As Iris Young points out, we must "analyze the exercise of power [in

contemporary societies] as the effect of often liberal and humane practices of education, bureaucratic administration, production and distribution of consumer goods, medicine and so on."(7) The very practices that Habermas chronicles are exemplary of a power that has no definitive subject. As Young explains, "the conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression, but those people are simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do not understand themselves as agents of oppression."(8) Colonization and bureaucratization also fit the pattern of a power that is not primarily repressive but productive. Disciplinary technologies are, as Sawicki describes, not.... repressive mechanisms ... [that] operate primarily through violence ... or seizure ... but rather [they operate] by producing new objects and subjects of knowledge, by inciting and channeling desires, generating and focusing individual and group energies, and establishing bodily norms and techniques for observing, monitoring and controlling bodily movements, processes, and capacities.(9) The very practices of administration, distribution, and decisionmaking on which Habermas focuses his attention can and must be analyzed as productive disciplinary practices. Although these practices can clearly be repressive, their most insidious effects are productive. Rather than simply

holding people back, bureaucratization breaks up, categorizes, and systemizes projects and people. It creates new categories of knowledge and expertise. Bureaucratization and colonization also create new subjects as the objects of bureaucratic expertise. The

social welfare client and the consumer citizen are the creation of bureaucratic power, not merely its target. The extension of lifeworld gender norms into the system creates the possibility for sexual harassment, job segregation, parental leave, and consensual corporate decisionmaking. Created as a part of these subjectivities are new gestures and norms of bodily behavior, such as the embarrassed shuffling of food stamps at the grocery checkout and the demeaning sexual reference at the office copier. Bodily movements are monitored and regularized by means of political opinion polls, welfare lists, sexual harassment protocols, flex-time work schedules, and so forth. Modern disciplinary power, as

described by Foucault and implied by Habermas, does not merely prevent us from developing, but creates us differently as the effect of its functioning . These disciplinary techniques not only control us, but also enable us to be more efficient and more productive, and often more powerful. Focusing on the disciplinary elements of the Habermasian critique opens the door for exploring the postmodern character of Habermasian politics. Because Habermas does describe a disciplinary world, his prescription for contemporary democracy (discursive politics) ought to be sensitive to, and appropriate for, a disciplinary world. Foucault's sensitivity to the workings of disciplinary power is central to the articulation of a plausible, postmodern version of discursive politics. In the following discussion I will argue for a performative redefinition of participation that will reinvigorate the micro-politics

demanded by Foucault, as well as provide a more nuanced version of the discursive politics demanded by Habermas.


AT- Framework: “Truth”

Their method of defining human agency with an all inclusive statement creates exclusion and reinforces biopolitical control

Roland Bleiker, 2003 (Professor of International Relations Harvard and Cambridge, Discourse and Human Agency, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. p. 37-38)

A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human agency. There is no essence to human agency, no core that can be brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic

formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others. The dangers of such a totalizing position have been well rehearsed. Foucault (1982, 209), for instance, believes that a theory of power is unable to provide the basis for analytical work, for it assumes a prior objectification of the very power dynamics the theory is trying to assess. Bourdieu (1998, 25) speaks of the

‘imperialism of the universal’ and List (1993, 11) warns us of an approach that ‘subsumes, or, rather, pretends to be able to subsume everything into one concept, one theory, one position.’ Such a master discourse, she claims, inevitably oppresses everything that does not fit into its particular view of the world.


AT: Ind Axn No Solve

Microlevel resistance within the debate round is keyAngela King, 2004 (Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, Journal of International Women’s Studies, “The Prisoner of Gender: Foucault and the Disciplining of the Female Body”)

However, just as Foucault did in his later work, I would like to stress that resistance is possible. I'm not suggesting that all women clamber to conform to the ideals of femininity. There have always been, and always will be, those who gleefully subvert or ignore the 'rules' or who enjoy the pleasures of fashion and beauty without feeling them to be an obligation or a necessity. As Wilson says, we can "acknowledge that dress is a powerful weapon of control and dominance, while widening our view to encompass an understanding of its simultaneously subversive qualities" (Elizabeth Wilson quoted in MacDonald op. cit., p.212). Foucault claimed that resistance exists wherever there is normalisation and domination. Power is never total, uniform or smooth but shifting and unstable; if it is exerted on 'micro levels' it can be contested on micro levels; there is "no single locus of great Refusal" but a "plurality of resistances" (Foucault 1998, p.95-6).


AT: No Alt

Outlining a specific discourse of resistance is a totalitarian means of exercising power: we must outline a broad alternative means of resistance to powerPickett, 2005 (Associate professor at Chaldron University, “On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics”, pp. 47)

Any reasonable interpretation of Foucaultian resistance will necessarily have a large amount of indeterminacy. While it is non-hierarchical and concerned with memory and the body and the negation of power while still potentially affirmative of something else, these various elements of resistance are compatible with a range of practical political engagements,

such as broadly liberal or even anarchist positions. This is because Foucault cannot lay down how or why one should struggle. Such a globalistic theory would become one more agent of power; totalizing a theory is itself "totalitarian."66 Still, it is possible to draw a broad political orientation out of Foucault's celebration of struggle.67 If resistance is worthwhile, as Foucault clearly believes it is, then the conditions which make struggle possible should be fostered. This is why Foucault believes there is a daily "ethico-political" choice to be made.68 We need to decide what constitutes the greatest danger and struggle against it.From this vantage point it is possible to see why the charge of pessimism or hopelessness that is frequently brought against Foucault is misguided. He is accused of presenting power as something so ubiquitous and overwhelming that all resistance becomes pointless . On the contrary, the fact that everything is dangerous means that there are multiple opportunities for resistance . And far from being pointless, Foucault maintains that engagement presents several possibilities. Resistance gives us the possibility of changing the practices he labels 'intolerables.' Once the asylum inmate, factory worker, or "sexual deviant" is enabled to speak, and his memory of struggles and subjugated knowledge is allowed its insurrection, those who are subjected to power can force change.


AT: Perm Do Both

1. The permutation is another link- their recognition of their complicity with biopower only as a reaction to our criticism is a tool to co-opt us- this is the exact way the state leverages subtly disciplinary power

2. They are severing out of the biopolitics in the 1AC—the alternative specifically rejects this. Severance is a voter-- It’s infinitely regressive and unpredictable, the aff can sever out of a different portion of their plan each speech.

3. Permutation fails—only by forming true resistance against the ideology can we resist the state’s control. The aff’s attempt to include a reform misses the point.Catherine E. Foote and Arther Frank, 1999 (Sociologist at University of Calgary, Professor of Sociology at University of Calgary, Columbia University Press New York , Reading Foucault for Social Work, “Foucault and Therapy, p. 181)

If resistance were solely a theoretical project, the search for a strategy outside truth games might be impossible, but the Foucauldian point, reasserted throughout his writing, is that his work-and our analysis hereseeks not to produce a theory but to show possibilities of practice. "The problem, you see, is one for the subject who acts-the


subject of action through which the real is transformed" (Foucault 1991:84).Speaking of

penal reform, Foucault leaves no doubt that any transformation that occurs "won't be because a plan of reform has found its way into the heads of the social workers" (82-

85). Instead, transformation can come only from those who "have come into collision with each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and confrontations." Transformation will occur only when "critique has been played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas" (84-85). The point is not to achieve any theoretical resolution in academic

essays such as this one, but discussions such as this can show directions of practice where resistance can be "played out in the real."

AT: Perm

The perm fails—biopolitics is constantly shifting and manifesting itself in different ways; it must be explicitly rejectedMichael Dillon and Luis Guerrero, 2008 (ph.D in International Studies and Head of Department of Security and War at Lancaster University, Deputy Postgraduate Research Director, Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, January, “Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century, Review of International Studies”, p.4-6)

This paper does precisely that. It explains how the biopolitics of biopower is necessarily also allied with freedom and what kind of ‘freedom’ is understood to be at work in it. In explaining precisely what Foucault understands, in addition, by ‘security’, and how this understanding of security differs from traditional geopolitical accounts of security derived from ontologies and anthropologies of political subjectivity, the paper also clarifies why Foucault concludes that biopolitics simply is a “dispositif de sécurité”. Strictly speaking, therefore, there is no biopolitics which is not simultaneously also a security apparatus. There is no biopolitics of this, or a biopolitics of that. When one says biopolitics one says security; albeit in a certain way. Biopolitics arises at the beginning of the modern age but it does not spring fully formed at its beginning. It would run entirely counter to Foucault’s approach to the analytic of power relations to pretend otherwise. While acknowledging a certain kind of precursor in the pastoral power of the Church, with which it appears superficially similar but from which it diverges in its specificities, what Foucault begins to draw-out is the logic of formation which takes hold


when power takes species life as its referent object, and the securing of species life becomes the vocation of a novel and emerging set of discursive formations of power/knowledge. This biopolitical logic of formation also expresses a new and emergent experience of the real. A logic of formation is therefore historical, local and particular. It also installs an ontopolitics as it experiments

with novel ensembles or technologies of social practice. However generalised it may become, biopolitics is not itself a universal phenomenon. It is the actualisation instead of a specific historical and, we would argue, evolving economy of power relations. Such ensembles of practices do not actualise themselves in perfect realisation of their logic. First, because their logic is always a contested epistemic object for them. Second,

because things always change in unintended ways. Biopolitical security practices do not articulate a design in nature. They are contingent achievements reflecting the partial realisation of designs which seek to enact ‘natures’. In the process, there are slippages

and breakages, shifts and revisions, for which the original drivers and concerns of biopolitics no longer account. There is nothing unusual in this. It would be unusual if it did not

happen. Mutation of the biopolitical order of power relations has continued tomerely entailed a change at the level of practice. Any change in practice is simultaneously also accompanied by a change in the experience of the real. In general terms the shift in the nature of the real associated with biopolitics, now, is captured by the term ‘emergence’.

Complete refusal to engage in sovereign power is key to breaking out from the restraints of disciplinary powerJenny Edkins, 2004 (International Politics Professor at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, “Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics”, p. 11-12, Google Books,)

One potential form of resistance to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoe and bios, inside and outside, human and inhuman. As we have shown,

sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of administration though relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. As Michael Dillon puts it, "Sovereign power [is] a form of rule gone global [that] has come to develop and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination it finds increasingly impossible to control because these have become integral to its propagation and survival."In asking far a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of resistance, then, we are not asking for the elimination of power relations and, consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all (and, indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power (as a form of violence) can be contested and a properly political power relation can be reinstated.We could call this escaping the logic of sovereign power. Our overall argument is that we can escape sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting its assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other resistance always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation), we need not only contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands.

AT: We’re A Good Version

1. This is another link – the aff’s characterization of governmentality as beneficial to the poor is an attempt to extend disciplinary power

2. Consent to the state is what allows the worst forms of violence


John Ransom, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dickinson College, “Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity”, p. 15)

At the beginning of this process, remember the individual gave consent . But when looking back on his years of training, the monk hardly recognizes the young man who agreed to enter the monastery. He is simply not the same person that he was then. He may have given his consent to the rigorous training of the monastery, but in a very real sense the relevant individual was not present when that consent was given. It is only after one is “disciplined” in a certain way- only after one’s subjectivity has been shaped and certain powers developed, while others are pushed to the side, that individuals can meaningfully give consent to what the structures of power will do to them.

AT: Can’t Change Power

Power is fluid- it can always be challengedLawrence Kritzman, 1988 (Lecturer on Philosophy and Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, “Foucault- Politics, Philosophy, Culture Interviews and Other Writings”)


Power is not a substance. Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into. Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals. Such relations are specific, that is, they have nothing to do with exchange, production, communication, even though they combine with them. The characteristics feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine other men’s conduct- but never exhaustively or coercively . A man who is chained up and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him. Not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue , preferring death, then he has been caused to behave a certain way. His freedom has been subjected to power. He has been submitted to government. If an individual can remain free, however little his freedom may be, power can subject him to government. There is no power without potential refusal or revolt .-


AT: Biopower Inevitable

1. Self-fulfilling prophecy—the state wants individuals to remain docile so their power won’t go challenged. The aff’s resigned attitude towards state control allows continued domination

2. Biopolitics are not inevitable—the intellectual must challenge the system Adrienne Chambon, 1999 (Director of Ph. D program at University of Toronto, Columbia University Press New York , “Reading Foucault for Social Work”, “Foucault’s Approach,” p. 67-8)

More fundamentally, Foucault spoke to the transformative potential of his work. Transformative work shows that the present is not natural and need not be taken as inevitable or absolute. Change can come from the realization of the precarious nature of established ways and by inviting the development of alternatives. This holds true for the client and for the worker and is of particular relevance to the academic social worker, researcher, and educator. We come close here to the definition of the role of the intellectual, as well as its limits: "The work of the intellectual ... is fruitful in a certain way to describe that-which-is by making it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is"

(Foucault 1983:206). Foucault concluded: These [forms of rationality] reside on a base of human practice and human history; and that since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.... Any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation. (206) Because power is productive, it is up to us to produce new forms, after seeing through that which is all too familiar, and to realize that those new forms will generate new possibilities as well as new constraints


AT: Biopower Good

1. Our entire 1NC is a turn to this argument—they’ve conceded that biopower gives the state total control over life, which also gives it the right to kill all individuals

2. This is yet another link—the state wants people to believe that it is effective and efficient in a pragmatic sense—this justifies the surveillance and control of individuals


AT: Dickenson/Democracy Solves

1. New link for us—Democracies’ method of governmentality as a way to better the lives of their citizens is a means of normalization and disciplinary power

2. Liberalism fails to free itself from biopoliticsMitchell Dean, 2001 (Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty.” Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 50-51)

Finally, although liberalism may try to make safe the biopolitical imperative of the optimization of life, it has shown itself permanently incapable of arresting—from

eugenics to contemporary genetics---the emergence of rationalities that make the optimization of the life of some dependent on the disallowing of the life of others. I can

only suggest some general reasons for this. Liberalism is fundamentally concerned to govern through what it conceives as processes that are external to the sphere of government limited by the respect for rights and liberties of individual subjects. Liberal rule thus fosters forms of knowledge of vital processes and seeks to govern through their application. Moreover, to the extent that liberalism depends on the formation of responsible and autonomous subjects through biopolitics and discipline, it fosters the type of governmental practices that are the ground of such rationalities. Further, and

perhaps more simply, we might consider the possibility that sovereignty and biopolitics are so heterogeneous to one another that the derivation of political norms from the democratization of the former cannot act as a prophylactic for the possible outcomes of the latter. We might also consider the alternative to this thesis, that biopolitics captures and expands the division between political life and mere existence, already found within sovereignty. In either case, the framework of right and law can act as a resource for forces

engaged in contestation of the effects of biopower; it cannot provide a guarantee as the efficacy of such struggle and may even be the means of the consolidation of those effects.

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