ADI
Critical Lab
1
Biopolitics K
Biopolitics K Index
Biopolitics K Index ..............................................................1
1NC Shell .............................................................................2
1NC Shell .............................................................................3
1NC Shell .............................................................................4
Link: Visas ...........................................................................5
Link: Work Visas ............................................................... 13
Link: Amnesty ................................................................... 14
Link: Trafficking Visas ...................................................... 15
Link: Agriculture ............................................................... 19
Link: US/Mexico Border ................................................... 24
Link: Globalization/Heg/Neo-Lib ...................................... 26
Link: Poverty ..................................................................... 27
Link: Identity Politics ........................................................ 30
Links: Law ......................................................................... 31
Link: Citizenship ................................................................ 32
Link: Free Will................................................................... 33
Link: Immigration .............................................................. 34
Link: Equal Protection ....................................................... 39
Internal Link ...................................................................... 41
Impacts: Feminism/Sexuality Turns .................................. 43
Impacts: Racism ................................................................. 44
Impacts: Capitalism ........................................................... 47
Impacts: Nuclear War ........................................................ 48
Impacts: War ..................................................................... 49
Impact: Totalitarianism ..................................................... 50
Alternative Extensions ...................................................... 51
Framework ........................................................................ 55
Discourse 1st ...................................................................... 56
Answer To: K Ignores Suffering ....................................... 57
Answer Too: Resistance Impossible.................................. 58
Answer To: Alt=Inaction................................................... 60
Answer To: Perm .............................................................. 61
***Affirmative Answers*** ............................................. 64
2AC Frontline .................................................................... 64
Biopower Capitalism Turn ................................................ 67
Incrementalism .................................................................. 68
Sovereignty Not Root of Power ....................................... 70
Link Turns ......................................................................... 71
No Alt Solvency ................................................................ 72
Perm .................................................................................. 75
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
1NC Shell
A. The biopolitical categories in the visa regime open the applicants to the biopolitics of the
state
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies,
biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_2_31/ai_n29276866/pg_13/
Foucault's writings on the topic of biopolitics ground this analysis. Foucault
examined the concomitant evolution of
industrial and institutional techniques of modern governance through an investigation of how mobile,
productive, healthy, moral bodies were constructed, schooled, policed, and harnessed for labor . (58) His
investigation of the how the penal system in particular led into the evolution of a disciplinary society stopped at the borders of the state,
but in principle can be expanded to encompass a biopolitics of international relations: the management of international bodies.
Fundamental to the evolution of the modern state was the control over mobility of citizens, which Foucault illustrates architecturally in
the panopticon and plague town, Timothy Mitchell within Egyptian schools and urban architecture, and John Torpey through state
passports. (59) What these authors neglect is the international aspect of this control of mobility. Following work by Barry Hindess,
Nevzat Soguk, and William Walters, who describe a structure of international management of population through
the regulation of citizenship, refugees, and stateless persons, the international control of persons is just
as vital to the stability of the modern state system as the domestic control of mobility. We can see the
ways in which the visa system contributes to the definition and control of international populations:
through the ascription of biopolitical characteristics in terms of labor skill or capitalization, epidemic
or health liability, and risk or normalcy. But, how do mobile individuals come to recognize themselves as part of this
population and engage in self-disciplinary behavior? For an explanation, I turn to the moment of discretion and the construction of the
confessionary complex.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
1NC Shell
B. The biopolitical framework established by Foucault produces prejudiced boundaries of
race that have become embedded within the current immigration system.
Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the New School, 1995 (Ana L., Race and the Education of
Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, p. 6-8, CPG)
While we might comfortably concur with Foucault that a
discourse of sexuality was incited and activated as an
instrument of power in the nineteenth century, we might still raise a basic question: a discourse about whom? His answer
is clear: it was a discourse that produced four "objects of knowledge that were also targets and
anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge" (HS:105), with specific technologies around them: the
masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the "hysterical woman," the Malthusian couple, and the
perverse adult. But students of empire would surely add at least one more. Did any of these figures exist as objects of knowledge
and discourse in the nineteenth century without a racially erotic counterpoint, without reference to the libidinal energies of the savage,
the primitive, the colonized -- reference points of difference, critique, and desire? At one level, these are clearly contrapuntal as well as
indexical referents, serving to bolster Europe's bourgeois society and to underscore what might befall it in moral decline. But they were
not that alone. The sexual discourse of empire and of the biopolitic state in Europe were mutually constitutive: their "targets" were
broadly imperial, their regimes of power synthetically bound.
My rereading of The History of Sexuality thus rests on two basic contentions, central to much recent work in colonial studies. First, that
Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political, or economic assertions, cannot be
charted in Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production of that
discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrasts for what a
"healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body" was all about. Europe's eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality can -- indeed must -- be traced
along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to nineteenth-century technologies of sex. They were refracted through the discourses
of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those
confidences were built, could not be disentangled. I thus approach The History of Sexuality through several venues by comparing its
chronologies and strategic ruptures to those in the colonies and by looking at these inflections on a racially charged ground. But, as
importantly, I argue that a "comparison" between these two seemingly dispersed technologies of sex in colony and in metropole may
miss the extent to which these technologies were bound.
My second contention is that the racial obsessions and refractions of imperial discourses on sexuality have not been restricted to
bourgeois culture in the colonies alone. By bringing the discursive anxieties and practical struggles over citizenship and national
identities in the nineteenth century back more squarely within Foucault's frame, bourgeois identities in both
metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race. Discourses of sexuality do more
than define the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic,
they have mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedimented discourses on
sexual morality could redraw the "interior frontiers" of national communities, frontiers that were
secured through – and sometimes in collision with -- the boundaries of race. These nationalist discourses were
predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the
poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were
worthy of recognition and whose were not.
Nationalist discourse drew on and gave force to a wider politics of exclusion. This version was not
concerned solely with the visual markers of difference, but with the relationship between visible characteristics
and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence. Assessment of these untraceable identity
markers could seal economic, political, and social fates. Imperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized,
metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain cultural
competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn defined the hidden fault
lines -- both fixed and fluid -- along which gendered assessments of class and racial membership were drawn .
Within the lexicon of bourgeois civility, self-control, self-discipline, and self-determination were defining features of bourgeois selves in
the colonies. These features, affirmed in the ideal family milieu, were often transgressed by sexual, moral, and racial contaminations in
those same European colonial homes. Repression was clearly part of this story, but as Foucault argues, it was subsumed by something
more. These discourses on self-mastery were productive of racial distinctions, of clarified notions of
"whiteness" and what it meant to be truly European. These discourses provided the working
categories in which an imperial division of labor was clarified, legitimated, and -- when under threat -restored.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
1NC Shell
C. BIOPOWER RISKS EXTINCTION
Foucault 84
(Michel, Director of Institute Francais at Hamburg, THE FOUCAULT READER p. 259-260. KNP)
"Deduction" has
tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to
incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: 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. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a
Since the classical age, the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power.
tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on
the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life.
Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit
such holocaust on their own populations. But this formidable power of death-and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and
the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits-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 no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they 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 continued existence.
D. The Alt: the AFF is an extension of biopower, we must reject the plan now, or risk
becoming an institution for juridical state power.
Foucault, Professor of philosophy at the college de France 84 (Michel, A Foucault Reader p 63
KNP)
I wonder if this isn’t bound up with the institution of monarchy. This developed during the Middle Ages
against the backdrop of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and
private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function albeit one
whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep. Sovereign, law and prohibition formed a system of
representation of power which was extended during the subsequent era by the theories of right:
political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. Such theories still
continue today to busy themselves with the problem of sovereignty. What we need, however, is a political
philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of
law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that has still to be done. 63
ADI
Critical Lab
5
Biopolitics K
Link: Visas
Visa requirements control those entering the US
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies,
biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_2_31/ai_n29276866/pg_13/
Preliminary empirical work suggests that there are a number of common requirements for visas: a fee
for processing (a remote tax); return tickets (good faith illustration that the applicant's stay is temporary);
statement of qualifications (to distinguish the degree of skilled labor); funds for stay; a health certificate
(declarations that one is not an epidemiological risk: AIDS/HIV; yellow fever; tuberculosis; etc.); and
affirmation of acceptable behavior (declarations that one is not a criminal/felon). Thus, the mobile
subject is configured by the receiving state in terms of health, wealth, labor/leisure, and risk. The
guarantee of the passport is its isomorphic representation of a particular body to a set of governmental
records. The visa application, which always tests and depends on the validity of the passport, attempts to
render the position of the applicant in terms of state, educational, health, and police institutions. As Don
Flynn has suggested, the product of the visa bureaucracy is rejection, and efficiency is determined by rates of
rejection against some imagined norm of regularly occurring fraud. (48)
The visa program exerts biopolitical control over the holding opening them up to state
control over entry
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies,
biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_2_31/ai_n29276866/pg_13/
The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the
community. In this structure, the fundamental right of the sovereign is to be able to exclude and define
the limits of its population with little reference to other states or sovereigns. Mobility is structured in terms
of entry, which is made obligatory by citizenship or refugee status, or entirely the discretionary, by
noncitizenship. I want to unpack this discretionary moment that is vital to the delimitation of the population
of the state. From the French vise, meaning having been seen, the visa refers to "(1) the authorisation given
by a consul to enter or to pass through a country, and (2) the stamp placed on the passport when the holder
entered or left a foreign country." (37) In modern usage, it refers to the prescreening of travelers and
represents a prima facie case for admission. (38) The visa in no way guarantees actual admission, which
remains the prerogative of the sovereign and its agents at the border. The visa regime allows for a
delocalization of the border function so that states may engage in sorting behavior away from the
physical limit of the state. (39) In some instances, visas may be applied for and received at the actual border
of a state, but in such cases it is viewed mostly as a revenue generator rather than a security function.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
The Biopolitical categories allow for biosocial control about what countries citizen’s do and
look like
Shamir 5 Ronen Sociological Theory Vol 23 June 2005 “Without Borders? Notes on
Golobalization as a Mobility Regime” http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148882
The current global mobility regime, writes Bauman, is based on a distinctive principle of osmosis: "traveling
for profit is encouraged; traveling for survival is condemned" (2002:84). To maintain this osmotic system,
new technologies of social intervention are developed and perfected in tandem with the physical
development of fences, prisons, and gated enclaves. One instance of this osmotic fine-tuning concerns
infinite administrative classificatory expansion. A basic illustration of this is the classificatory scheme
of American nonimmigrant visas. As of 2004, there have been 48 different categories of
nonimmigrant visas to the United States. Thus, for example, the H-2A type of nonimmigrant visa is
applicable to "temporary agricultural workers coming to the United States to fill positions for which a
temporary shortage of American workers has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture," while
the L-1 type of nonimmigrant visa is applicable to "intracompany transferees who work in positions as
managers, executives or persons with specialized knowl- edge." Thus, classes of people who are typically
barred entry, namely, unskilled laborers, may be granted mobility rights for designated tasks, while
people who become valuable citizens of multinational corporations, namely, corporate executives, are
granted special mobility privileges. In both cases, the visa system allows for the fine-tuning of
movement, carefully sorting out individual identities. In particular, the osmotic system is now geared
toward sorting out those who are deemed necessary to enhance the quality of the labor market from those
who are considered redundant or, worse, a burden. Thus, the continued mobility of high-skilled workers is
considered a vital issue for many rich countries. Accordingly, around 1.1 million people considered high
skilled came to work in the United States in 2000 on temporary stay visas, more than the roughly 850,000
immigrants admitted for legal permanent residence (Jachimowicz and Meyers 2002). Similarly, Germany
introduced a "green card" system to help satisfy the demand for highly-qualified information technology
experts. Through this new immigration program, about 9,200 highly-skilled workers have entered Germany
through August 2001, with 1,935 Indians accounting for the largest group
(http://www.migrationinformation.org). At the same time, millions are barred entry, whether as immigrants
or visitors, on various grounds of perceived threats. In sum, the osmotic system developed under the
guidelines of the global mobility regime must rely not simply on fences but on finely-tuned screening
mechanisms that provide it with its necessary social elasticity. Screening, in turn, relies on that technology of
intervention that I as biosocial
Temporary visas are forms of biopolitical control that allows people into society but limits
their acceptance into the community
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies,
biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_2_31/ai_n29276866/pg_13/
This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and
individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border
examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa
and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community,
and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through
passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a
biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be
international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the
creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of
the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessionary regime. The
global visa regime and international borders are crucial in constructing both international mobile populations
and international mobile individuals.
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Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
The affirmative’s characterization of visas is a prime example of the biopolitical racist
separation of people according to power-based criteria used to eliminate on the basis of
arbitrarily defined inferiority.
Milchman and Rosenberg, Professor of Political Science at Queens College of the City of
New York & Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City of New York, 2005
(Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340,
CPG)
But, according to Foucault, what is it that constitutes a group within the populations as a “race?”. Race is a “way of
introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must
live and what must die” (p. 254). The basis for such a break in the biological continuum can be ethnic or
religious; it can be founded on sexual orientation, on deviance from a society’s norms, on mental or
physical illness, or on criminality. Any such “cut” in the continuity of the species can constitute a race in Foucauldian
terms, so long as the “identity” in question is metaphysically defined, attributed to the very being of the individual or group.
Moreover, the constitution of race entails” … the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are
described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as good and that others, in contrast, are
described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls … It
is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears in the biological domain” (p. 255).
And on the bases of such a caesura, the exclusion or elimination of the inferior race can be undertaken,
purportedly in the interests of the life and health of the superior race, those who are normal. Race, for
Foucault, is linked to the “dividing practices” through which a population can be regulated and
controlled in a bio-political regime. The Foucauldian notion of race is a novel one, permitting us to see the numerous
ways in which such dividing practices are instantiated in the modern world, as so many manifestations of a racialization of
politics, even where there is no necessary genetic basis for the invidious distinctions that it entails.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
The visa is a way for countries to transfer biopolitical control of its citizens to other
counties
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies,
biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_2_31/ai_n29276866/pg_13/
Through the passport, the sovereign who claims one's allegiance asks for entry and protection on
behalf of the possessor; thus entry to the body politic is mediated through the administrative bodies of
the sovereigns. (14) Entry to a sovereign state in which one does not possess nationality is mediated
through the visa process and identity papers (passport, refugee, or stateless travel documents). While the
discussion of individual attachment or allegiance to the state/sovereign is usually understood as citizenship or
nationality, I would argue in the face of material facts on the ground and ethical concerns prompted by the
political consequences of those facts that we must widen our analytical scope to include a multiplicity of
forms of membership in political communities. (15) Jean Bodin defines this important boundary of the
political community: "The mutual obligation between subject and sovereign, by which, in return for the
faith and obedience rendered to him the sovereign must do justice and give counsel, assistance,
encouragement, and protection to the subject. He does not owe this to aliens." (16) At this stage, it is
important to note that the sovereign decision of inclusion/expulsion is irreducible and that the space of
decision is also a space of exception. The bordering process constituted by the decision to
include/exclude is a dialogue between body and body politic requiring the confession of all manner of
bodily, economic, and social information. Borrowing from Alison Mountz, we might speak of the "long
tunnel" of in-between spaces that is constituted by international travel. The gangway between the airplane
and the agent of customs precisely resembles the "camp." (17) The traveler is not simply in between states,
but also denationalized. It is useful to return to the anthropologist's categorization of "threshold rites" to
understand the process of the border. According to Arnold van Gennep, for example, the territorial passage is
divided into three specific rites: pre-liminal rites (the rites of separation from a previous world); liminal or
threshold rites (rites of transition); and post-liminal rites (rites and ceremonies of incorporation into the new
world). (18) The preliminal rites are ones of denationalization, status that is held in abeyance before the
sovereign decision. "Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and
inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical
protection no longer made any sense." (19) The liminal rite of examination, obedience, and confession
presents a challenge to Agamben. The sovereign in his account has no restraints and may simply exert the
power of decision. The border-crosser challenges this in several ways: the decision to include/exclude is
individual and institutional, and the border-crosser presents him/herself to the sovereign, and this element of
agency is totally neglected by Agamben.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
Changing the eligibility requirements doesn’t affect the biopolitical control visa policy
exert over people
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies,
biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_2_31/ai_n29276866/pg_13/
The field of migration studies has been hamstrung by two dominant approaches: microstudies of migration
networks, and macrostudies of push-pull factors. This article argues for the consideration of a different kind
of micropolitics of power, that of the border itself. We must investigate the legal state of exception at the
border and the ways that these exceptions are instantiated in laws and policies. The interface of the body
and the body politic is hotly contested, and scholars need to take seriously the question of admission and
exclusion to the political community at its border, not solely from an immigration/refugee rights perspective
but from a wider view of the global mobility regime and human rights. This corporealism must also take
into account the management of international populations through biopolitics in creating, classifying,
and policing specific kinds of international bodies, and the way in which political technologies of
individuals such as passports, visas, and frontier control educate mobile subjectivities in kinds of
obedience and auto-confession. We must ask: How does the global mobility regime foster conditions under
which we reorganize ourselves into international bodies and characterize those bodies as national or stateless,
laboring or leisured, healthy or diseased, and safe or pathological? Managing Mobility This is aided by
understanding the visa as part of a global biopolitical system. In the loose visa regime, we see the control of
population through the self-confession of our status as national, working, healthy, and safe bodies
through application procedures. We need to unpack the way in which visa systems erase the middle
ground previously occupied by gastarbeiter programs and shunt economic migrants into the category of
asylum seekers, a category that does little to acknowledge the material basis of well-founded fears of
economic persecution. Some of this work has been done by human rights-based advocacy groups like
Statewatch and Amnesty International, but we also need to conduct close ethnographies of the bureaucracies
responsible for the management of these decisions.
Societies of discipline are becoming stronger
Pisters 05 (Patricia, Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values p.179 KNP)
Two aspects of Empire are important to understand the way in which this global system functions: the society of
control and biopower. The society of control is a concept that has been developed by Gilles Deleuze. Starting from
Foucault's idea of the society of discipline that exercises power by disciplining bodies in institutional practices
and discourses (the family, school, factory, and prison), Deleuze argued that at the end of the second
millennium we have entered a society of control. 5 In a society of control, the power of the institutions has
weakened because its boundaries have become less stable: electronic house arrest “opens” the prison, the factory
is stretching out into the home via home-work, the school is losing its authority in favor of interactive selflearning, and the family seems to be undermined either by the internal collapse of the Western bourgeois family,
combined with a boundary crossing between public and private via the media, or by the dissolution of the nonWestern family by external forces like (forced) migrations. On the other hand, the power of all these institutions
is even stronger, precisely because they are less tangible. Control is everywhere, although we are no longer
just controlled by a gaze but by codes that contain all kinds of information about us. The moles' tunnels of the
society of discipline (recognizable institutions and discourses of power), says Deleuze, have been replaced by the
undulations of the snake (less recognizable forms of control that “crawl” everywhere). Perhaps the family , as a
modulating, moving concept, might still be very powerful as well, but I will return to this point at the end of this
chapter
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Biopolitics K
The government controls and classifies immigrants after entering the country, exerting
disciplinary power.
Griesbach 10 (Kathleen UC San Diego Immigration Detention, State Power, and Resistance: The Case of
the 2009 Motín in Pecos, Texas)
The differentiation of individuals by documentation is essential in the construction of the “Other.” The
soldierly “tactics” of US border enforcement illustrate the militarization of the national front to keep
out an “Other” whose demographic characteristics have historically been constructed through United States
immigration policies from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and onward in more subtle ways. The
surveillance and at times armed expulsion of others once they enter the US, and not merely if they
enter it illegally, exemplifies the perpetuation of disciplinary power. As Eithne Luibhéid argues,
Clearly, inspection at the border is not a one-time experience but it is rather, as Foucault’s image of the
carceral archipelago suggests, a process that situates migrants within lifelong networks of surveillance
and disciplinary relations Foucault’s discussion of “panopticism” illuminates the evolution of institutions
into disciplinary societies, through the extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout society in “the
formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society” 16. The theoretical Panopticon is a place
of constant surveillance, of power transmitted through the knowledge that others are watching. The
Panopticon shows us how “power is exercised, not simply held”17. In Bentham’s Panopticon “each comrade
becomes a guardian.” This calls to mind the Minutemen, the citizen activist group engaged in voluntary
civilian border “defense”. Their interventions in 7 7 , and a great majority of these immigrant detainees are
charged for nothing more than illegal entry.US border enforcement contribute to the “surveillance” of the
border, reinforcing the disciplinary power exercised over would-be immigrants to the United States.
They show that disciplinary power is exercised on all levels of society, well beyond the auspices of the
state. The same spirit of “surveillance” characterizes federal collaboration with local authorities, in the form
of 287 (g) partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement. In 287
(g) partnerships (signed into effect with the Immigrant Nationality Act of 1996, ICE trains local officials
around the US to act in its capacity, aggressively seeking and capturing undocumented migrants within local
jails (“criminal aliens”) and in the local community.18 In this way, the local police become “guardians”,
exerting disciplinary power on behalf of federal officials over immigrants illegally in the United States. The
vast majority of migrants apprehended through these strategies are Mexican1920 The disciplinary power
exercised toward the immigrant population of course doesn’t end at the border; surveillance of
immigrants continues once they enter the country in the context of documentation status and far
beyond official records in social segregation. Immigrants enter the official records on conditional
terms or else stay in the shadows as “undocumented” migrants. Their immigration status determines the
amount of “surveillance” they face from the government, in the sense that legal permanent residents or
other non-citizens are in much greater danger of being deported and can be denied citizenship for any
misstep. The actions of their 8 8 lives (tax activities, criminal record) come under great scrutiny when
they apply for citizenship or for other government benefits. In the pursuit of adjusting or acquiring status,
then, they are voluntarily under government watch throughout the probationary period before
citizenship is established, if it is at all. Differentiation by immigrant status determines the degree of
agency – to vote, to get a higher education, or to walk without anxiety down the street. immigration
control is both a powerful symbol of nationhood and people and “a means to literally construct the
nation and the people in particular ways”21, then differentiation by immigrant status - a way of
exercising disciplinary power - presents many complications to a coherent construction of who belongs
and who is “Other
ADI
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Biopolitics K
The biopolitical framework established by Foucault produces prejudiced boundaries of
race that have become embedded within the current immigration system.
Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the New School, 1995
(Ana L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, p.
6-8, CPG)
Several basic questions remain. What happens to Foucault's chronologies when the technologies of sexuality are refigured in an imperial
field? Was the obsessive search for the "truth about sex" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier
confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this "truth about sex" recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically those
working through the language of race? While we might comfortably concur with Foucault that a discourse of sexuality was
incited and activated as an instrument of power in the nineteenth century , we might still raise a basic question: a
discourse about whom? His answer is clear: it was a discourse that produced four "objects of knowledge that
were also targets and anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge" (HS:105), with specific technologies
around them: the masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the "hysterical woman," the Malthusian
couple, and the perverse adult. But students of empire would surely add at least one more. Did any of these figures exist as
objects of knowledge and discourse in the nineteenth century without a racially erotic counterpoint, without reference to the libidinal
energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized -- reference points of difference, critique, and desire? At one level, these are clearly
contrapuntal as well as indexical referents, serving to bolster Europe's bourgeois society and to underscore what might befall it in moral
decline. But they were not that alone. The sexual discourse of empire and of the biopolitic state in Europe were mutually constitutive:
their "targets" were broadly imperial, their regimes of power synthetically bound.
My rereading of The History of Sexuality thus rests on two basic contentions, central to much recent work in colonial studies. First, that
Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political, or economic assertions, cannot be
charted in Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production of that
discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrasts for what a
"healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body" was all about. Europe's eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality can -- indeed must -- be traced
along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to nineteenth-century technologies of sex. They were refracted through the discourses
of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those
confidences were built, could not be disentangled. I thus approach The History of Sexuality through several venues by comparing its
chronologies and strategic ruptures to those in the colonies and by looking at these inflections on a racially charged ground. But, as
importantly, I argue that a "comparison" between these two seemingly dispersed technologies of sex in colony and in metropole may
miss the extent to which these technologies were bound.
My second contention is that the racial obsessions and refractions of imperial discourses on sexuality have not been restricted to
bourgeois culture in the colonies alone. By bringing the discursive anxieties and practical struggles over citizenship and national
identities in the nineteenth century back more squarely within Foucault's frame, bourgeois identities in both
metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race. Discourses of sexuality do more
than define the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic,
they have mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedimented discourses on
sexual morality could redraw the "interior frontiers" of national communities, frontiers that were
secured through – and sometimes in collision with -- the boundaries of race. These nationalist discourses were
predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the
poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were
worthy of recognition and whose were not.
Nationalist discourse drew on and gave force to a wider politics of exclusion. This version was not
concerned solely with the visual markers of difference, but with the relationship between visible characteristics
and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence. Assessment of these untraceable identity
markers could seal economic, political, and social fates. Imperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized,
metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain cultural
competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn defined the hidden fault
lines -- both fixed and fluid -- along which gendered assessments of class and racial membership were drawn .
Within the lexicon of bourgeois civility, self-control, self-discipline, and self-determination were defining features of bourgeois selves in
the colonies. These features, affirmed in the ideal family milieu, were often transgressed by sexual, moral, and racial contaminations in
those same European colonial homes. Repression was clearly part of this story, but as Foucault argues, it was subsumed by something
more. These discourses on self-mastery were productive of racial distinctions, of clarified notions of
"whiteness" and what it meant to be truly European. These discourses provided the working
categories in which an imperial division of labor was clarified, legitimated, and -- when under threat -restored.
ADI
Critical Lab
12
Biopolitics K
The biopolitics of immigration policy protect the rich, hegemonic privelege of the Western
majority.
Bolaños, Professor of Philosophy at Metropolitan Autonomous University Cuajimalpa, 2009
(Bernardo L., http://www.ivr2009.com/admin/ewebeditor/UploadFile/20096816332309.pdf, CPG)
Joseph H. Carens has compared the moral status of unfree peasants under feudalism
(serfdom) with the legal treatment of foreigners in our days: “The current restrictions on
immigration in Western democracies [...] are not justifiable. Like feudal barriers to
mobility, they protect unjust privilege” (Carens 270). It is true that serfs could not leave
the fields of landowners just as many citizens from poor countries can not leave their
native countries to go abroad. Crossing territorial boundaries, even temporarily and for
scientific or cultural purposes, has become a privilege of citizens from rich countries. In
fact, immigration law and its enforcement often tolerate discrimination based on ethnic,
religious, cultural or socio-economic factors. And the fact that all kind of low income
applicants are rejected by consulates reinforces global inequality.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
Link: Work Visas
Domestic work is Biopolitical.
Rodriguez 07 (Encarnacion Gutierrez, “The Hidden Side” of the New Economy: On Transnational Migration,
Domestic Work, and Unprecedented Intimacy” Frontiers-A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol 28 KNP)
Negri relates here to the old Greek term "bios" to express the fusion between life and work. In reference to
Karl Marx's notion of labor as productive and reproductive work, we need to consider care and domestic
work as sites of biopolitics, as women are involved in resisting the power of life to make them other
than they know themselves to be (migration and asylum policies, racism, sexism and class position, for
example). While employers look for domestic workers, it quickly becomes evident that these workers
are people, and not just a labor force. Nevertheless, at the time of payment, employers believe that they
have absolute rights over the labor power of the employee. Disrespectful treatment, the exceeding of
personal limits, and the belief that one can take everything away from the care and domestic worker
are therefore common scenarios. This absolute domination by employers is expressed in their behavior
toward employees, something that Ms. Vatu vehemently criticized when she directly addressed her employer:
"So if, I mean I'll just say to the employers out there, if they could just change that kind of attitude that the
person who is coming here is suffering or the person who is coming here, she has to be a slave because we
are paying her."
Using work to determine a person’s usefulness is a form of biopolitical control
Dean, Professor: Macquarie University, 02(Mitchell Dean, “Powers of Life and Death Beyond
Governmentality”, Cultural Values, August 28, 2002)
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
ADI
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Biopolitics K
Link: Amnesty
Sanctuary is biopolitical
Lippert 4 (Randy Alternatives: Global, local, Political Vol 29)
I first briefly discuss what sanctuary practices reveal about a nonliberal pastoral rationality and how this
specific logic relates to a dominant neoliberalism. Following Foucault‘s account of sovereign power, I
then show how sanctuary is an instance of sovereign power. Sanctuary suggests that sovereign power is
not restricted to the (nation-)state, that it can flow from other spaces and sources, and that it is not
always coercive in nature. This analysis has several implications for understanding governing society
today, the most basic of which is to suggest the need to allow for a plurality of sovereignties and
rationalities in specific contexts. Foucault writes of pastoral power as a "less celebrated" rationality that
reveals itself, following an appearance in Hebrew literature, in Christian practices of the Middle Ages. (9)
Pastoral power, according to Foucault, is first and foremost about the "care for the life of
individuals" and a "constant kindness." It so happens that providing care and extending kindness on
a continuing, often-individualized basis, is the raison d'etre of sanctuary. Pastoralism's presence is not
restricted to sanctuary, extending as it does to target the marginalized in myriad contexts. Yet it is in
sanctuary practice that a pastoral rationality appears in near-exemplary form. While it can be given only
cursory attention here, sanctuary's theoretical relevance is partially as fertile ground for interrogating the
character of this pastoral mode, its scope, agents, knowledges, and objects. Two aspects of pastoral
power consistent with sanctuary practice are suggested in Foucault’s statement about the welfare
state being "one of the extremely numerous reappearances of the tricky adjustment between political
power wielded over legal subjects and pastoral power wielded over live individuals." (10) As pastoral
governance (11) constituted welfare states, this rationality is not a leftover of the distant past when
Christian churches wielded considerably more power than they do today. Nor is it continuous with
Christian church governance. Thus, Foucault elsewhere notes: you will say; the pastorate has, if not
disappeared, at least lost the main part of its efficiency. This is true, but I think we should distinguish
between two aspects of pastoral power—between ecclesiastical institutionalization, which has ceased or at
least lost its vitality since the eighteenth century, and its function, which has spread and multiplied outside
the ecclesiastical institution.
The Government gives sanctuary and can take it away
Lippert 4 (Randy Alternatives: Global, local, Political Vol 29)
Foucault writes of the "spectacle of the scaffold": "The sovereign was present at the execution not only
as the power exacting the vengeance of the law, but as the power that could suspend both law and
vengeance." (43) It is in this sense that the granting of sanctuary by a church/community and ministerial
discretion are exceptions and decidedly sovereign in character. The sovereign aspect is also reflected in
ministerial decisions on "humanitarian and compassionate" grounds by the absence of a warning when the
decision will be forthcoming and of any explanation for the decision. In the incidents studied, the decision
appeared suddenly and adopted the uncomplicated form of a "yes" or "no." (44) Further exemplifying this
sovereign character, in granting a reprieve to a family of Algerians who sought sanctuary in Montreal,
the minister announced at a press conference that his decision was "an exceptional measure for an
exceptional situation." (45) This contrasts markedly with routine decisions of the Immigration and Refugee
Board regarding refugee status that correspond to a relatively coherent schedule and are accompanied by
lengthy explanation
ADI
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Biopolitics K
Link: Trafficking Visas
The affirmative’s plan text is rooted in the recurrent biopolitics of the white supremacist
government United States that has reduced its native populations to forced sexual
hegemony. The affirmative carries through the ongoing harms of a biopolitical state
system. The AFF will continue to exert it’s power over other minorities.
Morgensen, Asst. Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, 2010
(Scott L., “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” GLQ: A
Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Volume: 16(1-2), p. 104, CPG)
I am compelled by Puar's analysis, which I extend at the intersections of queer studies and Native
studies. Puar presents the term homonationalism to explain how racialized sexuality and national terror
interact today. I interpret homonationalism as an effect of U.S. queer modernities forming amid the conquest
of Native peoples and the settling of Native land. The terrorizing sexual colonization [End Page 105] of
Native peoples was a historical root of the biopolitics of modern sexuality in the United States.
Colonists interpreted diverse practices of gender and sexuality as signs of a general primitivity among
Native peoples. Over time, they produced a colonial necropolitics that framed Native peoples as queer
populations marked for death. Colonization produced the biopolitics of modern sexuality that I call
"settler sexuality": a white national heteronormativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender
by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects. Despite having formed in the United
States to serve Anglo-American landowning classes and the Euro-ethnics they absorbed, settler
definitions of modern sexuality became hegemonic for all non-Natives, as well as for Native people who
sought ties to sexual modernity. Settler colonialism thus conditioned the formation of modern sexuality
in the United States, including modern queer subjects and politics. By the mid-twentieth century U.S.
sexual minority movements had formed on normatively white and national terms, which could include
reversing the discourses marking them as primitive and embracing a primitive or specifically Native sexual
nature. Non-Native queers of color long remained marginal to such projects or critiqued them, as their
participants or as the organizers of queer of color coalitions. But over time non-Natives were able to form
shared identities and movements to claim modern sexual citizenship in the settler state. Under such
conditions, queer movements can naturalize settlement and assume a homonormative and national form that
may be read specifically as settler homonationalism.
ADI
Critical Lab
16
Biopolitics K
The biopolitics inherent in discriminatory immigration requirements are the result of an
otherizing hegemonic state that uses traditional power structures to subjugate minorities
and immigrants.
Luibheid, Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, 2002
(Eithne, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, p. 43-44, CPG)
These procedures, which involved elicitation of biographical data, photography, and the creation of case files, transformed
the relationship between the immigrant Chinese woman and the immigration-control bureaucracy into one of discipline and
subjection within sexualized, racialized, gendered, and classist parameters. Beginning with biographical data, we see that any
Chinese woman wanting to enter the United States after 175 was compelled to provide details of her life to a degree that was
unprecedented in immigration control. Furthermore, she had to provide details specifically related to her sexual “virtue”, which
were minutely scrutinized and analyzed. Foucault has suggested that the drive to elicit biographical details
from ordinary people marked an important shift in relations of power. Traditionally, powerful and
important people were the ones from whom biographical details were elicited, recorded, and
scrutinized. But in disciplinary societies, it was society’s “Others” – the poor, colored, female, and
criminal – who were required to provide biographical details. This change did not, by any means,
reflect a leveling of the social field. On the contrary, such detailed “description [became] a means of
control and a method of domination.” For instance, if Chinese women refused to provide details of their lives for
official scrutiny, they were denied the possibility of immigrating.
Foucault draws attention to the ways that the calculated manipulation of spatial relations is integral
to disciplinary societies, writing poetically, “stones can make people docile and knowable.” In the case of
Chinese women seeking to immigrate to the United States, biographical details were elicited only after they had been corralled into
carefully controlled spaces. The first two interrogations were carried out in the Consul’s and Harbor Master’s offices, and on their
terms. The third interrogation took place immediately before the ship sailed, in a manner designed to ensure that the woman who
answered the officials’ questions “correctly” was also the one who sailed for San Francisco (rather than a substitute being sent in her
place). On arrival in San Francisco, the women were confined on the ship to ensure that Colonel Bee “[got] access to them before
anyone else.” Only after answering questions to Bee’s satisfaction were the women permitted to join relatives and friends waiting on
the dock. The strategic control of space that Chinese women endured was intended by officials to generate the “truth” of their sexual
pasts and likely sexual futures. Spatial control was designed to minimize opportunities for women to be “coached” about what to say
to officials, to avoid substitutions, and most likely to provide women who had been kidnapped with an opportunity to speak openly
outside the hearing of their procurers. Yet, as Benson Tong suggests, the likelihood of kidnapped women speaking openly to an
unknown official was small (though it did sometimes happen). Furthermore, the whole process was shaped by the larger, explicitly
racist assumption that “a Chinaman prefers a lie to the truth” and that Chinese women were equally dishonest. As Stuart Creighton
Miller describes, a founding image among Western traders, diplomats, and missionaries was that the Chinese were dishonest, tricky,
and sneaky, and this image led to the development of exhaustive regimes of questioning, conducted through strictly controlling space
and minimizing contact with other Chinese people, which were believed to be the best way to elicit “truth” from Chinese
immigrants. Judy Yong underscores that this process was “different not only in degree but in kind” from that enduring by other
immigrants. The process was not just racist but also racializing, in the sense of helping to literally construct the Chinese as a distinct
and racial sense of helping to literally construct the Chinese as a distinct and racialized group. After passage of the Page Law,
Chinese women became subjected to an early form of this racializing process.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
The biopolitical exclusion of homosexuals is a direct result of the policing nature of the
current immigration policy. Checkpoints and the proposed affirmative regulations reduce
people and identities to categories that can never be truly representative.
Luibheid, Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, 2002
(Eithne, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, p. 79-80, CPG)
According to Foucault, discourses actually construct the very sexualities around which policing is
then organized. This certainly proves to be the case when we examine how immigrants came to be
designated excludable on the basis of homosexuality. Since there is no easy way to differentiate lesbians and gay
men from heterosexuals, what led certain people to be singled out? On looking through case histories, it appears
that immigrants came to INS attention as possible lesbians and gay men on the basis of checkpoints
that were set up within the immigration process. These checkpoints served as particularly dense points
where dominant institutions constructed (and individuals contested) the possible meanings of lesbian
or gay identity and who should be included within these categories.
In thinking through the operation of these checkpoints, we must avoid two common and related mistakes. First, we should
not imagine that coherent, predefined lesbian or gay identities always existed among immigrant applicants, and that the
checkpoints simply captured these preformed “queer” subjects. To frame the issue in this way is to miss the myriad ways that
these checkpoints often regulated the terms by which formation of identity occurs.
Second, and conversely, we have to conceptualize lesbian and gay identities as being never reducible to
these checkpoints. Though the checkpoints were dense power points in the dominant culture’s production
and policing of homosexuality, not all (potential) lesbian/gay subjects were equally affected. This is
because lesbian and gay identities are also inflected by race, class, gender, cultural, and religious features
that defy the possibility that there can be any uniform queer identity; equally, the checkpoints themselves
reflected some degree of bias, such that they captured males more than females, and Latin Americans and
Europeans more than Asians. Consequently, in looking at who was likely to become ensnared by these checkpoints, we
should never imagine that this was the totality of the kinds of lesbian, gay, or “queer” identities that were passing into the United
States.
ADI
Critical Lab
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Biopolitics K
Foucault’s theory of biopower has direct consequences for any immigration reform in the
United States. The importance of sexuality in society has not dissipated, and as Foucault
suggested: the dominance of the affirmative will continue to silence the sexual bodies of
immigrants.
Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the New School, 1995
(Ana L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, p.
2-3, CPG)
This sort of passion for Foucault's general strategies is apparent in readings of his specific texts as well -- particularly in
treatments of volume 1 of The History of Sexuality. His book engages a disarmingly simple thesis: if in nineteenth-
century Europe sexuality was indeed something to be silenced, hidden, and repressed, why was there
such a proliferating discourse about it? Foucault argues that we have gotten the story wrong: that the
"image of the imperial prude...emblazoned on our restrained, mute and hypocritical sexuality" (HS:3)
misses what that regime of sexuality was all about: not restriction of a biological instinct, a "stubborn
drive" to be overcome, nor an "exterior domain to which power is applied" (HS:152). Sexuality was "a
result and an instrument of power's design," a social construction of a historical moment (HS:152).
For Foucault, sexuality is not opposed to and subversive of power. On the contrary, sexuality is a "dense
transfer point" of power, charged with "instrumentality" (HS:103). Thus, "far from being repressed in
[nineteenth century] society [sexuality] was constantly aroused" (HS:148). This is no dismissal of repression as a "ruse" of the
nineteenth-century bourgeois order or a denial that sex was prohibited and masked, as critics and followers have sometimes
claimed (HS:12). Foucault rejected, not the fact of repression, but the notion that it was the organizing principle of sexual
discourse, that repression could account for its silences and prolific emanations. At the heart of his enquiry are neither sexual
practices nor the moral codes that have given rise to them. Foucault's questions are of a very different order. Why has there been
such a protracted search for the "truth" about sex? Why should an identification and assessment of our real and hidden selves be
sought in our sexual desires, fantasies, and behavior? Not least why did that search become such a riveting obsession of the
nineteenth-century bourgeois order, and why does it remain so tenacious today?
His answer is one that reconceives both the notion of power and how sexuality is tied to it. For Foucault, the history of
sexuality is defined, not as a Freudian account of Victorian prudery would have it, by injunctions against talk about sex and
specific sexual couplings in the bourgeois family, but by patterned discursive incitements and stimulations that facilitated the
penetration of social and self-disciplinary regimes into the most intimate domains of modern life. Nor was that discourse initially
designed to sublimate the sexual energy of exploited classes into productive labor, but first and foremost to set out the
distinctions of bourgeois identity rooted in the sexual politics of the home. Central to Foucault's account of
proliferating sexualities and discourses about them is the emergence of "biopower," a political
technology that "brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life" (HS:143). In its specific nineteenth-entury form,
the disciplining of individual bodies and the regulations of the life processes of aggregate human
populations "constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was
deployed" (HS:139). Within this schema, technologies of sex played a critical role; sex occupied the discursive interface,
linking the life of the individual to the life of the species as a whole (HS:146).
While we have caught the gist of that message well -- that discourses of sexuality and specific forms of power are
inextricably bound, engagement with The History of Sexuality has been more formal than substantive, more suggestive than
concrete. This is not to say that the parallels between the management of sexuality and the management of empire have been left
unexplored. 5 Many students of colonialism have been quick to note that another crucial "Victorian" project -- ruling colonies -entailed colonizing both bodies and minds. A number of studies, including my own, have turned on a similar premise that
the discursive management of the sexual practices of colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things.
We have been able to show how discourses of sexuality at once classified colonial subjects into distinct
human kinds, while policing the domestic recesses of imperial rule. 6 But again, such readings take seriously the
fact of a relationship between colonial power and the discourses of sexuality, without confirming or seriously challenging the
specific chronologies Foucault offers, his critique of the repressive hypothesis, or the selective genealogical maps that his work
suggests.
ADI
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Biopolitics K
Link: Agriculture
The biopolitical nature of the U.S.-Mexican border has fundamentally altered the economic
opportunities for migrants and minority citizens. Hegemonic whiteness within the
affirmative’s agricultural visa plan only continues these harms and does not eradicate the
harms of the status quo.
Rowe, Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa, 2004 (Aimee Marie Carrillo, “Whose
‘America’?: The Politics of Rhetoric and Space in the Formation of U.S. Nationalism”, Radical History Review,
Volume: 89, p. 119-120, CPG)
The U.S.-Mexican border region has historically been a highly contested space, revealing the
competing and converging needs of capitalism, imperialist expansionism, and a U.S. nationalism deeply embedded in
whiteness. The United States annexed this region (California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas,
Oklahoma, and New Mexico) from Mexico following the U.S.-Mexican war. At that time, there existed among AngloAmericans a significant "All Mexico" sentiment, which held that the United States should annex the whole of Mexico. The
argument against this move was based not in a critique of its imperialist foundations but rather in the anxiety around the
(in)capacity of Anglo-American society to incorporate such large numbers of nonwhite, non-English-speaking people.18 The
history of the southwestern United States, "the borderlands," has been and remains a site of Anglo uncertainty that seeks to strike
a balance between competing hegemonic desires: the impulse toward expansion, the protection of a material space, and the
perceived need to assimilate the others who populate that space.
The shifting articulation of this border region produces a range of social relations, differentiated mobilities, and lived
experiences for its inhabitants. The transfer of "ownership" of this space following annexation literally reconfigured its
meanings—in terms of the state policies through which the space was being governed, the meanings of land and ownership, the
definition of citizenship, and the ways in which work and industry were organized. The transfer of the Southwest from
Mexican to U.S. territory redefined the spatial mobilities and the types of activities that became
possible within that space. For instance, "Mexican Americans experienced vast structural displacement
as the local economy shifted rapidly from a pastoral one, based predominantly on ranching and
subsistence farming, to a capitalist one, increasingly based on commercial agriculture, trade, and later,
large-scale infrastructural development of the [California] region."19 As Martí's concern over the annexation of Latin
America foreshadowed, the changing conceptualization of the border region radically alters the lived
experiences of its inhabitants, demarcating who can move within a certain space and under what
conditions, as well as the nature and agency of the forms of mobility that become possible for
differently situated social groups. This [End Page 120] means that the cultural production of space creates the condition
of possibility for a range of lives and livelihoods that might be possible for any group of people living within and/or moving
through that space. Space is not inert, but rather a site of highly contested meanings with tremendous consequences for those
who occupy it.
Such meanings carry over into contemporary border politics in the forms of the increasingly militarized U.S.-Mexican
border and the brutalization of migrant populations. These are the material effects of anti-immigration rhetoric as it provides
certain meanings to the border region. The hegemonic status of whiteness, historically and today, is central to the
process through which the current articulation of this border space takes on a material force that
preserves the white space bounded and enabled by it. The proliferation of popular discourses addressing population
shifts in the nation as a whole and within this border region expresses a tremendous anxiety around the traditionally hegemonic
national status of whiteness. The potential of a "white minority" calls into question the viability of a white
nation under a democratic regime, marking the apartheid system that undergirds the logic of the white
national space. At the same time, the fear that whites would become a minority brings into sharp relief
the contradiction of white domination through consent within an allegedly democratic nation—in
which all voices are purported to be equal. If whites were outnumbered, could they maintain social
control within an allegedly representational system of governance?
ADI
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20
Biopolitics K
The biopolitical nature of the current visa and immigration system has fundamentally
altered the lives of migrant and minority agriculture workers. They are excluded to the
point of invisibility, an impact that goes completely unnoticed while the cogs of America’s
economy reap billions of dollars while they suffer.
Huacuja, Asst. Prof. of Latin American Art at the University of Dayton, 2003
(Judith L., “Borderlands Critical Subjectivity in Recent Chicana Art”, Frontiers: A Journal of Womens
Studies, Volume: 24(2-3), p. 104-105, CPG)
For example, community justice concerns are well represented in Yolanda Lopez's Woman's Work is Never Done:
Dolores Huerta , 1995 (fig. 1). The poster commemorates the efforts of Delores Huerta, cofounder and first vice president of
The United Farms Workers Union (UFW), and the efforts of other female laborers to organize in protest against unsafe working
conditions and unjust wages in California's abundant agricultural regions. Huerta's work with the self-help group known as the
Community Service Organization represents a legacy of Latina/Chicana social activism that reaches back to the 1950s.
Yolanda Lopez's art pictures a class of women at risk for being marginalized, women who because of
their migrant-labor status are relegated to a borderlands means of existence. Fearful of detection by
immigration authorities, the women are forced to maintain a nearly-invisible profile while working in
the United States. This profile of seclusion allows U.S. agricultural industries to benefit from migrant
labor while dishonoring wage, labor, and health laws.
In Yolanda Lopez's print, female agricultural workers wear heavy veils, gloves, and masks in a futile
effort to protect their bodies from harsh and even lethal chemicals used in agriculture. The shrouds
render these women anonymous. The risk is that we, the viewers, read the images of these women as
unidentifiable, insignificant, or as nonentities. However, in the background of the poster we see Huerta raising a
banner for workers' rights. One of the workers, in solidarity with all the women, raises her arm to signify that all are in support
of the union. On hats and shirtsleeves, they bear the UFW logo. In this instance, women work to resist the capitalist tendency to
employ bodies as machine parts, useful only for the maximization of commodity production. In [End Page 105] their fight for
justice in the workplace, the women transform burdensome protective attire into proof of the atrocities visited upon their bodies.
Theorist Michel Foucault points to the ways in which institutions such as corporate agriculture
and mass media craft positions of strength or of disempowerment through representations, pictures,
and stories that human subjects occupy. More recently, social scientists have also argued that representations, stories,
and works of art are discursive objects that carry with them the possibility of upsetting subject positions. They argue that
representations have the power to convey "efficacy beliefs," that is, beliefs that "shape expectations about one's own actions, the
affective and unconscious dimensions to our sense of agency." 4
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Migrant workers and minorities have been pivotal to the success of the United States
agricultural industry. This success has come at a price, and has driven a deep divide within
the public on the immigration issue.
Ueda, Prof. of History at Tufts University, 2006
(Reed, A Companion to American Immigration, p. 417, CPG)
As the doors closed against European immigration, Mexican immigration began to emerge as a
new and important source of labor. The irrigation revolution of the late nineteenth century turned
many regions of the American west into some of the most prosperous agricultural producing regions in
the world, especially California. The borders between the United States and Mexico were open to people on both sides
who could pay a nominal backbone of commercialized agriculture production in such states as California, Texas, and Florida.
Many who saw the Mexican migrant workers as a drain on public relief funds during the Great Depression advocated and secure
their mass repatriation. But World War II presented a different scenario when manpower shortages created by mass conscription
induced the federal government to make an agreement with the Mexican government (that lasted until 1964) to allow
agricultural workers from Mexico, known as braceros, to work temporarily in the United States.
An economy so closely tied to an international labor market has always had a double-edge.
Immigrant labor historically played a decisive role in shaping the US economy, especially during its
formative stages. Popular opinion often split over the need for immigrant workers. The demand for
immigrants from the drive for business competiveness, on one hand, has been counterposed against
popular fears that they caused social complications and expansive welfare policies. Conflicting views
over the impact of immigrant labor continued into the post-industrial era when American labor
increasingly competed on several fronts on a worldwide stage. In some traditional industries, such as
agriculture, residential housing construction, domestic service, and restaurant and food service, immigrant workers
filled a growing domestic labor need. The flow of immigrant workers has made these businesses
profitable, but it has also generated heated debates over fears that is has been accompanied by the rise
of illegal or irregular immigration and by uncontrolled borders.
In newer financial and high-tech industries, multinational corporations have moved plants and offices outside the United
States to seek highly specialized and yet less expensive white-collar employees overseas. This so-called “out-sourcing” is a type
of reverse immigration: a pattern where jobs “immigrate” to laborers who otherwise might have immigrated to the United States.
Just as Nike and Zenith workers found out a few decades ago that their jobs had moves to Southeast Asia and Latin America,
employees of AT&T and Oracle are now replaced by operations in foreign countries. The globalization of labor, of
which immigration is one component, has brought into collision diverse economic interests and forms
of competition at various domestic and international levels. This process has challenged the imagination of public
policies and domestic employment protections.
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Biopolitics K
The dualistic biopolitical nature of American society has fractured the identity of migrant
and immigrant groups. Society uses them for economic growth, while otherizing them out
of the hegemonic majority. This fractured identity is a direct result of state action and
clearly demonstrates the dehumanizing nature of the current immigration and economic
systems.
Chavez, Asst. Prof. of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine, 1991
(Leo R., “Outside the Imagined Community: Undocumented Settlers and Experiences of
Incorporation”, American Ethnologist, Volume: 18(2), p. 262-263, CPG)
Undocumented immigrants, that is, are not generally regarded as members of the community; they
are society's "Others," who, as Michel Foucault (1970:xxiv) notes, "for a given culture, [are] at once interior
and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcize their interior danger)." As a consequence, the
larger society often endows the identity, character, and behavior of the illegal alien with mythic
qualities. And, like most mythicization, this helps justify and give meaning to the social and economic
order. The larger society's beliefs and attitudes concerning undocumented immigrants are an expression of
what Antonio Gramsci calls hegemony:
The permeation throughout civil society ... of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs, morality, etc. that is in
one way or another supportive of the established order and the class interests that dominate it.... To the extent that
this prevailing consciousness is internalized by the broad masses, it becomes part of "common sense." [Greer 1982,
quoted in Martin 1987:23]
The "common sense" view of undocumented immigrants stresses their transience, so affirming their ostensible lack of
commitment to the community's well being. As "illegal aliens" they are not legitimate members of the
community. The "illegal" component of this term underscores the fact that they exist outside the "legal" system that
constitutes society. "Alien" is synonymous with "outsider," "foreigner," and "stranger." As criminals, or
potential criminals, they exist outside the laws that govern the behavior of lawful citizens. In short, the
undocumented immigrant's image consists of a conglomeration of negative values and missing qualities
(even "undocumented" stresses the lack of documentation).
The hegemonic beliefs and attitudes that define "illegal aliens" must be taken into account when one is considering the
immigrants' incorporation into society. Although undocumented immigrants may settle in U.S. communities,
their incorporation into the life of the larger society does not depend solely on their own actions and
perceptions. A society that is unwilling to "imagine" undocumented settlers as part of the existing
society places limits on their incorporation. Undocumented immigrants are, for example, the targets of state
policies that limit, or attempt to limit, their participation in state programs such as health care,
education, and housing (Rumbaut, Chavez, Moser, Pickwell, and Wishik 1988; Chavez 1986, 1988). The state also
attempts to limit their ability to work. Agents of the INS raid places where undocumented immigrants are suspected of
working, and Congress passes laws that make it illegal to hire undocumented workers (Chavez, Flores, and Lopez-Garza 1990;
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives 1986). Even when not working, undocumented immigrants face the constant threat of
apprehension and actual physical removal from the country (Chavez and Flores 1988; Chavez, Flores, and Lopez-Garza 1989)..
The state makes it very clear that undocumented immigrants are unwelcome, actively seeking to
restrict their economic opportunities and discourage their continued presence in the country
At the same time, undocumented workers are part of the local economy. Employers view
undocumented laborers as dependable and hardworking, and some industries have come to rely on
their labor (Cornelius 1988). Obviously, the larger society harbors complex and contradictory attitudes about undocumented
immigrants. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said points out how such oppositions can form part of the image a
society creates of the "Other." Said argues, as Jackson (1989:150) notes, that the "relationship between East and West is
not 262 American ethnologist a purely imaginative relation, but one that is based on very real material foundations, including the
history of French, British and American imperialism." Like the West's ideas about the East, the larger society's views of "illegal
aliens" are not myths
merely in the sense that they may be false. The generally negative, but also contradictory, views of undocumented
immigrants serve a purpose; they obscure the undocumented immigrants' contributions to the
economic well being of the communities in which they settle.
Consequently, undocumented immigrants exist as marginal persons, as outsiders. Why, then, do undocumented
immigrants settle in an environment with such obvious obstacles to their full incorporation? And do they themselves ever feel a
part of the community?
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The biopolitical nature of the current visa and immigration system has fundamentally
altered the lives of migrant and minority agriculture workers. They are excluded to the
point of invisibility, an impact that goes completely unnoticed while the cogs of America’s
economy reap billions of dollars while they suffer.
Huacuja, Asst. Prof. of Latin American Art at the University of Dayton, 2003
(Judith L., “Borderlands Critical Subjectivity in Recent Chicana Art”, Frontiers: A Journal of Womens
Studies, Volume: 24(2-3), p. 104-105, CPG)
For example, community justice concerns are well represented in Yolanda Lopez's Woman's Work is Never Done:
Dolores Huerta , 1995 (fig. 1). The poster commemorates the efforts of Delores Huerta, cofounder and first vice president of
The United Farms Workers Union (UFW), and the efforts of other female laborers to organize in protest against unsafe working
conditions and unjust wages in California's abundant agricultural regions. Huerta's work with the self-help group known as the
Community Service Organization represents a legacy of Latina/Chicana social activism that reaches back to the 1950s.
Yolanda Lopez's art pictures a class of women at risk for being marginalized, women who because of
their migrant-labor status are relegated to a borderlands means of existence. Fearful of detection by
immigration authorities, the women are forced to maintain a nearly-invisible profile while working in
the United States. This profile of seclusion allows U.S. agricultural industries to benefit from migrant
labor while dishonoring wage, labor, and health laws.
In Yolanda Lopez's print, female agricultural workers wear heavy veils, gloves, and masks in a futile
effort to protect their bodies from harsh and even lethal chemicals used in agriculture. The shrouds
render these women anonymous. The risk is that we, the viewers, read the images of these women as
unidentifiable, insignificant, or as nonentities. However, in the background of the poster we see Huerta raising a
banner for workers' rights. One of the workers, in solidarity with all the women, raises her arm to signify that all are in support
of the union. On hats and shirtsleeves, they bear the UFW logo. In this instance, women work to resist the capitalist tendency to
employ bodies as machine parts, useful only for the maximization of commodity production. In [End Page 105] their fight for
justice in the workplace, the women transform burdensome protective attire into proof of the atrocities visited upon their
bodies.Theorist Michel Foucault points to the ways in which institutions such as corporate agriculture
and mass media craft positions of strength or of disempowerment through representations, pictures,
and stories that human subjects occupy. More recently, social scientists have also argued that representations, stories,
and works of art are discursive objects that carry with them the possibility of upsetting subject positions. They argue that
representations have the power to convey "efficacy beliefs," that is, beliefs that "shape expectations about one's own actions, the
affective and unconscious dimensions to our sense of agency." 4
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Link: US/Mexico Border
Citizenship, visas, borders, and other immigration policies inherent in the affirmative plan
reinforce the destructive harms of biopolitics. Agriculture workers are used and exploited
only to be turned away, silenced, and forgotten by the United States biopolitical machine.
Dejanovic, PhD Candidate in the Dept. of Political Science at York University, 2008
(Sanja, “Invisible Bodies, Illusionary Securing: The Performance of Illegality at the US-Mexico Border”,
Violent Interventions: Selected Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the York Centre for
International and Security Studies, p. 89-92, CPG)
Even while Mexican undocumented migrants demonstrate a degree of agency by virtue of their mobility, and through
awareness that such mobility defies their exclusion, their subjectivity and (non)political status is greatly determined by the
US socio-legal framework. In other words, the sovereign state designates the nature of their mobility before
the illegal migrant approaches the border. It is by configuring migrants as illegal that the US is able to
station devices of disciplining at the US-Mexico border, which is itself actualized and performed
through the mobility of both illegal and legal bodies. The border is, then, a technology of biopower , a
threshold if you will, that is performed through the entry of bodies that are regulated through a
‘disciplinary partitioning’ between legal and illegal.39 I argue that through such disciplining,
undocumented workers are made docile; they become “both a productive body and a subjugated
body.”40 I further propose that illegal migrants internalize, and are conscious of, the subjectivity generated through mechanisms of
surveillance. I have thus far argued that state governmentality or the ‘art of governance,’ is contingent on biopower, that is, the ability to
manipulate and control human mobility and life. Elaborating on Foucault’s concepts, Judith Butler proposes that in spaces of
exception, such as borderlands, where standard laws can be disregarded, sovereign power and the ‘art of
governance’- a form of capillary power, are intertwined through techniques of disciplining.41 As proposed
earlier, governmentality depends on the state as the sovereign body that produces knowledge about
subjects, and that solidifies and normalizes such subject formation through routine performativity and
operability in border spaces.42 At the core of the anatomy of disciplining is then performance of social
scripts that hinge on the sovereign state’s grasp of the physiology of the human body .43 Foucault
argues that such awareness of the physiology of the body empowers the state to “have an immediate
hold upon it; invest it, mark it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, [and] to
emit signs.”44 With regard to border politics, exclusion through illegality is a marker that dehumanizes,
because it partitions, along with other apparatuses of disciplining, towards the extraction of labor power from the body, and the
molding of the body into an economically efficient unit.45 In other words, devices of disciplining at the border are not meant to convert
illegal foreign bodies into nationals. Rather, the objectified body of the Mexican migrant represents an
extractable and unlimited labor resource that contributes to the reproduction of American life . How is
the migrant body, however, made docile? Behind the state’s overarching power over the body is a twofold aim; to structure its optimal
functioning within a system of capillary power relations, and to make it vulnerable to external malleability. One of the ways in which the
docility of the body is normalized is through an internalization of surveillance and disciplining in times of mobility, with the state no
longer having to use direct forms of coercion to manage and contain it.46 I have argued, however, that in spaces of exception, which are
considered extra-legal nodes that sort citizens from non-nationals, both direct and indirect forms of control are evident.47 This is
precisely because the border,interpreted as a ‘theatre of an enforcement crisis,’ is a stage that hosts spectacles of securing through
militarization, technologization, and surveillance. While such devices of disciplining are largely stationed at highly populated areas,
they, along with the illegal and criminal status that is projected onto migrants, are internalized in the form of self-surveillance. I argue
that such internalization of self-surveillance in moments of mobility is pivotal to subjugating migrant bodies. A number of authors
portray borders as apparatuses of social sorting that operate through the inclusion/exclusion binary, and manipulate the movement of
migrants.48 In more recent years, especially after 9/11, these filtering systems have become increasingly
discriminatory, “identifying, classifying, and managing groups sorted by levels of dangerousness,” and
by physiological traits.49 Techniques of surveillance, including; electronic databases, passports, ID
cards, cameras, visas, motion sensors, and others, are biometric mechanisms employed by the state to
bring growing populations under surveillance by converting the body into a ‘password.’ Those that have
the incorrect code are denied access. But, of course, the state controls or manipulates both the code and the devices by which passwords
are deciphered. Apart from verbal confirmations of identity, the scanning of retinas, fingerprints, facial profiles, and bodily dimensions,
are but a few of the methods by which the body confesses before the sovereign.51 That is, the body, rather than the voice, primarily
confesses at the border. Identities are thus written on, or ‘bio-politically tattooed,’52 by the state on both
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Dejanovic, 2008 CONTINUES>
foreign and national bodies, for the purposes of ranking them and disciplining them as un/healthy,
un/productive, un/desired, inferior, and/or delinquent.53 Underlying such ‘bio-political tattooing’ is
thus an encoded evaluation of the‘moral worth’ and economic use-value of migrants. Along with this is the
classification of bodies for the purposes of re-bordering and ‘risk management,’ which is advanced by sentiments of fear, suspicion,
resentment, and xenophobia of foreign bodies.55 The biometric, and seemingly neutral, selection of bodies based
around ‘race,’ gender, and socio-economic status, amongst other rankings, is pivotal to raising a
virtual firewall around the territory of the nation-state as to obstruct the entry of criminalized bodies
posing risk. This virtual firewall is also upheld by a number of high-tech gadgets, including ground sensors, search lights,
helicopters, spotter planes, and cameras, which re-enact a spectacle of securing by ‘holding the line’56 between civilized and ‘third
world’ peoples.57 As has been argued, such high-tech gadgets and biometric mechanisms of control generate a spectacle of securing at
the border. This spectacle relies heavily on the (re)production and performativity of subjectivities, especially those that are deemed to be
high risk or illegal.
The affirmative’s continued use of borders demonstrates their continued biopolitical
exclusion and dehumanization of cultures and people.
Dejanovic, PhD Candidate in the Dept. of Political Science at York University, 2008 (Sanja,
“Invisible Bodies, Illusionary Securing: The Performance of Illegality at the US-Mexico Border”, Violent
Interventions: Selected Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the York Centre for International and
Security Studies, p. 82, CPG)
The second part offers a more proximal look at the way in which the border is performed and (re)produced. Drawing from Michel
Foucault, I argue that the US-Mexico border is a technology of biopower and a type of threshold where entry
of bodies is surveilled and controlled through a ‘disciplinary partitioning’ of citizens from foreigners,
and legal from illegal migrants. While I do not go into the workings of the US shadow economy, I propose that
disciplinary partitioning is pivotal to converting illegal or undocumented migrants into docile and
economically efficient units rather than nationals or citizens. As such, I begin to explore how borderlands bring
greater visibility to the way in which neo-liberalism manipulates foreign bodies in movement.
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Link: Globalization/Heg/Neo-Lib
The discourse of competitiveness is used to legitimatize policy actions through threat
construction
Bristow, School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, 05
(Gillian Bristow, Professor at the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, “Everyone’s a ‘winner’:
problematising the discourse of regional competitiveness”, page 289-291, 4-13-05,
http://joeg.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/285)
The evolutionary, ‘survival of the fittest’ basis of the regional competitiveness discourse clearly
resonates with this evaluative culture. The discourse of competitiveness strongly appeals to the
stratum of policy makers and analysts who can use it to justify what they are doing and/or to find
out how well they are doing it relative to their ‘rivals’. This helps explain the interest in trying to
measure regional competitiveness and the development of composite indices and league tables. It also
helps explain why particular elements of the discourse have assumed particular significance—output
indicators of firm performance are much easier to compare and rank on a single axis than are indicators
relating to institutional behaviour, for example. This in turn points to a central paradox in measures of
regional competitiveness. The key ingredients of firm competitiveness and regional prosperity are
increasingly perceived as lying with assets such as knowledge and information which are, by definition,
intangible or at least difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. The obsession with performance
measurement and the tendency to reduce complex variables to one, easily digestible number brings
a ‘kind of blindness’ with it as to what is really important (Boyle, 2001, 60)—in this case, how to
improve regional prosperity. Thus while a composite index number of regional competitiveness will
attract widespread attention in the media and amongst policymakers and development agencies, the
difficulty presented by such a measure is in knowing what exactly needs to be targeted for appropriate
remedial action. All of this suggests that regional competitiveness is more than simply the linguistic
expression of powerful exogenous interests. It has also become rhetoric. In other words, regional
competitiveness is deployed in a strategic and persuasive way, often in conjunction with other
discourses (notably globalisation) to legitimate specific policy initiatives and courses of action. The
rhetoric of regional competitiveness serves a useful political purpose in that it is easier to justify
change or the adoption of a particular course of policy action by reference to some external threat
that makes change seem inevitable. It is much easier for example, for politicians to argue for the
removal of supply-side rigidities and flexible hire-and-fire workplace rules by suggesting that there is no
alternative and that jobs would be lost anyway if productivity improvement was not achieved. Thus, ‘the
language of external competitiveness. . .provides a rosy glow of shared endeavour and shared
enemies which can unite captains of industry and representatives of the shop floor in the same big
tent’ (Turner, 2001, 40). In this sense it is a discourse which provides some shared sense of meaning
and a means of legitimising neo-liberalism rather than a material focus on the actual improvement
of economic welfare.
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Link: Poverty
Attempting to narrate for the poor establishes an us vs. them dichotomy that oversimplifies
political and economic context and reinforces stereotypes
Schram, prof social theory and policy @ Bryn Mawr College, 95
(Sanford F. Schram, professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College, 1995, words of
welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty, pg. 46-49 “According
to Michel…in the face of grinding poverty.”)
According to Michel Foucault, most social statistics operate as the science of the state, aggregating social
practices into reified populations, whose mean and range serve to define, rather than reflect, norms and
margins.27 Statistical work most often is used then to identify repetitions that can be used to suggest
ways for regulating individuated behavior to conform to such norms. Yet ethnography also risks
replicating the myth of individua- tion that underlies social statistics. Glazer was hoping for a more
up-close and personal representation that would allow him to capture the "culture of poverty."" The
researcher, like the tourist or the fieldworker in an exotic land, would get to know the "alien
other" so as to see how they were and were not like "us." Yet the "us/them" divide implicit in such
a formulation reencodes the opportunity to read "the poor" as the negative referent they have been
historically, especially for liberal, individualist, capitalist moder- nity, with its insistence on
achieving through the market the identity of a self-sufficient autonomous self. Reading the poor in
this way revisits the opportunity to say good things about "us" by contrast with "them!' Ethnography of the poor, in Glazer's hands, would risk becoming a reassuring tale of how the "not poor"
are to be understood." Patricia Cough's critique of ethnography underscores how it glosses over its own
animating impulses to make sense of the viewing subject by inter- preting the viewed object.°
Ethnography's realism backgrounds the psy- choanalytic subtext that helps construct the narrative used to
depict those who are viewed. Ethnography's narrative subtext can be read to be about the ethnographer's
attempt to break with tradition, authority, established knowledge, or ascendant empirical understandings
by showing how his or her ethnography makes an authoritative, original, genuinely new contribu- tion.
This "oedipal" struggle invites the reader to identify with the narra- tive's subtextual insistence to
make empirical claims that suggest that theviewed object can be best understood in coherent terms
as an "other" from the particularviewpoint of the viewing subject. It is for this reason that realist
narrativity can be said to function ideologically. Realist narrativity is ideological for making invisible the
relays it produces between the terms it opposes. Especially important are the relays it produces between
those oppositions upon which bourgeois individualism depends, such as self and society, nature and
environment, sexuality and economy, private and public ....
If, then, it is to be concluded that
ethnography is informed with an oedipal logic of realist narrativity, developed through the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, it is because ethnography treats the subject's struggle for selfknowledge as a struggle to obtain factual representations ofempirical knowledge." The riddle of
how knowledge is constructed is not solved by trying to make the false choice between allegedly
factually objective statistics and authentically pure experience. Interrogating perspective must be
matched by accounting for position, and both must appreciate the political impli-cations of how
discourse narrates what is represented .12 If ethnography reenacts the psychoanalytic subtext of realist
narratives, including other forms of empirical science, it also must address the positional issue of who
gets to do ethnography on whom. In particular, to choose just one case of particu- lar relevance for
studying welfare, what is at work when white, male, mid- dle-class social scientists are trying through
ethnography to make sense of poor women of color? Ethnography as VoyeurismGlazer was right that
ethnographic work would follow in his wake; how- ever, he hardly could predict that this genre would
gain as much popularity as it has. In just the past few years, there have been numerous works using
ethnographic depictions of the poor, including, to name just a few, Leslie Dunbar's The Common Interest,
Susan Sheehan's Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair, John Schwarz and Thomas Volgy's The
Forgotten Americans, Mark Rank's Living on the Edge, Mitchell Duneier's Slim's Table, Nicholas
Lemann's The Promised Land, Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, and William Julius
Wilson's work on inner-city African American poor fam- ilies in Chicago." The last three of these in
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particular highlight the limita- tions of such work. Nicholas Lernann, born and raised in New Orleans,
offers a book that moves back and forth between policy machinations in Washington, D.C., and the
changing fortunes of black families moving from Clarksdale, Mis- sissippi, to Chicago, Illinois.
Revised after earlier articles received criticism, the book jettisons an explicit "culture of poverty"
argument.-14 Instead, by tracing migration from Clarksdale to Chicago and back, Lemann makes a
more understated argument (about two-thirds of the way through the text) nd implies that the legacy of
the sharecropping system broke the AfricanAmerican family and set it on the road to ruin.35 This cultural
explanation is almost smothered by rich narratives of the families he studied. Their lives are hard, Only
some of those who return South seem to get a reprieve. How this narrative underwrites the
sharecropping thesis anymore than the bad statistical work of previous studies is left unexplained.
Racism, eco- nomic dislocation, and political marginalization are mentioned, but the narrative
continues to suggest that sharecropping and migration from the rural South to the urban North
were critical factors in making poor, inner- city African American neighborhoods unlivable.
Instead, Lemann remains intent on telling a tale of migration about southern sharecroppers, all the
while backgrounding his own southern roots, which may very wen drive his insistence to tell a tale
of how the South shaped the lives of those who left and those who returned.36 Alex Kotlowitz's
ethnography of two young boys, Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers, from the Henry Homer Homes in
Chicago is a withering tale of childhood hardship in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United
States. Kotlowitz stresses the psychic cost of growing up amid consistent violence, crime, drug abuse and
drug trafficking, clashes with the police, and grinding poverty. In a moving narrative, Kotlowitz's
preoccupation with the physical violence of the immediate neighborhood de- mphasizes the structural
violence the broader society has inflicted on such neighbor- hoods. Racism, economic dislocation, and
even bureaucratic insensitivity are mentioned, but the violent nature of community life is the story line.
Kotlowitz cares for the boys he studied; he continues to visit them and pays for their private schooling. In
the book's preface, Kotlowitz notes that the children's mother, LaJoe, had a hope, which Kotlowitz
shared, that a "book about the children would make us all hear, that it would make us all stop and
listen."37 His work therefore represents an attempt to overcome the silences that surround the
deterioration of poor inner-city neighbor- hoods. Yet Kotlowitz's uncontextualized and close reading
of the psychic costs of growing up in a violent neighborhood allows his work to be ap- propriated
by white readers to tell other stories. They are free to use it for self-rationalizations that reinforce
stereotypical notions about poor inner- city African Americans. Kotlowitz's narrative tells white
audiences what they are already predisposed to hear-depravity persists in the inner city."' The
white outside observer chronicles the inside of the alien black culturewith- out suggesting how the
outside is implicated in constructing the inside. bell hooks provides an important point about the need
of even the pro- gressive, antiracist white documentarian to identity himself and the posi- tion he adopts:
"As critical intervention it allows for the recognition that progressive white people who are anti-racist
might be able to understand the way in which their cultural practice reiriscribes white supremacy
with- out promoting paralyzing guilt or denial . William Julius Wilson's most recentwork builds on
his earlier The Truly Disadvantaged.40 This time, Wilson uses survey data and in-depth ethnographic studies of amilies in Chicago to make the case that racism and eco- nomic dislocation have
contributed to the persistence of inner-city poverty. Yet a culture of resignation and resistance
among some poor persons, par- ticularly some young African American males, preventsthem from
mak- ing the most of the few opportunities that are available." The connection between the story and
the conclusion is not obvious. The telling of the tale is taken by itself as justifying the conclusion. The
lure of ethnography is the power of its narrative. To narrate lives is the privilege to say what they
mean. Narrative becomes self-legitimating, especially through retelling. Wilson's often-repeated
narrative is about how the loss of middle-class role models has allowed many poor inner-city
African American youths to forgo com- mitting themselves to the world of work and achievement.
Yet it is surely possible to tell other stories about these same individuals- stories that stress even
the persistence of role models in the face of grinding poverty.'
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The discourse of poverty, dependency, and work reinforces norms about correct conduct in
society and otherizes the poor
Schram, prof social theory and policy @ Bryn Mawr College, 95
(Sanford F. Schram, professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College, 1995, words of
welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty, pg. 128-130 “The
contemporary discourse…as exemplified by the Family Support Act of 1988”)
The contemporary discourse on welfare is very much a discourse of depen- dency. The poor and the
welfare dependent have served historically as con- venient, useful, and instructive mirror images for
encoding the distinctions that set the standards for acceptable individual conduct in society." Designating welfare taking as deviant, even criminalizing welfare dependency, has served the purposes of
social control by negative example.29 The standards for a self-sufficient, autonomous individual in
society are encoded and defined in terms of what the welfare dependent, as the "other," is not. In
recent years, the "feminization of poverty" and the growing identifica- tion of public assistance as
programs for minorities have intensified the idea of the welfare dependent as the "other:' The
contemporary discourse on dependency suggests that the rich and poor really are different; where
rich people may need tax incentives to be productive, poor people need welfare disincentives to
encourage them to work. As the distinctions solid- ify, it is easier to argue that opposites have to be
treated differently-re- wards for some and punishments for others-in order to get the same result."
This contemporary discourse of dependency is in no small part preoc- cupied with the issues of selfsufficiency, work, productivity; and related designations of self-worth.31 Although these concerns
have historically been present in welfare narratives," they take on a heightened sense of urgency in an era
in which the nature of work and its place in our lives has been subject to change and uncertainty. What is
at issue is the ability of work to serve as a regulating norm for the social order. The concern about
work is heightened when it takes on more abstract, intangible, and even ephemeral qualities as we move
from an industrial to a postindustrial economy." This is reinforced by an era in which the public space of
wage earning is no longer reserved exclusively for men and the private space of home is no longer the
only place for women, for the idea that work at home should be valued on par with wage labor further
destabilizes our understanding of what consti- tutes work. in addition, questions about work are bound to
increase in a time of growing concern about productivity and competitiveness, particu- larly of the
manufacturing sector in the U.S. economy. At the same time, anxiety about work increases as
restructuring of the industrial economy results in fewer manual jobs that pay a "family wage:' Finally, the
concern about work is heightened also by the growth of the welfare state itself and the increasing
numbers of people who derive their means of support pri- marily from the state rather than from
employment .Although the availability of jobs, the level of wages, and people's stan- dard of living
generally are to a great extent contingent upon the actions of the state, the contemporary discourse
reinforces the distinction between the independent and the dependent in terms of those who have
jobs (or receive public benefits in some way tied to their previous employment) and those who do not.
In this context, it becomes ever more apparent that the welfare dependent are deficient because they do
not have "work." The contemporary welfare narrative becomes one that highlights this deficiency and
proposes work programs as the cure for the ills of the poor, as exem- plified by the Family Support Act of
1988.
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Biopolitics K
Link: Identity Politics
Biopolitics is a politics of otherness. Operating within this mindset does nothing but
exclude and destroy the Body and human identity.
Fassin, Professor at the University of Paris North, 01(Didier, “The Biopolitics of Otherness:
Undocumented Foreigners and Racial Discrimination in French Public Debate”, Anthropology Today, Volume:
17(1), p. 7, CPG)
According to Agnes Heller (1996), biopolitics is ‘intimately linked to the question of identity politics’. I have
tried to show that it also implies necessarily a politics of otherness. Based on the recognition of ‘difference of
bodies’ which have race, sex, ethnicity and genes as their foundation, biopolitics, as she interprets it, is
‘ultimately defending the Body itself, its nature, integrity and health”. By renouncing ‘membership in
a common political body’, biopolitics thus exemplifies a retreat from, and even a negation of ‘politics’ in
the Arendtian sense of the recognition of human diversity from a universal perspective. However,
examination of French immigration politics in the 1990s allows for a less pessimistic and more nuanced reading. The
contemporary biopolitics of otherness in France rests on one major foundation: the recognition of the
body as the ultimate site of political legitimacy . But this recognition takes two parallel paths. On the one hand, the
suffering body manifests itself as the ultimate (but not unique) resource, supplanting all other social
justifications for immigrants to be granted legal status and residing in a basic right to keep oneself
alive as long as possible. This is a minimalist vision, but one which tends toward a universal horizon. On the other hand,
the racialized body extends from the foreigner to the national and introduces internal frontiers
founded on physical difference. This is a discriminatory concept, which creates hierarchies between
people. In the first case, the reduction in political asylum is a corollary of the rise in the humanitarian rationale: the
recognition of the suffering body imposes a legitimate order defining citizenship on purely
physiopathological grounds. In the second, threats to human diversity lead to a response by civil society and the state,
reminding us of shared political values: the recognition of the racialized body as principle of an illegitimate order allows for a
measure of return to politics through the denunciation of this principle by the victims and their supporters. This is to say, despite
common perceptions, biopolitics does not proceed by one logic. It demonstrates a tension, inscribed in the body,
between the supreme universality of life (which allows a sans-papiers with AIDs to be recognized by the state in the
name of his/her pathology) and the exaltation of difference, for which biology offers an apparently insurmountable
formation (allowing each person to perceive a natural source of inequality in the physical characteristics of others). If we can
recognize, in an unusual form, the eternal anthropological theme of the unity and diversity of the
human condition, the questions raised here certainly call for a renewed commitment from social scientists
to the critique of the contemporary foundations of politics.
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Biopolitics K
Links: Law
The Government uses laws as control tactics
Higgins 98 (Lesley College Literature Vol. 25)
Foucault argues that whereas "law and sovereignty were absolutely inseparable . . . with government it is
a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing
tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics--to arrange things in
such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved"
(Foucault Effect95). This tactical deployment of laws can be discerned in the British government's
switch from temporary and specific "Aliens" acts to permanent, future-oriented "Nationality" acts,
designed to exclude a wide variety of changing Others. Facing the pressures of a post-imperial order,
successive governments (irrespective of party) implemented a series of laws regarding immigration and
nationality, beginning with the 1948 British Nationality Act and culminating in the British Nationality Act of
1981, which modified or nullified the passports held by former colonial British subjects. 25 The 1968
Commonwealth Immigrants Act, for example imposed immigration controls for the first time on holders of
United Kingdom passports when Asian holders of such passports began to emigrate from East Africa to the
Kingdom. The Act extended immigration controls to the holders of United Kingdom passports issued outside
the British Isles unless they or one of their parents or grandparents had been born, naturalised, or adopted in
the United Kingdom itself, or had been registered in the United Kingdom or a Commonwealth country
already independent or selfgoverning in 1948. ( Thornberry5)
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Biopolitics K
Link: Citizenship
The political technology of citizenship promotes predisposed western views of success and
social norms that unfavorably shape the desires and outcomes of its citizens. Politics is a
ubiquitous structure that is not excluded from debate rounds. Debaters have an obligation
to critique the damaging power relations in the status quo.
Cruikshank, Ph.D., Minnesota University, ‘99
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director of Political Theory at the University of
Massachusetts, author of The Will To Empower, 1999, p. 4-5
Liberal democratic governance is premised not so much upon the autonomy or the rights of
individuals as upon their social fabrication as citizens, a fact that is obscured when citizenship is
regarded as a solution. The two normative trajectories of liberal democratic thought diverge on the
question of whether or not the citizen is inherently rational and self- interested or self-realizing. In
either case, however, the liberty of the citizens is understood to be the limit of liberal governance. It is in
those cases where individuals do not act in their own self-interest or appear indifferent to their own
development as full-fledged citizens that the limit of the liberal state at the threshold of individual
rights, liberty, and pursuits must be crossed. I find that participatory and democratic schemes -what I am
calling technologies of citizenship- for correcting the deficiencies of citizens are endemic within liberal
democratic societies. Technologies of citizenship operate according to a political rationality for
governing people in ways that promote their autonomy, self-sufficiency, and political engagement; in
the classic phrase of early philanthropists, they are intended to "help people to help themselves." This
is a manner of governing that relies not on institutions, organized violence or state power but on
securing the voluntary compliance of citizens. I argue, however, that the autonomy, interests, and wills
of citizens are shaped as well as enlisted. Technologies of citizenship do not cancel out the autonomy and
independence of citizens but are modes of governance that work upon and through the capacities of citizens
to act on their own. Technologies of citizenship are voluntary and coercive at the same time, the actions of
citizens are regulated, but only after the capacity to act as a certain kind of citizen with certain aims is
instilled. Democratic citizens, in short, are both the effects and the instruments of liberal governance.
Three relatively recent technologies of citizenship are fully treated here in Chapters 3, 4, and : Community
Action Programs under the Johnson administration; the self-esteem movement; and the reorganization of
wel- fare accounting practices under President Carter which resulted in the emergence of a new kind of
citizen -the welfare queen. Below and in Chapter 2, garbage reform and nineteenth-century self-help schemes
illus- trate the extent to which social reform movements aim at accomplishing through volunteerism and
gentle coercion what the liberal state cannot do without using force or violating its limits . Although the
scope and impact of a given social reform movement may be short-lived, its techniques for making citizens
do not disappear but are reformed or carried over into new programs. My second overarching argument is
that the political itself is continually transformed and reconstituted at the micro-levels of everyday life
where citizens are constituted. If power is ubiquitous, as I assert through- out, then it makes no sense
to speak of "the political," "the social," "the private," and "the public" as separate domains. The
political cannot be clearly demarcated from other domains without excluding some relations of power.'
Instead of reconceptualizing the political per se, I try to under- stand how the social transformation of
the political opens new possibilities for political action.
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Biopolitics K
Link: Free Will
The attempt to create a “free” individual who can make independent choices about their
body fails to recognize the role that power plays in the construction of autonomy and
prevents action.
Bevir Prof. of Poli Sci at UC Berkeley. 99 ( Mark “Foucault and Critique: Deploying Agency Against
Autonomy” KNP)
Foucault's analysis of the social construction of the subject might seem merely to recapitulate a concept already
familiar to us as socialisation. Actually, however, his critique of the subject cuts deeper than this. Foucault argues
that power is ubiquitous so a subject can come into being only as a construct of a regime of power/knowledge.
No society, culture, or practice possibly could be free of power. No individual possibly could constitute
himself as an autonomous agent free from all regimes of power. This is why, to return to our starting point,
Foucault rejected the concept of the "sovereign, founding subject" for one of "the subject" as "constituted
through Even when individuals appear to live in accord with commitments they have accepted for themselves,
they really are only examining and regulating their lives in accord with a regime of power. Foucault's view of
the subject, therefore, precludes an idea often seen as the core of liberalism, the Enlightenment Project, or
modernity; it precludes the idea of the individual coming before, or standing outside of, society. Indeed, Foucault
argues that our view of the subject as an autonomous agent derives from our having so internalised the
technique of confession that we see it falsely as a way of unlocking our inner selves rather than rightly as a
way of defining ourselves in accord with a social formation. He says: "the obligation to confess is now relayed
through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power
that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, demands only to
surface."' According to Foucault, the individual subject is not an autonomous agent, but rather a social
construct. To consider the validity of his view of the subject, I want to distinguish autonomy from agency.1°
Autonomous subjects would be able, at least in principle, to have experiences, to reason, to adopt beliefs, and to act,
outside all social contexts. They could avoid the influence of any norms and techniques prescribed by a regime of
power/knowledge. This concept of the autonomous subject resembles the idea of a "sovereign, founding subject"
that Foucault vehemently rejects: autonomous subjects, at least in principle, could found and rule themselves
uninfluenced by others. Agents, in contrast, exist only in specific social contexts, but these contexts never
determine how they try to construct themselves. Although agents necessarily exist within regimes of
power/knowledge, these regimes do not determine the experiences they can have, the ways they can exercise their
reason, the beliefs they can adopt, or the actions they can attempt to perform. Agents are creative beings; it is just
that their creativity occurs in a given social context that influences it.
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Biopolitics K
Link: Immigration
The attempt to regulate immigration flows is based on a desire to securitize that which is
outside a nations borders.
Didier Bigo, Prof. Institut des Etudes politiques, Paris. 2002 “Security and immigration:
Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease.”
Migration is increasingly interpreted as a security problem. The prism of security analysis is especially important for
politicians, for national and local police organizations, the military police, customs officers, border patrols, secret services,
armies, judges, some social services (health care, hospitals, schools), private corporations (bank analysts, providers of technology
surveillance, private policing), many journalists (especially from television and the more sensationalist newspapers), and a significant
fraction of general public opinion, especially but not only among those attracted to "law and order." The popularity of this
security prism is not an expression of traditional responses to a rise of insecurity, crime, terrorism, and the negative effects of
globalization; it is the result of the creation of a continuum of threats and general unease in which many
different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous
society. The professionals in charge of the management of risk and fear especially transfer the
legitimacy they gain from struggles against terrorists, criminals, spies, and counterfeiters toward other targets,
most notably transnational political activists, people crossing borders, or people born in the country but with foreign parents.
This expansion of what security is taken to include effectively results in a convergence between the
meaning of international and internal security. The convergence is particularly important in relation
to the issue of migration, and specifically in relation to questions about who gets to be defined as an
immigrant. The security professionals themselves, along with some academics, tend to claim that they are only responding to new
threats requiring exceptional measures beyond the normal demands of everyday politics. In practice, however, the transformation
of security and the consequent focus on immigrants is directly related to their own immediate interests
(competition for budgets and missions) and to the transformation of technologies they use (computerized databanks, profiling and
morphing, electronic phone tapping). The Europeanization and the Westernization of the logics of control and
surveillance of people beyond national polices is driven by the creation of a transnational field of
professionals in the management of unease. This field is larger than that of police organizations in that it includes, on one
hand private corporations and organizations dealing with the control of access to the welfare state, and, on the other hand, intelligence
services and some military people seeking a new role after the end of the Cold War. These professionals in the management of unease,
however, are only a node connecting many competing networks responding to many groups of people who are identified as risk or just
as a source of unease. (1)
The affirmative’s use of citizenship re-entrenches them within Foucault’s biopolitical
framework. Citizenship and borders exclude and continue the silencing and
dehumanization of entire cultures.
Dejanovic, PhD Candidate in the Dept. of Political Science at York University, 2008
(Sanja, “Invisible Bodies, Illusionary Securing: The Performance of Illegality at the US-Mexico Border”,
Violent Interventions: Selected Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the York Centre for
International and Security Studies, p. 83, CPG)
A powerful myth of national homogeneity underlies the Eurocentric state system. This myth retains
force because state formation is presumed to stem from sameness rather than difference or
heterogeneous life. Since its inception, the state system has been structured by locating heterogeneity
outside delineated territorial boundaries of sameness, which has been (re)produced through an ‘art of
governance’ that organizes, manages, and administers human life.6 The production of spatially
definitive political communities based on privileged membership, in this case citizenship, is, then,
instituted and operates through logic of exclusion and inferiorization of externalized life.7 Because
externalized life, as a source of heterogeneity, signals the deterioration of homogeneity, it must be
spatially contained through a number of biopolitical mechanisms, including borders .8 This logic, a
logic of closure, is not only an essential building block of national discourse, but also consolidates state
biopower to constitute the identity and political status of human beings both inside and outside of its
territorial boundaries.
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Biopolitics K
The affs attempt to regulate immigrants is inherently based on an attempt to secure the
unknown.
Didier, Prof. Institut des Etudes politiques, 02 (Bigo “Security and immigration: Toward a critique of
the governmentality of unease.” KNP)
My hypothesis is that the
securitization of immigration is not only an effect of, even if it contributes to, the
propaganda of the far right political parties, the rise of racism, a new and more efficient rhetoric
convincing the population of a danger, or successful "speech acts" performed by actors coming from the state or from the
society. (4) Securitization of the immigrant as a risk is based on our conception of the state as a body or a
container for the polity. It is anchored in the fears of politicians about losing their symbolic control
over the territorial boundaries. (5) It is structured by the habitus of the security professionals and their new interests not only
in the foreigner but in the "immigrant." These interests are correlated with the globalization of technologies of surveillance and control
going beyond the national borders. (6) It is based, finally, on the "unease" that some citizens who feel discarded suffer because they
cannot cope with the uncertainty of everyday life. (7) This worry, or unease, is not psychological. It is a structural unease in a "risk
society" framed by neoliberal discourses in which freedom is always associated at its limits with danger and (in)security.
The securitization of migration is, thus, a transversal political technology, used as a mode of
governmentality by diverse institutions to play with the unease, (8) or to encourage it if it does not yet
exist, (9) so as to affirm their role as providers of protection and security and to mask some of their
failures. (10) The securitization of immigration then emerges from the correlation between some successful speech acts of political
leaders, the mobilization they create for and against some groups of people, and the specific field of security professionals (which, in the
West, and despite many differences, now tend to unite policemen, gendarmes, intelligence services, military people, providers of
technology of surveillance and experts on risk assessments). It comes also from a range of administrative practices
such as population profiling, risk assessment, statistical calculation, category creation, proactive
preparation, and what may be termed a specific habitus of the "security professional" with its et hos of
secrecy and concern for the management of fear or unease. (11)
The affs attempt to rid America of illegal immigrants is based on a fear of the other.
Didier, Prof. Institut des Etudes politiques, 02 (Bigo “Security and immigration: Toward a critique of
the governmentality of unease.” KNP)
Policies of denial, of active forgetting about migration role and status, draw their strength from the way the state is conceived by the
main actors of these discourses of securitization of immigrants. (17) For journalists, bureaucrats, and lawyers, but also for most political
scientists of Western societies, state is often confused with state apparatus and governant. Governants in representative democracies,
they argue, derive their legitimacy from their citizens, so they associate state and democracy without much sense of the limits of and
contradictions between these two notions. Citizens are then conceived as nationals, understood by opposition to
foreigners, and, migrants are framed through various cultural discourses as foreigners, or as citizens
of a different national origin, who do not fit the "national standard" of norms and values. So,
migration is always understood, through the categories of the national and the state, as a danger to the
"homogeneity of the people." The activation of the term migrant in immigrant is by definition seen as
something destructive. The metaphor of the body politic embedded in the sovereignty myth--in the
need to monitor borders to reassure the integrity of what is "inside," in the practice of territorial
protection, in the technologies of surveillance--creates an image of immigration associated with an
outsider coming inside, as a danger to the homogeneity of the state, the society, and the polity. (18)
The genealogy of the Western state, in relation to both its strongest myths and its institutionalization, has been analyzed in the
sociologies of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. (19) They have shown how, in Bourdieu's terms, "states conceptualise us more
than we, as academics, conceptualise the State." The studies in international-relations theory by John Ruggie, Thomas
Biersteker, Richard Ashley, and R. B. J. Walker have similarly emphasized the capacity of states to impose
themselves as a frame of mind. (20) They obliged IR theorists to analyze the territorial dimension of the Westphalian state, a
topic that has also been examined by Bertrand Badie, Richard Mansbach, and Martin Heisler. (21) I will not develop this aspect here: I
just want to emphasize that, even if all these concepts were arms in symbolic and political struggles between different groups, the
concepts of sovereignty, security, and borders always structure our thought as if there existed a "body"-- an "envelope, or container"-differentiating one polity from another. The state justifies itself as the only political order possible as soon as it is
accepted that sovereignty, law and order, and a single body are the prerequisite for peace and
homogeneity. It justifies the "national" identity that the state has achieved through a territorialization
of its order, by a cutting up of borders.
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Biopolitics K
The attempt to define the legal status of immigrants is based on an attempt to construct
them as an enemy.
Didier, Prof. Institut des Etudes politiques, 02 (Bigo “Security and immigration: Toward a critique of
the governmentality of unease.” KNP)
This "will to mastery" on the part of the politicians has only one effect, but an important one. They
change the status of persons by opening or restricting the conditions of travel and stay (at the national--or, in
the contemporary European context, Schengen--borders), declaring legal or illegal the arrival and the stay on the
country, but they know that a person who wants to enter will succeed anyway . Thus, in an illegal situation, the
immigrant becomes, for the politician (and particularly for the local politicians, the mayors, who have to live a face-to-face
relationship with the migrants whom they wanted to reject) the personal enemy. Politicians see themselves as insulted
by the incapacity to enforce the integrity of the national body they represent. The "migrant" is seen as
both a public enemy breaking the law and a private enemy mocking the will of the politician.
Nevertheless, even if the political professionals of those countries where migration is problematized as a
political issue are frustrated by the confrontation between their self-images and their effective power
in relation to social practices, it is no mean power that they have--to be able to define and categorize
who is a migrant and what a migrant is. Their symbolic power is not at all an absence of power. (31) The political game in
each country delineates the figure of the migrant by inverting the image of the good citizen. In France, laicity and centralization create
the migrant image as that of a religious fanatic--a member of a community committed to destroying the principles of republicanism. In
Germany, social control and partnership create the migrant as a revolutionary and a deviant. In the United Kingdom, traditional and
community rules construct the migrant as a rioter with no respect for everyday rules and decent social behavior.
The incarnation of the figure may change, but the matrix grows stronger . In the mid-1920s, in France, the
migrants were Polish and Italians, while now they are primarily Algerians or their children born in France. Migrant, as a term, is the way
to designate someone as a threat to the core values of a country, a state, and has nothing to do with the legal terminology of foreigners.
The word immigrant is a shibboleth. (32) Here lies an apparent paradox: if each national image of migration is different,
how can security services work together, even at the European level. It is there that the plasticity of the terminology is so
important. If the French want to use the word Algerian to designate their unnamed enemy, they will have difficulties with the United
Kingdom because of the difference in policies concerning Islam. Similarly, if Germany speaks of Kurdish people as terrorists in front of
French representatives, they may be challenged. Yet if each security service uses the word immigrant as a sign of
danger, a consensus is possible--because such a word can designate a foreigner as an Algerian (a member of an
ethnic minority that may already have citizenship) or as other kinds of foreigner. Each country can then sell its fear to the
other country (hence, Algerians come under surveillance in Britain and Germany, and Kurds in France and Britain) in what
amounts to a stock exchange of security, which is exactly the role of Europol in competition with Interpol and now some confidential
circles of NATO.
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Biopolitics K
The fear of immigrants is based on an attempt to hold a cohesive national identity.
Didier, Prof. Institut des Etudes politiques, 02 (Bigo “Security and immigration: Toward a critique of
the governmentality of unease.” KNP)
Security is here considered by the more traditional groups as the peak of a political problem where "exceptional measures, "measures
beyond law," need to be taken. Thus the security process itself is the result of mobilization of the work of
political discourses and of practices of security agencies based on the argument of danger and
emergency. Many studies of security forget this primary work of political mobilization leading to securitization. They reproduce at
the analytical level the discourses of the "hard-liners" or security professionals. (39) They analyze security as being a different realm
from politics, or as being "a particular type of politics applicable to a wide range of issues."' (10) They consider that security is like a
"sphere" placed under the responsibility of the army and other experts on security, a sphere that is the mirror of existential threats
concerning survival but that could come eventually from separate sectors. (41) By so doing, they validate the view of the security
professionals that security is an "explanation" of the security process and not a discourse to be challenged.
By neglecting this, the critical vision of security developed by Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde introduces into the
academic field the military discourses on societal or internal security. They repeat the discourses of a part of the
military working on low-intensity conflict--discourses that, after the end of the Cold War, seek to
explain that immigration is an existential threat to national identity, even if migrants do not directly
threaten the state. They accept the "truth" about what security is not in the way they agree with the
military (Waever in particular is critical of the existential character of the threat), but do so by accepting the framing of a different
domain of security beyond the political--one linked with emergency and exception. (42) In doing so, they agree with the idea
of an "exceptionalization," or a "beyond the law" politics, and come back to "cynicism and realism," forgetting
"democracy." Sharing the illusio of the field they analyze, they do not really understand the "field effect" of the struggle between the
managers of unease, imposing, despite their resistance, the vision of the professionals as the "truth," and their coercive means as
"solutions."
Some of the actors in the academic field and the security professionals, then, participate in an active
strategy of legitimization of their role concerning migration through this political game of the integrity
of the body of people, society and state. (43) They refuse the heterogeneity of life and always try to
reduce it to homogeneity and hierarchy between different categories. (44)
The Affirmative institution of a plan that spreads biopower cannot solve for racism
because biopolitics is a prime cause of racism which leads to violence
Houen 06
(Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker, Theory and EventVolume 9, Number 1, 2006)
If political power is thus increasingly diffused within states, is there some other "special distinction," asks Schmitt, that might
characterise "the political"? His answer is the distinction between "friend and enemy," to which "political
actions
and motives can be reduced" in general. This distinction between friend and enemy is also applicable
to Foucault's discussion of race and biopolitics in Society Must be Defended. With biopolitics being directed
at the mass life of the population, its ultimate tendency, states Foucault, is to control "relations
between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species" (SMD, 245). Consquently, the
spread of biopolitics also nurtures a growth in racism. For while biopolitics consolidates the state as a
national race, it also draws the livelihood of the race into economic relations with other nations, other
races. The imbrication of state identity, race, and economics is thus implicit in the sort of "economic
imperialism" that Schmitt describes, an imperialism which Foucault also addresses when he discusses the history of European
colonialism (SMD, 60-1). If the livelihood of the race comes to involve feeding off other races, the necessity
for enforcing the integrity of the state becomes all the more important. And this becomes a prime
cause of racism, for Foucault: "[Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of
life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die" (SMD, 254). Such
racism, he continues, "make[s] the relationship of war -- If you want to live, the other must die' -- function
in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower" (SMD, 255).
But might it not be the case that this power to decide who lives and dies can also be used by the state as a way of reasserting political
control over biopower? And might this not involve rejuvenating state sovereignty and setting it against biopower's undermining of
sovereignty?
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Biopolitics K
The handling of immigrants within the context of crime represents a direct connection to
the biopolitical foundation provided by Foucault. Immigrants are stereotyped as criminals,
leading to their devolution as a cultural group, as well as to their continued deportation
and persecution.
Miller, Associate Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo
School of Law, 2003
(Teresa A., “Citizenship & Severity: Recent Immigration Reforms and the New Penology,” Georgetown
Immigration Law Journal, Volume: 17, p. 618-620, CPG)
The work of Jonathan Simon and other proponents of the “new penology” describe this process as “governing through crime.” Derived
from the work of Michel Foucault, Simon’s theory is that “crime and punishment have become the occasions and
institutional contexts” for shaping the conduct of others . In other words, we are governed through crime
whenever crime and its punishment become the occasion or the opportunity for exercising power over
others. Governing through crime characterizes the recent trend to increasingly construe problems of
regulation as problems of crime, and in doing so, makes available a whole host of tools and techniques of criminal punishment
that would otherwise be inappropriate and unavailable. Thus, the increasing salience of crime as a rationale for
harsher, more punitive treatment of immigrants demonstrates how non-U.S. citizens are being
governed through crime. Two related changes in immigration law that emerged within the past two
decades demonstrate how immigrants are being increasingly governed through crime: (1) greater
criminal punitiveness within a nominally civil system of immigration regulation, and (2) greater
criminal consequences for immigration violations, many of which were previously treated civilly . Despite
the early emphasis on selectively controlling the influx of foreigners with criminal backgrounds, not until quite recently have
immigration and criminal laws interacted so extensively to accomplish this. While foreign-born individuals have long been subject to
dual sanctions under immigration law as a result of prior criminal activity or disposition within the criminal justice system, over the
past twenty years there has been an unprecedented growth in the scope of criminal grounds for the
exclusion and deportation of foreign-born non U.S. citizens, as well as immigration crime themselves. In
other words, the harsh immigration consequences of criminal activity such as exclusion and deportation
have been expanded, as have the criminal consequences of immigration violations (many of which were
formerly treated civilly). Today more than twenty-five separate sections of the Immigration and Naturalization Act specifically proscribe
conduct that is associated with criminal activity or expressly made criminal by statute. The priority accorded crime control
within immigration law sharply contrasts with the manner in which legal and illegal immigrants were
regulated just twenty years ago. Immigration law historically regulated crime to a degree by excluding immigrants with
criminal records and deporting legal entrants who commit crimes soon after admission. However, the degree to which noncitizens have been detained and expelled for criminal histories since 1988 – without regard to the
remoteness of the conviction, the seriousness of the crime, the length of the alien’s residence in the
United States or the hardship imposed upon their families – is unprecedented. So is the degree to
which discretion has been removed from immigration judges to provide equitable relief from harsh
effects of detention and expulsion, as well as from federal judges to review the removal and detention
decisions of immigration judges. Furthermore, the degree to which criminal sanctions and law enforcement techniques are
being used to enforce the civil orders of immigration officials is unparalleled, as is the degree to which immigration and criminal law
enforcement officials are working cooperatively to regulate immigration.
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Link: Equal Protection
Attempts at group equality will fail due to their attempts at normalizing ideas of
productivity
Kelman and Lester, 02 (Mark Kelman-Profesor of Law at Stanford University and Gillian Lester-Professor of
Law at University of California, Berkley. “Ideology and Entitlement”. Left Legalism/Left Critique. Editors: Wendy
Brown and Janet Halley. Duke University Press. p. 147-151. “Those on the ideological left…it antidiscrimination
law”.
As illustrated above, the liberal centrist use of anridiscrimination norms to squelch market tendencies to
reward in accord with net, rather than gross, output is concretized and "legalized" largely in regard to people
with physical disabilities, though, to a lesser degree, left liberal proposals to facilitate women's ability to
work productively by adding (concededly) costly child care facilities that (by hypothesis) benefit women
more than their male coworkers would resonate in the same tradition. Left multi-culturalism has developed
the argument for erasing the material consequences of real group differences in productivity largely in
relationship to gender differences. This is true, most likely, because of political discomfort on the
muiriculturalist left with the possibility that groups defined in other ways-by, say, sexual orientation,
ethnicity, or "handicap" are "disabled" (or less productive) rather than "differently abled" (equally
but differently productive) in performing market tasks." The resistance to the rhetorical use of the term
"handicap," and more recently "disability," rather than "different ability" seems to reflect this profound
difficulty in confronting the possibility of differential market productivity between groups outside the gender
context.In the context of gender, it is reasonable to argue that even if women are less productive than men in
performing "market work," they are "hyper- capable" in performing equally significant work in the
historically de- monetized sectors. Given this reasonable supposition, it is plausible to ar- gue, first, that
"overcompensating" women for their market work simply makes up for the morally indefensible
nonmonetization and devaluation of their socially crucial nonmarket work (from child rearing to caring
for extended family to nurturance of social relationships to community ser- vice). More critically, though, the
recognition that the nonmarket work that has been dominated by women has been devalued permits left
multi- culturalists to acknowledge (or even embrace) group differences, whereas, for other groups, the
"distinct" social contributions of the oppressed sub- group, even if just as real, are not so readily socially
identified and accepted. But the argument that empowered groups making valuation decisions misassess
oppressed groups' genuine contributions almost surely fails (and in any event is not consistently maintained
within left multiculturalism).And without it, the left multiculturalist position is revealed for what it really
is: a normative claim that even if real productivity differences do exist in between groups, they should
not have any material impact. If "overcompensating" women in the traditional labor market were
really an attempt to compensate women for performing (undervalued) household-based tasks, we would
compensate those who performed household tasks equally (at least as long as they were equally
productive in these tasks). To give higher compensation for household work to women who would have
earned pro- portionately more in the market had they not labored at home - for exam- ple, to compensate an
attorney who stays at home more highly than her secretary who stays at home, as we would do if we
demanded that each woman's employer continue to pay her ordinary wages while she took extended
maternity leave - would surely be problematic if our goal were to ensure appropriate respect for household
work. The fact is that this is not a "rectification" principle that actually attempts to equalize pay for
equal productive output by accounting fully for traditionally public and tradi- tionally private output.
Rather, it is an attempt to break the pay-product nexus entirely, at least when the nexus results in
certain defined social groups being worse off than others.
If the left multiculturalist position really pressed us to reward true productivity, it would force us to
ensure that some women achieve the social status the most successful men achieve by paying the "best
mothers" salaries commensurate with, say, salaries paid high-priced lawyers and execu- tives. But
proposals to do so would serve largely to underscore the awkwardness of proposals to monetize the
traditionally demonetized sectors. In this sense, the left multiculturalist position is even more difficult
to ad- minister, and conceptually more "state-ist" than the liberal centrist position that disdains market
rationality to the extent that it demands that pay scales reflect gross, not net value added. The
CONTINUES-NO TEXT REMOVED
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CONTINUES-NO TEXT REMOVED
valuation of household labor, for instance, in this case, is entirely politicized, entirely a function of
centralized group decision making on "moral merit," whereas the gross value added by the protected
employee is judged in an impersonal market, in terms of the willingness of the purchasers of the producer's
output to pay for that output. Confronted with these difficulties, left multiculturalists more commonly
propose not to establish pay scales for historically unpaid domestic labor, but instead simply to ensure
that places throughout the social hierarchy are more evenly allocated by group. If males receive a
statistically disproportionate share of workplace privilege, there should be a presumption that it
reflects discrimination that must be remediated. The difficulty with making this presumption is that
the connection between either group or individual oppression, on the one hand, and nonrandom
representation in the "pay elite," on the other, is not clearly explicated.
How, for example, can it be considered less moral for a less "productive" group to be paid less than a
more productive group unless it is equally immoral to pay less productive individuals within a
particular group less than more productive ones within the same group? Alternatively, why are
policies designed to reduce inequality among groups less difficult to admin- ister than programs
designed to reduce inequality between individuals? It is not that group consciousness cannot be justified in
any way: it can readily be justified by, among other things, the fact that group members have atypically
interdependent utility functions, that group members in historically disadvantaged communities require "role
models," that social integration depends on some measure of group equality, and that members of groups that
have been historically stigmatized require substantive im- provements in economic outcomes not simply to
increase their access to consumption goods but to signal that they are no longer held in disrepute by the
dominant, mainstream culture.'-1 We must recognize the degree to which individuals derive their identity
in significant part from groups, which are not simple voluntary associations of presocial individuals
but constitutive of individuality; as a result, high levels of group inequality will have negative impacts
on individuals that unpatterned inequality would not. 66 Individual equality claims may focus, unduly
exclusively, on material deprivation- on the distribution of material goods-while much suffering may be
experienced not so much as a longing for goods as some combina- tion of a sense of powerlessness and
suppressed self-esteem. But power- lessness and suppressed self-esteem may be mainly experienced by individuals as members of groups, groups that lack social power and groups that are subject to widespread social
devaluation. Rectifying those prob- lems may well require more attention to ensuring group participation in
decision making and group access to meaning-giving cultural institutions, as well as attention to ensuring
across-group representation in socially validated roles. But none of these observations about the
importance of accounting for "group" outcomes in assessing a distributive policy gives rise to anything
as powerful as "group entitlement" trumping claims. In our view, they should give rise to something far
more akin to contingent social engineering rules of thumb that one desideratum, among many, in designing
social programs addressing the distribution of resources is that we reduce inter- group hierarchies. Even
more troublesome, in our view, is that the left multicukuralist position fails to confront adequately
what seems to us the vitally important fact that the interventions required to mute group inequality
are no less problematic than the interventions required by traditional socialists to mute "capitalist"
inequality (the "devaluation" of those individuals, how- ever socially identified, who are less market
productive). Firms required to pay some employees more than market wages surely won't inevitably go out of
business doing so (as conservative alarmists often claim): they will simply face a tax that they will, to some
extent, pay and, to some extent, expend resources to evade (such a tax is easier to evade than an income tax
because it can be ducked by refusing to hire protected workers or inducing those one must hire to quit). To
the degree the tax is paid, it will have some adverse effects on productive incentives: the extent of these
adverse incen- tives is a matter of empirical debate.'7 But the key fact is that this tax will have no more or
fewer problems than radically redistributive social demo- cratic taxes or the implicit taxes levied in
controlled economies that mute permitted pay differentials. One cannot evade the responsibility to defend
(or discard) certain sorts of centralized economic planning by renaming it antidiscrimination law.
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Internal Link
Biopolitics turns us into efficient economic units and reduces us to biological processes
Hubert, Ph.D from Delft University, 07 (Christian, Biopower, June 19,
http://www.christianhubert.com/writings/index.htm) KNP
In The History of Sexuality, (p. 139) Michel Foucault describes the power over life evolving since the seventeenth
century in two basic forms, in two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of
these poles centered on the body as a machine -- the optimization of its capabilities and its integration
into systems of efficient and economic controls. Foucault calls the procedures of power that characterized this pole the
disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. This society is a disciplinary one. The second pole, formed somewhat later,
focuses on the species body, on the biological processes of propagation, births and mortality. According to
Foucault, their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls:
a biopolitics of the population. -- biopower. Societies that derive from biopower are also called societies of
control. For Foucault, sexuality is at the intersection of the individualizing processes of discipline and
training and of the management of the population. Biopower is the modern form of regulation of
individuals and groups, and sexuality is the effect of that power. It not only extends the controlled
domain but also gives pleasure, which feeds back to the power that encircled it . While the passage from
disciplinary societies to societies of control remains mostly implicit in the work of Foucault, this was a subject that Gilles Deleuze more
explicitly stressed in his commentary entitled Foucault and in "Postscript on Societies of Control" in Negotiations. (Pourparleurs ) In the
latter essay, Deleuze notes that disciplinary societies depended on sites of confinement, the prison, the
hospital, the factory, the school, the family, all of whom are currently breaking down, and being replaced
by constantly modulating systems ever more immanent to the social field. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri follow
a Deleuzian interpretation of Foucault' s concept by stressing biopolitical production in their analysis of Empire. (see local / global.)For
Hardt and Negri, huge transnational corporations and especially the communications industry become the fundamental connective fabric of
the biopolitical world in the second half of the twentieth century. In the new societies of control, which are the most
complete realization of the relationships of capitalism, biopower permeates entirely the consciousness and
bodies of individuals. "When power becomes entirely biopolitical, the whole social body is comprised by
power's machine and developed in its virtuality." (p.24)" the relationship is open, qualitative, and
affective." "The source of imperial normativity is born of a new machine, a new economic - industrial communicative machine -- in short, a globalized biopolitical machine." (p.40) (see also desiring machines) In
Rewriting the Soul, Ian Hacking suggests a third point from which to triangulate the knowledge of power, which he calls a memoro-politics
... a politics of the human soul, an moral idea that invokes character, reflective choice, and self-understanding. For Hacking, the
development of the sciences of memory towards the end of the nineteenth century "wrested the soul from religion and turned it over to
science." (pp 213-214)
Biopower controls via normalization
Foucault, Director of Institute Francais at Hamburg, 84 (Michel THE FOUCAULT READER, ed.
Rabinow, p. 266 KNP)
Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the- growing importance assumed by the
action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Law cannot help. but be armed, and its arm
par excellence is death; to those •who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last resort, with that absolute
menace. The law always refers - to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge or life needs continuous
regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field
of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to
quality, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it
does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it
effects distributions around the norm. I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of
justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly
incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A
normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power
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Biopolitics manages life
Wiebe, Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, 2008 (Sarah, “Re-Thinking
Citizenship: (Un)Healthy Bodies and the Canadian Border,” Surveillance & Society, Volume: 15(3), p. 335,
CPG)
The goals of the state are expressed through the qualified life of its citizenry. As Michel
Foucault articulates, biopolitics refers to the governance of life itself. The governance
over life centres on several elements. One element is the conception of the body as a
machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel
increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls,
all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics
of the human body (Foucault, 1978: 139) The supervision of the body operates as a series of regulatory
controls. In this respect, I understand the regulatory controls of surveillance of health and bodies as a
biopolitics of the population. Life itself is carefully calculated and managed in order to achieve the
material, productive, economic goals of the state.
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Impacts: Feminism/Sexuality Turns
The affirmative represents the continuation of a terror-filled biopolitical regime that
projects fear and casts minorities as the queer identity in need of sexual normalization
through a forced acceptance of hegemonic Whiteness.
Morgensen, Asst. Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, 2010
(Scott L., “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” GLQ: A Journal of
Gay and Lesbian Studies, Volume: 16(1-2), p. 107-110, CPG)
Feminist and queer criticism in Native studies already explains terror as key to the sexual
colonization of Native peoples.7 Andrea Smith argues that "it has been through sexual violence and
through the imposition of European gender relationships on Native communities that Europeans were
able to colonize Native peoples," in a process that included marking Native people "by their sexual
perversity" as queer to colonial regimes.8 Bethany Schneider affirms that "Indian hating and queer hating
form a powerful pair of pistons in the history of white colonization of the Americas." 9 In part, Native
peoples were marked as queer by projecting fears of sodomy on them that justified terrorizing
violence.10 At the same time, diverse modes of embodiment and desire in Native societies challenged
colonial beliefs about sexual nature and were targeted for control. As Smith argues, given that "U.S.
empire has always been reified by enforced heterosexuality and binary gender systems" while many
Native societies "had multiple genders and people did not fit rigidly into particular gender categories .
. . it is not surprising that the first peoples targeted for destruction in Native communities were those
who did not neatly fit into western gender categories."11 And, as Schneider concludes, "the tendency or
tactic of Europeans to see sodomy everywhere in the so-called New World enabled a devastating twofisted excuse for murderous violence and a complicated homoerotics of genocide." 12 Such readings of
histories of terrorizing violence in Native studies are joined by arguments about how forms of violence acted
as modes of social control in the new colonial moral order. Schneider notes that Mark Rifkin's work shows
how "policies aimed at assimilating Indians through the destruction of kinship structures figured Indian
cultures as other than heteronormative in order to reinvent and assimilate them as straight, private-propertyowning, married citizens."13 Rifkin pursues this claim by arguing that scholars investigate [End Page 108]
(1) how a sustained engagement with American Indian histories and forms of self-representation as part of a
history of sexuality in the United States can aid in rethinking what constitutes heteronormativity and (2) how
queer critique of federal Indian policy as compulsory heterosexuality can contribute to an understanding of
its organizing ideological and institutional structure as well as strategies of native opposition to it. 14Queer
and feminist readings in Native studies thus explain how terrorizing violence became normalized in
colonial sexual regimes. Such work offers a productive basis for asking how terrorizing methods
produce the colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality. Theories of biopolitics and colonization are indebted
to Ann Stoler's efforts to locate Foucauldian theories of sexuality within colonial studies. Many scholars have
critiqued Michel Foucault's omission of colonialism from his work on sexuality. Stoler challenged this limit
in Foucault's work by asking if the power relations he traced in Europe related to the histories of imperial
metropoles and colonial societies. She argued that they did, by marking how Foucault addressed sexuality
and race in his theories of biopower —or, in the form of government, biopolitics.15 Stoler displaced a
more common reading of Foucault's history of sexuality in queer theory, which tended to frame European
societies and their normative whiteness as roots of modern sexuality, …
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Impacts: Racism
Biopower and the state are crucial in establishing the supremacy of racism
Foucault, 1997 [Michel, Society Must Be Defended, p. 258 KNP]
I think that, broadly speaking,
racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to
the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a
race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. You can see that, here, we are far removed from the
ordinary racism that takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or hatred between races. We are also far removed from the racism that
can be seen as a sort of ideological operation that allows States, or a class, to displace the hostility that is directed toward [them], or
which is tormenting the social body, onto a mythical adversary. I think that this is something much deeper than an old tradition, much
deeper than a new ideology, that it is something else. The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not
bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power,
with the technology of power. It is bound up with this, and that takes us as far away as possible from the race war and the
intelligibility of history. We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work. So
racism is bound up with the
workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race,
to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of-or the way biopower functions through-the old sovereign power of life
and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the actual roots of
racism.
Biopower creates the binary of the friend/enemy distinction that institutionalizes state
racism, that chooses who lives and who dies
Houen 06 (Alex Houen 2006 Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy
Acker, muse)
If political power is thus increasingly diffused within states, is there some other "special distinction," asks Schmitt, that might characterise "the political"?
His answer is the distinction
between "friend and enemy," to which "political actions and motives can be
reduced" in general. This distinction between friend and enemy is also applicable to Foucault's
discussion of race and biopolitics in Society Must be Defended. With biopolitics being directed at the mass life
of the population, its ultimate tendency, states Foucault, is to control "relations between the human race,
or human beings insofar as they are a species" (SMD, 245). Consquently, the spread of biopolitics also
nurtures a growth in racism. For while biopolitics consolidates the state as a national race, it also
draws the livelihood of the race into economic relations with other nations, other races. The
imbrication of state identity, race, and economics is thus implicit in the sort of "economic
imperialism" that Schmitt describes, an imperialism which Foucault also addresses when he discusses the history of European colonialism (SMD,
60-1). If the livelihood of the race comes to involve feeding off other races, the necessity for enforcing
the integrity of the state becomes all the more important. And this becomes a prime cause of racism, for Foucault:
"[Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between
what must live and what must die" (SMD, 254). Such racism, he continues, "make[s] the relationship of war
-- �If you want to live, the other must die' -- function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise
of biopower" (SMD, 255). But might it not be the case that this power to decide who lives and dies can also be used by the state as a way of reasserting
political control over biopower? And might this not involve rejuvenating state sovereignty and setting it against biopower's undermining of sovereignty?
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Biopower uses racism to exercise power and regulate the conditions for acceptable deaths
Mbembe 03 (Achille Mbmembe Public Culture 15.1 (2003) 11-40
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v015/15.1mbembe.html)
biopower appears to function through dividing [End Page 16] people into
those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the
living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it takes
control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups,
the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological
caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar)
term racism. 17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of
biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history
as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political
thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over,
foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general,
Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics
of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death. 18 Indeed, in Foucault's terms, racism is above
all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, "that old sovereign right of
death." 19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of
death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, "the condition
for the acceptability of putting to death." 20
In Foucault's formulation of it,
America is falsely inclusive. Racism assures that citizenship is never enough to become
American
Roshanravan 9 (Shireen M. Roshanravan Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism Volume 10,
Number 1, 2009 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/meridians/v010/10.1.roshanravan.html)
The self-negating mimicry of white/Anglo norms takes on a new dimension in the post-civil-rights-era
United States. Whereas the colonial context of British India made explicit the racialized boundary between
colonized Indians and British colonizers, in the post-civil-rights-era United States, the manifestation of what
many have called the “new racism” (Omi and Winant 1994; Collins 2004) relies on a hegemonic discourse
of a falsely inclusive “America,” to which all U.S.-citizen men and women can equally belong
regardless of racial classification. The nation-state’s struggle to “find a racial logic capable of
circumventing the imperative of equality established by the Fourteenth Amendment” shaped the historical
development of this racial discourse (Ngai 2004, 9). Crucial to this logic was a shift from biological notions of
race superiority to an emphasis on cultural differences whereby ethnicity and race became uncoupled
for Euro-Americans and conflated for those of Mexican and Asian ancestry. The separation of
whiteness from European ethnicity exposes the empty constitution of white racial identity that, in turn,
facilitates its conflation with an all-inclusive “America.” According to this logic, those who were of
European origin possessed ethnicities amenable to “American” (read: white) ideals, while those with
national origins racialized as non-white would forever be labeled foreign and incapable of assimilation
(Ngai 2004, 7–8). If white is a racial prerequisite for citizenship, and one’s national origins are
racialized as non-white, then becoming “American” is an impossible task.
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Racism is a power relation deciding who must live and who must die based on biology.
Racism is the indispensible precondition of killing.
Foucault, French historian and philosopher, 1976 (Michel, Society Must Be Defended, March 17, p.
254-256)
What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under
power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the
biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races,
the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior:
all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating
out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura
within a populatio n that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a
mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the
subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create
caesureas within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function.
Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: “The more you kill,
the more deaths you will cause” or “The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more.” I
would say that this relation (“If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill”) was not
invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: “In order to live, you must
destroy your enemies.” But racism does make the relationship of war – “If you want to live, the other
must die”- function in way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of
biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and
death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type
relationship: “The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer
degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I – as species rather than individual- can
live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.” The fact that the other
dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the
other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something
that will make life in general healthier: healthier and pure. This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political
relationship, but biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the
enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats,
either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words,
killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but
in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. There is a
direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race and racism is the precondition that
makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least
superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensible
precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in
the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. So you can understand
the importance - I almost said the vital importance – of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. If the power of normalization wishes to exercise the old sovereign
right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power
that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of
normalization, it too must become racist. When I say “killing”, I obviously do not mean simply murder as
such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk
of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.
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Impacts: Capitalism
Biopower leads to capitalism justifying control and killing
Crome, lecturer at Manchester College, 2009
Kieth, The Nihilistic Affirmation Of Life: Biopower And Biopolitics In The Will To Knowledge, 2009,
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia06/parrhesia06_crome.pdf, Accessed 7-10.09)
For Foucault, the emergence of biopower is instrumental to the development of capitalism. Crucially,
what occurred in Western countries in the eighteenth century was, according to Foucault, “the entry of
phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power” (Foucault,
141 – 42). Certainly, the biological had always exerted a pressure on the history of cultures and civilisations;
but the drama of its history had always been a drama of death, a drama played out on its vastest stage
through the forms of famine and epidemic. The economic developments of the early classical age allowed
some relief from these threats, whilst the knowledge concerned with life, permitting a relative control
over life and the aversion of the threat of death. The hold of death was checked. In the space opened-up
power and knowledge were able to assume greater responsibility for life processes, and to undertake to
modify and control them. “The fact of living”, Foucault writes, “was no longer an inaccessible substrate
that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed
into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention” (Foucault,142). Knowledge-power
became biopower: a series of mechanisms, techniques and technologies that transformed human life.
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Impacts: Nuclear War
THE EXPRESSION OF HUMANIST BIOPOWER WILL DESTROY THE PLANET
Bernauer, philosophy professor, Boston College, 90
(James MICHAEL FOUCAULfl FORCE OF FLIGHT: TOWARD AN ETHICS OFTHOUGHT, pp. 141-2)
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 interest 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.. that4 in the interest of protecting a society's quality of life, can plan, as well as
develop the means for its lc 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 biopolitical 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 tyrant's
vengeance has been stolen from us by the noose that has tightened around each of our own necks.
The state’s ability to control the body is the root of nuclear war, violence, and genocide
Rabinow Professor of Anthropology 84 (Paul, , Berkeley, THE FOUCAULT READER, , p. 260 KNP)
It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to
wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the
technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that
initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked
question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a
whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued
existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to
go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is
no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If
genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient
right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and
the large-scale phenomena of population
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Impacts: War
WARS IN THE NAME OF THE POPULATION PRODUCE DEVASTATING
CONSEQUENCES
Atterton, Philosophy Professor, 94 (Peter University of California San Diego HISTORY OF THE
HUMAN SCIENCES JOURNAL, v. 7, http://www.acusd.edu/-atterton/Publications/foucault.htm KNP)
The modern administration of death is situated and exercised at the very level of life itself, that is, 'it is
manifested' as simply the reverse: of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life'
(Foucault, 1978: 136). It might indeed seem paradoxical that power should exercise the prerogative of
taking life in the name of preserving it - a contradiction abated by its restricted use of the death penalty
(Foucault, 1978: 138). And yet it is just as logical' for power to exercise that prerogative, or rather deploy
that strategy, at least evolutionarily speaking, in cases where. Its own survival, its own potential and growth,
is in question: Such are instances of war which, 'unlike la peine de mort, .have become more numerous in
recent history,, or at least more destructive in their wagering the life of a population at large wars were
never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did
regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies,
that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed... The atomic
situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the
underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence, The principle underlying the
tactics of battle - that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living - has become the principle
that defines the strategy of states; at stake is the biological existence of a population
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Impact: Totalitarianism
Biopolitics leads directly to totalitarianism and the genocidal destruction of entire cultures.
This has been proven on countless occasions, and a vote for the affirmative leads us one
step closer to a new apartheid.
Milchman and Rosenberg, Professor of Political Science at Queens College of the City of
New York & Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City of New York, 2005 (Alan
& Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 342-343, CPG)
Foucault’s analysis of state racism focuses on the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. Nazism is seen as the
“paroxysmal” development of the technologies and mechanisms of biopower, while Stalinism has perfected
what Foucault terms a “social-racism”, in which the state exercises its right to kill or eliminate “class”
enemies, the abnormal, and “criminal” elements, no less metaphysically defined than the Jews or
“Gypsies” that were the target of the Nazis. Foucault’s linkage of state racism and the perpetuation of
mass murder to tendencies immanent to biopower, makes it clear that , for him, regimes such as Nazism
and Stalinism are not atavistic reversions to the premodern past, but historically specific
manifestations of tendencies that are also found throughout the modern, democratic, West. Indeed, in
their essay “Situating the Lectures,” the editor of “Society Must be Defended,” Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, point
out, “That there would appear to be a very strange kinship between “liberal societies” and totalitarian
states, or between the normal and the pathological, and sooner or later it must be investigate” (p. 276). It
seems to us, that Foucault’s meditation on biopower and “thanato-poltiics,” provides a basis for just such an
investigation. Moreover, Foucault’s focus on the state racism of regimes such as Nazism or Stalinism, now past, should not
mislead us into thinking that his vision of a “thanato-politics” was not a prospective one. Foucault lectured 15 years
before the genocide in Rwanda and the bloody ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But these outbreaks of
murderous state violence and racism, the examples of which have continued to multiply, confirm the
danger that Foucault saw ensconced within the dispositif of bio-politics.
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Alternative Extensions
Revaluation of rights is required to reduce government restraint
Pickett Professor of Political Science and Chairman of the Social Sciences Department 00 (Brent The Social
Science Journal, July p43 KNP)
Traditional understanding of rights usually involves a list or schedule of rights. In turn, there is an implicit
background to that schedule: “A particular list of human rights envisions not only an ideal person but also a
particular set of political threats of such a person” (Donnelly, 1985 p.23). Foucault’s dissent from the notion of
an ideal person has already been described. What is of importance here is that given the flexibility, of modern
power, it is impossible to specify a particular set of threats to human difference. Indeed, those threats are often
not even political, but rather much more quotidian, whether they are in the family, the workplace, or the therapist’s
office. Therefore, although there is a right to difference which in turn supports several traditional rights there
cannot be a fixed or final list of applications or cases. Even more strongly, there cannot be a fixed
schedule of rights. Instead, persons in various locales and institutions need to be able to invoke new right
against the extension of bio-power and the disciplines. This creation of new rights, or what Derrida (1986)
called a coup de droit, opens up a means of countering the “supple inventiveness” of modern power (Foucault,
1980, p 160). Although it is somewhat ambiguous whether this is meant as a support for new legal or moral rights
(or both), it seems likely that, given the trust for small groups rather than the state to bring positive change the moral
rights interpretation is stronger.
Resistance disrupts power
Atterton philosophy professor 94 (Peter, University of California San Diego, History of the Human Sciences
Journal http://www.acusd.edu/~atterton/Publications/foucault.htm KNP)
Must we pessimistically assume, therefore, that bio-history, becoming more and more elaborate and
powerful, proceeds with more or less unfettered sway without anything being able to interrupt or escape it?
The question is not Foucaldian, not least because it presents power as a sovereign unitary force given at the
outset. As we have seen, if biopower can be understood vectorially as having force and direction, dominance
and strategy, it is only through the resolution of a complex strategical situation within a societal body
as a multiplicity of power relations each with their own local aims and objectives. This does not rule out
the possibility of different tactics whose aims would be opposed to dominant alignments as they feature on
the side of bio-power. On the contrary, Foucault insists (though it is doubtless in this connection that more
research needs too be done) that it is only insofar as opposing tactics play the roles of adversary, target,
support or handle in power relations that such hegemonic alignments are possible, by which I take him
to mean that the serve as a local center around which multifarious disciplinary technologies may
coalesce so as eventually to integrate them into an overall strategy of administrative control. All the
same, this does not mean that prior to their being integrated or resolved in this manner-operating within what
Deleuxe and Guattaru have called an inclusive disjunction, such as the madman of anti-psychiatry, the bisexual, non-Oedipalized child, and so on-these opposing forces, or what Foucault calls resistances are to be
understood merely as another element in the functioning of power, i.e. only a reaction, a rebound, forming
with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. They
are disruptive and serve as the source of power’s ultimate instability.
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Each individual act of resistance creates a web of revolution necessary to challenge
biopolitics
Atterton 94 (Peter, philosophy professor, University of California San Diego HISTORY OF THE HUMAN
SCIENCES JOURNAL, 1994, p. http://www.acusd.edu/~atterton/Publications/foucault.htm.KNP )
Foucault considers all these are possible, with appropriate reservations and qualifications: "Are there no
great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing
with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society... Just as a network of
power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without
being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications
and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that
makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional
integration of power relationships."
The alternative is to not only reject the affirmative’s continuation of these policies, but to
do so through the problematizing method Foucault suggested: telling the truth through
conversation and debate.
Milchman and Rosenberg, Professor of Political Science at Queens College of the City of
New York & Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City of New York, 2005
(Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 335336, CPG)
The complex of issues around which these lectures and books revolve is a series of daring
problematizations undertaken by Foucault in the last eight years of his life (1976-1984). In this period,
Foucault’s concerns were twofold. He focused on the trajectory of what he termed “biopower” as the
basis of power relations in modern societies. Biopower designates “what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of
transformation of human life.” Biopower, then, refers to the various technologies through which life
itself, in all its dimensions, is subjected to the exercise of power. Foucault’s other concern in this period,
was the role of parrhesia or speaking the truth frankly, in the resistance to the modes of
subjectification [assujettisement] entailed by biopower, as well as the prospects for new modes of
subjectivity based on self-fashioning and a new vision of inter-subjective relationships based on friendship.
Foucault’s neologism, problemization (or problematization), has its origin in his effort to distinguish the
history of thought from the history of ideas. Thus, in Fearless Speech, Foucault tells us: “Most of the time a
historian of ideas tries to determine when a specific concept appears, and this moment is often identified by
the appearance of a new word. But what I am attempting to do as a historian of thought is something
different. I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem
for people who behave in specific sorts of ways, who have certain types of habits, who engage in certain
kinds of practices, and who put to work specific kinds of institutions. … The history of thought is an
analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or set of practices, which were accepted
without question, which were familiar and “silent”, out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises
discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior,
habits, practices, and institutions” (p. 74, emphasis added). One can speak of a problemization, then, when
a field of experience or a set of practices becomes a problem; when a complex of power relations or a mode
for the disclosure of truth, to take two pertinent examples, is marked by a crisis. The final Foucault, with
whom we are here concerned, problematized both sovereignty as the determinant form of political
power in the modern world, and the disclosure of truth with its basis in an a-historical, founding,
subject. It is these problemizations, and the crises from which they arose, that are the point of
departure for the paths opened up by Foucault’s meditations on biopower and parrhesia. And while
many of the elements for Foucault’s meditations had been present in the scattered interviews, lectures, and
books, published during the final years of his life, it is precisely in these newly published lecture courses, and
in Rose and Dean’s glosses on the lecture on govermentality, that a more complete theorization emerges.
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The alternative is premised on the rejection of current models of state sovereignty. In order
to dispense the harms predicated by a biopolitical regime, we must take rethink and
become emancipated from the traditional sovereignty mindset.
Milchman and Rosenberg, Professor of Political Science at Queens College of the City of
New York & Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City of New York, 2005
(Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340,
CPG)
Foucault’s analysis of regimes of biopower, and their disciplinary networks, leads him to confront the
question of how it is possible for individuals or collectives to resist this form of domination. And here too,
he insists that we must dispense with the theory of sovereignty: “Truth to tell, if we are to struggle
against disciplines, or rather against disciplinary power, in our search for a nondisciplinary power, we
should not be turning to the old right of sovereignty; we should be looking for a new right that is both
antidisciplinary and emancipated from the theory of sovereignty” (pp. 39-40) While Foucault’s analysis of
regimes of biopower focuses on the new technologies of domination instantiated in the disciplines and in normalization, in
rejecting the philosophico-jurdicial discourse based on sovereignty, he first explores the possibility that
another discourse, one based on a vision of politics as the continuation of war by other means, thereby
inverting Clausewitz, might provide the conceptual key to unlock the door of modern forms of domination.
Thus he asks: Can war really provide a valid analysis of power relations, and can it act as a matrix for techniques of domination?
… Is the power relationship basically a relationship of confrontation, a struggle to the death, or a war? … Can the phenomenon
of war be regarded as primary with respect to other relations (relations of inequality, dissymmetries, divisions of labor, relations
of exploitation, et cetera)? Must it be regarded as primary? (pp. 46-47)
Microlevel resistance is key
King, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, 2004
Angela, Journal of International Women’s Studies, The prisoner of gender: Foucault and the disciplining of the
female body. 3-1-04 http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4316121/The-prisoner-of-gender-Foucault.html,
Accessed 7-9-09
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).
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Foucault’s exploration into the Ancient philosophical search for truth yields the notion that
the best way to denounce and reject biopolitics is through courageous discourse and truthtelling. The risk undertaken by exposing the silencing of the State through debate is the
first step in breaking down the biopolitical fortress of exclusion, pain, and silence.
Milchman and Rosenberg, Professor of Political Science at Queens College of the City of
New York & Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City of New York, 2005
(Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 347349, CPG)
It is just such a problemization, we believe that sent the final Foucault on his “journey to Greece.” The
spatial/temporal setting for Foucault’s Berkeley lecture course, published as Fearless Speech, is far removed from the setting of
his lecture on governmentality, and the glosses that Dean and Rose have provided. In Fearless Speech, Foucault’s focus is
on the ancient world, from the Athens of Socrates to the imperial Rome of Seneca. Foucault’s interest in the
ancient world was not motivated by a conviction that he could find there a solution to the problems of modernity. Indeed, far
from romanticizing the ancient world, Foucault pointed to the existence of slavery and misogyny, as well as rigid class
hierarchies, to make it clear that Greco-Roman antiquity was not the answer to the cultural and political crises of modernity.
What Foucault did find in the ancient world, however, was an emphasis on self-fashioning, on truthtelling, and on friendship, that – beyond the prevailing class and gender hierarchies – seemed to contain
possibilities for meeting the challenge of contemporary crises and problemizations. In what ways could one re-function the
ancient concern with self-fashioning and parrhesia so that it could be meaningful in a world shaped by biopower? Foucault
contrasts parrhesia as truth-telling with the modern conception of truth, with its basis in Descartes, as certitude or
indubitableness based on the possession of the correct method. The moral character of the one who pursues the truth is irrelevant
in a Cartesian world, where access to Truth is a function of method. By contrast, “ In the Greek conception of parrhesia
… truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of certain moral qualities: when someone has certain
moral qualities, then that is the proof that he has access to truth – and vice versa. The “parrhesiastic game”
presupposes that the parrhesiastes [the truth-teller] is someone who has the moral qualities, which are required, first to know the
truth, and secondly, to convey such truth to others” (p. 15). Chief among those qualities is courage: “The fact that
a speaker says something dangerous – different from what the majority believes – is a strong indiction
that he is a parrhesiastes” (p. 15). Foucault distinguishes between political and ethical parrhesia, both of
which are characterized by risk or danger for the parrhesiastes. In fourth century B.C. Athens, the
parrhesiastes was the citizen who dared to speak truth to the Assembly, who risked the displeasure and
ire of his fellow citizens in his resource to democratic parrhesia. In the Hellenistic monarchies, when the
parrhesiastes, typically a philosopher or advisor to the ruler, “addresses himself to a sovereign, to a tyrant,
and tells him that his tyranny is disturbing and unpleasant because tyranny is incompatible with
justice, then the philosopher speaks the truth, believes he is speaking the truth, and more than that,
also takes a risk (since the tyrant may become angry, may punish him, may exile, may kill him)” (p. 16).
But speaking truth to power, political parrhesia, also entails a rapport a soi, an ethical relationship to
oneself. “When you accept the parrhesiastic game in which your own life is exposed, you are taking up
a specific relationship to yourself: you risk death to tell the truth instead of reposing in the security of a
life where the truth goes unspoken. Of course, the threat of death comes from the Other, and thereby
requires a relationship to the Other. But the parrhesiastes primarily chooses a relationship to himself:
he prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself” (p. 17). It is
precisely the ancient focus on the person as truth-teller, in contrast to the modern focus on possession of the Truth,
that Foucault seeks to re-function in his own problemization of the modern subject. For Foucault, it is
Socrates who embodies ethical or philosophical parrhesia in the form of philosophy as a way of life, inasmuch as the aim
of his truth-telling “is not to persuade the Assembly, but to convince someone that he must take care of
himself and of others; and this means that he must change his life. This theme of changing one’s life, of
conversion, becomes very important from the fourth century B.C. to the beginnings of Christianity. It is essential to
philosophical parrhesiastic practices.” Conversion here is not a religious experience, a revelation of the divine;
it is, rather, a transfiguration of “one’s style of life, one’s relation to others, and one’s relation to
oneself” (p. 106). For Socrates, it enables him to fulfill the basanic role, and to forge a link between logos
and bios (life).
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Framework
The Kritik must be evaluated before the plan – understanding power is necessary to
evaluate the full effects of the aff
Flyvbjerg, BT Professor of Major Programme Management at Oxford, 98
(Bent, economic geographer and urban planner, former Professor of Planning at Aalborg University, Denmark, Char
of Infrastructure Policy and Planning at Delft University of Technology Netherlands, “Habermas and Foucault:
Thinkers for Civil Society?,” The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49 No. 2 (June 1998), Blackwell Publishing, the
London School of Economics and Political science, p. 227, Jstor)
The value of Foucault's approach is his emphasis on the dynamics of power. Understanding how power works
is the first prerequisite for action, because action is the exercise of power. And such an understanding can
best be achieved by focusing on the concrete. Foucault can help us with a materialist understanding of
Realpolitik and Realrationalitat, and how these might be changed in a specific context. The problem with
Foucault is that because understanding and action have their points of departure in the par- ticular and the local, we
may come to overlook more generalized conditions concerning, for example, institutions, constitutions and
structural issues. -JC
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Discourse 1st
Language serves as the mediator of discourse that determines our understanding of society.
Cassiman, Sociology Professor, 2008. Shawn A. Cassiman, Sociology Professor 2008. Resisting the Neoliberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens. Department of Sociology,
University of Dayton.
The facts belie the substance of this rhyme. Words do hurt. Words are powerful. A cursory examination of the rhyme hints at the
power of words, of discourse, of the stories we tell, of how we construct our lives and realities. The rhyme also serves the function of a
talisman; using some words to ward off the power of others — words will never hurt me. But no matter the talisman, words do have the
power to wound. With repetition, they gain a life of their own, impart meaning, discursively elevate some
while sending others to the margins, and have a profound impact upon our lives and on the social
policies most important to us. This essay describes the power of words, of discourse, upon poverty policy and those living in
poverty. This contribution to the discourse is also concerned with encouraging critical reflection of the welfare reform discourse,
reflection upon our discursive participation, and issues of social justice. Discourse of Poverty and Welfare Reform 1691 Discourse What
is discourse? Scholars variously describe discourse as speech, an exchange of ideas or as a, ‘... a discussion that is
representative of... a particular school or epoch’, or more broadly ‘... every kind of symbolic order of intentional
processes of communication and understanding’ (Neuhert and Reich 2002, 2). Hoflander (2002) argues that, ‘Discourses
are collective, social and historically developed’ (477) while emphasizing that there are many ways of constructing and understanding
social reality. Schram (2006) reminds us that discourse also, ... situates isolated actions in context so as to give them a meaning they
would not otherwise have’ (xi) and ‘That it is lived language that is materialized in practice’ (12). Erickson n (2004) argues that, ‘... talk
is both a local process and a global one’ (107), while Wetherell et al. (2001) describes discourse as social action. What these authors
argue, then, is the very real and powerful nature of discourse. Foucault’s (1981) discussions of discourse focus upon the power
relationships laid bare in discourse. Words frame/shape/create our world—views, our values, and ourselves. Swift (1995) argues that,
‘The term “discourse” implies dialogue, a field that is not static but is continuously shaped by interaction within a particular context’
(25). Discursive arenas and/or discursive fields (Threadgold 1997) abound, though, for the most part, we remain oblivious to discourse
and its impact.
Discourse, even false ones, define people’s understanding of society and shape society to fit
the discourse.
Cassiman, Sociology Professor, 2008. Shawn A. Cassiman, Sociology Professor 2008. Resisting the Neoliberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens. Department of Sociology,
University of Dayton.
The perversity thesis outlined by Hirschtnan (1991) suggests, welfare recipients are not to blame, but are in fact the victims of a welfare
system designed to encourage the very sorts of behaviors associated with welfare mothers. In other words, there are perverse incentives
in the welfare system that, by design, encourages welfare receipt over wage work. Somers and Block (2005) examine the history of the
1834 New English Poor Law and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act or PRWORA drawing attention to the ‘... parallel ideational
transformations from poverty to perversity’ (268). They note that Murray (1984) resurrected the perversity thesis in his drive for welfare
reform. Murray argued, as had Malthus before him, that poverty was not the real problem affecting people in poverty, but the perverse
incentives built into a ‘generous’ welfare state. The generosity of benefits was leading welfare recipients to spurn low wage labor in
favor of generous welfare benefits. A construction’s truth is not a prerequisite to discursive domination. During
the welfare reform debates, opponents of welfare reform (Blank 1997) pointed out that in ‘real’ dollars, welfare benefits had
been steadily falling between the years of 1970 and 1990 and that rather than generous in comparison to other
welfare states, the benefit levels were quite inadequate (Gottschalk and Smeeding 1997). The discursive
construction of the welfare queen and its contributions to the welfare reform discourse also ignores, intentionally or not,
the inevitable and iterative nature of dependency (Fineman 2004), reifying ‘self—sufficiency’ while
stigmatizing dependency (Fraser and Gordon 1994). The welfare queen is a myth, as is globalization, and yet this
mythical creation dominates the public imagination and the policy discourse (Cassiman 2005, 2006; Hancock
2004; Lubiano 1992; Mink 1998; Resse 2005; Sidel 2006). Cruikshank (1997) argues that rather than the usual directional order of
discourse leads to policy, that the reverse is true. To rationalize policy, we need a discourse to explain it.
Either way, truthfulness is of little consequence.
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Answer To: K Ignores Suffering
Critical practice doesn’t ignore suffering—it helps us understand types of violence
obscured by our unquestioning use of a liberal paradigm.
Brown and Halley, 02 (Wendy Brown-Professor of Political Science and women’s studies at University of
California, Berkley and Janet Halley-Professor of Law at Harvard University. “Introduction”. Left Legalism/Left
Critique. Editors: Wendy Brown and Janet Halley. Duke University Press. P. 32)
Of course, there are those who would render this very valuation of pleasure an objection to the work we are
attempting to cultivate and promulgate, who would treat attention to suffering rather than pleasure as an
index of the value of all intellectual and political work. There are those who not only cast progressive
politics as necessarily bound to the relief of suffer- ing but regard any pleasure taken in intellectual or
political work with suspicion, as a sign that the work is not serious in its range or reach, that it is not committed to the downtrodden, that it does not
depict the world from their point of view. In this hydraulic model of suffering and pleasure in politics, in which the presence of each signifies the absence of the other,
pleasure is presumed to be indifferent to or to erase suffering. The sign of true political commitment is unstinting, self-effacing devotion to a cause of misery, and where
there is misery, no pleasure can be had.
But what if pleasure is itself a crucial source of political motivation? The
desire and energy to make a better world, one in which one really wants to live, cannot be easily
generated from an ethos that casts pleasure as a luxury. Moreover, what if pleasure and the relief of
suffering are not opposites? What if they can be intermixed in complex and productive ways? And what if
the relief of suffering is not the sole basis of worthy political work? Some emancipatory and egalitarian
visions may require more of us than the present demands. Some might even induce a certain suffering, for
example, more intense involvement in the making of collective life, more responsibility for others, more
limitations on wealth or in the use of the earth's resources. Similarly, some of these projects may have little
to do with what ordinarily qualifies as suffering but may pertain instead to challenging regimes of
domination in which palpable suffering is largely imperceptible. Let us suppose for a moment that
most people actually enjoy life under capitalism, that most women do not experience the unequal sexual
division of labor as a source of pain, that most slaves were happy most of the time: Would that disable a left
critique of capitalist regimes for the domination, alienation, inequality, and wasteful production that
they entail? Would that preclude feminists from seeking to restructure a geo- dered political economy?
Would that foreclose systematic critiques of sheer domination?
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Answer Too: Resistance Impossible
Resistance is always possible no matter how grim.
Deacon 03 (Roger is a professor at the University of Natal- Durban, Fabricating Foucault: Rationalising the
Management of Individuals, page 177).
To conclude this section, then, states of domination, far from exhausting the nature of power relations, are
both the products of, and, at least in a weak sense, remain characterized by, persisting struggles which may
either reinforce or resist ever-mutating configurations of power relations. [W]hat makes the domination of a
group, a caste, or a class, together with the resistance and revolts which that domination comes up against, a
central phenomenon in the history of societies is that they manifest in a massive and universalizing form, at
the level of the whole social body, the locking together of power relations with relations of strategy and the
results proceeding from their interaction (SP: 226). Thus, notwithstanding circumstances where “the
relations of power are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and the margin of liberty is
extremely limited” (Foucault 1987b: 123), or where “the practice of liberty does not exist or exists only
unilaterally or is extremely or is extremely confined and limited” (Foucault 1987b: 114), freedom is still
present and resistance is still possible even if existing strategies appear unlikely to reverse the situation
(as in the case of the Victorian wife who stoically capitalizes financially and domestically on her husband’s
philandering, or the gay or women’s liberation movements which take up and use for their own purposes
mainstream myths about homosexuality). “[N]o matter how terrifying a given system may be”, even in
the extreme case of the concentration camp, “there always remain the possibilities of resistance,
disobedience, and oppositional groupings”; this is not to say “that, after all, one may as well leave people in
slums, thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there” (Foucault 1984a: 245-6).
Each Individual act is critical
Foucault Director, Institute Francais at Hamburg 96 ( Michel, The Archaelogy of Knowledge
http://www.scribd.com/doc/11519197/Foucault-Body-and-Power KNP)
We must ask ourselves what purpose is ultimately served by this suspension of all accepted unities, if, in the
end, we return to the unities that we pretended to question at the outset. In fact, the systematic erasure of
all given unities enables us first of all to restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence, and to
show that discontinuity is one of those great accidents that create cracks not only in the geology of
history, but also in the simple fact of the statement; it emerges in its historical irruption; what we try
to examine is the incision that makes that irreducible-and very often tiny-emergence
Biopower is not inevitable, by realizing the existing power structures we have the power to
transform it into something more productive.
Chambon 99 (Adrienne, director of Ph. D program at U Toronto, Ph. D in Social Work from U Chicago, Columbia
University Press New York , Reading Foucault for Social Work, “Foucault’s Approach,” p. 67-8)
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
More fundamentally,
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>
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Answer To: Alt=Inaction
The search for solutions only re-entrenches the harms of the affirmative. The alternative
does not foreclose action- just your way of going about it
Flyvbjerg BT Professor of Major Programme Management at Oxford 98
(Bent, economic geographer and urban planner, former Professor of Planning at Aalborg University, Denmark, Char
of Infrastructure Policy and Planning at Delft University of Technology Netherlands, “Habermas and Foucault:
Thinkers for Civil Society?,” The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49 No. 2 (June 1998), Blackwell Publishing, the
London School of Economics and Political science, p. 224, Jstor)
It is because of his double 'bottom-up' thinking that Foucault has been described as non-action oriented.
Foucault (1981) says about such criticism It's true that certain people, such as those who work in the
institutional setting of the prison . . . are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books to tell them
'what is to be done.' But my project is precisely to bring it about that they 'no longer know what to do,'
so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become
problernatic, difficult, dangerous (Miller 1993: 235). The depiction of Foucault as non-action oriented
is correct to the extent that Foucault hesitates to give directives for action, and he directly distances
himself from the kinds of universal 'What is to be done?' formulas which characterize procedure in
Habermas's communicative rationality. Foucault believes that 'solutions' of this type are themselves part
of the problem
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Answer To: Perm
Relying on the state only ensures state control, and state justified violence. The Perm actually strengthens the
state by allowing it to appear as a reform where as it really just contributes to biopolitical control.
Decoteau 2008 (Claire Laurier has a Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Michigan, and is an assistant professor of
Sociology. Disertation for Ph.D in Sociology, at the University Of Michigan. “The Bio-Politics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid
South Africa” 2008. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61711/1/cdecotea_1.pdf)
Although Mbembe is describing the colonial world, the post-colonial political space is also heteronymously organized . Third,
states still exercise juridical control. According to Malcolm Bull, by suggesting that states are always ‘in exception,’
Agamben disavows normalized state violence, which can be exercised not only non-juridically but juridically (2004). Bull also notes
that while states have not relinquished their monopoly on violence, the ‘exception’ is a site of struggle, or at least a
product of it. “Agamben gives little indication that the state of exception is usually only one side of a social
confrontation, or that, rather than creating a void in the law, the exception is often made in an attempt to close a space opened up by someone
else … it is not the state of exception itself that carries the power of real life so much as the crisis with which it
attempts to deal, or the crisis that it provokes” (Bull 2004: 6; my emphasis). The ability to revise existing norms
(through legal or social frameworks) is essential to state-making because reformation
allows state power to be renewed (Bull 2004). Both Bull and Jean Comaroff (2007) insist that Agamben’s disavowal of
“constituent power”198 is misplaced (see Agamben 2003: 34-36). Constituent power can use the law, and is therefore not
extra-juridical (Bull), and can also be biopolitical (Comaroff). Bare life is not the only entity against which sovereign power acts.
It still engages in governmentality and because of this and because sovereignty is decentralized, it is a site of
struggle and resistance. Finally, and this is a point to which I will return in the next chapter, agency becomes completely impossible within
Agamben’s zone of indistinction. However, Comaroff points out that exclusion also leads to the production of new political
subjectivities (2007: 211). Several theorists have suggested that the squatter camps of the Third World are the spaces
of exception under a neoliberal world order (Biehl 2001 and 2005; See also Scheper-Huges and Bourgois 2004; Inda 2005). I will
argue that in order to protect the “nation’s biological body” (Agamben 1998: 142) from moral, economic and physical contagion – from
undisciplinarity, those in South Africa’s informal settlements have become the target of thanatopolitics. “[S]overeignty means the
capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (Mbembe 2003: 27). The
government relegates those who are dispensable, those who fail to “produce, work and consume ” (Foucault
2000b) and who represent a “biological danger to others” (Foucault 1978/1990) to “zones of abandonment” (Biehl
2001 and 2005), on the outskirts of the city, on the margins of the body politic.
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Perm Fails: Piecemeal reform within the system undercuts the alternative’s process of
criticism, and reinscribes power hierarchies
Dean, Professor: Macquarie University, 02(Mitchell Dean, “Powers of Life and Death Beyond
Governmentality”, Cultural Values, August 28, 2002)
One suspects that the emphasis on liberal governmentality, and its powers of freedom, might reproduce the
view that liberal-democratic forms of rule offer safeguards against aspects of sovereign and biopolitical
powers of life and death. In this regard, there is a risk of narrowing the relationship between the normativity
of a liberal conception of government and governmentality studies. My view is that we must be careful that
our analyses of contemporary government do not amount to a soft endorsement of the normative claims of
contemporary liberal democratic forms of rule. We must be careful of the assumption that liberal-democracy and
notions of individual and even human rights offer a prophylaxis against the less savoury aspects of biopolitics or of
sovereign powers. The following arguments should be sufficient to show why. This is connected to another possible
danger, which I shall call the ª reinscription thesisº . Here, these other domains of power might be treated as
having been reinscribed and in some sense made subordinate to the contemporary liberal framework of
governmentality. In such a view, heterogeneous powers such as sovereignty, discipline and of biopower are all
repositioned within the space of governmentality. The richness of empirical possibility of an analytics of
government thus leads to a downgrading of the importance of theoretical questions of the relations between
these power formations.
The inclusion of the state as the agent of decision ensures the perm co-opts the alternative.
Even progressive action will merely rein scribe the state as the decider of politics and life,
making biopolitics inevitable and violent
Burke in 2k5 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of
New South Wales, Sydney, Beyond Security)
Agamben, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, has done most to describe and denounce the violent and
impoverished conceptualisation of life implicit in such a politics. He saw in the convergence of a Schmittian theory of
sovereignty and what Foucault termed `biopolitics' a diabolical system of political and administrative power that
reduced human existence to 'bare life' (Homo sacer) that 'may be killed and yet not sacrificed' – Homo sacer being 'an obscure
figure of archaic Roman law in which human life is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its
capacity to be killed)'.18 He sees such a simultaneously exceptional and biopolitical power at work in `the Camp', which took on its
most horrific form in the Holocaust but is also in operation at the US prisons in Cuba and Abu Ghraib, and, as Suvendrini Perera19 has
shown, at immigration detention centres like Woomera and Baxter in remote South Australia, where sovereign power is unchecked and
life is taken hold of outside the existing legal order (or at least within a radically unstable and arbitrary one). The camp, Agamaben
argues, is 'the biopolitical paradigm of the modern' and the state of exception is becoming normalised
and universalised: it 'tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics'.20
Agamben thus issues a profound warning for anyone concerned with interrogating modern
conceptions of security – which, after all, posit the sovereign nation-state as the collective to be secured
and abrogate to government powers to protect the 'life' of this collective. Yet life is not valued equally
and its 'protection' comes with a simultaneous seizing of life by power: . . . in the age of biopolitics this
power [to decide which life can be killed] becomes emancipated from the state of exception and transformed into the power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant. When life
becomes the supreme political value, not only is the problem of life's nonvalue thereby posed as Schmitt
suggests, but further, it is as if the ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in this decision. In
modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or nonvalue of life as such.21In a world
where life and existence are defined biopolitically, and government takes on the responsibility to
secure, enable, regulate and order life, Agamben argues (after Foucault) that it is as if: 'every decisive political event
were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers
always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state
order, thus offering a new more dreadful foundation for the sovereign power from which they wanted
to free themselves.'22 In this light, the 'active defense of the American people' comes to sound sinister
indeed, for Americans and their Others alike. <8-9>
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Any link means the alternative is net beneficial-even benign policy prescriptions are rooted
in foundations that encourage violence and crowd out meaningful critique.
Burke in 2k5 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of
New South Wales, Sydney, Beyond Security)
It is clear that traditionally coercive and violent approaches to security and strategy are both still culturally
dominant, and politically and ethically suspect. However, the reasons for pursuing a critical analysis
relate not only to the most destructive or controversial approaches, such as the war in Iraq, but also to
their available (and generally preferable) alternatives. There is a necessity to question not merely
extremist versions such as the Bush doctrine, Indonesian militarism or Israeli expansionism, but also their
mainstream critiques – whether they take the form of liberal policy approaches in international relations
(IR), just war theory, US realism, optimistic accounts of globalisation, rhetorics of sensitivity to cultural
difference, or centrist Israeli security discourses based on territorial compromise with the Palestinians. The
surface appearance of lively (and often significant) debate masks a deeper agreement about major
concepts, forms of political identity and the imperative to secure them. Debates about when and how it
may be effective and legitimate to use military force in tandem with other policy options, for example, mask
a more fundamental discursive consensus about the meaning of security, the ffectiveness of strategic
power, the nature of progress, the value of freedom or the promises of national and cultural identity. As
a result, political and intellectual debate about insecurity, violent conflict and global injustice can
become hostage to a claustrophobic structure of political and ethical possibility that systematically
wards off critique. <p3-4>
Complete refusal to engage in sovereign power is key or we will be forever trapped in
authority
Edkins and Pin-Fat, International Politics Professor at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, 2004
(Jenny and Véronique, Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, p. 11-12)
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.
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***Affirmative Answers***
2AC Frontline
1)No link: plan decreases restrictions and is therefore less invasive
2) Biopower is inevitable and inescapable – the alt can never solve
Dula 01 [Peter Historic Peace Churches Consultation, Bienenberg, Switzerland,
http://www.peacetheology.org/papers/dula.html KNP]
Global capital operates on all registers of the social order. It is the pinnacle of biopower, where social
life is not just regulated but also produced. Understood in these terms, the web of power seems inescapable. There
is no outside to this power, as Hardt and Negri repeatedly insist. There is no non-co-optable space from which to mount a critique, no
proletariat (or church) to function as a locus of purity. And since this power takes the form of a constantly shifting web or
network it is difficult, if not impossible, to pin-point an ‘enemy’ (56-58). Negri goes so far as to say that ‘the proletariat is
everywhere, just as the boss is.’ In other words, everyone is now both oppressor and oppressed . In light of all this it
becomes easy to read Hardt and Negri as utterly hopeless and also as absurdly abstract. One wants to respond with Emerson’s retort to Tocqueville: ‘I hate
the builders of dungeons in the air.’ Or with Stuart Hall’s insistence that the argument that global capitalism is the final triumph of the West, ‘the
final
moment of a global post-modern where it now gets hold of everybody, of everything, where there is no
difference which it cannot contain, no otherness it cannot speak, no marginality which it cannot take pleasure out of…. [is] the form of
post-modernism I don’t buy. It is what happens to ex-Marxist French intellectuals when they head for the desert.’ On the ground, say in Prague or Capetown
not so many years ago, the line between oppressor and oppressed comes into focus in a way it can’t from the heights of Deleuzian metaphysics.
Civil
society becomes more elusive than Hardt and Negri’s condemnation (or Falk’s approval) suggests.
3.) Their alternative will be co-opted, resistance can’t break down biopower
Haber, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Colorado-Denver, 94 ( H.F.
BEYOND POSTMODERN POLITICS, p. 99 KNP)
Foucault states in the passage quoted above, that the existence of power "depends on a multiplicity of points
of resistance," that resistance "can only exist in the strategic field of power relations." But this means that
resistance is co-opted for the purposes of disciplinary and normalizing regimes of power, and is
evidence of the fact that resistance need not result in transformation. And in fact, Foucault is not
wrong. We see this co-opting of resistance all the time. Enough white middle-class women objected to
being confined to the role of housewife for it to have become the norm for those women to find jobs outside
of the home. But, far from changing the basic power structure, the phenomenon of women in the
workplace has served to strengthen it. The male-dominated society hasn't given much up-women are still
responsible for the household; government has not taken on the responsibility of making day care available to
all, it has not sufficiently altered the workplace to accommodate demands for maternity (much less demands
for paternity) leave, women are still not given equal pay for equal work, etc., it would not then be surprising
if these women "chose" to go back to being housewives. The dominant power regime assures a no-win
situation. If women work, more can be produced, and two-income families are able to spend more in an
inflationary age than a single-income family would. On the other hand, if women are forced to go back to
being housewives, the patriarchal power regime wins by having its values reinforced. Either way the
dominant power regime is able both to benefit from, and deflect, resistance. Or one could take the
example of how resistances are used as a target to strengthen the hold of the dominant powers by
unifying the people against a common enemy.
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4.) We’re Different – their generic evidence assumes the Nazi and Hitler-style biopolitical control which
resulted in genocides; prefer specific warranted internals.
5.) Permute – do the plan then the alternative
a.) Opp Cost – if it’s so good, the alt should solve for residual links
b.) Timeframe – our impacts are too important to be left out, we can still reject the
state later
6.) Permute – do the plan and all parts of the non-competitive parts of the alternative.
a.) Working within the system is critical to progressive changes – history proves that nonstatist movements, such as their alternative, are total failures.
Grossberg, Professor of Communications at the University of Illinois, 92 [Lawrence, We Gotta Get Out of This
Place, p. 390-391 KNP]
But this would mean that the Left could not remain outside of the systems of governance. It has sometimes to work with, against and
with in bureaucratic systems of governance. Consider the case of Amnesty International, an immesely
effective organization when its major strategy was (similar to that of the Right) exerting pressure
directly on the bureaucracies of specific governments. In recent years (marked by the recent rock
tour), it has apparently redirected its energy and resources, seeking new members (who may not be committed to
actually doing anything; memebership becomes little more than a statement of ideological support for a position that few are likely to oppose) and public
visibility. In stark contrast, the most effective struggle on the Left in recent times has been the
dramatic (and, one hopes continuing) dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. It was accomplished
by mobilizing popular pressure on the institutions and bureaucracies of economic and governmental institutions and it depended
on a highly sophisticated organizational structure. The Left too often thinks that it can end racism and sexism and
classism by changing people's attitudes and everyday practices (e.g. the 1990 Black boycott of Korean
stores in New York). Unfortunately, while such struggles may be extremely visible, they are often less
effective than attempts to move the institutions (e.g.,banks, taxing structures, distributors) which have put the economic realtions
of black and immigrant populations in place and which condition people's everyday practices. The Left needs
institutions which can operate within the system of governance, understanding that such institutions
are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition
against specific institutions that power can be challenged. The Left assumed for some time now that, since it has so little
access to the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in fact need more
Otherwise the Left has nothing but
its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our
world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they
must act with organizations, and within the systems of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as
responsibility) to fight them.
visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making power.
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7) the alternative only breeds nihilism and worse oppression
Collins ‘97 (Patricia Hill, Department of Sociology, PhD, Brandeis University, President-Elect of the American
Sociological Association, Fighting Words, p 135-136 KNP)
In this sense, postmodern views of power that overemphasize hegemony and local politics provide a seductive mix of
appearing to challenge oppression while secretly believing that such efforts are doomed. Hegemonic power
appears as ever expanding and invading. It may even attempt to “annex” the counterdiscourses that have developed, oppositional discourses such
as Afrocentrism, postmodernism, feminism, and Black feminist thought. This is a very important insight. However, there is a difference
between being aware of the power of one’s enemy and arguing that such power is so pervasive that
resistance will, at best, provide a brief respite and, at worst, prove ultimately futile. This emphasis on power as being
hegemonic and seemingly absolute coupled with a belief in local resistance as the best people can do, flies in the face of
actual, historical successes. African-Americans, women, poor people, and others have achieved results
through social movements, revolts, revolutions, and other collective social action against government,
corporate, and academic structures. As James Scott queries, “What remains to be explained…is why theories of
hegemony….have…retained an enormous intellectual appeal to social scientists and historians” (1990, 86). Perhaps for colonizers who refuse,
individualized, local resistance is the best they can envision. Overemphasizing
hegemony and stressing nihilism not only
does not resist injustice but participates in its manufacture. Views of power grounded exclusively in
notions of hegemony and nihilism are not only pessimistic, they can be dangerous for members of
historically marginalized groups. Moreover, the emphasis on local versus structural institutions makes it
difficult to examine major structures such as racism, sexism, and other structural forms of oppression.
Social theories that reduce hierarchal power relations to the level of representation, performance , or
constructed phenomena not only emphasize the likelihood that resistance will fail in the face of a pervasive hegemonic presence,
they also reinforce perceptions that local, individualized micropolitics constitutes the most effective terrain of struggle. The emphasis on the local dovetails
If politics becomes reduced
to the “personal,” decentering relations of ruling in academia and other bureaucratic structures seems increasingly unlikely. As Rey Chow opines,
“What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and
this depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand
nicely with increasing emphasis on the “personal” as a source of power and with parallel attention to subjectivity.
8) Relativisim- Rejecting the notion of objective truth embraces rape, racism, and
Holocaust denial
Catharine A. MacKinnon 2000 (Chicago Kent Law Review, 75 Chi. Kent L. Rev. 687)
It is my view that it is the relation of theory to reality that feminism changed, and it is in part a reversion to a
prefeminist relation of theory to reality that postmodernism is reimposing. This is not about truth. Truth is a
generality, an abstraction of a certain shape and quality. Social realities are something else again.
Postmodernism has decided that because truth died with God, there are no social facts. The fact that
reality is a social construction does not mean that it is not there; it means that it is there, in society,
where we live. According to postmodernism, there are no facts; everything is a reading, so there can be no
lies. Apparently it cannot be known whether the Holocaust is a hoax, whether women love to be raped,
whether Black people are genetically intellectually inferior to white people, whether homosexuals are
child molesters. To postmodernists, these factish things are indeterminate, contingent, in play, all a
matter of interpretation. Similarly, whether or not acts of incest happened or are traumatic to children
become fogged over in "epistemological quandaries" as beyond thinking, beyond narrative, beyond
intelligibility, as "this event that is no event"--as if survivors have not often reported, in intelligible
narratives, that such events did happen and did harm them. 41 That violation often damages speech and
memory does not mean that, if one has speech and memory, one was not violated. Recall when Bill Clinton,
asked about his sexual relationship with a young woman intern, said that it all depended on what "is" means.
The country jeered his epistemic dodge as a transparent and slimy subterfuge to evade accountability: get
real. The postmodernists were strangely silent. But you can't commit perjury if there are no facts. Where are
these people when you need them?
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Biopower Capitalism Turn
A) Biopower is key to Capitalism
Read 03 (Jason; Assistant Professor of Philosophy – University of Southern Maine The Micro-Politics of Capital:
Marx and the Prehistory of the Present p. 140-1 KNP)
In many ways the articulation of the concept of biopower falls outside of Marx’s problematic. Foucault argues that biopower predates
the emergence of industrial capitalism: “This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the
development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of
bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomenon of population to
economic processes.” Biopower predates capitalism insofar as the recognition of the relationship between the population as a vital
entity and the state dates back to at least early mercantilism, or mercantile capitalism. Population does not simply designate the number
of individuals bounded by a territory but the dynamic relations of birth and death, sickness and health, which are vital to a nation
politically and economically. It is only later, after the rise of the urban centers of production and the threat of revolution, after the health
of the rich and the poor become intertwined, that the state concerns itself not only with the population as a statistical entity but
specifically with the health and environment of the working body. What is essential for Foucault is the manner in which the investment
of the state into the life and death of the population, the environmental conditions of the cities, and the health and longevity of the
working class in each case is a properly political relation forming a biopolitics. In each instance the goals of the intervention are
political: Biopolitics functions to increase productivity while at the same time reducing the conditions
and causes for revolt. Thus, it is more accurate to say that biopolitics works for both economic and political
goals, or better, it is constituted at the point at which political power becomes inseparable form economic
power. Biopolitics, like Marx’s critique of political economy, short-circuits the division between the economic and the political.
Moreover, at the same time as biopolitics functions in the service of political and economic goals, is also works to restructure and
transform political and social space, for example, by imposing grids and models drawn from the control of contagions onto the city,
models that are always both hygienic and political. It brings with it new models of the partitioning of social space, new forms of
knowledge regarding social space, new ways of living and understanding life.
B. Capitalism’s socializing functions are key to survival
Heilbroner 85 (Robert L.; Norman Thomas Professor of Economics – New School for Social Research The
Nature and Logic of Capitalism p. 23-4 KNP)
Of at least equal importance with the institutions that shape the economic activities of the system
are those that mold behavior and belief at the diffuse, unspecialized level we call social life. Here,
typical behavioral ways are influenced by the pressures of indoctrination and education – experiences
that make it possible for individuals to enter their social formations with a sense of familiarity and acceptance. These pressures
begin with the family that introduces the infant to the norms of private and public existence; continue with the reinforcement of, and
sometimes with the challenge to, those norms by the child’s peers and teachers; and are capped by the enticements,
rewards and punishments administered by larger social organizations, from churches to corporations
to the state itself. The latter includes, of course, the socio-legal framework that casts its powerful compulsions over so much of
social activity, establishing with the force of law what we must do and what we may not do. This socializing and
normalizing process is by no means a completely integrated or frictionless one. As they move through
history, all societies must make their peace with nature and with themselves, the latter constituting the theme of domination and
oppression that will play a very large role in our analysis. Here we need only note that the institutions in which are
molded typical patterns of rule, obedience, and beliefs are themselves molded by an inner dynamic
that may take the form of class against class, against tribe, even civilization against civilization, or
at times contests that focus on color, religion, sex. For these reasons, at close range the socialization
process is often a tense and sometimes turbulent one. But at a sufficient historic distance, the
spectrum of socializing institutions clearly succeeds in creating typical behavioral patterns. Primitive
societies produce hunters and gatherers with their requisite attitudes as well as skills; imperial and feudal societies produce peasants
and lords with their respective mentalities and accepted roles; and capitalist societies create workers and capitalists
who also bring to their activities deeply ingrained conceptions of their social functions. Were there
not a high degree of dependability to this indoctrination process, the extraordinary stability of
social formations would not be the rule, and humanity would long ago have perished or found its way to
a heaven on earth. The viscosity that is so prominent a feature of social history must therefore be traced to the stabilizing influence
of the behavior-shaping cores of its social formations.
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Incrementalism
Foucauldian criticism is flawed it obscures genuine analysis and denies progressive action.
Sangren, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of
Foucaultian Usage. Jstor KNP]
It is Foucault's explicit disarticulation of power from subjectivity or agency that arguably most defines the novelty of his usage, and it is
this element of his thinking that is most widely emulated by other scholars. Against Foucault's reifying, transcendental notion of power a notion in which intentional action is incidental to power - I argue that power can be employed coherently as an
analytical category only when it is linkable to some socially constituted agent - that is, to a person or to a
socially constituted collectivity. This is not to say that actors or agents are possessed of complete knowledge of how their own desires
and motives are also products of complex social circumstances or of how their actions have effects that exceed intentions.8 As Foucault
frequently emphasizes, people, selves, the subjects are in part products of historically and locationally specific circumstances, cultures,
discourses. However, denying agency - that is, power to actors, viewing people even at the level of their
desires primarily as products and only trivially, if at all, as producers, is not only fatalistic, it
significantly misrecognizes the realities of social life.9 In comparing "Chinese" notions of power (or, more precisely,
some notions of power produced by Chinese culture) with Foucault's, my intention is to draw attention to similarities in their alienating
properties. I suggest that in the Foucaultian categories of power and its ineluctable other, resistance, one can perceive remarkable
affinities to Chinese contrastive oppositions such as yang (a metaphysically conceived representation of ordering) and yin (yang's
disordering, resistant alter). Far from providing the kind of critical insights that Foucault would claim,
Foucaultian power and resistance obstruct genuine critical analysis and constitute elements of a
romantic ideology whose "effects of truth" are most socially manifest in providing an avant-gardist
intelligentsia an ideology that dissociates its "theory" from its own individual and class interests - and,
paradoxically, all this in the name of reflexivity and high-minded political virtue. This representative
dissociation of power from intention in Foucault is also apparent in Chinese ideologies of power. Such dissociations-forms of
alienation-are defining characteristics of ideology's operations in social processes .
The Supreme Court has noted the fundamental importance of biopoltics in American
society. It is the state’s Constitutional duty to protect society, even at the price of individual
bodies.
Pushaw, Law Professor at Pepperdine University - School of Law, 01 (Robert J., Jr., “The
Medical Marijuana Case: A Commerce Clause Counter-Revolution”, Lewis and Clark Law Review: 9, p. 869870, CPG)
In her dissent, Justice O’Connor also made little effort to characterize the regulation of marijuana by California, instead of the
federal government, as a direct enhancement of individual liberty. Rather, she described liberty as a topic of state, not
individual, concern. Thus, she highlighted the efforts of states to “regulate medical marijuana differently” from the
federal government out of concern “for the lives and liberties of their people”. She also invoked Justice Brandeis for
the idea that federalism, by making room for exercise of state police powers, “promotes innovation by allowing for the possibility that “a
single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to
the rest of the country.’” Put more dramatically, Justice O’Connor highlighted the role of federalism in fostering fifty-one laboratories in
which we become the subjects of experiments on how to best manage our liberty. For his part, although he expressed concern about the
expansion of the federal commerce power, Justice Thomas also showed little concern for the plaintiffs’ individual liberty claims. Instead,
he argued that “Congress has encroached on States’ traditional police powers to define the criminal law and to protect the health, safety,
and welfare of their citizens.” At the end of his opinion, he declared, “The majority prevents States like California from devising drug
policies that they have concluded provide much-needed respite to the seriously ill … Our federalist system, properly understood, allows
California and a growing number of other States to decide for themselves how to safeguard the health and welfare of their citizens.”
And, Justice Thomas was well aware that when the states “decide for themselves,” the decision will likely be in favor of some kind of
regulation. Once again, the emphasis here is on the legitimacy of state efforts to regulate in ways that
maximize aggregate public health. My point is that at least eight of the justices agreed in Raich on the
constitutional principle that one of the proper concerns of government is to regulate aggregate public
health, which in turn means controlling the individual bodies of citizens as units of the larger public .
The only issues that divided them were (1) which government will have the honors and (2) whether or when the act of regulating can
itself constitutionally justify further regulation. Remember, too, that the issue in Raich was the provision of marijuana to seriously ill
people for the purpose of allievating their pain. The power “to make live and let die” is neither a metaphor nor a theoretical frolic.
Biopolitical regulation of populations is concrete – individuals will live or die or will suffer more or less
pain as a result of it. So, when the justices extol the inevitability or desirability of regulation, they are talking, among other things,
about the power of governments to regulate and manage – whether to increase or decrease – the pain that their subjects feel in their daily
lives. As we will see, the regulation of public health ultimately means managing our deaths as well
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Extra-legalism creates the “myth of activism” – eroding any possibility for actual reform
Orly Lobel ‘7 -- Professor of Law @ University of San Diego, “The Paradox of Extralegal Activism Critical Legal
Consciousness and Transformative Politics” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 120, 2007
At this point, the paradox of extralegal activism unfolds. While public interest thinkers increasingly
embrace an axiomatic rejection of law as the primary form of progress, their preferred form of activism
presents the very risks they seek to avoid. The rejected “myth of the law” is replaced by a “myth of
activism” or a “myth of exit,” romanti- cizing a distinct sphere that can better solve social conflict. Yet
these myths, like other myths, come complete with their own perpetual perils. The myth of exit
exemplifies the myriad concerns of cooptation. For feminist agendas, for example, the separation of the
world into distinct spheres of action has been a continuous impediment to meaning- ful reform.
Efforts to create better possibilities for women to balance work and family responsibilities, including
relaxing home work rules and supporting stay-at-home parents through federal child care legisla- tion, have
been couched in terms of support for individual choice and private decisionmaking.173 Indeed, recent
initiatives in federal child care legislation to support stay-at-home parents have been clouded by
preconceptions of the separation of spheres and the need to make one- or-the-other life choices. Most
importantly, the emergence of a sphere- oriented discourse abandons a critical perspective that distinguishes
between valuing traditional gender-based characteristics and celebrat- ing feminine difference in a
universalist and essentialist manner.174 Not surprisingly then, some feminist writers have responded to civil
society revivalism with great skepticism, arguing that efforts to align feminine values and agendas with
classic republican theory of civil so- ciety activism should be understood, at least in part, as a way of legitimizing historical social structures that subordinated women.175 The feminist lesson on the law/exit
pendulum reveals a broader pattern. In a classic example of cooptation, activists should be con- cerned about
the infusion (or indeed confusion) of nonlegal strategies with conservative privatization agendas. Indeed, in
significant social policy contexts, legal scholarship oriented toward the exploration of ex- tralegal paths
reinforces the exact narrative that it originally resisted — that the state cannot and should not be
accountable for sustaining and improving the lifeworld of individuals in the twenty-first-century economy
and that we must seek alternative ways to bring about social reform. Whether using the terminology of a
path-dependent process, an inevitable downward spiral, a transnational prisoner’s dilemma, or a global
race to the bottom, current analyses often suggest a lack of control over the forces of new economic
realities. Rather than counter- ing the story of lack of control, pointing to the ongoing role of gov- ernment
and showing the contradictions between that which is being kept regulated and that which is privatized,
alternative extralegal scholarship accepts these developments as natural and inevitable. Similar to the
arguments developed in relation to the labor movement — in which focusing on a limited right to collective
bargaining demo- bilized workers and stripped them of their voice, participation, and de- cisionmaking
power — contemporary extralegal agendas are limited to very narrow and patterned sets of reforms.
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Sovereignty Not Root of Power
SOVEREIGNTY IS NOT THE ORIGIN OF POWER
Baxter, law professor, Boston University,96 (Hugh STANFORD LAW REVIEW, January 1996,
p. 475. KNP)
Throughout I have been assuming that we must try, with Foucault, to avoid recourse to the discourse of
sovereignty. But why did Foucault so arduously seek to escape that discourse? His main objection was
that the language of sovereignty neither describes the techniques by which power is actually exercised
nor focuses sufficiently on the effects of power. We mischaracterize power when we see it as following
the single model of the legal command. And we misunderstand it when we seek it "in the primary
existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent
forms would emanate." Foucault's objection, in short, was that the language of sovereignty mis-describes
power relations.
SOVEREIGNTY IS NOT THE ORIGIN OF POWER
Goodman, 00 (Ryan University of Chicago Law School Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer,
CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW, p. 669. KNP)
It is doubtful how far one really has to go to retool Foucault in order to analyze the constitutive effects of
law; Foucault himself would have embraced some of the more nuanced ways of describing law's production
of local social relations and law's involvement in individuals' self-surveillance. Nonetheless, Foucault
strongly disavowed theories that assumed power was located principally in the state's repressive
apparatus or, as he called it, "power-sovereignty." It is therefore important to acknowledge the
potentially uneasy union of Foucault's conceptual framework, in which power is often described as
dispersed, productive, and exercised through local discourses, and empirical research that emphasizes
the importance of law's influence on social relations.
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Link Turns
Institutionalized exclusion of “illegal” and unworthy immigrants is the height of control
over life.
Dean, Professor: Macquarie University, 02(Mitchell Dean, “Powers of Life and Death Beyond
Governmentality”, Cultural Values, August 28, 2002)
Another example of an equally heterogenous set of powers is found in the treatment of those groups
variously called asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and refugees. While we can map fundamental
transformations in the national and international government of refugees (Lippert 1998), these
governmental regimes are incomplete without decisions on who is to be included and who is to
excluded from the juridical-political order. Some are thought worthy of inclusion in the citizenry;
others are placed in the paradoxical situation of being included through their exclusion . In
Australia, for example, those awaiting ª processingº are placed outside the political order within the
perimeters of ª detention centersº . These sovereign decisions on the value of populations are a
condition for a government of such populations, which regulates their movements across national
borders, assigns them particular statuses and treats them accordingly.
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No Alt Solvency
Grass roots politics fail
Orly Lobel ‘7 -- Professor of Law @ University of San Diego, “The Paradox of Extralegal Activism Critical Legal
Consciousness and Transformative Politics” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 120, 2007
Similarly, at the local level, grassroots politics often lack a clear agenda and are particularly ripe for
cooptation resulting in far lesser achievements than what may have been expected by the groups
involved. In a critical introduction to the law and organizing model, Professor Scott Cummings and Ingrid
Eagly describe the ways in which new community-based approaches to progressive lawyering privilege
grassroots activism over legal reform efforts and the facilitation of community mobilization over
conventional lawyering.181 After carefully unpacking the ways in which community lawyers embrace aw
and organizing, Professor Cummings and Eagly rightfully warn against “exaggerating the ineffectiveness of
traditional legal interventions” and “closing off potential avenues for redress.”182 Significantly, the
strategies embraced by new public interest lawyers have not been shown to produce effective change in
communities, and certainly there has been no assurance that these strategies fare comparatively better
than legal reform. Moreover, what are meant to be progressive projects of community action and
community economic development frequently can have a hidden effect of excluding worse-off groups, such
as migrant workers, because of the geographical scope and zoning restrictions of the project.183 In the same
way that the labor and corporate social responsibility movements have failed because of their em- brace of a
legal framework, the community economic development movement — so diverse in its ideological
appeal yet so prominent since the early 1990s as a major approach to poverty relief — may bring
about its own destruction by fracture and diffusion.184 In all of these cases, it is the act of engagement,
not law, that holds the risks of cooptation and the politics of compromise. It is not the particularities of
lawyers as a professional group that create depend- ency. Rather, it is the dynamics between skilled,
networked, and re- sourced components and those who need them that may submerge goals and create
reliance. It is not the particularities of the structural limitations of the judiciary that threaten to limit the
progressive vision of social movements. Rather, it is the essential difficulties of imple- menting theory into
practice. Life is simply messier than abstract ideals. Cooptation analysis exposes the broad, general risk
of assuming ownership over a rhetorical and conceptual framework of a movement for change.
Subsequently, when, in practice, other factions in the po- litical debate embrace the language and frame their
projects in similar terms, groups experience a sense of loss of control or possession of “their” vision. In sum,
in the contemporary context, in the absence of a more programmatic and concrete vision of what
alternative models of social reform activism need to achieve, the conclusions and rhetoric of the
contemporary critical legal consciousness are appropriated by advocates representing a wide range of
political commitments. Under- stood from this perspective, cooptation is not the result of the turn to a
particular reform strategy. Rather, cooptation occurs when imagined ideals are left unchecked and
seemingly progressive rhetoric is repro- duced by a conservative agenda. Dominant interpretations
such as privatization and market competitiveness come out ahead, whereas other values, such as group
empowerment and redistributive justice, receive only symbolic recognition, and in turn serve to facilitate
and stabilize the process.185
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Grass root politics don’t spillover to national reform
Orly Lobel ‘7 -- Professor of Law @ University of San Diego, “The Paradox of Extralegal Activism Critical Legal
Consciousness and Transformative Politics” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 120, 2007
The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often funda- mentally performative, obscuring the
distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism — the law
and organizing model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the
celebrated, separate nongovern- mental sphere of action — all produce a fantasy that change can be
brought about through small-scale, decentralized transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality
is described as a microcosm of the whole and the audience is national and global. In the context of the
humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to ethnographic studies from the
1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each individual story
could translate into a “time of the nation” body of knowledge and motivation.227 In contemporary legal
thought, a corresponding gap opens between the local scale and the larger, translocal one. In reality,
although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new localstate- national federations have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the
existing voluntary federations that flour- ished in the mid-twentieth century are in decline.228 There is,
there- fore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent intermediate public
sphere, which has been termed “the missing mid- dle” by Professor Theda Skocpol.229 New social
movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing significant institutional
change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the
ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are so embedded in current activism.230 Is the focus
on small-scale dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive debate?
Micro-politics radical focus on new alternatives makes us incapable of producing real
change
Orly Lobel ‘7 -- Professor of Law @ University of San Diego, “The Paradox of Extralegal Activism Critical Legal
Consciousness and Transformative Politics” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 120, 2007
Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform. Although
the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives to legal reform models and as capable
of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited improvement in
existing social ar- rangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be ex- plained in terms of
the most profound risk of the typology — that of legitimation. The common pattern of extralegal scholarship
is to de- scribe an inherent instability in dominant structures by pointing, for example, to grassroots
strategies,223 and then to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities translate into a more
complete transformation. This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to rely on an aggregate
approach — an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something substantial. In fact, the
myth of engagement obscures the actual lack of change being produced, while the broader pattern of
equating extralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential of change. There
are few in- stances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution.
Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as though the scholarly narrative has the power to
unpack more than the actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and
part of a whole through mere re- framing. At the same time, the elephant in the room — the rising
level of economic inequality — is left unaddressed and comes to be under- stood as natural and
inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists decry as losers’ selfmystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as the product of their
own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of their willed
reality.
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Turn: Foucault’s notion of rejecting biopower in all instances necessitates nihilism
Taylor, associate professor at Stanford University ‘86
(Charles, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in Hoy, David Couzens. Ed. Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell: 69–102. AD:7-8-9, 1986, CMM)
Dennis (2006) builds on Foucault’s notion of shepherd/police who spy on people’s private and public
lives with the intent of shaping ethical behavior from the top-down. Foucault differentiated between the
function of what is commonly known as policing with the function of 17th century German
Polizeiwissenschaft (police)which branched out into “all of the people’s conditions, everything that they
do or undertake.” (Turquet cited in Dennis 2006). Dennis argues that the “Polizeiwissenschaft project has
been re-animated, via digital technologies.” Dennis echoes Foucault’s concerns that there is a
“widespread acceptance of some morally and politically significant beliefs that mislead, distort, and
give us a false sense of what is happening around and to us (Kumar 2005).” Charles Taylor distinguishes
between ethics and morality by describing the latter as “that part of ethics which is concerned with our
obligations to others, in justice and benevolence.” In the course that he is currently teaching (2007) Taylor examines
how, For some thinkers, this is the really important department of ethics, far more significant than questions about what constitutes a
good or worth-while life. For others, this primacy is quite mistaken and unacceptable. This issue is often fought out under the description
“the primacy of the right over the good”. If one accepts the primacy, certain questions open up: viz, utilitarianism versus a Kantian
approach. If one refuses this primacy, then another set of questions become important, because there are a host of different ways of
defining the good life (Taylor 2007). I am intrigued by the tension between top-down morals and bottom-up ethics. Taylor’s notion of
morality is that part of ethics which concerns issues such as social justice, hospitality, politics of friendship and other relationships where
we have social responsibilities. With this notion of morality there is always space for agency at the individual level. There may be
economic, political, legal or even physical and emotional consequences to making ethical choices that run counter to pervasive moral
codes. In a police state, an ethical choice may be a dangerous choice. In a capitalist-dependent democracy, one’s personal code of ethics
may conflict with a code of professional ethics. But are these pervasive moral codes imposed top-down by shepherds of consciousness
on powerless individuals? Or are they accepted and obeyed by individuals for the sake of expediency? In other words, we have a choice
but with it comes consequences. In risk society much of what is discussed under the name of ethics seems to be related to measuring
costs and benefits. The encoding of these into measurable and accountable standards of practice within professions for example is not a
guaranteer of ethical behaviour. Ethical standards can be morphed over time and become part of our inner topography simply through
desensitization or sensitization. We may not even be aware of their source or legitimacy. Charles Taylor described how any form of
domination, “even if it is partly self-imposed, is possible only if there is “a background of desires, interests, purposes” that people have
and if “it makes a dent in these, if it frustrates them, prevents them from fulfilment, or perhaps even from formulation,” diminishing
freedom in these ways (Taylor 1986: 91 cited in Kumar).” In the early 1970s Foucault called for intellectuals, particularly in the social
and human sciences, to immediately undertake the urgent task of revealing hidden relationships of political power which controlled,
oppressed and/or repressed the social body (Foucault 1974:171). Foucault was impatient with the project of modernity seeing it as
regressive not progressive. He challenged modern techniques of discipline for their growing systems of control (Taylor 1986:80). While
he defended certain disadvantaged groups and adopted his own causes, Foucault rejected the possibility of imagining a future social
order in which human nature could be fully realized. He rejected grounding his own ethics in God’s will, human nature or even
Habermas’ universal presuppositions (Kumar 2005). Is this what Taylor would describe as moral subjectivism, the view that morality is
grounded not in reason or the way things are but in the preferences of individual subjects (Taylor EA)? Foucault’s seventies
project was an attempt to heighten awareness of ways in which ruling classes deceive people and
undermine their freedom in many ways including exercising power in a repressive, hidden, top-down
manner. Now that he has succeeded beyond his wildest imagination so that we are all somewhat streetsmart and cynical about truth claims from Big Science, Big Government, Mass Media and now Big
Technology, where does that leave us? Wistfully nihilistic? Taylor argues that Foucault’s portrait of
social change in the late 20th century leaves us with a disempowering nihilism. See Kumar (2005) on
Fraser, Habermas, Walzer and Taylor. Taylor feels that we should reject our desire to discern
irreversible optimistic or pessimistic (Bell, Daniel Bloom, Allan) societal trends and cultural trends. In
between is the space of moral philosophy where conscious ethical choice is not only possible but the
only responsible action. So where does the ethical turn in the social sciences lead us?
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Perm
Criticicism of legal sphere works best when combined with advocacy for specific legal
change.
Orly Lobel ‘7 -- Professor of Law @ University of San Diego, “The Paradox of Extralegal Activism Critical Legal
Consciousness and Transformative Politics” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 120, 2007
At first glance, the idea of opting out of the legal sphere and moving to an extralegal space using
alternative modes of social activism may seem attractive to new social movements. We are used to
thinking in binary categories, constantly carving out different aspects of life as belonging to different spatial
and temporal spheres. Moreover, we are attracted to declarations about newness — new paradigms, new
spheres of action, and new strategies that are seemingly untainted by prior failures.18 6 However, the
critical insights about law’s reach must not be abandoned in the process of critical analysis. Just as
advocates of a laissez-faire market are incorrect in imagining a purely private space free of regulation,
and just as the “state” is not a single organism but a multiplicity of legislative, administrative, and
judicial organs, “nonstate arenas” are dispersed, multiple, and constructed. The focus on action in a
separate sphere broadly defined as civil society can be self-defeating precisely because it conceals the
many ways in which law continues to play a crucial role in all spheres of life. Today, the lines between
private and public functions are increasingly blurred, forming what Professor Gunther Teubner terms
“polycorpora- tist regimes,” a symbiosis between private and public sectors. 187 Simi- larly, new economic
partnerships and structures blur the lines between for-profit and nonprofit entities.188 Yet much of the current
literature on the limits of legal reform and the crisis of government action is built upon a
privatization/regulation binary, particularly with regard to social commitments, paying little attention to
how the background conditions of a privatized market can sustain or curtail new concep- tions of the
public good.189 In the same way, legal scholars often em- phasize sharp shifts between regulation and
deregulation, overlooking the continuing presence of legal norms that shape and inform these shifts.190
These false dichotomies should resonate well with classic co- optation analysis, which shows how social
reformers overestimate the possibilities of one channel for reform while crowding out other paths and
more complex alternatives. Indeed, in the contemporary extralegal climate, and contrary to the
conservative portrayal of federal social policies as harmful to the non- profit sector, voluntary associations
have flourished in mutually bene- ficial relationships with federal regulations.191 A dichotomized notion of
a shift between spheres — between law and informalization, and between regulatory and nonregulatory
schemes — therefore neglects the ongoing possibilities within the legal system to develop and sustain
desired outcomes and to eliminate others. The challenge for social re- form groups and for policymakers
today is to identify the diverse ways in which some legal regulations and formal structures contribute to socially responsible practices while others produce new forms of exclu- sion and inequality. Community
empowerment requires ongoing gov- ernment commitment.192 In fact, the most successful communitybased projects have been those which were not only supported by pub- lic funds, but in which public
administration also continued to play some coordination role.193
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Resistance within is possible.
Foucault, Philosopher of Awesomeness, 1978.
(Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, pp. 94-96)
Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to
slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships
(economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are
the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal
conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or
accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play. -Power comes from below; that is,
there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power
relations, and serving as a general matrix -no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited
groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come
into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage
that run through the social body as a whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them
together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of the
force relations. Major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations. -Power relations are both
intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation:
there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or
decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs,
nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of
power that functions in a society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit
at the. restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another,
attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive
systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few
who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which
coordinate the loquacious tactics whose ':inventors" or decision makers are often Without hypocrisy. -Where there is power,
there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it, there
is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason,
power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power
relationships, Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle
in power relations. These points of resistance represent everywhere in the power network. Hence there IS
no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the
revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that
are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant,
or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can
only exist in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction
or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always
passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but
neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the
latter as an irreducible opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or
focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or
individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. Are
there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one
is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing
unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible
regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web
that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the
swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless
the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat
similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.
ADI
Critical Lab
77
Biopolitics K
Intellectuals should not try to spark change against biopower, we need to work within the
state
Kelly, PhD Foucault author, 2009
Mark, eInternation Relations Michel Foucault’s Political Philosophy, 3-31-09, http://www.e-ir.info/?p=618,
Accessed 7-9-09)
Such considerations inform Foucault’s late thought, in which he is concerned with ancient ethics and
practices of the self. While new practices of the self are putatively suggested as a corrective for
subjection, this is not proposed as an immediate solution. It is unclear for Foucault to what extent ethical
practices are possible today. Rather, an orientation towards the self is advised as a way of dealing with
the inevitable frustrations of political praxis, though certainly not as an alternative to organised
political activity. That said, for Foucault political activity must limit itself. Firstly, a division must be
observed between the critical activity of the intellectual and the actions of the masses. Intellectuals like
Foucault have a particular responsibility to advise the masses, which means that they should neither
attempt to lead the masses or tell them what to do, nor even to join them, but to stand to one side
advising them as to the situation through analysis of it, and indeed to criticise the actions of the masses
if need be. Note that there is no proper role here for politicians qua leaders – Foucault has no advice for
such people, but for him the point of mass political activity is to achieve liberation, hence ultimately it
is oriented against leadership. However, Foucault is not an anarchist. The central political role of the
intellectual is to advise as to the possibilities of political action, though an analysis of the strategies of
power. Thus, there must be a decision, made by those who resist but informed by a critical analysis, of
what can be achieved and where we should attack. That is, Foucault does not valorise all resistance per se,
or condemn all power out of hand: both things are too ubiquitous for such anarchist fantasies to make sense.
Rather, anarchism qua opposition to power per se suggests a futile attack on all power simultaneously. While
Foucault does not want us ever to accept any power uncritically, we can never be free of power. Thus,
we must always question and challenge power, with new problems and new priorities continually
emerging in response to our probing resistance.