Foucault K

Westwood Debate 2009-2010 Foucault
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Foucault K
Foucault K.................................................................................... 1
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2NC Link Wall...............................................................................6
2NC Helen Xtn..............................................................................7
2NC Dean Xtn...............................................................................8
2NC Alt Xtn..................................................................................9
Link- Social Services...................................................................10
Link- Social Services...................................................................12
Link- Welfare..............................................................................13
Link- Welfare..............................................................................14
Link- Welfare Discourse...............................................................15
Link- Medicine............................................................................16
Link- Medicine............................................................................18
Link- Medicine............................................................................19
Link- Health Education................................................................20
Link- Education...........................................................................21
Link- Education...........................................................................23
Link- Education...........................................................................24
Link- Education...........................................................................25
Link- No Child Left Behind...........................................................26
Link- Native Americans................................................................27
Link- Abortion ............................................................................28
Link- Abortion............................................................................. 30
Link- Drug Rehab........................................................................31
Link- Community Care.................................................................32
Link- Psychiatry..........................................................................33
Link- Terrorism...........................................................................34
Link- Economy............................................................................36
Link- Ethics/Obligation................................................................37
Link- Governmentality.................................................................38
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Link- Apoc Rhetoric.....................................................................39
Impact- Extinction.......................................................................40
Impact- Freedom......................................................................... 44
Impact- Root Cause of War..........................................................45
Impact- Racism...........................................................................46
Impact- VTL................................................................................47
Impact- Holocaust.......................................................................48
Impact- Rights............................................................................49
Alt Solvency...............................................................................50
Alt Solvency...............................................................................51
Alt Solvency...............................................................................53
AT: Framework...........................................................................54
AT: Framework...........................................................................55
AT: Framework...........................................................................56
AT: Framework...........................................................................57
AT- Framework: “Truth”..............................................................59
AT: Ind Axn No Solve...................................................................60
AT: No Alt...................................................................................61
AT: Perm Do Both........................................................................ 62
AT: Perm....................................................................................63
AT: We’re A Good Version............................................................64
AT: Can’t Change Power..............................................................65
AT: Biopower Inevitable..............................................................66
AT: Biopower Good......................................................................68
AT: Dickenson/Democracy Solves.................................................69
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First, the affirmative’s social program functions by controlling and
gathering knowledge about individuals while disguising the subtle,
yet dangerous forms of power it wields over all life
Ilpo Helen, 2k (Department of Sociology at University of Helenski, Finland, Welfare and
its Vicissitudes, Acta Sociologa, p.60)
Dean uses the catch-phrase ’government through processes’ to describe governmentalization of the state,
which refers to the fragmentation tendency of the modern state power and politics. The liberal welfare
state has an inclination to disperse into various practices. or rather assemblages, defined
by particular objectives of government, special expertise and knowledge/power formations. They
form a kind of texture of institutions, projects and processes aiming to conduct the conduct of
living human beings. In general, this fabric state has adopted a peculiar position both outside and
inside ’society’. The political authority regulates and intervenes in the relations and
processes of society as an outside agent. However, the action taken by the agents of state
authority happens and takes effect inside society, which means that ’socio-economic’ relations and
processes set the fundamental conditions for the policy-making and actions of the state. The borderline
character of the contemporary state is aptly described as a night watch, frugal in nature.
However, if the aspect of bio-power and the prefix welfare are emphasized, a chemical metaphor might be
even more appropriate. The positivity of the governmentalized state lies in its functioning
as a catalyst for ensuring, fostering and directing vitality - forces and potentials of ’life’
- of and in society. The transformation of the state has engendered the paradox of modern political reason.
The working of liberal and welfarist government is thought to be essentially self-
demarcating: this very character implies, however, that the power of the state is limitless, total
(cf. Schmitt [1933] 1958). Due to the basic principle that the state should secure human life and respect its
natural course and multiplicity, the instances of political rule need to have contact with every
possible phenomenon and condition of human life. Good government requires comprehensive
knowledge of the various phenomena of life, of individuals, groups and relations ’in society’, as well as
opportunities and capacities to affect, regulate and intervene in any biological, psychological and social
phenomenon or process of life, both actual and possible. The total nature of the modern state lies in this
potential. Foucault considered modern bio-political reason as demonic, because it mixes
totalizing traits with individualizing ones. Regarding the latter aspect, the idea of governmental
practices as pastoral power is crucial. The pastoral aspect of contemporary ’government over
life’ is related to the personal care and guidance provided by the welfare services to
secure and foster the health and well-being of individual members of society. According
to Foucault, this aspect derives from the power of the pastor in early Christian congregations and the
Catholic Church. The task of the pastor was to look after the spiritual condition not only of his flock as a
whole, but also of its individual members. To carry out this task he needed thorough knowledge of every
member of his parish. In the regimes of welfare, this personal caring for and knowing about the
members of the flock has been secularized, politicized and dispersed among numerous
expertises and institutions. The demonic character of liberal and welfarist government is
inherent in the very potentiality of pastoral power to be total. The pastoral aspirations
turn the basic elements and subtleties of individual and collective life, existence and
experience into political matters, and submit them to sophisticated regimes of
government and to complex forms of knowledge and expertise. Moreover, all this is linked
to the authority of the state.
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The affirmative’s extension of state control over individual life
legitimizes the annihilation of entire populations with mass
genocides and nuclear weapons
Mitchell Dean, 2001 (Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Demonic
Societies: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty”, Ethnographic Explorations of
the Postcolonial State, p. 55-58)
Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in the first volume of the History
of Sexuality that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled "Right of Death and Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrast between the
two registers of government is thus between one that could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by
the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life. Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken
down. The right of death can also be understood as "the right to take life or let live"; the power over life as the power "to foster life or disallow
it." Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is included in the
constitution of sovereign power by Its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped
down mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and sovereignty is not one of a power of life
versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions of life.
Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include
what had earlier been sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his
enemies but to disqualify the life—the mere existence—of those who are a threat to the life of the population, to disallow those deemed
"unworthy of life," those whose bare life is not worth living. This allows us, first, to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of
biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of
biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 136—37). In Foucault's account,
war: it provides it with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These machines
allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations. Wars become
genocidal in the twentieth century. The same state that takes on the duty to enhance
the life of the population also exercises the power of death over whole populations.
Atomic weapons are the key weapons of this process of the power to put whole populations to
death. We might also consider here the aptly named biological and chemical weapons that
seek an extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the
biosphere in which they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable. Nor
does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies
that killing—whether by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits holocausts upon whole groups
or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the Utopia
to be achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is only
occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that
suggests a relation to the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the
right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of
populations and hence wars will be waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and
their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection
between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is
not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race,
and the large-scale phenomena of population" (1979a: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more
notice: "massacres become vital." There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity between the power over life and the power to take life
characteristic of biopower. The emergence of a biopolitical racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in
which this homogeneity always threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be approached as a fundamental mechanism of
power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995: 84—85). For Foucault, the primary function of this form of racism is to establish a
division between those who must live and those who must die, and to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion
and techniques of population had given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new linkage among population, the internal organization
of states, and the competition between states. Darwinism, as an imperial social and political program, would plot the ranking of individuals,
populations, and nations along the common gradient of fitness and thus measure eflicienqp6 However, the series "population, evolution, and
race" is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the "white races" or of justifying colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat
the degenerates and the abnormals in one's own population and prevent the further degeneration of the race. The second and most important
function for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that "it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the
assurance of life" (Stoler 1995: 84). The life of the population, its vigor, its health, its capacities to survive, becomes necessarily linked to the
This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the
elimination of internal and external threats.
injunctions of the eugenic project: identify those who are degenerate, abnormal,
feeble*minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to forced sterilization: encourage
those who are superior, fit, and intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but mere existence and disqualify their propagation:
encourage those who can partake of a sovereign existence and of moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a
positive justification for the right to kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism,
however, we need to take into account another kind of denouement between the biopolitical management of population and the exercise of
sovereignty. This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and democratized form founded on the liberty of the juridical subject, as it
is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further element of sovereignty, its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault 1979a: 148).
For Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in blood—as a reality and as a symbol—just as one might say that sexuality becomes the key field on
which biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised through repression and deduction, through a law over
which hangs the sword, when it is exercised on the scaffold by the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and
families were forged through alliance, "blood was a reality with a symbolic function." By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigor,
fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality" (Foucault 1979a: 147). For Foucault (1979a: 149—50),
the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated "the oneiric exaltation of blood," of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an
immensely cynical and naive fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the detailed administration of
the life of the population and the regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and education.' Nazism generalized biopower
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without the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of right, but it could not do away with
sovereignty. Instead, it established a set of permanent interventions into the conduct of
the individual within the population and articulated this with the "mythical concern for blood and
the triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into the
eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the themes of
the purity of blood and the myth of the fatherland. In such an articulation of these elements of sovereign and
biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the administration of life and the right to
kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a
dreadful homogeneity. It has become a necessary relation. The administration of life comes to
require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and therefore war, will be exercised at the level of an
entire population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life of other races becomes
necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of other races is only one face of the
purification of one's own race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other part is to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the
risk of death and total destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an "absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state and an
absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are superimposed and converge on the Final Solution. With the Final Solution, the state tries to
eliminate, through the Jews, all the other races, for whom the Jews were the symbol and the manifestation. This includes, in one of Hitler's last
Solution for other races, the absolute
acts, the order to destroy the bases of bare life for the German people itself "Final
suicide of the German race" is inscribed, according to Foucault. in the functioning of the
modern state (232).
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Our alternative is to assume the role of specific intellectuals within
the round by rejecting the notion of disciplinary power rooted in the
affirmative’s project. Only by constant problematization of the way
the affirmative harnesses governmentality can we open up a new
space of contestation.
David Owen, 1994 (Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at University of
Southampton, Morality and Modernity, p. 208-210)
The ‘universal’ intellectual, on Foucault’s account, is that figure who maintains a commitment to critique as
a legislative activity in which the pivotal positing of universal norms (or universal procedures for generating
norms) grounds politics in the ‘truth’ of our being (e.g. our ‘real’ interests). The problematic form of this type
of intellectual practice is a central concern of Foucault’s critique of humanist politics in so far as humanism
simultaneously asserts and undermines autonomy. If, however, this is the case, what alternative
conceptions of the role of the intellectual and the activity of critique can Foucault
present to us? Foucault’s elaboration of the specific intellectual provides the beginnings of an answer to
this question: I dream of the intellectual who destroys evidence and generalities, the one
who, in the inertias and constraints of the present time, locates and marks the weak points, the
openings, the lines of force, who is incessantly on the move, doesn’t know exactly
where he is [they are] heading nor what he [they] will think tomorrow, for he is too
attentive to the present (PPC p. 124) The historicity of thought, the impossibility of locating an
Archimedean point outside time, leads Foucault to locate intellectual activity as an ongoing attentiveness to
the present in terms of what is singular and arbitrary in what we take to be universal and necessary.
Following from this, the intellectual does not seek to offer grand theories but specific
analyses, not global but local criticism. We should be clear on the latter point for it is necessary to
acknowledge that Foucault’s position does entail the impossibility of ‘acceding to a point
of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what
may constitute our historical limits’ and, consequently, ‘we are always in the position of bargaining
again’ (FR p. 47). The upshot of this recognition of the partial character of criticism is not, however, to
produce an ethos of fatal resignation but, in so far as it involves a recognition that everything is dangerous,
a ‘hyper and pessimistic activism’ (FR p. 343). In other words, it is the very historicity and particularity of
criticism which bestows on the activity of critique its dignity and urgency. What of this activity then? We can
sketch the Foucault account of the activity of critique by coming to grips with the opposition he draws
between ideal critique and real transformation. Foucault suggests that the activity of critique is
not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are but rather of pointing out
on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, uncontested
modes of thought the practices we accept rest (PPC p.154) The genealogical thrust of this critical
activity is ‘to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-
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evident is no longer accepted as such’ for ‘as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly
thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible’ (PPC p. 155). The
urgency of transformation derives from the contestation of thought (and the social practices in which it is
embedded) as the form of our autonomy, although this urgency is given its specific character for modern
culture by the recognition that the humanist grammar of this thought ties us into the technical matrix of
biopolitics. The specificity of intellectual practice and this account of the activity of
critique come together in the refusal to legislate a universal determination of ‘what is
right’ in favour of the perpetual problematization of the present. It is not a question, for
Foucault, of invoking a determination of who we are as a basis for critique but of locating what we are now
as the basis for reposing the question ‘who are we?’ The role of the intellectual is thus not to
speak on behalf of others (the dispossessed, the downtrodden) but to create the space
within which others can speak for themselves. The question remains, however, as to the capacity
of Foucault’s work to perform this crucial activity through an entrenchment of the ethics of creativity as the
structures of recognition through which we recognize our autonomy in the contestation of determinations of
who we are.
2NC Link Wall
We’ll isolate four links:
1. Power over life— The aff’s method of keeping people alive with
welfare programs puts all of life in the hands of the state – this also
gives the state the authority to annihilate entire populations
2. Surveillance—Welfare programs let the state monitor and gather

information about individuals; this knowledge gives the state power
to subjugate people
3. Ideal Body—Social services are rooted in the normalization of

society. The aff’s attempt to make everyone healthy and productive,
is a means of subjectification used to make people tools of the state
4. Masking—The plan is a seemingly charitable deed that serves as a

guise for the state’s insidious power over individuals
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2NC Helen Xtn

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

Limitless power in the hands of the state allow it to wage arbitrary
wars, massacre sections of the population, and justify the use of
nuclear weapons. Since the governmentality of the aff that
functions on the levels of the populations, it also makes the
annihilation of entire populations possible. That’s Dean ’01.
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2NC Alt Xtn
Our alternative is the only way to come to grips with disciplinary

power and its dangerous potential by intellectually rejecting
biopolitics—we must locally indict the logic of power and locate its
weak spots; only then can we create true resistance – That’s Owen
‘94
We can never be cognizant of our freedom without being

disciplinarily subjugated—only by continually challenging
biopolitical notions are we able to open a space of resistance
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Leslie Paul Thiele, 1990 (Professor of Political Science at University of Florida, September,
American Political Science Review, 84:3, “The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of
Foucault’s Thought”, Jstor)
Freedom, Foucault maintained, must be understood as resistance to the impositions of power, as the
antimatter of power. Freedom is less a state of being, characterized traditionally by the
absence of repression, domination, and exploitation than a kind of activity in the nexus of
opposing forces. Resistance cannot exist without power any more than power can exist
without resistance. Freedom emerges as the product of this symbiotic relationship.
What glimpses of freedom are available to us in local and specific acts of insurrection
and insubordination, however, are to be attained only after a sobering reevaluation of
the potency, productivity, and limitless domain of power/knowledge. The alternative to
such sobriety is to remain in thrall to the opiate belief in absolute emancipation. Then,
in the delusory struggle for such unlimited freedom, one would unwittingly reinforce
one’s attachment to the stratagems of power/knowledge, as frenzied movements of a newly
captured fly only serve to entangle it hopelessly in the spider’s web. Recognition of one’s
entanglement in the webs of power/knowledge, Foucault’s defenders maintain, is a form of
liberation in itself.
Link- Social Services

Social services are a means of disciplinary power used to normalize
the population
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Laura Epstein, 1999 (Professor of Social Work at University of Chicago, Columbia
University Press New York, Reading Foucault for Social Work, “The Culture of
Social Work,” p. 8-9)
Modern social work is perceived by its practitioners and by the public as social science. It has strived to
acquire the characteristics of science. Its history and discourse are packed with the language and analytic
processes of social science. However, it is not usually recognized that social work is a major social
institution that legitimates the power contained in modern democratic capitalist states.
Since the English, French, and American revolutions, governments have come to believe that in order to
govern, state power must be grounded on broad public support, that it should be democratic (Foucault 1980;
Wolin 1988). In democracies public order is achieved by many different means, overt coercion being one-but
the last resort. Totalitarianism is outlawed. The modern state must normalize the citizenry and organize
large, urban, and diverse populations into workforces that can adequately staff the public and private
enterprises that maintain the performance of the economy, preserve civil order and the welfare of the
citizens, fend off aggressors, and pursue the political aims of the state in the world order. The state needs
the academy, the professions, and the arts to steer the enterprise and mold, guide, and teach the minds.
The human or social sciences are the backbone of the technologies that have emerged as instruments by
which the state can govern with minimal coercion, or, when coercion is employed-as is the case of young
black American men subjected to immense amounts of incarceration-human science offers ways to support,
ameliorate, disguise, and justify the state's carceral machinery. Social work collaborates with other
occupations, mainly the "helping disciplines," all of which together manage the
population. Social work is the Janus-faced one. To accomplish its purposes social work must
dominate its clients, although in theory and in its manner of interpersonal relations with clients it
puts forward a democratic egalitarian manner. However, to be effective, to show results, it
must influence people, motivate them to adopt the normative views inherent in the
intentions of social work practice. It must produce an effect without force, without
command, indirectly. It must not be authoritative. It must enable its clients to be
transformed, to adopt normative ways and thoughts voluntarily. Doublespeak is
characteristic of twentieth-century communication in all walks of life, in all corners of social interaction. In
social work noninfluential influencing is its communicative art, its specialty. It has evolved complex
rationales and methods for appearing to sew together influencing and not influencing, without the seams
showing too much. A polished style evolved to conceal this basic dissonance within social
work. For example, it is common to state the intentions of social work as helping people to accommodate to
the status quo and as challenging the status quo by trying to bring about social change. This dissonance is
intrinsic to the nature of social work, to its essence.
Social programs are biopolitical manifestations of the state that

create the dichotomy between “normal” and “abnormal” behavior
Jerry Floersch, 2002 (Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve
University, Book Review – “Reading Foucault for Social Work”,
http://msass.case.edu/faculty/jfloersch/foucaultreview.html)
As one might expect from a volume influenced by Foucault, this one, Reading Foucault for Social Work, has a
conspicuous and recurring theme: social work and social welfare literature and practice are far
from being socially neutral or limited to technical interventions; they are deeply implicated in the
construction of power relations ¦" (p. 151). Though this is not new to the criticism of social work, we
learn new methods for keeping the discussion alive through Foucault's contribution to interrelated debates
about knowledge, power, domination, normalization, and social practice. Foucault's signature term, bio-
power, encapsulates his thought and provides a point of departure for most of the volume. Modern
governments, for example, use bio-power to control, regulate, and routinize everyday
social relations; typically, however, this is not accomplished through techniques, knowledge, and
classificatory schemes that give emphasis to the heavy-handed and power-over. Bio-power refers,
instead, to the myriad ways that dominant discourses on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and work,
become taken-for-granted, normalized, and internalized, so that the individual desires
to be the kind of subject dictated by the dominant discourse. The chief technique of
bio-power is a group of practices called "dividing practices" that work to place social
work clients either inside a normal circle of behavior, or outside, within a circle of
abnormal behavior. The common tools of social work bio-power are the examination, the
intake, or assessment; the making of a "case"; surveillance and follow-up (see Chapter
Nine by Ken Moffat); and, of course, therapy (see Chapter Seven by Catherine E. Foote and Arthur W. Frank).
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The hoped-for effect of deploying bio-power in social work is the production and
reproduction of normalized client subjectivities. For example, we learn from Carol-Anne O'Brien
(Chapter Six) that gay and lesbian youth often feel marginalized by heteronormative practices in social
service agencies. Moreover, most social work literature on youth sexuality contributes to the reproduction of
a heterosexual marriage discourse. Foucault argues that modern social institutions set the political, legal,
and social conditions (called governmentality) for creating subject positions like the married,
heteronormative male (see Chapter Three by Adrienne S. Chambon). When such discourses are effectively
reproduced, the "male" comes to desire or want to become the masculine, married man; here, bio-power is
internalized.
Link- Social Services

Social services function to manage the population through
bureaucratic and discursive practices
Laura Epstein, 1999 (Professor of Social Work at University of Chicago, Columbia
University Press New York, Reading Foucault for Social Work, “The Culture of
Social Work,” p. 13-14)
Foucault's central theme is the study of the processes by which society and the
helping professions normalize people (1984a). He studies transgression ("deviance" in American
usage). A philosopher by training who ended up holding a chair in social history, Foucault undermined the
liberal humanist conviction that technology is intrinsically alien to the study of the human sphere (1980).
Foucault's position is that the determining feature of modern human sciences and the
helping professions is that they are constituted by their technologies of intervention:
by observation, measurement, assessment, and administration (1984b). In other words, the
human sciences consist of techniques and practices brought into existence in order to
discipline, regulate, administer, and arrange all the population of human individuals.
The power of the human sciences comes from all the institutions, acts, and discourses
occurring in the course of creating and managing these regulatory apparatuses. The
knowledge generated in the human sciences is the product of practices developed in
the course of and in order to operate these systems. Foucault's work is a study and analysis of
the details of practice. He makes no conventional distinctions between the theory and practice of the
helping disciplines, rolling the two into one.
The state’s method of governmentality by providing social services

is an extension of disciplinary power
Benjamin Muller, 2004 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Macquarie
University, “Globalization, Security, Paradox: Towards A Refugee Biopolitics”)
According to Michel Foucault, "biopolitics" is about the intervention and regulatory controls
of populations. (16) Foucault argues that "diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation
of bodies and the control of populations" marks the beginning of an era of "bio-power."
(17) Bio-power introduces a critical element of Foucault's "governmentality": the relation between security,
territory, and population. (18) Bio-power serves to politicize what Giorgio Agamben refers to as "bare life,"
making biological existence political. (19) As the passage above poignantly states, biopolitics is a
specifically modern form of politics where the biological existence of humanity is
politicized, and the veil between the public and private is pushed aside. The
administration or "governmentality" of the management of life through (bio)technologies of
health care, education, housing, passports, etc., places various "spaces of existence"
into the realm of the sovereign's power. As Foucault clearly demonstrates in his genealogy of the
prison, the modern technique of punishment employs "disciplinary power" or techniques of
coercion in order to train or correct "the body," which is in dramatic contrast to previous approaches that
involved the ritualistic marking of the body through terror and torture. (20) In summary, biopolitics
marks the modern move from the sovereign power over death, to the sovereign power
over life, which is bio-power. This has very important administrative and "governmental" implications.
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Link- Welfare
Welfare’s attempt to “help” poor people is a disciplinary means of
subjugation that gives the state the right to all life
Mitchell Dean, 2002 (Professor of Sociology at MacQuarie University Sociology, “Life and
Death Beyond Governmentality”, Cultural Values, p.126-127)
This point about the multiform character of ensembles of rule can be quite easily made in relation to the
ethos of welfare. In what does this ethos seek? From Foucault (1981, 2001), it is about an effort to
maximize the security of the population and the independence of its members. This
entails balancing the labor of forming a community of responsible, virtuous and
autonomous citizens with a pastoral care of their health, their needs and their capacities
and means to live. The ethos of welfare is a potent admixture of rights and
obligations, freedom and coercion, liberty and life. It is formed through practices of freedom by which
citizens are formed and form themselves. Yet these are located within a web of sovereign powers
by which subjects are bound to do certain things. These include the use of deductive and
coercive powers of taxation, of systems of punishment, detention, expulsion and
disqualification, and of compulsion in drug rehabilitation, child support, immunization and workfare
programs, etc., for the achievement of various goals of national government. More fundamentally, these
sovereign powers consist in decisions as to what constitutes a normal frame of life,
and hence of what constitutes public order and security, and when such a situation obtains
(Schmitt 1985b: 9). Today there are various rationalities of the government of the state that attempt to
provide a means of deciding this normal frame. Among communitarians, such as Etzioni (1996), this normal
frame is decided upon by the shared moral values of communities. Among sociologists such as Anthony
Giddens (1998) and Ulrich Beck (2000), this normal frame is defined by the processes that lead to a new
kind of institutionally negotiated individualization and cosmopolitanism. Among new paternalists, such as
Lawrence Mead and his associates (1986, 1997), it is decided by the views of the citizenry made known by
their representatives in the Congress. There is an agreement between all three groups that, however we
decide the content of this normal, everyday frame of life, at least certain populations can be invited,
expected and, indeed, obligated,to follow it. As Giddens puts it (1998: 37), We need more actively to
accept responsibilities for the consequences of what we do and lifestyle habits we adopt. The theme of
responsibility, or mutual obligation, was there in old-style social democracy, but was largely dormant, since
it was submerged within the concept of collective provision. We have to find a new balance between
individual and collective responsibilities today. Fifty years ago, T. H. Marshall smuggled in sovereign notions
of rights to justify the pastoral character of the welfare state in his classic essay, Citizenship and Social
Classo (1963). Today, welfare reform, and its instruments of workfare, emphasizes the
converse of rights, obligations, when it demands the transformation of the individual
as a condition of the exercise of a pastoral and indeed paternalist care. Both cross the
threshold between the political-juridical order of sovereignty and pastoral government of conduct. For
Marshall, pastoral care is a function of social rights; for new paternalists, communitarians and Third Way
social democrats, sovereign instruments bind those receiving pastoral care to paternally defined collective
obligations. Summing up this part of the argument, government, understood as the conduct of conduct, is
Rekha Page 14 of 69
one zone or field of contemporary power relations. To understand those relations we need to take into
account heterogenous powers such as those of sovereignty and biopolitics. The exercise of power in
contemporary liberal democracies entails matters of life and death as much as ones of
the direction of conduct, of obligation as much as rights, as decisions on the fostering
or abandonment of life, on the right to kill without committing homicide, as well as of the shaping of
freedom and the exercise of choice. Nevertheless, having distinguished this heterogenous field of power,
there are key thresholds that are crossed in which these distinctions begin to collapse. Sovereign
violence, its symbols and its threat, is woven into the most mundane forms of
government. The unemployed, for example, are to transform themselves into active job-seekers or
participate in workfare programs under the sanction of the removal of the sustenance of life. In
contemporary genetic politics and ethics, too, we enter thresholds where it becomes unclear
whether we are in the presence of the powers to foster life or the right to take it. The
biopolitical, the sovereign, the governmental, begin to enter into zones of indistinction.
Link- Welfare
Welfarism is a form of authoritative control meant to curb behavior

considered deviant from the norm
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, 2008 (Professor of Management Accounting at the
London School of Economics, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and
Political Science, Governing the Present, p. 72-74)
The English example illustrates three key features of welfarism. The first concerns the relations between
political rationalities and the formation of networks of government. As a political rationality, welfarism is
structured by the wish to encourage national growth and well being through the
promotion of social responsibility and the mutuality of social risk. This rationality was
articulated in a number of different ways. The Beveridge Report was framed in terms of a kind of contract
between the State and its citizens, in which both parties had their needs and their duties. The state would
accept responsibility to attack the 'five giants of Want, Disease, Idleness, Ignorance and Squalor' through a
nationalised health service, a commitment to full employment and a social insurance system which would
prevent the social demoralization and other harmful effects of periods of want by redistributing income
across the life cycle. In return, the citizen would respect his or her obligations to be thrifty, industrious, and
socially responsible. The Labour Party, on the other hand, articulated this rationality in terms of the just and
equal treatment for each and for all, to be realized by planned, rationalised and universal state dispensation
of security, health, housing and education.
The rationality of welfarism was programmatically elaborated in relation to a range of
specific problematizations: the declining birthrate; delinquency and anti-social
behaviour; the problem family; the social consequences of ill health and the advantages conferred by a
healthy population; and the integration of citizens into the community. These were not novel problems, but
in the post-war period they were to be problematized by a multitude of official and unofficial experts and,
crucially, were to be governed in new ways. The key innovations of welfarism lay in the
attempts to link the fiscal, calculative and bureaucratic capacities of the apparatus of
Rekha Page 15 of 69
the state to the government of social life. The social devices of the pre-war period consisted
of a tangle of machinery for the surveillance and regulation of the social, familial and
personal conduct of the problematic sectors of the population. The personnel, procedures,
techniques and calculations that made up these devices were attached to specific locales and organizations:
the courts, the reformatories, the schools and the clinics. Welfarism sought to articulate these varied
elements into a network and to direct them in the light of centralised calculations as to resources, services
and needs.
However, welfare was not a coherent mechanism that would enable the unfolding of a
central plan. The networks were assembled from diverse and often antagonistic
components, from warring Whitehall departments to peripheral and ad hoc agencies. This was no 'state
apparatus', but a composition of fragile and mobile relationships and dependencies
making diverse attempts to link the aspirations of authorities with the lives of
individuals. Assembling and maintaining such networks entailed struggles, alliances and competitions
between different groups for resources, recognition and power. The problem posed for the next thirty years,
for those aspiring to form a 'centre' from which the welfare apparatus could be governed, was one of
regulating those who claimed discretionary powers because of their professional or bureaucratic expertise.
Link- Welfare Discourse

Modern welfare discourse is a disciplinary approach predicated off
of medical institutions pinning blame on the poor
Sanford Schram, 2006 (Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, “Welfare
Discipline: Discourses, Governance, and Globalization”, p. 143-144)
Today, the age old perversity thesis is being reincarnated in highly technocratic ways for the new forms of
governance. Today, welfare policy discourse understands reliance on public assistance in
highly medicalized terms by borrowing metaphors from other service domains that end
up locating the causes of poverty and welfare dependency in the individual and her or
his personal deficiencies. Today, welfare policy discourse medicalizes welfare
dependency in the name of facilitating the disciplining practices that Michel Foucault calls
“governmentality” whereby state power is disseminated through the social institutions of
civil society to further promote pratices of self-discipline as needed by the emerging
Rekha Page 16 of 69
social order. The medicalization of welfare dependency is fast becoming a major administrative focus
under the new welfare reform regime instituted in the 1990s. It is as if the aphasia of welfare discourse
prevents us from confronting the trauma of poverty. We use euphemistic substitutes like welfare
dependency to paper over our complicity in perpetuating other people’s destitution,
while simultaneously shifting the blame from the structure of society to the individual
behavior of those who are forced to live in poverty. With this old aphasic shift taking new form,
welfare dependency becomes the center of our discursive terrain about how in the contemporary parlance of
our therapeutic culture to treat recipients for their diseased condition of dependence on welfare. Welfare use
beyond the shortest periods of time as a form of transitional, aid as say when a single mother relies on
welfare while working through a divorce, is now considered an abuse. In other words, welfare use
beyond a few months is now welfare abuse, signaling the need to undergo treatment
to overcome one’s dependency on welfare. The dependency metonymy is a displacement for
other terms that, for political reasons, people cannot use. So in aphasic fashion, welfare use, welfare
receipt, and the especially verbotem welfare taking are being replaced by welfare
dependency.
The discursive practices of welfare create an exclusionary system

based on the stigmatization of individuals who the state deems as
useless to society
Sanford Schram, 2006 (Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, “Welfare
Discipline: Discourses, Governance, and Globalization”, p. 39-40)
If the welfare state is in crisis today, then it is a crisis that is in large part one of discourse. It
is a crisis-mongering discourse of globalization that creates the insistence that capitalist societies must learn
to live beyond the welfare state. The dissemination of American-style discourse has given
increased emphasis to welfare dependency as connoting a stigmatized condition that
makes an individual a deviant and the society as a whole less productive, less
efficient, and less able to compete globally. Legitimate reasons for needing public assistance are
increasingly hard to articulate in such a discourse, and the positive benefits to one’s family and society are
as well. In Europe, the discourse of welfare dependency has given birth to a preference for an active welfare
state where receipt of public assistance is seen as passive and negative. Labor activation policies are being
implemented in country after country to counteract the alleged deleterious effects to both the individual and
society. The metaphors of active and passive operate in the globalizing discourse of
welfare dependency to reinscribe hierarchies of privilege and positions those in need
of public assistance as less worthy until they become active and are inserted into the
labor force. In the new discourse of the active welfare state, there is the risk that work at any job will
become the only legitimate solution to one’s alleged passivity. A discourse of labor activation
enrolls the unemployed in seeking inclusion in the society on terms that reinscribe
their subordination as those who need to be disciplined if they are to ever achieve self-
sufficiency. In this way, welfare reform can give rise to new forms of governance for
regimenting subordinate populations to the emerging social order in an era of globalization.
Link- Medicine
The medical system is rooted in surveillance of entire populations
and subtle power structures that prescribe “healthy” practices
Rekha Page 17 of 69
Denise Gastaldo, 1997 (Professor at University of Toronto, “Is Health Education Good For You?
Rethinking Health Education Through the Concept of Bio-Power”, Foucault, Health, and Medicine)
The body became the focus of analysis as an individual entity; it was no longer an
indissociable and collective entity, like a population (Foucault 1991: 136-7). Viewing this process from a
social constructionist perspective, the individual body was ‘invented’ at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. Many power techniques have since been developed to make the body docile so
that it can be ‘subjected, used, transformed, and improved’ (Foucault 1991: 136). Dreyfus
and Rabinow (1982: 153-4) state that some form of control over the body is found in all societies. However,
the employment of disciplinary power divides the body into parts and trains it, with the
objective of making the parts and the whole more efficient. This happens in a subtle
and continuous way, in a web of micro-powers, each including the use of space, time
and everyday practices. The body has been turned into an object of knowledge. In order to govern
the population, knowledge is gathered on each individual body. For the first time, the future
of society is related not only to the number of citizens and family organization but to the use each person
makes of sex (Foucault 1990: 26). Knowledge about populations also acquired a distinct perspective in the
eighteenth century. Governments recognized that dealing with populations required different strategies to
those used for handling individuals. The health, illness, death and birth of populations were
emerging as economic and political issues. These issues are directly related to the labour force,
economic growth and distribution of wealth. In the last two centuries, population has become the target of
statistical analysis and intervention measures have been designed aimed at sub-groups and the population
as a whole (Foucault 1990: 146).
In order to manage the population, every individual should be reached by techniques
of power. The control of the social body through life demands a whole new set of strategies. For example,
the practices of examining bodies, asking questions about habits and other private
issues, the prescription of behaviours and drugs would not be easily accepted in health
without similar experiences in other sites of social life. Foucault (1991: 28) argues that the
‘body politic’ relies on communication routes that construct bodies as objects of knowledge. Confession, for
instance, is an important communication strategy that has been used to circulate knowledge about
individual bodies. Confession, as well as the therapeutic practice of medicine, bridges the
micro-physics and macro-physics of power because they link individual bodies to the
social body. People are supposed to reveal their sins to their parents, to the priest, to the judge, to the
doctor, to the teacher. Gordon (1991:4-5) suggests that bio-power is the link between micro and macro; it is
‘a politics concerned with subjects as members of a population, in which issues of individual sexual and
reproductive conduct interconnect with issues of national policy and power’.
The link between the individual and the population does not mean that bio-power is a general system of
domination of a group that permeates the whole social body. It is also not a set of mechanisms that
guarantee control of citizens by the state (Foucault 1990: 92). Rather, bio-power is a subtle, constant
and ubiquitous power over life. It is exercised through a set of power techniques, but two basic forms
can be identified as the poles of this ‘line of power’. In Foucault’s terminology, they are the ‘bio-politics of
the population’ and the ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’. Bio-politics is the pole of bio-power
that employs regulatory controls and interventions to manage the population (Foucault
1990: 139). The biological processes that are generated by the collection of individuals are directly
linked to economic and social issues. For example, an epidemic may abruptly attack the labour
force of a region; an increase in life expectancy implies the extension of health care and social support to
elderly people. Social policy is a visible strategy to handle collective processes concerned
with the life and health of the population. Other invisible power techniques, such as the expansion
of the domain of the health system into private life, collaborate to gather information and to establish what
is considered normal and pathological.
Anatomo-politics at the other pole, focuses on the body as a machine (Foucaul 1990: 139).
Docility and usefulness are identified by Foucault as ways to integrate the body into economic and social
life. In order to achieve this, the operation of disciplinary power pervades relations in
families, schools, hospitals, work, etc. In the case of medicine, the effect of discipline is for the
therapeutic space to become a political space. Individuality has been constructed based on
symptoms, disease, or lifestyle; control over these processes is at the core of medical
care (Foucault 1991: 144). The political space that health care and policy constitute is an
important site for the exercise of disciplinary power. Focusing on individual bodies or on the social
body, health professionals are entitled by scientific knowledge/power to examine,
interview and prescribe ‘healthy lifestyles. The clinical gaze is omnipresent and
acceptable because its objective is to promote health- as well as to promote a
disciplinary society.
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Link- Medicine
Medicine is a social tool used to define “normal” state of being- the
aff is an exercise in power struggle as the “medical professionals”
derive their legitimacy from subjugating impoverished people
Deborah Lupton, 1997 (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Cultural Risk Research at Charles Sturt University,
Australia, “Foucault, Health, and Medicine”, “Foucault and the Medicalisation Critique”)
Supporters of the medicalisation critique have generally identified a central paradox: medicine, as it is
practiced in Western societies, despite its alleged lack of effectiveness in treating a wide range of conditions
and its iatrogenic side-effects, has increasingly amassed power and influence. They contend that
social life and social problems had become more and more ‘medicalised’, or viewed
through the prism of scientific medicine as ‘diseases’. Critics such as Irving Zola (1972) and
Eliot Freids0n (1970) argued that medicine had begun to take on the role of social regulation
traditionally performed by religion and the law. One of the most vociferous advocates of the
medicalisation critique was Ivan Illich (1975), who contended that rather than improving people’s health,
contemporary scientific medicine undermined it, both through the side-effects of medical treatment and by
diminishing lay people’s capacity for autonomy in dealing with their own health care.
The notion that individuals should not have their autonomy constrained by more
powerful others is central to the ideals of the medicalisation critique. In concert with liberal
humanist ideals, critics argue that becoming ‘medicalised’ denies rational, independent
human action by allowing members of an authoritative group (in this case the medical
profession) to dictate to others how they should behave. There is a concern evident in the
literature on medicalisation about the ‘dependency’ that contemporary scientific medicine is seen to
encourage. As this would suggest, the term ‘medicalisation’ is generally used in the sociological literature in
a pejorative manner: to be ‘medicalised’ is never a desirable state of being. As such, ‘medicalisation’ is
positioned as something which should be resisted, in favour of some degree of ‘de-medicalisation’.
Proponents of the critique generally take an overwhelmingly negative view of members
of the medical profession, seeing doctors as attempting to enhance their position by
presenting themselves as possessing the exclusive right to define and treat illness,
thereby subordinating the opinions and knowledges of lay people. This increasing power
of scientific medicine, it is contended, has detrimental effects for traditionally
disempowered and exploited social groups by deflecting questions of social inequality
into the realm of illness and disease, there to be treated inappropriately by drugs and other
medical therapies.
The affirmative’s endorsement of the medical system is an

underhanded attempt to preserve social oppression of the poor by
rendering them docile to doctors
Australia, “Foucault, Health, and Medicine”, “Foucault and the Medicalisation Critique”)
Proponents of the medicalisation critique call attention to the notion that patients in general, because of
the lack of medical knowledge, are placed in the position of vulnerable supplicants when
they seek the attention of doctors, with consequently little opportunity to challenge
doctors’ decisions. This is particularly the case, they argue, for members of the working class
and other socio-economically disadvantaged groups whose lack of power is further
Rekha Page 19 of 69
entrenched through their interactions with powerful doctors who seek to maintain the
social status quo. Research carried out exploring the doctor-patient relationship from this perspective
has tended to focus on the ways that the medical consultation facilitates the power of doctors
over patients and supports capitalist ideologies. For example, in his analysis of the ‘micro-
politics of medicine’, the Marxist sociologist Hower Waitzkin (1984) looked at the verbal encounters between
doctors and patients with the intention of identifying the features of the encounter that ‘medicalise’ and
‘depoliticise’ the social structural dimensions of ill health. Waitzkin argued that ‘The medical encounter
is one arena where the dominant ideologies of a society are reinforced and where
individuals’ acquiescence is sought (1984: 339). In addition to those writers interested in class
struggle, the medicalisation critique has been taken up with enthusiasm by feminist critics of medicine (for
example, Ehrenreich and English 1974). Feminist critics have viewed the medical profession as a largely
patriarchal institution that used definitions of illness and disease to maintain the relative inequality of
women by drawing attention to their weakness and susceptibility to illness and by taking control over areas
of women’s lives such as pregnancy and childbirth that were previously the domain of female lay
practitioners and midwives.
Link- Medicine
Medicine controls people by using death as a looming threat—the
state is able to maintain full control over individual behavior
Alan R. Petersen, 1997 (Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Murdoch University, “Foucault,
Health, and Medicine”,
p. 100-101)
All this is not to argue that Foucault and his followers would necessarily dispute the notion that
contemporary societies are subject to great influence from scientific medicine. Quite the contrary: while they
may not use the term 'medicalisation', one of their central contentions is that society is medicalised in
a profound way, serving to monitor and administer the bodies of citizens in an effort to
regulate and maintain social order as well as promoting good health and productivity.
Medical knowledge and practice serve to differentiate between social groups, to identify
and propose means of addressing inequities in health and social advantage. Medicine and health have
become central to the notion of the 'normal' person because, in part, medicine: has come to link the ethical
question of how we should behave to the scientific question of who we truly are and what our nature is as
human beings, as life forms in a living system, as simultaneously unique individuals and constituents of a
population. Medicalisation is evident in the ways in which warnings about health risks
have become common events. People are constantly urged to conduct their everyday
lives in order to avoid potential disease or early death. As a result, "Sociologically speaking,
everyone lives under the medical regime, a light regime for those who arc not yet patients, stricter
according to how dependent on doctors one becomes* (dc Swaan 1990: 57). This is particularly the case for
older people and the chronically ill, in relation to improvements in longevity and medical treatment for acute
illnesses. Where once, for instance, physical activity might have been undertaken for the purposes of
'character formation', 'experiencing nature* or 'the pleasure of functioning*, it is now often understood as a
medical activity, undertaken for the purposes of good health
Rekha Page 20 of 69
Link- Health Education

Health education necessitates total state control of individual
bodies under the guise of empowerment
Health education is also subjugation. Many health education practices involve the
imposition of ‘truths’ about health, in which the patient loses control of her or his own
body. Instead of choice, the patient experiences the government of her or his body or family
from outside. Health education can also mean control because it extends the clinical gaze over
the population. Health education covers most of the issues related to life, and is put into practice by a
network of professionals, from social workers to psychologists. This double view of health education is based
upon the idea that total autonomy and liberation are not possible for any human being. According to
Foucault’s theory, no educational process can only liberate because at the same time it
disciplines bodies. Therefore, health education is seen here as both empowerment and
subjugation.
Health education is normally taken for granted as being a good practice. Practices and policies suggest that
health education has not been challenged in its constituent elements (e.g. confession, self-disclipline, etc.),
but has been reformed or transformed in its general strategies of approach – from traditional practices to
participatory practices. As bio-politics, health education policies have been disseminating discourses of
participation and empowerment. This means that the health system is turning from repressive
approaches to constructive approaches to manage the population. As anatomo-politics,
health education is exercised in the promotion of health. Whether healthy or sick, the ‘healthy citizen’ keeps
in touch with the national health system because health education activities are for all, preventing disease
and promoting health. Therefore, health education, though its capacity of expanding the
limits of health practice into the healthy community, is an exercise of power over life.
Health education allows medical professionals to discipline

individuals by the construct of a dichotomy between healthy and
unhealthy behavior
Rekha Page 21 of 69
Radical and traditional health education share an underlying notion of empowerment through education or
subjugation through ignorance. Both are based on the understanding that human beings are liberated
beings unless something oppresses them; empowering them through education is a way to remove the
‘chains’ of oppression – ignorance, lack of political understanding, submissive behaviours, etc. I would argue
that both processes, subjugation and liberation, are acknowledged as elements of health education power
relations. However they are not the final outcome of these power/knowledge relations. What health
education does construct is identity. Health education is an educational experience that gives
professionals and patients/clients elements for building up representations of what is
expected from ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’ people. These social roles are reinforced by a
complex system of rewards and punishments. Health education is an experience of
being governed from the outside and a request for self-discipline. From inside, health
education is a constructive exercise of power that improves the medical gaze; through the
promotion of health, it circulates everywhere in spheres that are new to bio-medicine.
The state is able to disguise control over the body behind the guise
of promoting health education
Bio-power refers to the mechanisms employed to manage the population and discipline individuals. In
Foucault’s view, biological life is a political event: population reproduction and disease are
central to economic processes and are therefore subject to political control. I employ the
concept of bio-power to investigate the political dimension of health education in the arenas of health and
health promotion. In this century, health has become increasingly important politically as a
major point of contact between government and population. With the establishment of a net
of human rights and citizenship practices, the art of government has had to develop more
refined strategies in order to maintain control over the population while avoiding coercive
actions. Seen from this perspective, health education can make a contribution to the exercise
of bio-power because it deals with norms of healthy behaviours and promotes
discipline for the achievement of good health. It is educational in nature because it
promotes behaviours that should be adopted by the entire population and interferes
with individual choice, providing information to foster ‘healthy’ lifestyles.
Link- Education
The affirmative’s endorsement of schooling is disciplinary power at
its finest—students are made to feel liberated within the confines of
the state’s control
Jan D. Matthews, 2004 (Winter, “Toward The Destruction of Schooling:, p. 21-23)
Those who are uneducated are seen as lacking something

Schooling is seen as a good thing.
essential to being fully functioning, fully human. From Plato to Comenius to Kant, humanity is
something that is imposed upon the young. Even Paolo Freire, a favorite of leftists, believes in a “humanizing
pedagogy,” presumably one that makes people more fully human.97 We need to spend less money on the
military, more money on schools, say the progressives. Their complete identification (“we”) with the nation-
state is utterly pathetic. “Humanitarianism” has saturated the left and the right: everyone is working
hard oppressing themselves, all for a better humanity, a better future. Like George Bush, the
progressives don’t want to leave a single child behind.98 In Hebrew there is one word for both
“education” and “chastisement.”99 The powerful men of the ancient world were rather clear about what
schooling entailed. Today it is of the utmost importance to conceal the role of schooling in
society. Submission to authority is always the goal of schooling. The power wielded by
authorities–the power to reward and punish, to habituate the individual to desired
Rekha Page 22 of 69
patterns of thought and action–works to integrate the individual into a hierarchical
social order. 19th century prison reformers and progressive school reformers were working to make this
integrating function more efficient and more total in its effects. Both groups were humanitarians because
they sought to make the individual better adapted (obviously doing her a great service) to a new set of
social conditions; society had to be shaped into a different form, re-formed. Society is the main actor, and
individuals merely respond. To those who haven’t picked up on this clever phrasing, “society” can be
understood as those who have the power to make administrative and legislative
decisions. Individuals only act as a part of “society” to the extent that they submit to
existent social conditions, and possibly try to influence those who hold positions of power. As John
Dewey put it, “through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and
resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to
move.”100 At first glance Dewey seems to be saying that education can determine the direction in which
society goes, but in fact he says that society shapes itself through education, so education is really not
determining anything. In other words, schooling is a technique that society uses. One cannot fault
him for such truthfulness. Durkheim agreed that education is “only the image and reflection of society. It
imitates and reproduces the latter in abbreviated forms. It does not create it.”101 Educators respond to changes in society
and make sure their schooling produces the necessary products. In a Harvard lecture of the 1920’s George
S. Counts said the following: “This is not the place to evaluate industrial civilization. . . . Education must
come to terms with industrial civilization and discover its tasks in the new age.”102 Educators work within
institutional confines, within the confines of their social roles as authorities and slaves (just like the Greek
pedagogues) of the powers that be. Since most educators believe unquestioningly that schools
serve a positive function in society, all of their theories of schooling and ideas for
reform are likely to reinforce the basic assumption that schools are a good thing.103
Modern theories of schooling are based on a social ideal of progress. This is basically a conservative ideal in
the sense that technological change tends to be irreversible and reform tends to build upon itself, by and
large keeping institutional structures and social relations intact. The more things change the more they stay
the same. Schools have been steadily expanding (progress) and have been able to reform by accretion.104
The technical basis of modern industry may be revolutionary in the Marxist sense of bringing us closer to
revolution within a linear model of historical progress, but is this revolutionary at all? Marx himself praised
the essentially “dangerous character” of revolutionists such as “steam, electricity, and the self-acting
mule.”105 Attributing such a character to technology is clearly an oversight, more or less incompatible with
any revolutionary theory based on the need for an insurrectional rupture with our technological society.
Marx’s oversight stems from his failure to adequately identify the relationship between the productive
apparatus and the capitalist system that produces it and to fully recognize Capital’s domesticating function.
The writings of Jacques Camatte and Fredy Perlman are excellent in expanding upon these themes. In many
ways, resistance to the proliferation of the factory system parallels the resistance to
compulsory schooling. When a definite loss of autonomy was seen as a new and
threatening imposition, radical acts of resistance and sabotage were not uncommon.
The industrial system (along with puritanical morality) served to domesticate the exploited, allowing for
resistance to be more easily recuperated through institutional channels such as union bargaining and
political reformism. What were considered factory virtues are virtually the same thing as
school virtues. Discontents who have internalized these virtues aim at tinkering with the repressive
apparatus, not destroying it. Modern theories of schooling can be said to begin with Rousseau. Rousseau
considered civilization some form of mistake, but he did not oppose it. In his view, society was the source of
all evil. He did not, however, see the teacher as part of this “evil,” and consequently gave teachers
invaluable advice about how to exercise their supposedly righteous control over their pupils. “Begin then, by
studying your pupils more thoroughly, for it is very certain that you do not know them,” he wrote.106
Rousseau gave the following advice in regard to the way teachers should control their students: “Let him
[the student] believe that he is always in control though it is always you [the teacher]
who really controls. There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the
appearance of freedom.”107 This statement describes much of the philosophy of modern schooling.
The institutionalized authority of the teacher is a given. The question is how the teacher can make best use
of this authority. Rousseau gave an excellent answer. To think that this somehow encourages the
freedom and independence of the student is reasonable, as long as that freedom and
independence is exercised within the boundaries set by the authorities. As B.F. Skinner
said approvingly, Rousseau “did not fear the power of positive reinforcement.”108 B.F. Skinner was an
influential behaviorist psychologist of the mid-twentieth century. His overriding interest was in the control
and modification of human behavior–a practice he believed could solve the world’s problems–if only
everyone could value efficiency over freedom.
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Link- Education
The affirmative’s presentation of education as a means of freedom
is actually a biopolitical practice that facilitates ways that an
individual can become useful to the state
James Marshall, 1995 (PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture from Stanford University,
“Foucault and Neo-Liberalism: Biopower and Busno-Power”)
Foucault discusses in considerable detail how the requisite techniques and technologies for the exercise of
bio-power were developed.6 These can be classified under two headings. First, technologies of
domination act essentially on the body, and classify and objectify individuals. They
were developed in disciplinary blocks such as the prison, the hospital, and the school. In so far
as these objective classifications are adopted and accepted by individuals so their selves are also
constituted. Second, in technologies of the self there is the belief, now common in western
culture, that it is possible to reveal the truth about one's self. By telling the truth about one's
sexuality, where the "deepest" truth is embedded in the discourse and discursive practices of sexuality,
individuals become objects of knowledge both to themselves and to others. But telling the truth is
both therapeutic and also controlling. Eventually, according to Foucault, we learn how to do these
things to ourselves. He refers to the conjoint effects of these two technologies as governmentality. Foucault
also develops the notion of governmentality as the art of government or, as it is sometimes referred to, the
"reason of state." This notion "refers to the state, to its nature and to its own rationality." He sees the
technologies of domination and the self as being the techniques used "to make of the
individual a significant element for the state."8 By "government" Foucault should be understood
as meaning something close to "the conduct of conduct."9 This is a form of activity which attempts
or aims at the conduct of persons; it is the attempt to shape, to guide, or to affect not
only the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute people in such ways
that they can be governed. In Foucault's work this activity of governance could cover the relations of
self to self, self to others, relations between institutions and social communities, and the exercise of political
sovereignty. Governmentality is obtained not by a totalizing deterministic or oppressive
form of power, but by bio-power directed in a totalizing manner at whole populations
and, at one and the same time, at individuals so that they are both individualized and
normalized. Here one locates the human sciences and their "truths," and the
institutions or disciplinary blocks (including education) in which these truths have been
developed, played, and continue to play, a crucially important role. Underlying many of the recent
educational "reforms," their literature and the new practices and processes, are notions of
freedom and choice. Students, parents, etc. are presumed to be capable of
deliberating upon alternatives and choosing between alternative educational programs
according to individual needs, interests, and the qualities of programs. Here it seems to be
presumed that it is part of the very nature of being human to want to make continuous
consumer-style choices. But the normal notions of autonomy needed to make choices,
and the notions of needs and interests, presuppose that such choices are the student's
(or chooser's) own, that as choosers they are independent, and that needs and interests have not
been manipulated or imposed in some way upon them. There is also a conjoint claim that the
quality of an education constituted by the choices made by a consumer as consumer is superior to that
offered to a consumer by the choices and educational decisions made by providers of education.
The school system is a masked power structure that normalizes

individuals and calculates students’ value based on disciplinary
standards of the state
John Ransom, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dickinson College.
“Foucault’s Discipline The Politics of Subjectivity”, p.16)
Disciplines do not function through consent- they do not derive their legitimacy or their goals from the
individuals who come into contact with them. What disciplinary power does is normalize. As an
example, Foucault points to the invention of the nineteenth-century classroom.
Rekha Page 24 of 69
Rectangular desks arranged in a rectangle allows for the formation of “a single great
table, with many different entries, under the scrupulously ‘classificatory’ eye of the
master.” The student’s “progress, worth, character… application, cleanliness and
parents’ fortune” would all be reflected in the pupil’s position on the table. As a result, a
mass of individuals is dispersed, individualized, and organized. The goal, however, is not to
maintain a static distribution. Instead, a standard of performance is set. Individuals are
evaluated and arranged according to that standard but also subjected to exercises
that will move them closer to the norm. As students’ performances improve or decline,
their position on the “table” changes accordingly.
Link- Education
Education is an accepted form of subjugation that allows the state
to assume the role of an all knowing entity that controls society’s
reserve of knowledge
Gaile Cannella, 1999 (Research Professor at Tulane University, “Contemporary Issues in
Early Childhood”, 1:1, The Scientific Discourse of Education: Predetermining the Lives of
Others – Foucault, Education, and Children”, p. 4-5)
The acceptance of the scientific discourse of education has lead to the emergence of
forms of knowledge and ‘experts’ in that knowledge who are by definition given exclusive
rights to speak and act. Even social constructivists have labeled particular forms of knowledge as more
sophisticated, as more informed, as not appropriate for those who are younger. The knowledges of
particular groups/individuals are excluded and labeled inferior to others, whether because
of being younger, smaller, viewed as having less experience or dependent, less well read, new to a field, and
on and on. Reconstructions of knowledge are excluded, as examples – knowledge as struggle, as ambiguous,
as nonexistent, as undefinable. Certainly, knowledge is not accepted from particular groups, especially
children who have not reached adolescence. Those who are often identified as the major
stakeholders in educational discourse are given no voice, much less equal partnership
in the process. Have we involved them in our teacher education reform efforts? in our educational
renewal activities? in our conversations about democracy? We speak of educational reform and
collaboration, but that collaboration is only with those who are adults. As Foucault points out,
‘From the depths of the Middle Ages, a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the
common discourse of men’ (1972, p. 217). The appeal to reason within a discourse provides an additional
compelling form of exclusion. This oppositional principle, the claim to ‘reason versus folly,’ legitimates the
labeling of discursive formations that do not fit the assumptions of the particular discourse as null, invalid,
without intellect, even as relativistic or worthless. The claim to reason and the denial of folly places
human activity that does not fall within the realm of particular discourse assumptions in a
void, in a vacuum in which no one hears. Again, even within a critique of education as
Enlightenment/Modernist scientific discourse, with moves to democratize schooling, collaboration, and
educational renewal, children continue to be accepted as learners, thinkers, and changing
human beings who we must educate. To question this assumption is a professional
death sentence, a commitment to the asylum of the strange, the demented, and the
trouble-maker. The final principle of exclusion is the ‘will to truth’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 218), the true
discourse that denies any ties to power because it is ‘true.’ This will to truth shifts as influenced by
‘mutations of science,’ but continues to emerge in new forms. Feminist, critical, and even multicultural
critiques have, to some extent, challenged the true discourse, for example the truth of child development as
grounded in the ‘true discourse’ of human nature and progress. However, the basic assumptions
underlying educational discourse (i.e. educational necessity, the existence of learning, thinking, and
human mind, educational advancement, sophisticated knowledge, and the inferiority of childhood) have
imposed themselves on us for so long that we do not recognize them as masking
forms of power and desire. Although we would challenge regimes of truth, we function as if
Rekha Page 25 of 69
these assumptions represent a true discourse. Prohibition, ritual, and exclusive rights to speak
serve as rules for exclusion that combined with the principles of reason and the will to truth reinforce and
compliment each other in the perpetuation of the dominant form of educational discourse. Institutions,
capitalist business practices, even discourses on democratic schooling reinforce our present day acceptance
of learning, thinking, education, advancement, privileged knowledge, and human inferiority. Further,
disciplinary technologies of education reinforce this discourse by creating human
bodies that in the educational attempt to improve themselves, to be useful, become
objects to be molded and controlled.
Link- Education
Schools’ methods of classifying, ranking, and ordering students is
state imposed disciplinary subjugation
Jeffrey Roth, 1992 (Director of Research University of Pennsylvania, American Educational
Research Journal, “Review: Of What Help Is He? A Review of "Foucault and Education", 29: 4)
Constant observation is made possible

The first of these disciplinary technologies is surveillance.
through the ordering of bodies in space and time. In schools, the ordering of space is
seen in the familiar grid of self- contained classrooms, segregated by age. Time is
demarcated precisely into periods and terms. For Foucault, the consequences of partitioning these two
coordinates were profound and gave rise to some of his most dazzling leaps of interpretation: Each
individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distribution in groups;
break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities. ... One must eliminate
the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse
circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation.9 Another technology allows people to be traced
over time. The written examination, the results of which are entered into a cumulative
record (for students and faculty alike), documents an individual's capacity. Examinations
measure, classify, and rank. They allow individuals to be compared with others in a
group and further individualized into a special case to be treated or rewarded. Counting
the number of correct answers on a written examination allows Gaussian statistics (the properties of the
normal curve) to be applied to the results. This quantification makes possible a third disciplinary
technology, which Foucault called normalizing judgment. Once a mean or average is established
for a distribution of test scores, the measure of central tendency serves as a norm,
reference to which allows assignment to be rationally and objectively made to ranks
above and below the mean. A quantified norm both totalizes and individualizes a population. The
mean and standard deviation summarize a group's variability, while a distribution of
scores can be ordered into percentiles or stanines and individuals assigned a specific
rank location. Normalizing a population is itself a move toward homogeneity, pushing to the tails
Rekha Page 26 of 69
anything idiosyncratic, peculiar, and unfamiliar. I will have more to say about the consequences of
standardized measurement in a later section.
Schools are a means of imposing state based exclusion based on

class and location—the aff’s attempt to improve this are simply
means of masking this logic
Jacques Donzelot 1999 (Professor of Political Sociology at University of Paris, Columbia
University Press New York Reading Foucault for Social Work, “Foucault Roundtable,” p.88)
Previously, things were done with the means available; these were exclusionary practices. Today, a
very
effective system of confinement exists in the school system. Schools, as we know
them, enable people to stay in their assigned places according to the requirements of
the system, that is, based on their social origin. Baudelot and Establet's book on the Capitalist
School tells the story quite well. It speaks of two networks of schooling: the secondary-and-above network,
and the primary and professional network. There may be a third one, the legal-clinical network, a sort of new
educational layer that absorbs to a certain degree the old products of exclusion. We could talk of a form of
dialectic-although I don't like that word very much-between exclusion and confinement. When things
are going well, under conditions of available resources, confinement takes place
through the school system. When this is not sufficient, exclusionary means take over.
This is the problem as far as I see it. It is no more complicated than that.
Link- No Child Left Behind

NCLB is a practice rooted in the ideology of eugenics—the state’s
structural racism in education standards is a biopolitical method of
targeting portions of the population as inferior
Nicholas Hartlep, 2008 (M.S.Ed. Doctoral Student Urban Education at University of
Wisconsin- Milwaukee, “Eugenics in Education: Apologetics for Oppression”)
The eugenic labels presently used in education vary in offensiveness. Albeit tacit at times, the following are
a few eugenic-laden labels/practices widely used within the educational arena: (1) “at-risk” student; (2)
“special needs” student; (3) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, previously Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965; and (4) the ability tracking of students. The term “at-risk” undermines objectivity and
inaccurately labels children in education. What does “at-risk” mean? Furthermore, what is the purpose for its
use in the educational arena? The same holds true for the term, “special needs” student. In terms of
exceptionality and uniqueness, I would argue that all students are special in some form or fashion. NCLB is
eugenically contrived insofar as it causes division and a separation of races as it
relates to the achievement gap and the acknowledgement that certain nonwhite
students perform subordinately well when compared to white students. NCLB serves as an
apparatus that assuages underrepresented, non-white populations of students’
academic growth/achievement. The tracking of students is a eugenic-laden practice
Rekha Page 27 of 69
that is founded exclusively upon perceived ability level and, therefore, is not inclusive.
Minority students are disserved when educators predetermine their abilities directly or indirectly. As Winfield
testifies: The fact that subsequent generations of educational policy makers have so
enthusiastically embraced mechanisms of measurement (testing and dependence on IQ),
techniques of tracking and sorting [italics added] (high school tracks, gifted and talented programs), and
forms of content presentation (curriculum) that have their conceptual roots in eugenic ideology suggests
that the aim of passing the imperative on to the younger generation was successful. (p.
132) Non-whites are harmed and disserved through tracking. The continued use of ability tracking
jeopardizes many non-white students and is a eugenic practice presently entertained
in the educational corpus.
Link- Native Americans

The government’s compassionate approach to Native American
policy is merely a power play intended to continue subjugation and
dominance of Native land
Taiaiake Alfred, 1999 (Director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University
of Victoria, “Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto”, p. 13)
In the past two generations, indigenous people around the world have broken the rusty cage of colonial
oppression and exposed the injustices imposed on them. Brave and powerful leaders have challenged the
European’s self-proclaimed right to rule and ruin our nations. Our people have achieved a victory of the
mind: the attitudes that sustained our subjugation can no longer be defended. Confronted with the
moral and intellectual defeat of its empire in Indian Country, the former oppressor has
presented a more compassionate face.
Rekha Page 28 of 69
Newcomer governments claim to be forging historic new relationships with indigenous
nations, relationships based on mutual respect, sharing, sovereignty, and our inherent
rights. Economic development, modern treaties, self-government, compacts, revenue-sharing, and co-
management have become the watchwords of the ‘post-colonial’ age. But beyond the words, is the promise
holding?
There have been some improvements. But our reserves are still poor, our governments are still divided and
powerless, and our people still suffer. The post-colonial promises cannot ease this pain. The state has
shown great skill in shedding the most onerous responsibilities of its rule while holding
fast to the lands and authorities that are the foundations of its power. Redefining without
reforming, it is letting go of the costly and cumbersome minor features of the colonial
relationship and further entrenching in law and practice the real bases of its control. It
is ensuring continued access to indigenous lands and resources by insidiously promoting a
form of neo-colonial self-government in our communities and forcing our integration into the legal
mainstream. Real control remains in the hands of white society, because it is still that
society’s rules that determine our life—not through obviously racist laws, but through
endless references to the ‘market’. ‘fiscal reality’, ‘Aboriginal rights’, and ‘public will.’
And it is still the white society’s needs that are met.
In this supposedly post-colonial world, what does it matter if the reserve is run by Indians, so long as they
behave like bureaucrats and carry out the same old policies? Redefined and reworded, the ‘new’ relationship
still abuses indigenous people, albeit more subtly. In this ‘new’ relationship, indigenous people are still
bound to another power’s order. The rusty cage may be broken, but a new chain has been
strung around the indigenous neck; it offers more room to move, but it still ties our
people to white men pulling on the strong end.
Link- Abortion
The family planning initiative of the affirmative allows the state to
regulate its notion of the perfect society while justifying other
biopolitical measures under the guise of poverty alleviation
Sanford Schram, 2006 (Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr
College, “Welfare Discipline: Discourses, Governance, and Globalization”, p. 33-34)
Rekha Page 29 of 69
For conservatives, family planning is a stark example of social engineering. Yet, as Linda Gordon
notes, Planned parenthood, the dominant organization for providing such services for more than 50 years
assiduously sought to ensure that family planning, from contraception to marriage counseling, was seen as
consonant with the dominant discourse of family. At various turns this has proven most difficult, particularly when
contraception was shown to be at least as important to the unmarried as the married, or when abortion was finally
determined to be part of women’s right to privacy. More important, the integration of women’s
reproductive rights into family discourse has at times meant the subordination of efforts to
achieve gender equality in order to rationalize reproductive freedom as consistent with
family values. Family planning is a politically significant misnomer. The term obscures the fact that the most
political significant services offered in the name of family planning, such as pregnancy counseling for unmarried
teenagers, are often provided when the planning of a family is exactly what does not happen, or is what the young
women want to avoid. The better response, however, is not to deny the need for the services implied by family
planning, but instead to legitimize them on their own terms. Rather than subordinate the laudable social goal of
reproductive freedom, it is better to resist the tendency to tie reproductive freedom to the family ideal. Although
there are bound to be moments in any struggle where the tie to dominant discourse may be strategically
advantageous, the contradictions that come with achieving reproductive freedom in the name
of family suggest that this is a tie that binds retrogressively. Planning is its own misnomer here.
Families are often ill-equipped for planning and planning for families is something that many people do poorly, for a
variety of reasons that have more to do with the inadequacies of their circumstances than with the people
themselves. Poverty, lack of education, youth, and many other factors make some people more dependent on
attempts to engage post hoc in retrospective family planning. Family planning often deals with problems of poverty
well beyond the family. Yet, perpetuating the profamily orientation within the context of allegedly
rational planning would reinforce the idea that family structure was the key to solving the
problems of poverty. This same family discourse justifies coercive intervention in other areas
of public assistance, including the growing popularity of the idea that welfare recipients
should be encouraged or required to submit to contraceptive implants. The dilemma for family
planning advocates is how to legitimate their services within the dominant discourse on families without
emphasizing family over other, more critical, causes of poverty. While under assault by the right as antifamily,
advocates of the Planned Parenthood variety have risked falling prey to profamily rhetoric as a way to eke out some
legitimacy for reproductive rights. Family is the all too convenient card for rationalizing many social
practices- some good, some reprehensible. It can irresponsibly justify almost all that is done
in its name as well as limit consideration of practices that deserve to be affirmed in their own
right even if they cannot be justified as serving the allegedly greater good of the family.
Including abortion in rights discourse is a means of normalization of

the population
John Ransom, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dickinson College.
“Foucault’s Discipline The Politics of Subjectivity” pg-161)
An attempt is made to expand the list of basic civil rights (freedom of association, religion, and so on) to
include the latest balance of forces in a particular political battle. We tend to distort the vocabulary
of rights to fit the latest episode in the political struggle. Not just a right to free speech, then,
but a right to an abortion; a right to life; a right to clean environment, a job,
neighborhood control; and so forth. For Foucault, this exclusive focus on “rights” as the only
intelligible way to map opposition in modern society is one which is understandable but which he hopes to
work past. Systems of power- disciplines- that have nothing to do with rights but instead
function through the creation and normalization of individuals are responded to with a
reformulated and ultimately unworkable discourse of rights. As Foucault puts it:
What we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at
the face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the
law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations
concerning rights. The “right” to life, to one’s body., to health, to happiness, to the
satisfaction of needs,… this “right”-which the classical juridical system was utterly
incapable of comprehending- was the political response to all these new procedures of
power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty
Rekha Page 30 of 69
Link- Abortion
Disciplinary power is the heart of reproductive services—the state
has total control over the existence of the population
Australia, “The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body”, p. 6-7)
The State exercises disciplinary power over the body politic, intent on the
documenting and regulating of the health status of populations. The focus on this book,
centering as it does on the institution of public health, is on the latter dimension of biopower. Turner has
built upon Foucault’s concept of biopower to construct a conceptual framework which categorizes the ways
in which the state must deal with bodies in space; the restraint of the populations in time;
the regulation of bodies in space; the restraint of the interior body through disciplines;
and the representation of the exterior body in social space. Turner goes on to outline the
institutional subsystems which are responsible for these categories: for reproduction,
patriarchy; for regulation, panopticism; for restraint, asceticism; and for representation, commodification.
The discourses and practices of public health and health promotion attempt to serve all these functions. For
example, arguments of health are used to encourage people to have more or less children,
to seek health care deemed appropriate by the state when undergoing pregnancy and
labor, to desist from or engage in abortion, sterilization or contraception. As I will outline
in Chapter, the concern with the reproduction of the labor force at the turn of the twentieth century was a
major impetus for the public health movement’s focus upon infant mortality and fertility rates. Systems of
regulation are constantly used to survey populations’ health status (the questionnaire is the
most obvious example). The latter two ways outlined by Turner in which the state deals with bodies are also
highly relevant to the activities of health promotion, in its concern with self-surveillance, discipline and
control; for example the discourses valorizing dietary and body weight control in the name of good health
first, and good looks, second. It is not only the shape and deportment of the human body
that is constructed through the discourses and practices of public health, but also
subjectivity, or the ‘inner self’. The concept of subjectivity is central to an
understanding of the ways in which people negotiate the imperatives of public health
and health promotion. Subjectivity may be defined as a sense of self or self-identity. It is socially
constructed through interactions with others; thus we are not born with subjectivity, we acquire it from
infancy. Language and discourse are central in the constitution of subjectivities, in a complex relationship
with other sources such as sensual embodied experience and the unconscious. Subjectivity is fragmented,
highly changeable and dependent on the context. There are numerous, often contradictory ways in which
individuals fashion subjectivities. That is not to argue, however, that individuals have a totally ‘free’ and
unrestrained choice of subjectivities. Subjectivity is constructed through and by the
articulation of power, for ‘it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain
bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and
constituted as individuals’ (Foucault, 1980b: 98). There are strong structural constraints placed on the
range of subjectivities available; for example, individuals born with female genitals are direct from birth in
ways both subtle and overt to behave, dress, think, feel and express themselves in ways consonant with
current broad understandings and assumptions of femininity. While there may be a number of choices within
the range of accepted versions of femininity, these will always be limited.
Rekha Page 31 of 69
Link- Drug Rehab

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

This paper draws on Michel Foucault to argue that
biomedically-organized and federally controlled drug treatment modality in the United
States, affecting approximately 115,000 heroin addicts, represents the state’s attempt
to inculcate moral discipline into the hearts, minds, and bodies of deviants who reject
sobriety and economic productivity. Surprisingly, Foucault has relatively rarely been applied to
studying illegal psychoactive drugs or to critiquing the social science and biomedical literatures on the
subject (for some exceptions see Bourgois, Lettiere and Quesada 1997; Friedman and Alicea 1995; Moore
and Wenger 1995; O’Malley and Mugford 1992; Smart 1984). Foucault’s concepts of 1) biopower, 2)
the disciplinary power/knowledge nexus, and 3) the political utility of the specific
intellectual offer a means for critiquing the moral imperatives that drive most drug
policy under the rubric of quantitative evidence-based science and health promotion.
To summarize briefly, Foucault’s term biopower refers to the ways historically entrenched institutionalized
forms of social control discipline bodies. The bio-politics of substance abuse include a wide
range of laws, medical interventions, social institutions, ideologies, and even
structures of feeling (Ong 1995; Caputo and Yount 1993; Foucault 1982: 208–226; Williams 1977;
Rabinow (ed.) 1984: 258–272). The definition of methadone maintenance as “drug treatment” is a
particularly concrete example of biopower at work. The state and medical authorities
have created distinctions between heroin and methadone that revolve primarily
around moral categories concerned with controlling pleasure and productivity: legal
versus illegal; medicine versus drug. The contrast between methadone and heroin
illustrates how the medical and criminal justice systems discipline the uses of
pleasure, declaring some psychoactive drugs to be legal medicine and others to be
illegal poisons. Ultimately, it can be argued that the most important pharmacological difference between
the two drugs that might explain their diametrically opposed legal and medical statuses is that one (heroin)
is more pleasurable than the other (methadone).
Rekha Page 32 of 69
Link- Community Care

Decentralization of care for people with disabilities results in an
increased system of monitoring and normalization rooted in
biopower
Nigel Parton, 1994 (Professor in Child Care Studies at the University of Keele,
“’Problematics of Government’, (Post) Modernity and Social Work”, p. 25-26)
What has emerged is a reinterpretation of government which, while heavily influenced by and riven through
with neo-liberal principles, has much wider appeal and support. This emerging arena is often referred to as
'welfare pluralism' (Johnson, 1987) and has a number of features. First, an emphasis on plural provision
whereby a greater proportion of social care is provided by voluntary agencies, private organizations and
community initiatives. State provision should be minimal and reserved for areas where no-one else is
providing. Second, decentralization and a community orientation of the statutory services themselves. The
predominant mode of provision should be community-oriented, implying flatter organizational structures and
a different interpretation of professionalism— recognizing that the consumer or user knows best and that
informal sources of care should be reinforced and not supplanted wherever possible. Third, the introduction
of contractual rather than hierarchical accountability, whereby relationships within and between welfare
organizations should be specific and formal and services should be contracted out to voluntary and private
agencies wherever possible. Similarly, at the consumer/professional interface the nature of the relationship
and the focus of the work should be formally spelt out in a contract which can be subject to regular
monitoring and review. Finally, in emphasizing the need for greater monitoring and inspection, the
participation of consumers should be central to decision-making and future plans. In the process, the role
and practices of managers become crucial. It is managers, as opposed to the professionals, who are seen as
the powerful actors in this new network. Managers become the new mediators between the expert
knowledge(s), individual and community needs, and the allocation of scarce resources—in effect
harmonizing overall objectives and day-to-day practice. More specifically, notions of management frame and
supplant the central activities of the professionals themselves and the forms of knowledge they draw upon.
No longer are social workers constructed as therapists or caseworkers, but as care or
case managers coordinating and operationalizing care packages, where their
knowledge of resources and networks is crucial and where, again, notions of
monitoring and review are central. The apparent failure of the social sciences to produce
the knowledge and techniques in wide areas of social life whereby problems and needs could be
reduced or ameliorated has resulted in an emphasis on improving multi-agency and
multi-disciplinary work. As a consequence, an increasing emphasis in policy and
Rekha Page 33 of 69
practice has been put upon refining systems, producing procedures and guidance and
overhauling intra- and inter-organizational structures. The central skills and activities
are concerned with assessment, planning, care management, negotiating,
coordinating, using information technology, and operating the law and procedures. Not
surprisingly more and more time is spent on administration; in meetings; on writing reports; and
on liaison —rather than on direct work with clients or, as they are now constructed, users
and consumers. I am not suggesting that these are new activities and skills for social work, simply that
they now constitute the central activities of what it is to be a social worker. In effect social workers are
constituted as managers of family life for certain sections of the population. The increased emphasis
on management, evaluation, monitoring, and constraining professionals to write things
down, is itself a form of government of them, and more crucially, of those with whom they
are working. It forces them to think about what they are doing and hence makes them
more accountable against certain norms. In the process, power flows to the centre or agent who
determines the professionals' inscriptions, accumulates them, analyses them in their aggregate form, and
can compare and evaluate the activities of others who are entries in the chart. An increasing emphasis is
placed on the production of mission statements, objectives, outcomes, statistics, community care plans, and
annual reviews. The management of information itself becomes the central rationale for policy and practice,
from those in central government to professionals on the front line.
Link- Psychiatry
Truth-seeking methods like psychiatry are a means of normalization
of individuals by prescribing ways of living that model the “ideal
society”
Nigel Parton, 1994 (Professor in Child Care Studies at the University of Keele,
“’Problematics of Government’, (Post) Modernity and Social Work”, p. 14-15)
One ofFoucault's central objectives was to provide a critique of the way modern
societies regulate and discipline their populations by sanctioning the knowledge-claims
and practices of the new human sciences— particularly medicine, psychiatry, psychology
and criminology— which provided the opportunity for the emergence of the 'psy' complex (see also Ingleby,
1985, and Rose, 1985). He argued that these new disciplines legitimated new knowledge
claims and forms of social regulation which subverted the classical order of political
rule based on sovereignty and right. They instituted a regime of power exercised
through disciplinary mechanisms and the stipulation of norms for human behaviour.
The normal family, the healthy child, the perfect wife and the proper man both inform ideas about ourselves
and are reproduced and legitimated through the practices of the 'psy' complex. According to Foucault, from
the eighteenth century onwards, these new knowledges increasingly colonized the old powers to such an
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extent that the more traditional forms of law and judicial rights were transformed. No
longer were the
crucial decisions taken in the courtroom according to the criteria of judicial rights, but
in the hospital, the clinic or the welfare office, according to the criteria of
'normalization'. Even when decisions were taken in the courtroom, these were
increasingly colonized by the 'psy' complex according to these same criteria (Foucault, 1977a).
Normalizing disciplinary mechanisms which attempt to subject the individual to
training require a knowledge of the whole person in their social context, and depend
on medico-social expertise and judgements for their operation. They depend on direct
supervision and surveillance, and they emphasize the need to effect change in
character, attitudes and behaviour in an individualized way. They are concerned with
underlying causes and needs and attempt to contribute to the improvement of those being served as well as
to social defence.
Link- Terrorism
The threat of terrorism used in the affirmative is a biopolitical tool
the state uses to subjugate individuals
Miguel De Larrinaga and Mark Doucet, 2007 (ph.D in Political Science, “Global
Governmentality, Biopower and the Human Security Discourse,” p. 10-11,)
The manner in which Western governments, for instance, have been able to label
terrorism as a specifically global threat to world order can be understood through such
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an understanding of sovereign power. Seen from this vantage point, the “global war on
terror” and its attendant manifestations in the form of coordinated military operations,
counter-insurgency, police, and border measures and intelligence practices in the name
of exceptionality lend themselves to a particular global cartography. This mapping is one that summons, in
the borderlands of global order, subjects that are amenable to the sway of a global sovereign
power. It is the lives of these subjects rendered as bare, in which create the conditions
of possibility for interventions mounted from the vantage point of global sovereign
rule. In rendering bare the lives subject to its interventions, global sovereign power
operates on the same terrain with the biopower that circulates in the technologies and
practices of global governmentalities. In other words, both sovereign power and the complex
assemblage of global governmentalities operate in the realm of the biopolitical – i.e. they require lives that
are rendered bare. As will be examined later in this paper it is through the human security discourse that we
can formulate an understanding of the intimate connections and distinctions between technologies of
sovereign power and biopower as they are deployed globally. Within the above context, Empire then
becomes for us a way of apprehending forms of power and their complex interrelationships that have this
element of globality. 29 In this sense, Empire is “a ‘network power’” that “includes as its primary elements
or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and
other powers.”
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Link- Economy
The aff’s attempt to save the economy is a biopolitical extension of
the state’s attempts to inculcate neoliberal values in individuals
Trent Hamann, 2009 (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, Foucault
Studies, No. 6, “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics”)
In his 1978-1979 course lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics Michel Foucault offered
what is today recognizable as a remarkably prescient analysis of neoliberalism. In the thirty years since he
gave these lectures their pertinence and value for a critical understanding of contemporary forms of political
governance in the United States have grown. As I illustrate below, everyday experiences reflect a
neoliberal ethos operative within almost every aspect of our individual and social lives
with consequences that are dire for many and dangerous for most if not all of us. Indeed the
central aim of neoliberal governmentality is the strategic social conditions conducive to
the constitution of Homo economicus, a specific form of subjectivity with historical roots in
traditional liberalism. However, whereas libe-ralism posits ”economic man” as a ”man of exchange”,
neoliberalism strives to ensure that individuals are compelled to assume market-based
values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of ”human
capital” and thereby become ”entrepreneurs of themselves”. Neoliberal Homo economicus is a free
and autonomous ”atom” of self-interest who is fully responsible for navigating the social
realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculation to the express exclusion of all
other values and interests. Those who fail to thrive under such social con-ditions have no one and
nothing to blame but themselves. It is here that we can rec-ognize the vital importance of the links between
Foucault’s analyses of governmen-tality begun in the late 1970’s and his interest in technologies of the self
and ethical self-fashioning, which he pursued until the time of his death in 1984. His analyses of
”government” or ”the conduct of conduct” bring together the government of others
(subjectification) and the government of one’s self (subjectivation); on the one hand, the
biopolitical governance of populations and, on the other, the work that individuals
perform upon themselves in order to become certain kinds of subjects. While the more traditional
forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain
evident in our ”globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of
everyday life through the specifically neoliberal ”conduct of conduct” recommend that
we recognize and invent commen-surate forms of critique, ”counter-conduct” and ethical
subjectivation that constitute resistance to its dangers.
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Link- Ethics/Obligation
The ethics of the affirmative is a normalizing form of disciplinary
power
Stephen Hopgood, 2k, (Lecturer of Asian Studies at the University of London, Millennium:
Journal of International Studies, “Reading the Small Print in Global Civil Society: The
Inexorable Hegemony of the Liberal Self”, 29:1)
In preceding sections, I have argued that liberal notions of interest rely crucially on the
inculcation of supportive virtues. However, the modern delegitimation of public
pronouncements about private conceptions of the good has relegated these virtues to
‘the small print’. They remain just as much the price of admission, and humanitarian
activists remain as determined as earlier missionaries to effect widespread social
change though transformations of personal identities. It is merely that ‘virtues’ and
‘right conduct’, so at odds with the idea of personal choice, now receive minimal publicity, something in
which the international media, so deeply implicated in the expansion of global civil society, cannot help
but be complicit. Where once there was talk of the ‘good’, now there is talk of the
‘right’.
I have illustrated that this talk of the ‘right’ merely disguises talk of the ‘good’; the latter is
the iron fist in the velvet glove. Human rights do not protect identities, they open them
up for the process of complete transformation. Acknowledging this fact is vital, at the
very least, to creating a space for those critical of liberalism, and those engaged in
actual resistance to it, to undermine the natural, truth-like status of human rights
claims. If public sphere arguments for creating ‘equality’ in the private sphere—totalising
projects—are to be feared, especially after two centuries of imperialism and
totalitarianism, then human rights are just as much part of such a public totalising
project, and not, as they appear to be, part of the antidote. It should be no surprise to us now
that humanitarian activists make, and believe deeply in, judgements about what
constitutes a good life. It could not be otherwise because human rights are empty; often what
activists lack is simply self-awareness. The modern virtues they promote revolve around a conception of
appropriate self-hood as an essential freedom from family, culture, tradition, even nation
(these are human not civil rights), of an autonomous and morally self-sufficient person able to
pursue self-authored interests.72 This ‘natural’ identity is in fact, as we have seen, a
product of inculcated virtues. It entails, for example, that class inequality, which confronted
Native Americans as it does all colonised (and decolonised) peoples, is seen as a private
matter. One thus needs to acquire the proper virtues to succeed in today’s world where globalisation
makes market exchange the model for social affairs.
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Link- Governmentality
The aff’s program that that gives the state authority over life is the
dangerous practice of governmentality—power is politicized and and
disseminated among the government
Mike Raco and Rob Imrie, 2k (Professor of Geography at the Universty of Reading,
Professor of Geography at Royal Halloway, “Univeristy of London – Environment and
Planning”, “Governmentality and Rights and Responsibilities in Urban Policy; v. 32 p. 2187 –
2204)
For Foucault, such (alleged) transformations in governance direct one's attention to what
Hunt and Wickham (1994, page 26) refer to as ``the emergence of new and distinctive
mentalities of government or governmental rationality', which involve a calculating pre-
occupation with activities directed at shaping, channelling, and guiding the conduct of
others.'' This, then, points towards Foucault's concept of governmentality as a means of
analysing, and seeking to make sense of, the alleged transformations to a `rights and responsibilities'
framework in government policy. As Foucault (1979, page 20) notes, the object of government is the
population, or the development of instruments and techniques which, as Miller and Rose
(1990, page 2) suggest ``module its wealth, health, longevity, its capacity to wage war
and to engage in labour.'' The population becomes a domain of regulation and action or a
resource to be fostered, used, and optimised, primarily through the deployment of
disciplinary measures or techniques in the administration of individual people's lives
(Dean, 1999, page 20). As Foucault (1979) suggests, political power is developed and
implemented through a multitude of agencies and mechanisms not necessarily reducible to the
state. Consequently, ``the analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that sovereignty of
the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of domination are given at the outset''
(page 92).
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Link- Apoc Rhetoric

The affirmative’s apocalyptic rhetoric is the tool the state uses to
justify any action—resulting in mass annihilation
Peter Coviello, 2k, Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College, Queer Frontiers:
Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, “Apocalypse From Now On”)
Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the world
we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed – it did not go away.
And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an
event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida’s suitably menacing phrase)
“remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,” then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose
parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypse is defined now by the affliction it
brings somewhere else, always to an “other” people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of
dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished “general population.” This fact
seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag’s incisive observation, from 1989, that, “Apocalypse is now a
long running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On.’” The decisive point here in the
perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that the
apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is
ever useful. That is, through the perpetual threat of destruction – through the constant
reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse – the agencies of power ensure their authority to act
on and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively
than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses
himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-
threatening than, in his words, “life-administering.” Power, he contends, “exerts a positive
influence on life … [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting
it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.” In his brief comments on what he calls
“the atomic situation,” however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power
must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as
“managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,” agencies of modern power
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presume to act “on the behalf of the existence of everyone.” Whatsoever might be
construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to authorize any expression
of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating. “If genocide is
indeed the dream of modern power,” Foucault writes, “this is not because of a recent return to the
ancient right to kill’ it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the
species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.” For a state that would
arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the
patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise,
nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.
Impact- Extinction
Biopolitics’ total control of the population allows for extinction
James Bernauer, 1990 (Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, “Michel Foucault’s
Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics of Thought,” p. 141-142)
This capacity of power to conceal itself cannot cloak the tragedy of the implications contained in Foucault's
examination of its functioning. While liberals have fought to extend rights and Marxists have denounced the
injustices of capitalism, a political technology, acting in the interests of a better administration of life, has
produced a politics that places man's "existence as a living being in question." The very period that
proclaimed pride in having overthrown the tyranny of monarchy, that engaged in an endless clamor for
reform, that is confident in the virtues of its humanistic faith -- this period's politics created a landscape
dominated by history's bloodiest wars. What comparison is possible between a sovereign's
authority to take a life and a power that, in the interest of protecting a society's quality
of life, can plan, as well as develop the means for its implementation, a policy of
mutually assured destruction? Such a policy is neither an aberration of the
fundamental principles of modern politics nor an abandonment of our age's humanism
in favor of a more primitive right to kill; it is but the other side of a power that is
"situated and exercised at the level of life, the species the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population. The bio-political project of administering and optimizing life
closes its circle with the production of the Bomb. "The atomic situation is now at the
end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the
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underside of a power to guarantee and individuals continued existence. " The solace that
might have been expected from being able to gaze at scaffolds empty of the victims of a tyrant's vengeance
has been stolen form us by the noose that has tightened around each of our own necks.
Impact- Extinction
Power's drive to control and manage the world creates conditions
where individuals are thought of as expendable, which leads to
extinction
Boaventura Santos, 2003 (Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of
Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Law School. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and
Director of the Center of Documentation on the Revolution of 1974, at the same University.,
"Collective Suicide?" March 28, 2003 http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php)
the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to
According to Franz Hinkelammert,
save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name
of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political
reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide
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of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused
millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in
Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the
periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress
is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not
herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the
illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there
are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to
take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is
not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to
the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all
terrorists and potential terrorists.This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the
radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the
notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore,
seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic
of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods
involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able
to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and
social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion,
worldwide, against the war is found to he incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly
democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming
collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the
definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide
becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian
fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable
populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of
"collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on
two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand
civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100
billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years.
Impact- Extinction
Biopower causes extinction, as it re-enforces a kill to save mentality
and allows for people to “manage” populations, this in turn will us
all.
George Kouros, 1997 (Yale Law Graduate, And Holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Emory.
“Become What You Are”)
Although the consequences are grave, the administrative practices of biopower go largely
unchallenged precisely because they promise the opportunity of vastly improving the quality of life.
But a system primarily concerned with technological exigencies of ensuring survival
paradoxically is no longer able to assign meaning to the value of life. Life is something to be
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secured at all costs, and by any means, as the American military motto of "you have to kill
to save" during the Vietnam War demonstrates. For Foucault, this technological imperative
to secure survival is what brings us closest to the possibility of our own extinction: [T]his
formidable power of death ... now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that
endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars ... are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone;
entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able
to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the
circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out
destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact
increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the
end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside
of the power to guarantee an individual's existence . . . If genocide is indeed the dream of
modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because
power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race. (HS 137) In the interest
of optimizing life we find ourselves possessing the capabilities to wipe out all of humanity as we know
it. Heidegger, much like Foucault, understands "the atomic situation" as the product of a
technological process that seeks to create "a happier human life."8 But he also emphasizes that "precisely if the hydrogen bombs
do not explode and human life on earth is preserved" that we face the greatest danger (DT 52). Responding to a chemist's proclamation that
"The hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will,"
Heidegger writes: "We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man
compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little" (DT 52). In other words, in the absence of a nuclear holocaust we
assume that we have managed to keep technology in hand. Without the sound of an explosion to alert us, we become complacent to the
deadliness of our own technological achievements. For example, the chemist's ability to manipulate DNA and genetically screen out
undesirable traits, while promising the possibility of a "happier human being," maintains the conditions for a eugenic nightmare.-JC
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Impact- Freedom
Disciplinary powers turn humans into machines who act as the tells
them too, this eliminates all freedom and justifies mass atrocities.
Michael Clifford, 2001 (Professor of Philosophy at the Mississippi State University,
"Political Genealogy After Foucault." Routledge Publications, p.48)
The chief function of disciplinary power," says Foucault, "is to 'train.'" Even though the target of disciplinary power
is the individual body, with a focus on the smallest gestures, its goal is to train the ndividual to become a
productive, contributing unit of a larger force. Discipline is not "simply an art of distributing bodies ...
but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine" (DP, 164). Disciplinary
practices are designed to produce a body that can function like a cog in the wheel of a vast
machine. We can see this most evidently in the military, where the soldier is but one element in an armed force,
and in industry, where the individual worker is part of a larger workforce. Discipline acts to train the soldier
and the worker so that they can work in concerted effort with other individuals and are not
just a haphazard, random arrangement of disparate units. The composition of productive forces is
also the object of discipline in such institutions as education and medicine, though it is not perhaps as apparent.
Disciplinary practices emerged in response to certain economic, social, and demographic
changes in society. Increases in population, for example, influenced the entrenchment of disciplinary
techniques in the school system. By the nineteenth century, the school had become "a machine for
learning, in which each pupil, each level and each moment, if correctly combined, were
permanently utilized in the general process of teaching" (DP, 165). Likewise, the plagues of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the general fear of contagious disease that attended the growing
density of urban population, gave rise to a "political dream" of a society in which the movements
of all citizens would be monitored, regulated, and controlled. This dream had its material realization,
at least partially, in the disciplinary reorganization of hospitals, which became "a mechanism that pins down and
partitions; it must provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass..." (DP, 144). It does this, of course, by
identifying and isolating individuals, their individual diseases and methods of treatment. Behind this is a
political tactic, ostensibly directed toward the health and welfare of society as a whole, but
in practice implemented according to a disciplinary regimentation of a broad demographic
conglomerate. The dream of a perfectly supervised society in which every individual would
be accounted for, in which all activities would be regulated down to the smallest detail, gave
rise to a number of disciplinary projects, says Foucault. These ranged from the great confinements in
Europe to Jeremy Bentham's ideal model of perpetual surveillance: the panopticon. The panopticon was to be an
annular building divided into separate cells into which individuals would be placed. A central observation tower
would be able to monitor the activities of the individual at all times. While for the most part only the prison was
ultimately modeled on Bentham's design, the principle of constant surveillance would become intrinsic to most
modern institutions
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Impact- Root Cause of War

Bio-power is the root cause of war and violence between states
Michael Dillon and Julian Reid 2001 (Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and
International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Doctoral Student in the Department of
Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster , “Global Liberal
Governance: Biopolitics, Security, and War”, 2001Millennium - Journal of International
Studies, pp.39-40)
For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the
corporeal.1 [U]ltimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an
apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy…In this central and
centralised humanity…we must hear the distant roar of battle.2 Intimately allied with the
globalisation of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new and
diverse ensemble of power known as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a
varied and complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the administration and
production of life, rather than in threatening death. Global liberal governance is substantially
comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and dynamics of populations so
that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life chances. In this
great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification
and extension, via liberal forms o f power, of what Michel Foucault called the ‘great economy o f
power’ whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once ‘the
problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged’.3 Foucault called this
kind of power—the kind of power/knowledge that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the
juridical sovereign kind of po wer that threatens death— biopower, and its politics biopolitics. This
paper forms part of our continuing exploration of the diverse character of global liberal governance as
a form of global biopolitics.4 We are concerned, like Foucault, to draw attention to the peculiar ways in
which biopower deploys force and violence, not least because biopower hides its violent face and,
‘gives to the power to inflict legal punishment a context in which it appears to be free of all
excess and violence’.5 Second, we draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the ways in
which global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is
assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio -economic and cultural net works of
bio political relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzean adage concerning the relation
between politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war b y other means. We are also concerned,
however, to note how the conceptualisation and practice of war itself changes via the very
process of its assimilation into, and dialogical relation with, the heart of biopolitical order;
and we concentrate on that point in this essay. There is, in addition, a further way in which we seek
to extend Foucault’s project.
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Impact- Racism
Racism is a core mechanism of biopower—these artificially imposed

divisions create perpetual wars and genocide
Eduardo Mendieta, 2002 (Associate Profess of Philosophy at SUNY at Stony Brook, “To
Make Live and Let Die: Foucault on Racism)
This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the
emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription
within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am quoting:
“the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a
society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in first
instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to
death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrière] function of the
state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be
assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political
Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after
the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a
power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the
population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course,
the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.”
(Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of
one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a
population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism within the
state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made
a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war of
races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit,
against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power,
biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and
medicalizes war. Racism makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the
same time masking its weapons of death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism
banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health
of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an everyday
occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To protect society
entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum
of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature.
Rekha Page 47 of 69
Impact- VTL
Biopower renders life calculable, and subjects individuals to the
state’s whims—kills value to life
Jonathan Inda, 2002 (Department of Chicano Studies at University of California “Biopower,
Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman’s Body”, p. 100-101)
“For a long time ,” Foucault notes, “one

of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power
was the right to decide life and death” (History: 135). For instance, If an external enemy sought to
overthrow him, the sovereign could justly wage war, requiring his subjects to fight in defense of the state.
So, without directly proffering their death, the sovereign was sanctioned to risk their life. In this case, he
exercised “an indirect power over them of life and death” (135). However, if someone hazarded
to rebel against him and violate his laws, the sovereign could exert a direct power over the transgressor’s
life, such that, as penalty, the latter could be put to death. The right to life and death, then, was somewhat
dissymmetrical, falling on the side of death: “The sovereign exercised his right to life only by exercising his
right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the
death he was capable of requiring.. The right which was formulated as the ‘power of
life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live” (136). As such, this type of
power, Foucault observes, was wielded mainly as a mechanism of deduction, making it
“essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (136).
That is, power was fundamentally a right of appropriation—the appropriation of a portion of the wealth,
labor, services, and blood of the sovereign’s subjects---one that culminated in the right to seize hold of life in
order to subdue it. The power of appropriation or of deduction, Foucault suggests, is no longer the principal
form of power in the West. Since the classical age, the mechanisms of power here have undergone a radical
transformation. Power now works “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces
under it”; it is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one
dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (History: 136). Thus, in contrast to a
power organized around the sovereign, modern “power would no longer be dealing simply with legal
subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery if would be
able to exercise over them would be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life,
more that the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body” (142-143). In
short, political power has assigned itself the duty of managing life. It is now over life that
power establishes its hold and on which it seeks to have a positive influence. This power over life, which
Foucault calls biopower, is most apparent in the emergence of “population” as an economic and political
problem in the eighteenth century. This “population” is not simply a collection of individual citizens. We are
not dealing , as Foucault notes, with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a composite body “with its
specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of
health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation” (History: 25). The “population,” in other words,
has its own form of order, its own energy, traits, and dispositions. The management of this “population,”
principally of its health, Foucault suggests, has become the primary commitement as well as the main
source of legitimacy of modern forms of government: it’s the body of society which becomes the new
principle [of political organizations] in the nineteenth century. It is this social body which needs to be
protected, in a quasi-medical sense. In place of the rituals that served to restore the corporeal integrity of
the monarch, remedies and therapeutic devices are employed such as the segregation of the sick, the
monitoring of contagions, the exclusion of delinquents. (“Body/Power”: 55) The concern of government,
Rekha Page 48 of 69
then, is to produce a healthy and productive citizenry. Its commitment is to the protection and enhancement
of the health of particular bodies in order to foster the health of the composite body of the population. This
means, according to Foucault, that “biological existence” has now come to be “reflected
in political existence” (history: 142). As such, biopower ultimately designates “what brought
life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations” (143), its main overall concern
being the life of the population, that is, of the species body—the body that functions as the foothold of
biological processes pertaining to birth, death, health, and longevity. Simply put, the species body and
the individual as a simple living being have become what are at stake in a state’s
political tactics, marking the politicization of life, turning politics into biopolitics and
the state into a biopolitical state.
Impact- Holocaust
Biopower allows for slaughter of whole populations which authorizes a holocaust.

Jonathan Inda, 2002 (Department of Chicano Studies at University of California “Biopower,
Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman’s Body”, 98-99)
The political effects of this sort of rhetoric have not been insignificant, for it has given rise to and legitimated
numerous efforts to exclude the immigrant from the body politic (e.g., fortification of the border, denial of health
care). The logic here is rather simple: since the migrant population threatens the common good, its exclusion or
elimination is seen as necessary in order to guard the well-being of the nation. The repudiation of the immigrant is
thus justified in the name of protecting the welfare of the social body. One way to interpret these practices of
exclusion is in terms of what Michel Foucault called biopower. This term describes a technology of power whose
main concern is “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase e of its
wealth, longevity, health, etc.” (“Governmentality”: 100). The focus of biopower, in other words, is the
control of the species body and its reproduction. It is a regulatory power whose highest function is to
thoroughly invest in life in order to produce a healthy and vigorous population. There is an underside to
biopower, however, since it is often the case that “entire populations are mobilized for the purpose
of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity….. it is as managers of life and survival,
of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars,
causing so many men to be killed” (history:137). Simply put, then, biopower does not just foster
life; it also routinely does away with it in order to preserve it. This means that the counterpart
of the power to secure an individuals continued existence is the power to expose an entire
population to death (or at least to multiplying its risk of death). It is thus possible under regimes of
biopower to simultaneously protect life and to authorize a holocaust. It is in this biopolitical space
that I would like to situate the contemporary repudiation of the migrant in the United States.
Thus the purpose of this chhpter is to explore how the state, in order to fortify the health of the population,
routinely aims to eliminate those influences that are deemed harmful to the biological
growth of the nation, It will show how the exclusion of the immigrant- as well as his/her exposure to the risk of
death—is codified as an essential and noble pursuit necessary to ensure the survival of the
Rekha Page 49 of 69
social body.. This exclusion will be explored primarily through the states repeated attempts to deny
undocumented immigrants access to prenatal care. In other words, the paper will concentrate mainly on the body
of the undocumented immigrant woman as an important terrain of strggle, particularly as it pertains to the
regulation of her capacity to reproduce.
Impact- Rights
Creation of a political subject justifies the destruction of freedom

and elimination of individual rights.
Clifford 2001 (Michael Clifford is a professor of philosophy at the Mississippi State University.
He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University. "Political Genealogy After
Foucault." Routledge Publications, 2001. pg. 34 DC)
What emerges from the discursive practice of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a
political subject animated by the spirit of threat. This notion of the political subject lies at the core of liberal
democratic theory. Liberal theory is founded, explicitly or implicitly, on a "contractual" model of political
subjectivity whose roars can be found, as we have seen, in the beginning years of the Enlightenment. This
contractual model is characterized by an essential division between the individual and the State, between
discrete subjects and sovereign authority. The political subject in this view is independent and abstract, and
is the locus of rights, liberty, and justice. This view pervades the history of liberalism, from John Milton and
the Levellers of John Lilburne, through the early contract theorists, the founding fathers, the French
philosophes, nineteenth-century social reformers such as John Stuart Mill and T. H. Green, to the present-day
political theories of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Even when political theory eschews, or at least places
less emphasis on, social contract, as in forms of Kantianism and utilitarianism, there is still the emphasis on
respecting the autonomy and rationality of the political subject, a binary division between sovereignty and
subjects, and the concern with identifying the limits and legitimation of power and political obligation. These
ideas, which Foucault would recognize as the objects of a discursive practice-autonomy, rights, sovereignty,
legitimation, and obligation-presuppose threat: they are invoked in the name of an already-constituted
Rekha Page 50 of 69
political subject whose rights may be violated, whose freedom may be removed, whose property may be
stolen or seized unjustly by a despotic sovereign, whose country may be overthrown by foreign oppressors.
Even peace, the ultimate goal of the body politic, is understood as an absence of threat. Take away threat
and the modern liberal political subject ceases to make sense.
Alt Solvency
The alternative is key—we must criticize the power structure of the
affirmative in order to rupture the “truth” prescribed by the state in
all life
Carol Johnson, 2004 (PhD in Philosophy at Texas Women’s University, “Foucault,
Rogerian Argument, and Feminist Standpoint Theory: Intersecting Discourses Concerning
Welfare Reform During the 1990s”, p. 24-25)
Responding to critiques of Habermas and others, Thomas Flynn, in “Truth and Subjectivation in the Later
Foucault” and “Symposiums Papers: Foucault and the Politics of Postmodernity,” defends Foucault’s method,
pointing out that Foucault’s intent was not to provide a “prescription” to resist the
pervasive, subjugating apparatuses of government and the system that participates in
the social construction of the individual, but rather to offer ways to describe and
critique that system (“Truth” 188). According to Flynn, Foucault’s concern was always focused on the
power relationships between those who exercise power and those who submit to it (188). Flynn offers that
Habermas rejects Foucault’s claims concerning power relationships because Foucault’s own theory is
based on the very ground that he is arguing against, and therefore, “collapses” on itself
Rekha Page 51 of 69
(191). Foucault’s relativism is problematic for Habermas, but Flynn argues that Foucault’s purpose was not
to provide “principles” to be followed and maintained, but a way of seeing and being in the world that was in
constant critique of the historical precepts that constructed the current domains of power and
knowledge which in turn construct individuals and the social systems in which they
live. Many of the critiques of Foucault’s theory point to his rejection of universalizing
and foundational themes underlying much of modernity as well as its lack of clarity as a
method of resistance. However, like Sawiki and Flynn, I think Foucault’s methods ask us to rupture
those paradigms in an effort to examine discursive relationships as they are presently
being executed in everyday life. As far as his failure to provide a method of resistance, I believe
with others that this was a deliberate omission—to do so was not his purpose; his purpose was to question
and expose relationships of power and how they functioned through discourse, not to remedy them. That is
why I combine Foucault’s exploration of truth with the strength of feminist standpoint theory in Chapter V
when I seek to identify a ground of resistance in the language of welfare receivers. Although Foucault
cautions one to question the use of confession as a form of resistance, he also in his work concerning
parrhesia identifies confession as a form of truth telling and possibly a method of self-dialectical
enlightenment. Flynn offers Foucault’s own work as a kind of parrhesia, a truth-seeking-
telling method (“Truth”). Throughout this study, I use Foucault’s methods as a lens, a
sensitivity, and a reminder that today’s social welfare discourse lives not only in
partnership with the myriad other discourses and disciplines intersecting and sharing
the current noetic field, but also that it lives in the shadow of its own history.
Alt Solvency
The alternative is key—only be engaging in constant questions of
criticism can we escape from the grasp of disciplinary power
Trent Hamann, 2009 (Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, Foucault Studies no
6, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics)
Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically new form of governmentality or just a set of variations on
classical liberalism, we can certainly recognize that there are a number of characteristics in contemporary practices that are new in the history
Rekha Page 52 of 69
of governmentality, a number of which I’ve al-ready discussed. Another one of these outstanding features is the extent to which the imposition
of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any autonomy that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and
moral dis-courses, institutions, and practices. Foucault notes, for example, that in the sixteenth century jurists were able to posit the law in a
critical relation to the reason of state in order to put a check on the sovereign power of the king. By contrast, neoliberalism, at least in its most
utopian formulations, is the dream of a perfectly limitless (as op-posed perhaps to totalizing) and all-encompassing (as opposed to exclusionary
and normalizing) form of governance that would effectively rule out all challenge or op-position. This seems to be the kind of thing that Margaret
Thatcher was dreaming about when she claimed that there is “no alternative”. Such formulations of what might be called “hyper-capitalism”
seem to lend themselves to certain traditional forms of criticism. However, critical analyses that produce a totalizing conception of power and
domination risk the same danger, noted above, of overlooking the some-times subtle and complex formations of power and knowledge that can
while there
be revealed through genealogical analyses of local practices. Important for any genealogical analysis is the recognition that,
is no ”outside” in relation to power, re-sistance and power are coterminous, fluid, and,
except in instances of domination, reversible. There is an echo of this formulation in Foucault’s
understanding of go-vernmentality as ”the conduct of conduct”. Governmentality is not a matter of
a dominant force having direct control over the conduct of individuals; rather, it is a matter
of trying to determine the conditions within or out of which individuals are able to
freely conduct themselves. And we can see how this is especially true in the case of neoliberalism
insofar as it is society itself and not the individual that is the direct object of power. Foucault provides
examples of this in “The Subject and Pow-er”, in which he discussed a number of struggles of
resistance that have developed over the past few years such as “opposition to the power of
men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the popu-
lation, of administration over the ways people live”. Despite their diversity, these struggles
were significant for Foucault because they share a set of common points that allow us to
recognize them as forms of resistance to governmentality, that is, ”critique”. Through the
examples he uses Foucault notes the local and immediate nature of resistance. These
oppositional struggles focus on the effects of power expe-rienced by those individuals
who are immediately subject to them. Despite the fact that these are local, anarchistic
forms of resistance, Foucault points out that they are not necessarily limited to one place but
intersect with struggles going on elsewhere. Of greatest importance is the fact that these
struggles are critical responses to contemporary forms of governmentality, specifically
the administrative techniques of subjectification used to shape individuals in terms of
their free conduct. These struggles question the status of the individual in relation to
community life, in terms of the forms of knowledge and instruments of judgment used to
determine the ”truth” of individuals, and in relation to the obfuscation of the real differences that make individuals irreducibly
individual beings. Tying all of these modes of resistance together is the question “Who are we?” While some might be concerned about
exactly who this we is suggested by Foucault, both here and in his discussions of Kant and enlightenment, I think the question is in some ways
is meant to remain an ongoing critical question that can never be
its own answer. In other words, it
definitively answered, or, as John Rajchman has sug-gested, it is a question that can only be answered by those who ask it and
through the process of asking it. In his introduction to The Politics of Truth he writes: The ‘we’ always comes after, emerging only through the on-
going light its activi-ties shed on the habits and practices through which people come to govern themselves—and so see themselves and one
another. Indeed in this lies precisely the originality of the critical attitude, its singular sort of universality, its distinc-tive relation to ‘today’—to
This ”critical attitude” that Foucault repeatedly refers to in all of his discussions
‘now’, ‘the present’, l’actuel.
of Kant from the 1970’s and 1980’s is inseparable from both his analysis of governmen-tality
and his discussions of ethics and the history of the experience of the relation-ship between the
subject and truth. What fascinated Foucault about the ”care of the self” he discovered in Greek
and Roman ethics was the ”spiritual” relationship that existed between the subject and
truth. In order to gain access to the truth, that is, in order to acquire the ”right” to the truth,
individuals had to take care of themselves by engaging in certain self-transformative
practices or ascetic exercises. Here we find critical and resistant forms of subjectivation
where, rather than objectifying them-selves within a given discourse of
power/knowledge, individuals engaged in prac-tices of freedom that allowed them to
engage in ethical parrhesia or speak truth to power. In modernity, however, following what Foucault identified
as ”the Cartesian moment” the principle ”take care of yourself” has been replaced by the imperative to “know yourself” [THS, 1 - 24]. In
contemporary life that which gives an individual access to the truth is knowledge and knowledge alone, including knowledge of one’s self. In this
the self is not something produced through the work individuals perform on themselves,
context knowledge of
is something given through dis-ciplines such as biology, medicine, and the social
rather it
sciences. These modern forms of knowledge, of course, become crucial to the emerging
biopolitical forms of govern-mentality. Whereas individuals were once urged to take care of themselves by using self-
reflexive ethical techniques to give form to their freedom, modern biopolitics ensures that individuals are already taken care of in terms of
biological and econom-ic forms of knowledge and practices. As Edward F. McGushin puts it in his book Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the
Philosophical Life, Power functions by investing, defining, and caring for the body understood as a bioeconomic entity. The operation of biopower
is to define the freedom and truth of the individual in economic and biological terms. Reason is given the task of comprehending the body in
these terms and setting the conditions within which it can be free. ...The formation of the disciplines marks the moment where askesis itself was
absorbed within biopolitics.
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Alt Solvency
The alt alone is key—we must question the state as specific
intellectuals while neither endorsing nor completely rejecting
notions of power
Trent Hamann, 2009 (St. John’s University, Foucault Studes no 6, Neoliberalism,
Governmentality, and Ethics, http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-
studies/article/view/2471/2469)
Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that would
subsume particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern ”atti-tude” that can be traced
historically as the constant companion of pastoral power and governmentality. As Judith Butler points out in
her article “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”,39 critique is an attitude, distinct from
judgment, pre-cisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules
and ra-tionalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular form of gover-
nance. From its earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has al-ways relied
upon certain relations to truth: truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz-ing knowledge of individuals,
and truth as a reflective technique comprising general rules, particular knowledge,
precepts, methods of examination, confessions, inter-views, etc. And while critique has at times
played a role within the art of government itself, as we’ve seen in the case of both liberalism and
neoliberalism, it has also made possible what Foucault calls “the art of not being governed, or better,
the art of not being governed like that and at that cost” (WC, 45). Critique is neither a
form of ab-stract theoretical judgment nor a matter of outright rejection or condemnation
of specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical and agonistic engagement, re-engagement,
or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that have led one to become a
certain kind of subject. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault suggests that this modern
attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a way of acting and behaving
that at one and the same time marks a relation of be-longing and presents itself as a
task. Its task amounts to a “historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves
and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying” (WE,
125). But how can we distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls to
”do your own thing” or ”be all you can be” that stream forth in every direction from political campaigns to
commercial advertising? How is it, to return to the last of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault
does not simply lend technical sup-port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can
distinguish criti-cal acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called ”the Cali-fornian
cult of the self” (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed to assist in discovering one’s
”true” or ”authentic” self, or the merely ”cosmetic” forms of rebellion served up for daily consumption and
enjoyment. On the other hand we might also be careful not to dismiss forms of self-fashioning as ”merely”
aesthetic. As Timothy O’Leary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of Ethics, Foucault’s notion of an
aesthetics of existence countered the modern conception of art as a singular realm that is necessarily
autonomous from the social, political, and ethical realms, at least as it pertained to his question of why it is
that a lamp or a house can be a work of art, but not a life. O’Leary writes: Foucault is less interested in the
critical power of art, than in the ‘artistic’ or ‘plas-tic’ power of critique. For Foucault, not only do no special
advantages accrue from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but this autonomy unnecessarily restricts our
possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault aware of the specif-ic nature of aesthetics after
Kant, he is obviously hostile to it. What O’Leary rightly identifies here is Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics
of exis-tence that specifically stands in a critical but immanent relation to the ways in which our individuality
is given to us in advance through ordered practices and forms of knowledge that determine the truth about
us. The issue is not a matter of how we might distinguish “authentic” forms of
resistance (whatever that might mean) from “merely” aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of
investigating whether or not the practices we engage in either reinforce or resist the
manner in which our freedom—how we think, act, and speak—has been governed in ways
that are limiting and into-lerable. In short, critical resistance offers possibilities for an
Rekha Page 54 of 69
experience of de-subjectification. Specifically in relation to neoliberal forms of governmentality, this
would involve resisting, avoiding, countering or opposing not only the ways in which
we’ve been encouraged to be little more than self-interested subjects of ra-tional
choice (to the exclusion of other ways of being and often at the expense of those “irresponsible” others
who have “chosen” not to amass adequate amounts of human capital), but also the ways in which
our social environments, institutions, communities, work places, and forms of political
engagement have been reshaped in order to foster the production of Homo
economicus. Endless examples of this kind of work can be found in many locations, from the international
anti-globalization movement to local community organizing
AT: Framework
1. Our interpretation for the round is that the negative gets one
kritik—solves all of their abuse claims
2. Kritiks key to real world education and engagement—critical

theory literature is an important method by which people can learn
to question the assumptions behind policies
3. The judge should evaluate our discussion of power before the

round—it is a crucial prerequisite to passing policies
Keith Krause, 1996 (Graduate Institute of International Studies at University of Geneva.

“Critical Theory and Security Studies” YCISS Occasional Paper Number 33 February 1996
http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP33-Krause.pdf)
These claims have deep philosophic roots, and different scholars would "sign on" to them claims in different
degrees, but they pose a sharp contrast to neorealist or neoliberal scholarship in International Relations.14
One convenient way to highlight this contrast is Roxanne Doty's distinction between "how"
and "why" questions. The latter are concerned "with explaining why particular
decisions resulting in specific courses of action were made," the former with "how the
subjects, objects, and interpretive dispositions were socially constructed such that
certain practices were made possible."15 Most importantly, "how" questions are logically
prior to "why" questions: before particular courses of action can be selected, the range
of possible or plausible options has to be constructed, and scholars have to understand
the way in which certain options (such as "maintaining reputation," or "gaining prestige") acquire
meaning or value. In security studies (as I will discuss below), this involves constructing the nature
(and source) of threats, the "object" being secured, and the possibilities for reinforcing,
ameliorating or even overcoming "security dilemmas." Traditional approaches take all of these
issues as givens.
Rekha Page 55 of 69
AT: Framework
Performative resistance key to solivng—failure to reconceptualize

politics furthers the illusion of democratic control and re-entrenches
disciplinary power
Jessica J. Kulynych, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University,
Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity, 30:2, p. 315)
The notion of performativity as both identity- or world-creating and as demonstration, is crucial for
understanding contemporary political action. Performative resistance does not eliminate power
and it is not effected in the name of some subjugated agency, but rather its purpose is disruption and
re-creation. It is a reoccurring disruption that ensures an endless reconstitution of
power. Disciplinary technologies effect the internalization of norms--a removal from view of
the mechanisms that create us as subjects, making our identities self-evident. Resistance brings those
norms back into an arena of contestation. By its very existence resistance ensures resistibility,
which is the very thing internalized norms are designed to suppress. In other words, resistance is not
undertaken as a protest against the subjugation of a reified ideal subject, but rather resistance, as the
action of thoroughly constructed subjects, reveals the contingency of both subjectivity and
subjection. While Chaloupka suggests that the role of the protestor is "tellingly different" from that of the
citizen, I disagree. Often only the act of resistance provides any meaningful sense of
"citizenship" in this privatized contemporary world. As Dana Villa points out, resistance "can be
seen as a successor concept to Arendt's notion of political action: where the space for action is usurped,
where action in the strict sense is no longer possible, resistance becomes the primary vehicle of
spontaneity and agonistic subjectivity."(70)
Performative resistance recognizes disciplinary power, enables action in the face of
that power, enables innovation in deliberation, and thus allows us to see the world of
political action differently. Consequently, it is possible, and more meaningful, to
conceptualize contemporary participation as a performative rather than a
representative action. The failure to reconceptualize political participation as resistance
Rekha Page 56 of 69
furthers an illusion of democratic control that obscures the techniques of disciplinary
power and their role in global strategies of domination, fundamentally missing the real,
although much more humble opportunities for citizens to "take part" in their own
"governance." Accepting the idea of participation as resistance has two broad implications
that fundamentally transform the participation debate. First, it widens the parameters
of participation to include a host of new actors, activities, and locations for political action.
A performative concept redirects our attention away from the normal apparatus of
government and economy, and therefore allows us to see a much broader range of political
actions. Second, it requires that we look anew at traditional participatory activities and
evaluate their performative potential.
AT: Framework
Only specific problematization within round can create discursive
forms of resistance against the state
Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, 2k (“Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex
Emergency,” Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, 25:1, Ebsco Host)
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the
question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional
accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of population is
further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These
typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy,
health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now,
where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there
is an operation of power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the
production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a
certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain
mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.[34]
More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there
is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed
and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy
Rekha Page 57 of 69
domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these
epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require
the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of
policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that
grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here,
too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is
prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they
seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the
ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human
conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of
becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for
science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while
policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations.
Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological
investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of
challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into
their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological
assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real
problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such
"paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are
compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both
more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they
want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a
continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which
they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[35]
Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will
ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological
assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and
problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and
changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global
governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially
reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear
problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems
simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear
economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically
inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and
globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized
by it.
In consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and
epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local
conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten
to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.[36] It is here that the "emergence"
characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized
that
there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The
"subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well, since the concept population
does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as
well as Foucauldian "biopower" ways.
AT: Framework
Their adherence to a bureaucratic structure of argument is a means
of being disciplined and manipulated by the state
Jessica J. Kulynych, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University,
Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity, 30:2, p. 315)
While separately both Habermas and Foucault challenge the traditional understanding of participation, their
combined insights further and irrevocably extend that challenge. Theoretical focus on the distinctions
Rekha Page 58 of 69
between Habermas and Foucault has all too often obscured important parallels between these two theorists.
Specifically, the Habermas-Foucault debate has underemphasized the extent to which Habermas also
describes a disciplinary society. In his descriptions of bureaucracy, technocracy, and system colonization,
Habermas is also describing a world where power is productive and dispersed and where political action is
constrained and normalized. Habermas, like Foucault, describes a type of power that cannot be adequately
characterized in terms of the intentions of those who possess it. Colonization is not the result of
conscious intention, but is rather the unintended consequence of a multitude of small
adjustments. The gender and racial subtexts infusing the system are not the results of
conscious intention, but rather of implicit gender and racial norms and expectations
infecting the economy and the state. Bureaucratic power is not a power that is
possessed by any individual or agency, but exists in the exercise of decisionmaking. As
Iris Young points out, we must "analyze the exercise of power [in contemporary societies] as the
effect of often liberal and humane practices of education, bureaucratic administration,
production and distribution of consumer goods, medicine and so on."(7) The very practices that
Habermas chronicles are exemplary of a power that has no definitive subject. As Young explains, "the
conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression, but those
people are simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do not understand themselves as agents of
oppression."(8)
Colonization and bureaucratization also fit the pattern of a power that is not primarily
repressive but productive. Disciplinary technologies are, as Sawicki describes,
not.... repressive mechanisms ... [that] operate primarily through violence ... or seizure ... but rather [they
operate] by producing new objects and subjects of knowledge, by inciting and
channeling desires, generating and focusing individual and group energies, and
establishing bodily norms and techniques for observing, monitoring and controlling
bodily movements, processes, and capacities.(9)
The very practices of administration, distribution, and decisionmaking on which Habermas focuses his
attention can and must be analyzed as productive disciplinary practices. Although these practices
can clearly be repressive, their most insidious effects are productive. Rather than simply
holding people back, bureaucratization breaks up, categorizes, and systemizes projects
and people. It creates new categories of knowledge and expertise. Bureaucratization
and colonization also create new subjects as the objects of bureaucratic expertise. The
social welfare client and the consumer citizen are the creation of bureaucratic power, not
merely its target. The extension of lifeworld gender norms into the system creates the possibility for
sexual harassment, job segregation, parental leave, and consensual corporate decisionmaking. Created as a
part of these subjectivities are new gestures and norms of bodily behavior, such as the embarrassed
shuffling of food stamps at the grocery checkout and the demeaning sexual reference at the office copier.
Bodily movements are monitored and regularized by means of political opinion polls, welfare lists, sexual
harassment protocols, flex-time work schedules, and so forth. Modern disciplinary power, as described
by Foucault and implied by Habermas, does not merely prevent us from developing, but
creates us differently as the effect of its functioning. These disciplinary techniques not
only control us, but also enable us to be more efficient and more productive, and often
more powerful.
Focusing on the disciplinary elements of the Habermasian critique opens the door for exploring the
postmodern character of Habermasian politics. Because Habermas does describe a disciplinary world, his
prescription for contemporary democracy (discursive politics) ought to be sensitive to, and appropriate for, a
disciplinary world. Foucault's sensitivity to the workings of disciplinary power is central to the articulation of
a plausible, postmodern version of discursive politics. In the following discussion I will argue for a
performative redefinition of participation that will reinvigorate the micro-politics demanded
by Foucault, as well as provide a more nuanced version of the discursive politics demanded by
Habermas.
Rekha Page 59 of 69
AT- Framework: “Truth”

Their method of defining human agency with an all inclusive
statement creates exclusion and reinforces biopolitical control
Roland Bleiker, 2003 (Professor of International Relations Harvard and Cambridge,

Discourse and Human Agency, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. p. 37-38)
A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition,

a one sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human
agency. There is no essence to human agency, no core that can be brought down to a
lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic
formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human
agency to the detriment of all others. The dangers of such a totalizing position have
been well rehearsed. Foucault (1982, 209), for instance, believes that a theory of power is
unable to provide the basis for analytical work, for it assumes a prior objectification of
the very power dynamics the theory is trying to assess. Bourdieu (1998, 25) speaks of the
‘imperialism of the universal’ and List (1993, 11) warns us of an approach that ‘subsumes, or,
rather, pretends to be able to subsume everything into one concept, one theory, one
position.’ Such a master discourse, she claims, inevitably oppresses everything that does
not fit into its particular view of the world.
Rekha Page 60 of 69
AT: Ind Axn No Solve
Microlevel resistance within the debate round is key

Angela King, 2004 (Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, Journal of
International Women’s Studies, “The Prisoner of Gender: Foucault and the Disciplining of the
Female Body”)
However, just as Foucault did in his later work, I would like to stress that resistance is possible. I'm not
suggesting that all women clamber to conform to the ideals of femininity. There have always been, and
always will be, those who gleefully subvert or ignore the 'rules' or who enjoy the pleasures of fashion and
beauty without feeling them to be an obligation or a necessity. As Wilson says, we can "acknowledge that
dress is a powerful weapon of control and dominance, while widening our view to encompass an
understanding of its simultaneously subversive qualities" (Elizabeth Wilson quoted in MacDonald op. cit.,
p.212). Foucault claimed that resistance exists wherever there is normalisation and
domination. Power is never total, uniform or smooth but shifting and unstable; if it is
exerted on 'micro levels' it can be contested on micro levels; there is "no single locus
of great Refusal" but a "plurality of resistances" (Foucault 1998, p.95-6).
Rekha Page 61 of 69
AT: No Alt
Outlining a specific discourse of resistance is a totalitarian means of

exercising power: we must outline a broad alternative means of
resistance to power
Pickett, 2005 (Associate professor at Chaldron University, “On the Use and Abuse of Foucault For Politics”, pp.
47)
Any reasonable interpretation of Foucaultian resistance will necessarily have a large amount of
indeterminacy. While it is non-hierarchical and concerned with memory and the body
and the negation of power while still potentially affirmative of something else, these
various elements of resistance are compatible with a range of practical political engagements, such as
broadly liberal or even anarchist positions. This is because Foucault cannot lay down how or why
one should struggle. Such a globalistic theory would become one more agent of power;
totalizing a theory is itself "totalitarian."66 Still, it is possible to draw a broad political
orientation out of Foucault's celebration of struggle.67 If resistance is worthwhile, as
Foucault clearly believes it is, then the conditions which make struggle possible should be
fostered. This is why Foucault believes there is a daily "ethico-political" choice to be made.68
We need to decide what constitutes the greatest danger and struggle against it.
From this vantage point it is possible to see why the charge of pessimism or hopelessness that is frequently
brought against Foucault is misguided. He is accused of presenting power as something so
ubiquitous and overwhelming that all resistance becomes pointless. On the contrary, the
fact that everything is dangerous means that there are multiple opportunities for
resistance. And far from being pointless, Foucault maintains that engagement presents several
possibilities. Resistance gives us the possibility of changing the practices he labels
'intolerables.' Once the asylum inmate, factory worker, or "sexual deviant" is enabled
to speak, and his memory of struggles and subjugated knowledge is allowed its
insurrection, those who are subjected to power can force change.
Rekha Page 62 of 69
AT: Perm Do Both
1. The permutation is another link- their recognition of their

complicity with biopower only as a reaction to our criticism is a tool
to co-opt us- this is the exact way the state leverages subtly
disciplinary power
2. They are severing out of the biopolitics in the 1AC—the

alternative specifically rejects this. Severance is a voter-- It’s
infinitely regressive and unpredictable, the aff can sever out of a
different portion of their plan each speech.
3. Permutation fails—only by forming true resistance against the

ideology can we resist the state’s control. The aff’s attempt to
include a reform misses the point.
Catherine E. Foote and Arther Frank, 1999 (Sociologist at University of Calgary,
Professor of Sociology at University of Calgary, Columbia University Press New York ,
Reading Foucault for Social Work, “Foucault and Therapy, p. 181)
If resistance were solely a theoretical project, the search for a strategy outside truth
games might be impossible, but the Foucauldian point, reasserted throughout his writing, is
that his work-and our analysis hereseeks not to produce a theory but to show possibilities
of practice. "The problem, you see, is one for the subject who acts-the subject of action
through which the real is transformed" (Foucault 1991:84).Speaking of penal reform, Foucault
leaves no doubt that any transformation that occurs "won't be because a plan of
reform has found its way into the heads of the social workers" (82-85). Instead,
transformation can come only from those who "have come into collision with each
other and with themselves, run into dead-ends, problems and impossibilities, been
through conflicts and confrontations." Transformation will occur only when "critique has
been played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas" (84-85). The
point is not to achieve any theoretical resolution in academic essays such as this one, but
discussions such as this can show directions of practice where resistance can be
"played out in the real."
Rekha Page 63 of 69
AT: Perm
The perm fails—biopolitics is constantly shifting and manifesting
itself in different ways; it must be explicitly rejected
Michael Dillon and Luis Guerrero, 2008 (ph.D in International Studies and Head of
Department of Security and War at Lancaster University, Deputy Postgraduate Research
Director, Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, January, “Biopolitics of Security in
the 21st Century, Review of International Studies”, p.4-6)
the biopolitics of biopower is necessarily also

This paper does precisely that. It explains how
allied with freedom and what kind of ‘freedom’ is understood to be at work in it. In
explaining precisely what Foucault understands, in addition, by ‘security’, and how this understanding of
security differs from traditional geopolitical accounts of security derived from ontologies and anthropologies
of political subjectivity, the paper also clarifies why Foucault concludes that biopolitics simply is a “dispositif
de sécurité”. Strictly speaking, therefore, there is no biopolitics which is not simultaneously also a security
apparatus. There is no biopolitics of this, or a biopolitics of that. When one says biopolitics one says security;
albeit in a certain way. Biopolitics arises at the beginning of the modern age but it does not spring fully
formed at its beginning. It would run entirely counter to Foucault’s approach to the analytic of power
relations to pretend otherwise. While acknowledging a certain kind of precursor in the pastoral power of the
Church, with which it appears superficially similar but from which it diverges in its specificities, what
Foucault begins to draw-out is the logic of formation which takes hold when power takes species life as its
referent object, and the securing of species life becomes the vocation of a novel and emerging set of
discursive formations of power/knowledge. This biopolitical logic of formation also expresses a
new and emergent experience of the real. A logic of formation is therefore historical, local
and particular. It also installs an ontopolitics as it experiments with novel ensembles or technologies of
social practice. However generalised it may become, biopolitics is not itself a universal
phenomenon. It is the actualisation instead of a specific historical and, we would
argue, evolving economy of power relations. Such ensembles of practices do not
actualise themselves in perfect realisation of their logic. First, because their logic is
always a contested epistemic object for them. Second, because things always change in
unintended ways. Biopolitical security practices do not articulate a design in nature. They
are contingent achievements reflecting the partial realisation of designs which seek to
Rekha Page 64 of 69
enact ‘natures’. In the process, there are slippages and breakages, shifts and revisions, for
which the original drivers and concerns of biopolitics no longer account. There is nothing
unusual in this. It would be unusual if it did not happen. Mutation of the biopolitical order of power
relations has continued tomerely entailed a change at the level of practice. Any
change in practice is simultaneously also accompanied by a change in the experience
of the real. In general terms the shift in the nature of the real associated with biopolitics, now, is captured
by the term ‘emergence’.
Complete refusal to engage in sovereign power is key to breaking

out from the restraints of disciplinary power
Jenny Edkins, 2004 (International Politics Professor at the University of Wales
Aberystwyth, “Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics”, p. 11-12, Google Books,)
One potential form of resistance to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any
lines between zoe and bios, inside and outside, human and inhuman. As we have shown,
sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more
appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of
administration though relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere
bare or naked life. As Michael Dillon puts it, "Sovereign power [is] a form of rule gone global [that] has
come to develop and deploy modes of destruction whose dissemination it finds increasingly impossible to
control because these have become integral to its propagation and survival."In asking far a refusal to
draw lines as a possibility of resistance, then, we are not asking for the elimination of
power relations and, consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility
of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that
speaks: quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only
through a refusal to draw any lines at all (and, indeed, nothing less will do) that
sovereign power (as a form of violence) can be contested and a properly political
power relation can be reinstated.We could call this escaping the logic of sovereign
power. Our overall argument is that we can escape sovereign power and reinstate a
form of power relation by contesting its assumption of the right to draw lines, that is,
by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other resistance always inevitably remains within
this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation), we need not
only contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also resist the call to draw
any lines of the sort sovereign power demands.
AT: We’re A Good Version

1. This is another link – the aff’s characterization of governmentality
as beneficial to the poor is an attempt to extend disciplinary power
2. Consent to the state is what allows the worst forms of violence

John Ransom, 1997 (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Dickinson College,
“Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity”, p. 15)
At the beginning of this process, remember the individual gave consent. But when looking back on
his years of training, the monk hardly recognizes the young man who agreed to enter the monastery. He is simply
not the same person that he was then. He may have given his consent to the rigorous training of the monastery,
but in a very real sense the relevant individual was not present when that consent was given. It is only after
one is “disciplined” in a certain way- only after one’s subjectivity has been shaped and
certain powers developed, while others are pushed to the side, that individuals can
meaningfully give consent to what the structures of power will do to them.
Rekha Page 65 of 69
AT: Can’t Change Power

Power is fluid- it can always be challenged
Lawrence Kritzman, 1988 (Lecturer on Philosophy and Professor of Comparative
Literature at Dartmouth College, “Foucault- Politics, Philosophy, Culture Interviews and
Other Writings”)
Power is not a substance. Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved
into. Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals. Such relations are specific, that is, they
have nothing to do with exchange, production, communication, even though they combine with them. The
characteristics feature of power is that some men can more or less entirely determine
other men’s conduct- but never exhaustively or coercively. A man who is chained up
and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him. Not power. But if he can be
induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue,
preferring death, then he has been caused to behave a certain way. His freedom has
been subjected to power. He has been submitted to government. If an individual can
remain free, however little his freedom may be, power can subject him to government.
There is no power without potential refusal or revolt.-
Rekha Page 66 of 69
AT: Biopower Inevitable

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

system
Adrienne Chambon, 1999 (Director of Ph. D program at University of Toronto, Columbia
University Press New York , “Reading Foucault for Social Work”, “Foucault’s Approach,” p.
67-8)
Rekha Page 67 of 69
Foucault spoke to the transformative potential of his work.
More fundamentally,
Transformative work shows that the present is not natural and need not be taken as
inevitable or absolute. Change can come from the realization of the precarious nature
of established ways and by inviting the development of alternatives. This holds true for the
client and for the worker and is of particular relevance to the academic social worker, researcher, and
educator. We come close here to the definition of the role of the intellectual, as well as its limits: "The
work of the intellectual ... is fruitful in a certain way to describe that-which-is by
making it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is" (Foucault
1983:206). Foucault concluded: These [forms of rationality] reside on a base of human
practice and human history; and that since these things have been made, they can be
unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.... Any description must always be made in
accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space
of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation. (206) Because power is productive, it is up to
us to produce new forms, after seeing through that which is all too familiar, and to
realize that those new forms will generate new possibilities as well as new constraints
Rekha Page 68 of 69
AT: Biopower Good
1. Our entire 1NC is a turn to this argument—they’ve conceded that

biopower gives the state total control over life, which also gives it
the right to kill all individuals
2. This is yet another link—the state wants people to believe that it

is effective and efficient in a pragmatic sense—this justifies the
surveillance and control of individuals
Rekha Page 69 of 69
AT: Dickenson/Democracy Solves
1. New link for us—Democracies’ method of governmentality as a

way to better the lives of their citizens is a means of normalization
and disciplinary power
2. Liberalism fails to free itself from biopolitics

Mitchell Dean, 2001 (Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, “Demonic Societies:
Liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty.” Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State,
ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 50-51)
Finally,although liberalism may try to make safe the biopolitical imperative of the
optimization of life, it has shown itself permanently incapable of arresting—from eugenics
to contemporary genetics---the emergence of rationalities that make the optimization of the
life of some dependent on the disallowing of the life of others. I can only suggest some
general reasons for this. Liberalism is fundamentally concerned to govern through what it
conceives as processes that are external to the sphere of government limited by the
respect for rights and liberties of individual subjects. Liberal rule thus fosters forms of
knowledge of vital processes and seeks to govern through their application. Moreover, to
the extent that liberalism depends on the formation of responsible and autonomous
subjects through biopolitics and discipline, it fosters the type of governmental
practices that are the ground of such rationalities. Further, and perhaps more simply, we might
consider the possibility that sovereignty and biopolitics are so heterogeneous to one another
that the derivation of political norms from the democratization of the former cannot
act as a prophylactic for the possible outcomes of the latter. We might also consider the
alternative to this thesis, that biopolitics captures and expands the division between political
life and mere existence, already found within sovereignty. In either case, the framework of
right and law can act as a resource for forces engaged in contestation of the effects of biopower; it
cannot provide a guarantee as the efficacy of such struggle and may even be the means of
the consolidation of those effects.

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Westwood Debate 2009-2010 Foucault

2NC Link Wall

We’ll isolate four links:

2. Surveillance—Welfare programs let the state monitor and gather

3. Ideal Body—Social services are rooted in the normalization of

4. Masking—The plan is a seemingly charitable deed that serves as a

2NC Helen Xtn

2NC Dean Xtn

2NC Alt Xtn

Our alternative is the only way to come to grips with disciplinary

We can never be cognizant of our freedom without being

Link- Social Services

Social programs are biopolitical manifestations of the state that

Link- Social Services

The state’s method of governmentality by providing social services

Welfarism is a form of authoritative control meant to curb behavior

Link- Welfare Discourse

The discursive practices of welfare create an exclusionary system

The affirmative’s endorsement of the medical system is an

Link- Health Education

Health education allows medical professionals to discipline

Those who are uneducated are seen as lacking something

The school system is a masked power structure that normalizes

Constant observation is made possible

Schools are a means of imposing state based exclusion based on

Link- No Child Left Behind

Link- Native Americans

Including abortion in rights discourse is a means of normalization of

Link- Drug Rehab

methadone maintenance, the largest

Link- Community Care

Link- Apoc Rhetoric

Impact- Root Cause of War

Racism is a core mechanism of biopower—these artificially imposed

“For a long time ,” Foucault notes, “one

Biopower allows for slaughter of whole populations which authorizes a holocaust.

Creation of a political subject justifies the destruction of freedom

2. Kritiks key to real world education and engagement—critical

3. The judge should evaluate our discussion of power before the

Keith Krause, 1996 (Graduate Institute of International Studies at University of Geneva.

Performative resistance key to solivng—failure to reconceptualize

AT- Framework: “Truth”

Roland Bleiker, 2003 (Professor of International Relations Harvard and Cambridge,

A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition,

AT: Ind Axn No Solve

Microlevel resistance within the debate round is key

Outlining a specific discourse of resistance is a totalitarian means of

AT: Perm Do Both

1. The permutation is another link- their recognition of their

2. They are severing out of the biopolitics in the 1AC—the

3. Permutation fails—only by forming true resistance against the

the biopolitics of biopower is necessarily also

Complete refusal to engage in sovereign power is key to breaking

AT: We’re A Good Version

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

AT: Can’t Change Power

AT: Biopower Inevitable

2. Biopolitics are not inevitable—the intellectual must challenge the

AT: Biopower Good

1. Our entire 1NC is a turn to this argument—they’ve conceded that

2. This is yet another link—the state wants people to believe that it

AT: Dickenson/Democracy Solves

1. New link for us—Democracies’ method of governmentality as a