Biopower Wave II

Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Index -
Link to State............................................................................................................................. 2
Link to Education, Medicine, Criminology, Psychiatry.........................................................................7
Link to Education....................................................................................................................... 8
Link to Poverty........................................................................................................................ 12
Link to Morals......................................................................................................................... 13
Link to Human Rights............................................................................................................... 16
Link to National Identity............................................................................................................ 18
Link to Medicaid...................................................................................................................... 20
Link to Western Medical Model................................................................................................... 25
Link to Health......................................................................................................................... 27
Link to Disease........................................................................................................................ 28
Link to Obesity........................................................................................................................ 29
Link to Bioterror...................................................................................................................... 36
Link to War/Mil Readiness......................................................................................................... 37
Link to Capitalism.................................................................................................................... 38
Link to Homophobia................................................................................................................. 40
Link to Justice......................................................................................................................... 41
Link to Racism........................................................................................................................ 44
Link to Rights......................................................................................................................... 46
Link to Federalism................................................................................................................... 48
Link to Economy..................................................................................................................... 49
Link to Population Management................................................................................................... 51
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to State
Using the state to govern the population simply works to use biopower coercively and threatens to
spread it to all aspects of life
Brian C.J. Singer and Lorna Weir 2006
Politics and Sovereign Power: Considerations on Foucault. YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, CANADA
The formulation of governmentality as a veridical, authoritative discourse for the administration of

population corrected Foucaults previous concept of power as any relation influencing human conduct,
provided that it acts on those who are free in the sense of not being physically constrained to comply
(1997d: 340; 1994f: 236). At its limit this latter, abstract conceptualization of power
coincided with all social practices other than those directly coerced. In the brief
moment of the analytics of power, power had threatened to spread uncontrollably across all domains,
and across all relations, affecting everything we say, and everything we do. The notion of governmentality saved
the distinction between rare discourse and common culture, which had constituted the problem space of Foucauldian analysis (1972:
220; 1971: 1012; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983: 4781; Weir, 1998: 2513). We note here tangentially that the integration of
techniques of the self, and the associated notion of self-governance, into the study of governmentality has in practice led the literature
on governance to investigate selfreflexivity in common culture. Thus the concept of governance, particularly when
defined as the conduct of conduct, has, like the earlier concept of power, begun to spread
uncontrollably, popping up whenever we begin, reflexively, to concern ourselves with our thoughts and
actions.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to State
Any use of the state results in the state increasing it biopolitical control, they are inseparable.
Marianne Constable 1991
Foucault & Walzer: Sovereignty, Strategy & the State. Marianne Constable JD, PhD (Jurisprudence and Social Policy), Berkeley, Professor
"Governmentality" describes the emergence of the modern (regulatory or bio-power) concerns of security,
population, and government counterposed against earlier concerns with sovereignty and obedience . While
it ostensibly involves an examination of texts about the state, it also provides a history of the state itself. Thus Foucault's point about the interconnection
of discourse and practice, of knowledge and power, arises again: discussion of state sovereignty cannot be radically
separated from the power attributed to, and exercised by, the state. Government first appeared as a problem in the
sixteenth century in works on the art of government. Earlier, the Prince had been perceived as external to the principality, singular, unique, and
transcendent of it. This was the Prince to whom Machiavelli presented advice on how to strengthen and protect the link binding him to his territory and his
sub-jects. With government, the relation between what had been the Prince and the principality became a relation between governor and governed, a
relation replicated between the head of the family and the household, the superior and the convent, the teacher or tutor and the child or pupil. These forms of
government shared a concern for proper management, for "an economy" of individuals, goods, and wealth.3
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to State
Politics and public policy merely re-retrenches current biopolitical control. Regulative principles done
by the affirmative cannot solve the problems they claim as long as they still used the same democratic
sovereign that coercively controls us in the first place.
The transition from "an art of government to a political science, from a regime dominated by structures
of sovereignty to one ruled by techniques of government"4"corresponds to the development of the
regulatory mode of power Foucault later calls bio-power, although the earlier modes of power-the law of the
sovereign and the discipline of the administrative state do not disappear. Instead, a "sovereignty-discipline-government" triangle
forms, "which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism apparatuses of security." 46The emergence
of legally mandated protections for the economy (the FDIC, social security)and the population( drug-testing for
jobs, airport security checkpoints, blood-alcohol tests for drunk-driving), and the gradual in-corporation into law of
previously unthought of "rights" (to life, to die, to abortion, to euthanasia, for animals) exemplify the new
constellation of power. The question for jurists is no longer the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century problem of deriving an art
of government from a theory of sovereignty. Rather, political theorists seek a foundation in law for an already
existing and spreading government.47 Foucault's point is that the modern state is not the most useful focus,
target, or model of power or of resistance today. To conceive of the modern state as a unified entity loses sight of the
fact that today's governmental society and today's state, no less than the sovereign-state of political theorists, is not a unified whole.
Perhaps, Foucault suggests, the State is no more than a composite reality and a mythical abstraction whose importance is a lot more
limited than many of us think. Maybe what is really important for our modern times ... is not so much the State-domination of
society, but the "governmentalisation" of the State.48 Foucault's position implies a vast misunderstanding by modern political
theorists of both the possibility and the significance of the task they have set for themselves. According to Foucault, the
regulative principles reiterated by the men and women who, Walzer believes, can "tell us when state power is
corrupted or systematically misused, who cry out that something is rotten," cannot set things right. Indeed, while Walzer
criticizes Foucault for ignoring "elections, par-ties, and assemblies," as well as "the demos,"4' which Walzer believes help protect us
from the tyrannical exercise of power, Foucault argues that the "democratization of sovereignty" is "fundamentally
determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion. '"0T hat is, the lawfulness of law, the
legitimacy of the state, the authority of state apparatus, all rest on the creation and production of certain
disciplines and knowledges of ourselves as "subjects" of law and "objects" of knowledge, not least of
which is political theory. Such disciplines and knowledge come not from the state, but from the diverse practices and
discourses which make up our society. The state may or may not regulate factory-workers, prisoners, patients, schoolchildren, drug
addicts, travelers, and ballplayers, as well as their managers, wardens, doctors, teachers, counselors, drivers, and umpires, directly.
Whether the state does so or not though, these objects of knowledge and subjects of power are regulated and constituted by some
discipline-be it management science, criminology, medicine and psychiatry, education, recreational science, or even public
policy-that ascertains the appropriateness of state intervention.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to State
The use of the state or enactment of law enters into the zone of indistinction
and biopolitics dictating who is including into the realm of human life and who
the political body otherizes
Athanasiou 2003
athena Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity, Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Muse
Organic life, or Heideggers physis, is thrown back to the nomos of its theological foundations. Only we are now in
the terrain (emplacement) of the eminently political relationship between life and sovereign
power, the indistinguishability of life from Law (as well as of physis from nomos); we are neither in
the realm of religion nor in that of juridical order, but rather in that zone of indistinction
that is biopolitics in its form as the state of exception (Agamben, Homo Sacer). The
actualization of bare life in the figure of the sacred living figure emerges from the order of
biopolitical sovereignty. As Agamben has shown, the Nazi concentration camp is the zone of
exclusion and exception that not only resides in the heart of modern sovereignty but also
organizes its Law. There is, then, a relation of exclusionary inclusion between the sovereign power and bare
life: bare life is excluded at the moment of juridical inclusion, that is, at the moment of institution of the body
politic, and is included in the state of exception. Centered on exercising control over life, death, and the
human body, this manifestation of power dictates who may enter the realm of recognized
human life and who must not; it determines from whom the body politic ought to protect
itself; it determines and forcibly materializes the location of the border of humanity. The
discourse of the sacredness of life,12 in both its ontotheological and juridical-political
connotations, is all too commonly deployed as an alibi for the violence of modern biopolitics,
as a strategy of containment by which the eminently political character of biopower is
neutralized. It is significant from this perspective that the Nazi extermination of Jews,
homosexuals, and Roma has been articulated through the sacrificial register of the
Holocaust. But no sacrificial figure of rite, consecration, or divinization can redeem the political death to which
bare life is exposed.13 As Agamben puts it:
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to State
By the use of laws and poltico gives way to being subjected by the biopolitical
machine, this state of exception is a hidden goal of any political space
Athanasiou 2003
athena Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity, Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies, Muse
In tracing the affinity of Heideggerian ontology with Nazism, Agamben suggests that Heideggers involvement with National Socialism be read
through the prism of his understanding of life as an actual determination and essential experience and task (Aufgabe) of facticity. Following
Levinas (Reflections), he traces the analogies between this ontology of lifes indistinguishability from its actual situation and the philosophy of
Hitlerism. Indeed, in Heideggerian ontology, human life is always already politics; life and politics
form an immediate and indissoluble unity (taking politics in a very broad sense: more as a
bodily exposure to a certain materiality of human historicity and sociality than a reflective
engagement in processes of accountable appropriation and disappropriation). Science and
knowledge belong to the life of the polis. For Heidegger, the purest form of thinking is the
highest doing, according to the ancient Greek experience of bios theoretikos, where bios
receives its determination from theoria, the consummate form of human existence
(Question 164). Human essence always already contains immediately the force that
constitutes man as Dasein, as a political and historical Being-there but also Being-open,
emplaced in and enframed by the polis, taking into consideration that the campor the
camps exclusion from the polisis also included in the polis; it is, indeed, a constitutive part of the political sphere. As Agamben
puts it: For both Heidegger and National Socialism, life has no need to assume values external to it in
order to become politics: life is immediately political in its very facticity. Man is not a living being who
must abolish or transcend himself in order to become human man is not a duality of spirit and body, nature and politics,
life and logos, but is instead resolutely situated at the point of their indistinction. (Homo Sacer 153, original emphasis)17 The camp makes its
appearance in Heideggers philosophical text as the hidden paradigm of modern technology, echoing Agambens words: [T]he campas
the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the
state of exception)will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity,
whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize (Homo Sacer 123). The
representational use to which Heiderggers text subjects the production of corpses bespeaks a textual coming to light of the body as incarcerated
and slain propos of modern technology. The textual subjection of disintegrated corporeality takes form in the figure of the soma of the Shoah, the
body that is entirely exhausted in perished bare life, life that is unworthy of being lived. And all this despite the fact that, as Nancy reminds us,
Heidegger considers the body as extraneous to his project (qtd. in Nancy 232). It is through the prism of Heideggers technological production of
corpses that we should then read Nancys disclaimer:
There has never been any body in philosophy (20).18
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Education, Medicine, Criminology, Psychiatry

Any public policy by the government regulating education, medicine, criminology, psychiatry results in
increasing government biopolitical control into all spheres of life (everything link)
The transition from "an art of government to a political science, from a regime dominated by structures
of sovereignty to one ruled by techniques of government""corresponds to the development of the
regulatory mode of power Foucault later calls bio-power, although the earlier modes of power-the law of the
sovereign and the discipline of the administrative state do not disappear. Instead, a "sovereignty-discipline-government" triangle
forms, "which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism apparatuses of security. The emergence of
legally mandated protections for the economy (the FDIC, social security)and the population( drug-testing for jobs,
airport security checkpoints, blood-alcohol tests for drunk-driving), and the gradual in-corporation into law of
previously unthought of "rights" (to life, to die, to abortion, to euthanasia, for animals) exemplify the new
constellation of power. The question for jurists is no longer the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century problem of deriving an art
of government from a theory of sovereignty. Rather, political theorists seek a foundation in law for an already
existing and spreading government.47 Foucault's point is that the modern state is not the most useful focus,
target, or model of power or of resistance today. To conceive of the modern state as a unified entity loses sight of the
fact that today's governmental society and today's state, no less than the sovereign-state of political theorists, is not a unified whole.
Perhaps, Foucault suggests, the State is no more than a composite reality and a mythical abstraction whose importance is a lot more
limited than many of us think. Maybe what is really important for our modern times ... is not so much the State-domination of
society, but the "governmentalisation" of the State.48 Foucault's position implies a vast misunderstanding by modern political
theorists of both the possibility and the significance of the task they have set for themselves. According to Foucault, the
regulative principles reiterated by the men and women who, Walzer believes, can "tell us when state power is
corrupted or systematically misused, who cry out that something is rotten," cannot set things right. Indeed, while Walzer
criticizes Foucault for ignoring "elections, par-ties, and assemblies," as well as "the demos,"4' which Walzer believes help protect us
from the tyrannical exercise of power, Foucault argues that the "democratization of sovereignty" is "fundamentally
determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion. '"0T hat is, the lawfulness of law, the
legitimacy of the state, the authority of state apparatus, all rest on the creation and production of certain
disciplines and knowledges of ourselves as "subjects" of law and "objects" of knowledge, not least of
which is political theory. Such disciplines and knowledge come not from the state, but from the diverse
practices and discourses which make up our society. The state may or may not regulate factory-workers,
prisoners, patients, schoolchildren, drug addicts, travelers, and ballplayers, as well as their managers, wardens, doctors,
teachers, counselors, drivers, and umpires, directly. Whether the state does so or not though, these objects of knowledge and
subjects of power are regulated and constituted by some discipline- be it management science, criminology, medicine
and psychiatry, education, recreational science, or even public policy-that ascertains the appropriateness
of state intervention.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Education
Educational reform simply is the increasing of state disciplinary power.
There are, first, the "procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the
human body." Discipline focused on the body as a machine, and sought the integration of the human
being, as object, into systems of efficient and economic controls. Discipline ensured "the optimization of [the
body's] capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility."29 The
development of universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops, prisons exemplify the growth of
disciplinary power, a power whose diffuse sources and points of contact serve as contrast to the more
direct, centrally-organized power of the sovereign.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Education
Schools are used to cultivate obedience through mediums like the coppertop grading system to achieve maximum
efficiency and increase biopolitical control while preventing school as being recognized as compulsory
Gabbard & Ross 2004
David and Wayne, Defending Public Schools page 10 Professor. Department of Curriculum & Instruction. College of Education. East
Carolina University.
the state compels us to attend school for two primary reasons that help us
schooling conditions children for the future lives as coppertops while
simultaneously cultivating their obedience to the state. It accomplishes this, in part by disguising the disciplinary
functions of schools that treat children as coppertops behind a mask of benevolence. In order to achieve maximum
efficiency, the mechanism and the supporting ideology of disciplinary power had to remain hidden. Therefore, by
providing modern institutions with beneficient images, pastoral powers can be said to function in manner similar to the
From the foregoring analysis, we can discern that
comprehend the traditional role of school. In short,
Matrix-as a dream world, a neural-interactive simulation, and a world pulled over peoples eyes to prevent them from seeing the truth. First,
the state must prevent people from recognizing the truth that schooling is compulsory, which means that the state
claims the right to lay hold of the bodies of children to carry out the disciplinary measures required to maximize
their utility to the market. To blur the connections between school, state, and law, schooling was tied to the value
of education and presented as a human right and an opportunity. Framed as a value and protected as a right,
schooling came to fit into the logic of the market as something that could be acquired. In the vernacular of schooling, we
have learned to say that we want our children to get an education, or to receive an education. Suddenly, something
that had previously been treated as a process became a thing that one could possess. Befitting the markets logic of
acquisitiveness, education devolved into a commodity and the more of it that one consumes, as evidenced by the
number of diplomas and degrees that one possesses, the more ones use-value within the market grows. Human being,
then could be graded like coppertop batteries. Some are AAAs, some AAs, some are Cs and some are Ds. As they increase in their charge through
the consumption of schooling, the coppertops increase their certified use-value in the market.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Education
The market place is created in a way in which only students with degrees can be evaluated with worth, biopolitical
institutions change what was once seen as an opportunity into a necessity
Gabbard & Ross 2004
The market itself played a role in this when employers began requiring educational credentials (diplomas,
degrees, and certificates-testimonials to the degree to which a persons use-value had been developed) as a
precondition of employment. The degree that the market literally became peoples only means for satisfying their wants and needs, these
formal job requirements made compulsory school laws somewhat obsolete. Because the market itself began
requiring participation in the ritual of schooling as a condition of employment, the connection between the
compulsory nature of schooling , the state, and the law became less discernable. As a consequence, school could
become viewed less in terms of being an institiution that the state forced people to attend and more in terms of an
opportunity and, later, a right that the state granted to individuals, enabling them to meet the demands of the
market.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Education
The compulsory education system instills that children are given rights and privileges but these
claims are facades by the state in order to make them the most efficient in the biopolitical sphere
Gabbard & Ross 2004
In addition to conditioning us to blindly accept our status as coppertops, another major feature of the Matrix that
schools assist in the feeding in our brains revolves around our utility to the market as consumers. This feature also
contributes to developing our loyalty and obedience to the state by socializing children to identify themselves, first
and foremost, in nationalistic terms as Americans. Within this identity structure there comes a sense of privilegethe privilege of having been born or naturalized into a society that represents the very best of what any human
civilization could ever possibly have to offer. At the most superficial level of analysis, the formal curriculum of compulsory schooling
frames what is very best about America in jingoistic terms, celebrating its democratic form of government, with all the freedoms and rights that it
The schools hidden curriculum, however, frames those freedoms and rights primarily within
the contex of the market, not politics. Here the utopian character of market fundamentalism surfaces to define
what is very best about America in terms of the rights and opportunities that the state affords individuals
to pursue their own individual secular salvation. Again, through the formation of consumer conscience,
individuals learn to judge their own degree of salvation according to market standards. We learn to equate wellbeing with well-having. Given the total quantity and quality of goods and services currently made available through the market-the
purports to afford its citizens.
overall level of affluence that establishes the American market society as the historic and universal standard against which all other nations and
societies pale in comparison-to what degree and for what duration must I comply with and consume schooling in order to cultivate the proper
amount of use-value that will enable me to acquire a level of affluence comparable to that standard? Again ,
children must never learn to

view their attendance at school as a compulsory duty imposed on them by the state for the purpose of rendering
them useful to the market as producers/consumers. They must recognize schooling in terms of the value of
education and, therefore, as one of the first opportunities, rights, or privileges afforded to them by the
benevolent state.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Poverty
The idea of the impoverish is a concept created by the state that is biopolitical and actually justifies
increased state power
Foucault's concern with the state enters this analysis as a concern with. the conditions that allow for the
state as myth to function, or with the conditions of its possibility , rather than with its legitimacy or limits.
Foucault thus challenges the centrality of the state and the centrality of political theory which posits our
subjection to the state. He challenges the type of knowledge, of which political theory is only part, that
posits both subjects and objects and the opposition between truth and falsity . This challenge means that
one abandons-where power is concerned-the violence-ideology opposition, the metaphor of property, the model of the
contract or of conquest; that-where knowledge is concerned-one abandons the opposition between what is "interested" and what is
"disinterested," the model of knowledge and the primacy of the subject.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Morals
Attempts to coercively gain a moral view results in reinforcing the already hierarchal and dominating
system of the state, this coercively brings people into the states control and is biopolitical (moral link)
Richard Day 2001
Ethics, affinity and the coming communities. B.A.Sc.(UBC), M.A.(York,Toronto), Ph.D.(SFU)
Associate Professor
Contemporary Western societies are not only societies of the tree; they are also societies of the state form. Since it is
impossible to do justice to this concept here, I will restrict the discussion to the couplet warmachine/state form, and the relations of this couplet with the arborescent/rhizomatic distinction. State forms, at the highest level of
generality, are apparatuses of capture that bring outside elements inside by connecting them up with
an arborescent system. While Deleuze and Guattari do provide elements of a genealogy (1986: 42437), they are careful to point out that the state form cannot be traced
back to a point of origin. Rather, there have been states always and everywhere (429), coexisting in relations of competition and cooperation with war-machines, forces that are exterior to
the state apparatus and attempt to untie the bonds of capture (352), to destroy the State and its subjects (Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 104). In terms of social and political effects, states tend
to perpetuate already instantiated (arborescent) forms, while war-machines tend to destroy old forms and instantiate new ones through rhizomatic connections. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari,
revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine and not of state apparatus (Guattari, 1995: 66); indeed, they see their own writing as an operation that weds a war machine and
lines of flight, abandoning . . . the State apparatus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 24). Yet, just as arborescent forms can grow rhizomatic appendages, states can and must incorporate
warmachines, tame them and put them to use in an institutionalized army, make them part of the general police function (Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 103). This is the special danger of the
war-machine: if it does not succeed in warding off the development of a state form, it must pass into the service of the state or destroy itself (104). It is here, in the form of ecstatic injunctions
accompanied by somber warnings, that Deleuze and Guattari, like Foucault, present not only a negative call to resistance, but also a consistent and positive ethicopolitical stance. At times,
We have
no need to totalize that which is invariably totalized on the side of [dead] power; if we were to move in
this direction, it would mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a hierarchical
structure. We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire system of networks and popular bases (Foucault,
1996: 78). This system of networks and popular bases, organized along rhizomatic lines and actively warding off the development of arborescent structures, would
provide bases for social forces that neither ask for gifts from the state (as in the liberal-democratic new social movements)
nor seek state power themselves (as in classical Marxism). Unlike the molar forms of social transformation, these
molecular movements would resist the will to domination in Foucaults sense, in favour of affinity; that
is, they would take up ethico-political positions but refuse to try coercively to generalize these positions
by making moral, ontological, or other foundational claims.
they take us even further than this, advocating what Keith Ansell-Pearson has called novel images of positive social relations (Ansell-Pearson, 1998: 410). Thus Deleuze :
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Morals
The affirmatives call for morals is a call for a universal morality where everyone is forced to submit. Not
only is this biopolitical but according to Foucault would be catastrophic
Marli Huijer 1999
The aesthetics of existence in the work of Michel Foucault. Centre for Gender and Diversity, University of Maastricht Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen
It would have been only logical to round off this political technology of the body with the death of
man or the death of the body. Because no matter how much insight Foucaults analysis might provide into the disciplining forces that are operative in Western
societies, the individual with his docile body, as it came to the fore in Surveiller et punir, has just as negligible a right to exist as the man from Les mots et les choses.
But perhaps, as Franqois Ewald proposed, we should conceive of Foucaults genealogical analysis as a genealogical critique, as a weapon against that power that
divests it of all its masks and takes it to pieces (Ewald, 1975: 1235). Although Foucault presented the genealogy in Surveiller et punir as a factual study on changes in
the penal system on the basis of a political technology of the body, he also referred to the critical effect of genealogy (Foucault, 1980b: 78-108). If genealogy is a
critical analysis of power relations, then yet another mode of thinking about the I is possible in the void of disappeared man in addition to a mode of thinking about
the subject in terms of subject positions in language and as an object of power and knowledge. This other thinking came to the fore in Lusage des plaisirs when
Foucault gave a third answer to the question of what the I is without a presupposed I. He suggested the possibility that the experience of oneself is a relation to
oneself that comes into being in links to truths and power relations. And he dedicated himself to an analysis of games of truth, true-and-false-games through which the
being historically constitutes itself as experience, in other words as something that can and must be thought (Foucault, 1984a: 12-13). For Foucault, this experience is
not a case of being-subjected-to something or someone, nor is it a case of being-linked-to ones own identity, it is an experience that comes into being in an interplay
of truths and power relations. In these games of truth and power relations, the human being constitutes a relationship to himself (experiences himself) through a certain
link to truth. This last thought movement makes the declaration of the death of man superfluous: man can be perceived as one of the figures in a multifarious
series of subjectivities. A bit more than a decade later, Foucault
referred to his philosophical statement in Les mots et les choses that

man had all but perished as a mistake. Instead of stating that man or the subject was dead, what he
wanted to say was that in the course of history, human beings have never ceased to construct
themselves, in other words to perpetually alter the level of their subjectivity and constitute themselves in
a manifold and infinite series of differing subjectivities that will never reach a final point and will never
position us eye to eye with man (Foucault, 1980a, DE IV: 75). The aesthetics of existence is a stylization of the relation to oneself, existing side by
side with other formations. It is not a prescription or an ideal to be strived for by everyone. According to Foucault, The search for a form
of morality acceptable for everyone - in the sense that everyone would have to submit to it - seems
catastrophic to me (Foucault,1984j, DE IV: 706)
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Morals
Their call for morality above all other concerns leads towards a homogenous biopolitical structure
Jeffrey Minson 1985
Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics
Foundationalism we define abstractly as follows. It views ethical considerations as always grounding,

and therefore ideally overriding other considerations. The ethical cannot be confined to other province
of human and social life but rather subsumes all other provinces. This subsumption consists in always
being entitled to subject economic, political, artistic, legal or any other aspects of situation to its criteria
of evaluations. Moral evaluations takes priority over other particularistic and consequently one-sided types of evaluations; these themselves lie under an
injunction to attempt to take their cue from the ethic mode of evaluations which transcends them all. Evaluations takes the form of subjecting
actions or state of affairs to the test of whether they conform to the first principles of that ethic. To take a
well-known example from eighteenth century political philosophy, Jeremy Benthams Fragment on Government advertised the merits of the principle of utility as the
rock on which all rationally justifiable Parliamentary legislation and social administration must be grounded: accurately apprehended and steadily applied (the
principle of utility) affords the only clue to guide a man through these straits (Bentham 1967, pp. 93, 97). However,
philosophical theories hold

no monopoly on this form of argument. Anticipating the case-study on abortion in Chapter 8 below, it is on the basis of ethical foundationalism
that people view abortion as primarily a moral issue, the questionable corollary of this view being that principled abortion law and policy must flow from a prior
consideration of its moral justifibiability. Foundationalism is never a purely ethical stance; over and above principles of evaluations or justification, it always embodies
a view (if not in explicit empirical propositions, then in its metaphors, imagery and rhetoric) about its moral constituency i.e. the nature of the agents who are
subjected to its constraints. When Mary Midgley seeks to base her ethics on universal human needs, she neglects to take account of the extent to which the ethical
foundationalism framework orders the space in which these universal human attributes can appear as
the prior and ethically decisive one. Foundationalisms mode of evaluation conveys two implications in
respect to change: (i) if something is morally wrong, therefore we ought to move heaven and earth to
change it; and (ii) an imperialist impulse towards homogenization, i.e. an urge to remould the whole
world in the ideal image of its first principles. For these reasons foundationalism may be singled out as
the single most important key to the enigma of the so-called eccentricity of ethics which was first broached in the
preface.
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Biopower Links
Link to Human Rights

The use of human rights as a justification for state action was what justified the universal security
framework that currently increases state control into our everyday lives. This use of human rights
largely increases biopolitical control in the name of protecting humanity.
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political
Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals)
DT
What we propose below is an examination of the complementarity between sovereign power and biopower via the concept of human security as it has been articulated from the realm of the
international, while concurrently revealing how the human security discourse itself provides a way of tracing some of the complexity highlighted above, thus problematizing the more formal
and theoretical assemblage of sovereign power and biopower found in the work of Foucault and Agamben. In order to place this analysis in context, we begin by tracing the discourse of
security from the post-World War II context onward. What we intend to show is that the shift from the term defence to security helps set the terrain from which the interweaving of
biopower and sovereign power found in the concept of human security is rendered possible. The formal origins of the concept of human security are to be found in the worldview of an
international organization that was concerned with post- Cold War humanitarian issues, and only subsequently became enmeshed in the discourse of national foreign policy
concerns and academic debates on security. Generally attributed to the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report and some of the concurrent writings of Mahbub ul-
the initial impulse was to shift the referent from the state to the legitimate concerns of ordinary
people who s[eek] security in their daily lives (UNDP, 1994: 22). In other words, the objective was to bring
security down to the level of human life by seeking to develop strategies in the provision of both safety
from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression and protection from sudden and hurtful
disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in homes and jobs or in communities (UNDP, 1994: 23). In so
doing, security was to be decoupled from the particular national interest of states and tied to the
universal concern[s] (UNDP, 1994: 22) of all people. In articulating itself universally, human security was therefore
initially meant to be built upon the bedrock of universal human rights. This move would be accompanied
by efforts to identify a comprehensive list of threats that the all encompassing (UNDP, 1994: 24)
concept of human security would respond to that is, economic, food, health, environmental, personal,
community and political security (UNDP, 1994: 2425). Clear connections were made between severe impediments to human
Haq,
development and pervasive and chronic threats to the fulfilment of human potential. Such a broad formulation sought to transcend the state, insofar as it
brought into question its role as a provider of security relative to other actors for example, international organizations, NGOs and non-military government agencies
while simultaneously identifying the state itself as a potential source of insecurity. This elision of the state also served to make the quotidian the object of security.
Whereas security tended to be understood in terms of defining historical moments centred around the survival and integrity of the state, we now see emerging an
understanding of (in)security that arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event (UNDP, 1994: 22). In this way, human
security certainly participated in the broader redefinition of security begun in the 1970s and 1980s; however, it also set off on new terrain, in that shifting its referent to
the individual introduces as threats a host of contingencies that emerge from daily life. This initial deployment of the concept in the mid-1990s was
subsequently accompanied by other efforts to theorize human security in ways that would be more amenable to the multilateral and middle-power
approaches found in the foreign policy concerns of certain states. Examples like the Responsibility To Protect generally
moved away from the broader development concerns of the Human Development Report towards a
more narrow focus on introducing a new set of international norms on intervention that would guide
and restrict the conduct of the state and the international community in extreme and exceptional cases
(ICISS, 2001: 31). Here, the threats are concomitantly narrowed down to violent threats to individuals (Human
Security Center, 2005: viii), such as mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror,
and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease (United Nations, 2004: 65). Emphasis shifts from an understanding of
threats that stem from a broad set of quotidian political, social, economic and environmental contingencies, to what are deemed to be avoidable
catastrophe[s] (United Nations, 2004: 65). Within this context, there is a partial but significant return to the state, in that it is through the nexus of
the state that the provision of both security and insecurity, by state and non-state actors, is predominantly understood.
Link to Human Rights

The use of human rights as a means to intervene has been used to create a global world order framed
around a biopolitical government
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David Chandler 2009

War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War' Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, UK
The following section outlines the dominant, broadly Foucauldian, frameworks of critique that locate the
global war on terror and earlier proclamations of human rights intervention as part of a new liberal global war to
control and regulate the globe, either in the interests of neoliberal capitalism or as the essential workings
of global biopolitical governmentality. There then follows a short section on the revival of interest in the work of Carl Schmitt as a way of
giving a more grounded framework to abstract perspectives that link global war to liberal universalism in unmediated ways. The concluding sections of this article
suggest an alternative framework of analysis, capable of understanding global wars as a reflection of the lack of political stakes in the international sphere. This is
done, first, through a discussion of Schmitts analysis of the development of partisan struggles from territorialized, or telluric, national struggles to globalized
The application of this understanding of

global war as disconnected from clear stakes of political contestation is then further developed with
regard to both modern terrorism and projections of Western power in abstract frameworks of the war on terror and the
promotion of liberal values. The article concludes that global war can be better understood in relation to the lack of stakes in the international
deterritorialized struggles, which lack strategic constraints and cannot be grasped politically.
sphere, with the erosion of contestation reflected in the demise of political and legal frameworks that reflected and structured geopolitical rivalries.
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Link to National Identity

The idea of a national identity is the idea of equilibrium that the biopolitical state is attempting to
achieve, this allows for an totalitarian and biopolitical government.
Rosalyn Diprose, Niamh Stephenson, Catherine Mills, Kane Race and Gay Hawkins 2008
Governing the Future: The Paradigm of Prudence in Political Technologies of Risk Management. University of New South Wales, Australia & University of Sydney,
Australia
Our study offers a critical assessment of the conceptual assumptions and cultural specificity underlying the mobilization of the paradigm of prudence in Australia. In
particular, we are interested in how this prudent and wary attitude to the future, along with the focus on ensuring physical security of a population (as distinct from
emotional security or preservation of diversity of life), is used to justify treating people as mere physical (biological) entities whose future life should be determined
through extended governance over biological life. We draw in part on Foucaults and Agambens differing concepts of biopolitics to examine this phenomenon,
modernity is characterized by a biopolitics of regulatory controls and

complexes converging on bodies and their biological processes, regulatory controls that express the
power to foster life or disallow it in the interests of maintaining the biological existence of a
population. What the concept of biopolitics can help articulate is the complex ways in which politics and biological life intersect. The connection
between biopower and national security lies in the aim of biopower to maintain the uniformity of the
biological processes of the species body (population). While the species body and its life processes form a multiple body, fostering
diversity of human biological life is not the aim of this mode of governance (Foucault, 2003: 245). Instead, biopower aims at curtailing
unpredictable random events and achieving overall equilibrium in a population, an equilibrium that
reassures with the promise of protecting the security of the whole from internal dangers (Foucault, 2003: 249).
It is in this regularization of life that biopower is normalizing and state intervention into ordinary life
is justified judgements about which biological disabilities, random events and kinds of life present a
danger to the population get aligned with normative ideas of race, sex, sexual reproduction, family, sexuality, body size,
national identity, etc. Agamben (1998: 114) goes further than Foucault and argues that what characterizes modernity is not biopolitics per se, but the way
beginning with Foucaults (1980: 138139) idea that
biopolitics, in partially collapsing the classical distinction between zoe (nature or biological life) and bios (living human being as political subject), fosters the
political reduction of the human to bare life through the paradoxical inclusive exclusion of biological life in the political. This means that biological life is
simultaneously excluded from the political (as that which can be killed) and made the target and object of state power. Agamben uses this formula to explain, among
other things, the mass internments and genocides of the 20th century. While he does not put the implications of his account of the political in exactly these terms, the
spread of biopower simultaneously reduces human beings as bios (living beings as political subjects open to an undetermined future), if not to bare life, at least to
it can justify a kind of authoritative, totalizing

governance that would determine the future of a population in terms of what the present government
considers to be the preferred biological destiny of the nation.
zoe (biological life governed by external forces). Our interest in this idea relates to how
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Link to National Identity

National Identity politics are intrinsically linked to biopolitics because they attempt to create a
homogenous identity on biological grounds.
Ivan Varga 2005
The Body - The New Sacred? The Body in Hypermodernity. professor of Sociology at the University of Rome 3, where he is Head of the Department of Sciences of
Education. He has been visiting scholar at the University of Berkeley,
Baylor Debate Camp
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Biopolitics is intrinsically related to identity politics a typical phenomenon of postmodernity. It takes natural features
of the body such as gender, race, ethnicity, age to use them for political purposes. Thus it promotes particularism
as opposed to universalism. Moreover, if a group is presented as homogeneous on biological grounds, it blurs the
other differences within the group. Women can be taken as same gender but socially and ethnically there are differences among them. (One could
ask, what is there in common between, say, a poor black woman and the First Lady?) The same applies to groups that define themselves along racial or ethnic criteria .
National identity politics also refers to common roots: ethnic, genetic similarities and the territory they
inhabit, which is, however, shrouded in a mythical imagination that disregards the class and cultural
differences within. (This is the Blut und Boden the blood and soil ideology promoted by fascism, which was
easily translated into the ideology of ethnic superiority.) Ferenc Fehr, in the concluding remarks of his paper at the Vienna
symposium, attributes the pervasiveness of biopolitically influenced ideologies in their various forms to the disappearance of a politicsbased on grand narratives or of
class politics or of a redemptive politics in postmodern societies (Fehr, 1996: 65).
Link to Medicaid
Medicaid forces poor women into state surveillance and control. Its a racist and classist system that
perpetuates the biopolitical control of the state as well as the capitalist system that exploits the very
poverty the affirmative attempts to help
Bridges 2008
(Khiara M. Bridges, Pregnancy, Medicaid, State Regulation, and the Production of Unruly Bodies - Copyright (c) 2008 Northwestern
University School of Law - Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy - Winter, 2008 - 3 Nw. J. L. & Soc. Pol'y 62)
Much has been written about the state's interest in the production and management of health--both of the individual and of the population. n4 Foucault most famously, perhaps, elaborated
upon this state interest via his notion of "biopolitics": Whereas in the classical age, state power was demonstrated in the exercise of producing death, in the modern age, "this 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, [*66] and multiply it, subjecting it to
precise controls and comprehensive regulations." n5 Foucault describes a "power over life" that
focus[es] on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life
expectancy, and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of
the population. n6
prenatal care presents itself as an occasion par excellence for the state to "administer, optimize, and
multiply" life, to subject the body to "precise controls and comprehensive regulations," and to ultimately gain a
modicum of control over "the level of health" of the population. n7
Following Foucault,
Yet, pregnancy is not a legal event. That is, the fact of pregnancy alone does not put the pregnant woman within the jurisdiction of the biopolitical state. While the
state may desire to exercise its "power over life" by submitting the expectant mother and her fetus to "an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls," the
pregnant woman is not compelled to surrender herself to such a state project. Again, this is because, at present, the fact of pregnancy alone does not enable the state to
reach the woman and her pregnant body with its biopolitical power. n8
The biopolitical state could achieve the regulation of every pregnant woman by creating a law that mandates that women receive prenatal care either from state actors
or from persons that must otherwise answer to the state. However, at present, such a law does not exist. Indeed, there is no law in the United States that makes criminal
or otherwise penalizes a woman's failure to submit herself to any kind of prenatal care during her pregnancy. That is, should a woman undergo the forty weeks of
pregnancy without ever having sought and/or received medical care from a physician, nurse practitioner, midwife, or other professional whose services are intended to
ensure the birth of a healthy baby and the continued health of the new mother, I am not aware of any [*67] law that punishes such a woman's behavior, or lack
thereof. n9 In Colorado, a woman who exposes her fetus to controlled substances may be found to have neglected her child and, consequently, lose custody of the
infant. n10 And, of course, once a baby is born, there are a wealth of laws that punish a woman for directly harming or failing to protect her child. But, prior to a
baby's birth, there is no law that penalizes a woman for "failing to protect" her not-yet-born child by neglecting or otherwise refusing to have a medically-managed
pregnancy.
Undoubtedly, the power of moral sanctions imposed upon pregnant women who fail to receive prenatal care should not be underestimated. Many of the pregnant
women I have encountered at Alpha Hospital are very much aware of the "immorality" of a pregnant body unsupervised by a member of the medical establishment.
On the unlikely occasion that a woman is not aware that a pregnancy unmanaged by medicine opens her up to moral condemnation, the employees of the OB/GYN
clinic at Alpha Hospital often provide this education. For example: the majority of patients with whom I have spoken at Alpha Hospital's OB/GYN clinic began their
prenatal care shortly after discovering their pregnancies and deciding that they wanted to carry them to term--usually within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Then
again, many patients decide to come to Alpha Hospital after becoming dissatisfied with the care that they have received at another hospital. These patients--usually
quite far along in their pregnancies--are expected to bring along with them documentation of their prenatal care from the other hospitals. This holds true even though
Alpha repeats all laboratory tests, ultrasounds, vaginal examinations, and the like conducted by other hospitals. Hence, asking a woman for her records from another
hospital frequently functions only to shame those women who cannot produce such documentation and provoke them into defending their documentation-less status.
Many times, women in the final weeks of their pregnancies, yet seeking to begin prenatal care at Alpha Hospital, cannot produce such documents because they have
not been receiving prenatal care and have asserted that they were in fact receiving care at another hospital solely to avoid moral censure. I have observed on numerous
occasions the women who work behind the front desk at Alpha Hospital--two women who greet women arriving for their appointments and take their relevant
Baylor Debate Camp
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paperwork, and two other women who solely answer the clinic's incoming telephone calls--exchange looks of disapproval when a visibly pregnant woman without
documents seeks to begin her prenatal care at the hospital. n11 On one occasion, a prospective patient (who, I eventually learned, had recently arrived in New York
City from the Dominican Republic) saw the disapproving glances and overheard a rhetorically-asked, "She doesn't have any papers?" In response, the patient answered back
defensively and insolently, "I was going to the doctor in my country, so don't even worry about that!" n12
[*69] Although such moral sanctions are a powerful and effective force--which, at the very least, inform women that failing to receive prenatal care is commonly viewed as irresponsible
moral sanctions might

and should be understood as assisting the state's endeavor to encourage poor women to submit themselves to a
state-invested prenatal care program: a woman's feelings of guilt, due to moral condemnation of her medically-unsupervised pregnant body, may
behavior, but, more likely, induce pregnant women to actually submit themselves to prenatal care--these moral sanctions are not "law." Undoubtedly,
cause her to seek prenatal care. If the only medical care she can afford is that which is subsidized by the state, then the state finds itself a new subject upon her
acceptance of state-subsidized care, brought forth by acts of extralegal morality. Nevertheless, morality is not law. That is, although moral sanctions may be analogized
to the law insofar as both have blanket applications and potentially punitive natures, the state is not invested in moral sanctions and cannot directly use them to
comprehensively regulate the pregnant body.
Finally, moral sanctions do not allow the state to fill the extralegal, interstitial
space of pregnancy. n13
While moral sanctions do not create legal subjects located within the state's biopolitical enterprise, Medicaid
might. At Alpha Hospital and other facilities that accept Medicaid insurance coverage for prenatal care, state subsidization of
a pregnant woman's medical expenses via Medicaid functions as a carrot that entices women to submit themselves
to state supervision, management, regulation, and discipline. Women are offered a contract where, in exchange for
the state's payment of medical bills, they are [*70] obliged to open their lives to state intervention. A description of the
process of initiating prenatal care at Alpha Hospital illustrates the point.
CONTINUED
the hospital can be reimbursed by the state for the services it renders to patients with Medicaid, the
hospital itself must be qualified as a "PCAP provider"--meaning that the state has approved it to provide prenatal
care services to [*83] Medicaid recipients. n45 And Medicaid Policy Guidelines mandate that a patient meet with
a nurse, nutritionist, HIV counselor, social worker, and a Medicaid financial officer. n46 That is, in order for the hospital to be
Moreover, before
reimbursed through Medicaid for the prenatal services that it provides, it must guarantee that the patient meets with the above professionals. Hence, the entire
The state essentially says to poor pregnant women, "We will pay your bills in
exchange for, at the very least, state surveillance of your pregnant body and the private arena in which it exists." It
is quite an exchange to make--considering that women with private insurance are not similarly compelled to cede access to their private lives. Indeed ,
government subsidization of medical service becomes a kind of recruitment device that enlists poor women into
the welfare bureaucracy's subjection. Again, some may find state intervention into women's private lives completely unproblematic and potentially
apparatus described above is mandated by the state.
desirable--understanding it as a laudable effort to provide pregnant women with a wealth of information that they could use to make their pregnancies healthy events
private lives
that are rendered accessible to state intervention, regulation, and management. As a consequence, Medicaid coverage of
prenatal care could be construed as a carrot that attracts poor women into the state regulatory apparatus.
on multiple levels. n47 However, it is not all women whose private lives are intervened upon; indeed, it [*84] is only poor, uninsured women's
Furthermore, even if a woman has no interest in applying for Medicaid--opting to use her own private insurance or pay out-of-pocket for her prenatal care n48--she
must still meet with the nutritionist, social worker, HIV counselor, and nurse before being scheduled to see a provider for a medical examination. This policy is
effected because the hospital chooses to err on the side of fiscal caution--presuming that every patient receiving healthcare within the obstetrics clinic will eventually
become a Medicaid recipient. In the event that a patient ultimately receives Medicaid coverage, the hospital can be reimbursed for the services it provides--as it has
satisfied all the PCAP requirements for Medicaid reimbursement for that patient. Alternatively, in the event that the patient ultimately does not receive Medicaid
coverage and, instead, pays for prenatal services through private insurance or out-of-pocket, the hospital is not disadvantaged in any way; the only consequence would
be that the PCAP services would have been rendered unnecessarily. As a result, all Alpha Hospital pregnant patients--without regard to whether they receive
Medicaid--are compelled to expose themselves to state [*85] intervention, regulation, and management by providing information about the minutiae of their private,
intimate spheres.
To distill the central theme of the above exposition:
for the uninsured poor, state regulation is simultaneous with prenatal care.
Foucault's theorization of the carceral is helpful in understanding the significance of this fact . In Discipline and
Punish, Foucault argued that the classical-era scaffold, which could demonstrate the immense power of the
sovereign only by destroying the body of the prisoner, was replaced by the instrument of the modern-era prison-the consummate vehicle for acting on the heart, thoughts, will, and inclinations of the prisoner. It produced docile
bodies through a technique that combines constant surveillance with the precise management of the prisoner's
body in space--both physical and temporal. The Panoptican, the prison par excellence, dramatized and epitomized
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the operation of power in the modern age: the prisoner, whose body is always capable of being seen, bears this
knowledge and, in turn, becomes the agent of his own discipline and oppression.
In the final chapter of this seminal tome, Foucault explained that the work accomplished by the prison has been disseminated to a range of institutions:
[M]oving still farther from penality in the strict sense, the carceral circles widen and the form of the prison slowly diminished and finally disappears altogether: the institutions for
abandoned or indigent children, the orphanages . . ., the establishments for apprentices. . . . And then, still farther, there was a whole series of mechanisms that did not adopt the "compact"
prison-model, but used some of the carceral methods: charitable societies, moral improvement associations, organizations that handed out assistance and also practiced surveillance, workers'
estates and lodging houses . . . . n49
The result of this dissemination was the creation of a "carceral archipelago," which "transported [the technique of the prison] from the penal institution to the entire social body." n50 Indeed,
"this great carceral network reaches all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society." n51 Thus, bodies incarcerated in penal institutions are not the only bodies subjected to
constant surveillance and management, performed with the intent to "correct" the desires of the subject; rather, all bodies caught within the "carceral net"--usually indigent, disenfranchised,
and importantly, female (a point, unfortunately, ignored by Foucault)--are thus subjected.
Medicaid coverage of prenatal care as an apparatus that attracts poor, pregnant subjects into
the carceral archipelago. That the state pays the medical bills accrued by pregnant women for their prenatal care is benign, in and of itself; however, the
In this way, one can understand
endeavor appears more disciplinary and surveillance-intensive when one considers that the state first requires the woman to meet with a nutritionist (who constructs a
chart quantifying, and frequently censuring, her diet), an HIV-counselor (who attempts to gain her consent to an HIV-antibody test, the results of which will most
assuredly be sent to the proper authorities and become the stuff of citywide, statewide, [*86] and nationwide statistics), a social worker (who compels the women to
divulge intimate details about her life), as well as nurses, health educators, and financial officers. All of this is to say, the pregnant woman who has decided to attempt
like Alpha finds herself most decidedly within the state apparatus. n52
In sum, the fact of pregnancy alone does not bring a woman within the jurisdiction of the state. Yet, the fact of
pregnancy combined with the woman's attempted receipt of state aid not only brings a woman within the state's
jurisdiction, but also becomes an opportunity for the state to create a legal subject whose private life is exposed to
state supervision and surveillance. In this way, Medicaid and PCAP programs function to create legal subjects of
pregnant women--bringing them within the jurisdiction of the biopolitical state, making them and previously
invisible (some would say "private") elements of their lives visible, exposing them to state oversight, and
ultimately baring them to the potentiality of state-sanctioned violence. n53
CONTINUED
[*90] Women receiving Medicaid cannot enjoy prenatal care delivered outside of a paradigm of pregnancy as a
medical event requiring medical intervention. The prenatal healthcare provided by Medicaid, by statutory
mandate, is premised on constant surveillance of the pregnant body--a body whose health appears to be capable of
failing at any given moment. This is in line with what medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd termed the "technocratic model of
childbirth"--within which "the female body is viewed as an abnormal, unpredictable, and inherently defective
machine." n62 I would like to expand Davis-Floyd's argument to encompass the nine months that precede labor and childbirth; hence, I argue that the regime
of prenatal care described above is a function of a "technocratic model of pregnancy"; accordingly, Davis-Floyd's
"technocratic model of childbirth" would represent the final stage of a larger ideology of the pregnant body . It is a body whose
prenatal care at a public hospital
ability to process sugar may suddenly disappoint, whose blood pressure may dangerously climb, and whose weight gain (or lack thereof) may indicate some
unspecified complication. It is a body that is deficient in nutrients, for both itself and the body of the fetus that it carries within; hence, prenatal vitamins are prescribed
to it, and it is enrolled in WIC to enable its acquisition of "iron-fortified adult cereal, vitamin C-rich fruit or vegetable juice, eggs, milk, cheese, peanut butter, dried
beans/peas, tuna fish and carrots." n63 It is one that is always already susceptible to pathogens in the form of bacteria and viruses; hence, it must be screened for their
presence. Indeed, the pregnant body produced by Medicaid is so greatly susceptible to sexually-transmitted pathogens (i.e., gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and HIV)
that it must be doubly screened for their presence during pregnancy, and once again six weeks after the woman gives birth. The body produced by Medicaid is one
whose interior should be made visible to the naked eye via technological interventions; n64 subsequent thereto, women are rewarded with fuzzy black-and-white
images of their insides. n65 Lastly, the look of the place should not be [*91] disregarded: that is, the Medicaid-produced pregnant body is one that is appropriately
treated in antiseptic examination rooms by physicians, nurse practitioners, and midwives who wear white lab coats. n66 This body should be led down white-walled,
white-tiled corridors by gloved and uniform-wearing medical assistants. n67 The body should be exposed, unavoidably, to the smell of disinfectants, cleaning
solutions, sanitizers, and sterilizers.
In essence, the body produced by Medicaid is one that is insistently and tenaciously medically managed. While one
can make a persuasive argument that the course of treatment mandated by Medicaid exceeds "normal"
medicalization insofar as Medicaid [*92] recipients are doubly and trebly tested for conditions for which the
private-insured are screened only once, that is not my interest. I believe that even if one assumes, for argument's
sake, that Medicaid-recipients' prenatal care is not medicalized beyond the extent to which privately-insured
women's care is medicalized, the intersection of this "normal" medicalization with a population entirely composed
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of poor women generates especially disempowering effects. In the following section , I discuss Barbara Duden's scholarship on the fetus
and her critique of the medicalization of pregnancy, generally. I then explore her critique in the context of the poor women that it affects at Alpha Hospital.
CONTINUED
But a woman can refuse to accept this state and put herself outside the framework that imposes such needs. Inevitably, she then exposes herself to a series of
criticisms. Some will see her as a "primitive" who deprives herself and her infant of the benefits of modern medicine. Others will see in her the romantic who places
good will, emotions, and irresponsible trust above the certainties of a modern institutionalized reality. And others will dismiss her as utopian. n74
Yet, the poor, uninsured patient at Alpha Hospital does not have the option of rejecting a scientific, technological model of pregnancy and putting herself "outside the
framework that imposes such needs." She does not have the luxury of being viewed as a romantic or being dismissed as a utopian. She cannot even elect the title of
no options outside of an intensely medically-managed pregnancy exist for poor women accepting
Medicaid, they are forcibly conscripted into the regime of biomedically-produced-and-satisfied needs. n75 I do not read
"primitive." Insofar as
Duden as arguing in favor of [*95] women foregoing medical treatment entirely--and neither would I suggest it. Rather, I read Duden as acknowledging that a continuum of prenatal care
exists: one may conceptualize the woman who refuses all manner of prenatal care on one end of the spectrum. On the other end, sits the woman who is the incubator for a fetus whose needs
Medicaid recipients are forced to sit with the latter or forego prenatal care
altogether. I understand such circumscribed choice as hardly a choice at all.
are satisfied only by the most relentless medical science.
CONTINUED
Moreover, insofar as the model of prenatal care enacted at and by Alpha Hospital-- which is administered pursuant to Medicaid guidelines--is one premised on surveillance of a body that is
always capable of failing at a moment's notice, one may argue that the foundation of this prenatal regime is the unruly body. The construction of the pregnant body as an unruly body
occurs whenever it is intensively medically-managed; consequently, the pregnant bodies of the non-poor may be thus constructed and treated. [*97] This is to say that
the unruly pregnant body is not specific to the uninsured poor; rather it is characteristic of the body of any pregnant woman who elects (insofar as any woman, living
within a society in which the medicalization of pregnancy is the norm, can conceive of their being any choice at all) to be treated within and subjected by the standard,
biomedical paradigm. But, as discussed above, therein lies the fundamental difference between the unruly bodies of the poor and the non-poor: the non-poor may elect
to have their bodies administered in such a fashion.
To the extent that Medicaid coverage of prenatal expenses is concomitant with

a pregnancy administered squarely within the biomedical paradigm, then poor, uninsured women do not choose in
any sense to have their bodies constructed as unruly. It is a construction that is foisted upon them.
Furthermore, the unruly bodies constructed by Alpha rarely disappoint. That is, anomalies, disorders, abnormalities, and malfunctions are regularly and relentlessly found within the pregnant
bodies of Alpha patients; yet many of these anomalies, disorders, abnormalities, and malfunctions "resolve themselves" or otherwise have no effect on the health of the fetus or the mother.
For instance, on several occasions, I have translated explanations by the ultrasound technicians to Spanish-speaking patients that placenta previa n77 was detected during their sonograms;
however, the ultrasound technicians always assure the women that they should not worry because the placenta usually moves away from the cervix over the course of the woman's pregnancy.
Thus, the potential issue is resolved.
On these occasions, I imagine that the effect of a diagnosis of placenta previa merely serves as a reminder to the woman that she occupies an unruly body that may fail at any given moment;
she is thereby warned that her submission to the biomedical paradigm and the physicians that perform it is required if she hopes for the health of her baby. n78 That patients are frequently
diagnosed with conditions that proceed to no effect might be explained as a failure of a medical technology that "sees too much." Or, it might just be the effect of screens, tests, and
examinations that speak in terms of probability, risk, and likelihood: all patients are rendered at risk for something--even if that risk is one in one million.
[*98] It should be noted that Alpha Hospital offers women the choice of receiving their prenatal care from midwives. In spite of this, this choice does not usually offer women an exit from a
medically-managed pregnancy and consequent construction of their bodies as unruly ones.
First, many women do not know that the choice among the physician, the nurse practitioner, and the midwife exists. On the day of the PCAP appointment, after meeting with the host of staff
members discussed above and completing all the urine and blood tests requested of them, women are given an appointment to return to the clinic and have a medical examination. This
appointment--ironically called a "doctor's appointment" by Alpha staff--is the woman's first meeting with the physician, nurse practitioner, or midwife. Whether the woman is assigned to a
physician, nurse practitioner, or midwife is a matter of chance; the woman receives the next available appointment in the schedule. If the next available appointment is with the midwife, the
patient is so assigned and will continue to be seen by the midwife for the duration of her pregnancy (unless a medical problem is later detected and she is transferred to the High Risk Clinic to
be attended by a physician). Few patients know that there exist three categories of providers in the obstetrics clinic at Alpha Hospital. n79 Further, if patients are aware of the three
varieties of care, few of them know that they can request one of the three. n80 And further still, of the small group of patients who know that they can make a choice
among a physician, nurse practitioner, and midwife, very few of these know the differences in the manner of care offered by midwives versus physicians or nurse
practitioners. That is, very few appreciate that midwives ascribe to a paradigm within which the pregnant body is not constructed as unruly.
Second, and crucially, women who choose to receive their prenatal care from midwives still undergo a medically-managed pregnancy because the care provided by
midwives at Alpha Hospital is not qualitatively different from the care provided by physicians and nurse practitioners. This similarity in care is due to the fact that the
midwives, like the other categories of providers at Alpha, must comply with the Medicaid protocol for PCAP providers. Undeniably, many patients who have had
experiences with both the midwives and physicians appreciate that the midwives take a different approach to women's healthcare. The patients with whom I have
spoken frequently describe their midwives as "nice"; they say that the midwives "take their time" during their meetings with the patients; many patients say that the
midwives ask more questions and try to get them to talk more about their pregnancies. n81 This is to be contrasted with patient [*99] encounters with physicians,
who are described as "rushed" and "fast," or alternatively, "unremarkable." n82 Nevertheless, patients who are seen by the midwives must submit urine to be tested at
every visit. They must endure the "glucose challenge test," the triple screening for gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and HIV, and all required vaccinations. Their fetuses
are screened for genetic abnormalities when clinically indicated. Their bodies are constantly weighed, blood pressures systematically checked, and interiors regularly
made visible via ultrasound and vaginal examinations. This program of prenatal care is mandated by Medicaid. So, essentially, the unorthodoxy, or "alternativeness,"
of any midwifery practice reimbursed by Medicaid--without regard to whether the midwife practices within a public hospital or outside of one--is severely constrained
by the necessity of delivering care in accordance with the dictates of being a Medicaid "PCAP provider."
The result is that poor, uninsured women in the state of New York are compelled to live unruly bodies and the
medically-managed pregnancies that are their cause and effect. This is significant because in the absence of a
choice of a low-intervention prenatal care [*100] program, Medicaid--and the state that administers it--enacts
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
the poor, pregnant body as one that can only and should only be treated medically, scientifically, and
therapeutically. Prenatal care within the Medicaid regime can be understood to proceed from the assumption that
the errors and risks within the poor, pregnant body (which are invariably "there" and must be detected via
constant screens and tests) can only be remedied by medical science. The poor body, then, is one that is exposed to bacteria and viruses;
hence, antibiotics, antiviral medications, and vaccinations are administered. The poor body is one that is malnourished; hence, WIC, and the concomitant prescription
of prenatal vitamins and recommended consumption of meat and dairy, are provided. The poor body is one whose reproduction is dangerously unrestrained and, yes,
unruly; hence, the parade of contraceptives placed in front of the post-partum body n84--ranging from the lower-intervention condoms to the intensely highintervention Depo-Provera injection. n85
The consequence, I believe, is a medicalization of poverty. Poverty is treated as a condition that produces ailments
and disorders all rectifiable, or at least managed, through the application of medical science. In this way, the poor
are treated as biological dangers--to themselves, to their fetuses, and to the society within which they exist.
Indeed, Medicaid's profoundly medicalized management of pregnancy, and the simultaneous production of poor,
pregnant women as biological dangers, might be understood as an admission by the state of the unjust nature of
capitalism and the class structure that is its sine qua non. Essentially, the state assumes that the poor, pregnant body that presents itself to the
obstetrics clinic is one that has not had the benefit of regular (or, even irregular) medical check-ups--an assumption that is especially true for the "undocumented"
pregnant bodies that present themselves at Alpha. The battery of tests to which patients must submit themselves might be understood as a corrective to the years of
medical inattention that poverty and the absence of health insurance compel. The function of every organ and every system is assessed because class inequality
dictates that their health would not have been established previously via periodic evaluations--a comfort that the insured enjoy. Indeed, it is not entirely unreasonable
to assume that an aggressive medical gaze is appropriate for the uninsured. These are women who do not have the benefit of annual Pap smears to detect abnormal cervical cell
[*101] growth. These are women who do not have the luxury of having a urinary tract infection diagnosed before it becomes asymptomatic and manifests itself as kidney malfunction. These
are the women who do not have the advantage of being told if that lump in the breast really is nothing to worry about.
All of this is to say that Medicaid's tenacious management of pregnancy performs a confession: it confesses that
capitalism and the poverty that is its effect create a state of affairs inside of which common and curable ailments
within the poor body go undetected. The insistent medical manipulation of the pregnant body mandated by
Medicaid can be understood as an attempt to rectify that situation; however, within that attempt is an implicit
acknowledgement of the unjust nature of the class structure of this capitalist society.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Western Medical Model

In the Western Medical Model Women are coercively controlled through the state taking control of
pregnancy. The model just furthers the normative biopolitical control of the state
Shildrick 2004
(Margrit, Professor at the University College in Dublin, Genetics, normativity, and ethics: Some bioethical concerns Sage Publications)
The possible variations of both techniques and lines of reproductive interconnections are extremely complex and not my subject here, except to note that despite the
breakdown of the usual and supposedly natural chains of transmission, there is still a certain privileging of genetic correlation. Early feminist opposition
to
assisted reproductive technologies frequently made the point that fertile women would often undergo the
relatively dangerous procedure of in vitro fertilization (IVF) rather than donor insemination simply in
order that their male partners sperm could be used, thus preserving proper genetic links (see, for example,
Lorber, 1989). Similarly court battles over reneged surrogacy contracts although not finally decisive because
they may always be inflected with contrary race and class issues have tended to favour the claims of
genetic parents over merely birth or social parents. The same issue of genetic primacy may also underlie the troubling UK case of Diane
Blood who applied to the courts to vary the decision of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) that prohibited her use of her deceased partners
stored sperm for assisted reproduction. The HFEAs refusal to sanction such a procedure on grounds that the husband had not consented to such use of his live bodily
material relied on traditional bioethical and legal models concerned with notions of contract, property in ones body, and protective rights. That such principles are
inadequate to deal with cases arising in an explicitly postmodern context is not my point here, but rather that the widespread sympathy aroused by Mrs Blood and the
satisfaction that greeted the courts partial reversal of the original decision speak to a belief that genetic connection is the proper form of familial connection.4 What
is at work in the uptake of assisted reproductive procedures, then, is an attempt to normalize genetic families at the very moment that bioscientific technology opens
up other models of kinship. And it is precisely the same kind of paradox and resulting tension that runs through the whole issue of specifically genetic research and
technologies. The area of gene therapies which relies on the identification of the individual genes or gene sequences that are apparently responsible for various
negatively marked bodily differences is a case in point. The relevant technologies are designed to support one of two possible approaches: either somatic cell therapy
which corrects cellular anomalies for the lifetime of the affected individual only, or the more radical germ-line therapy which intervenes in the so-called sex cells to
alter or eliminate a particular genetic trait both for the individual and for his or her genetic descendants. These types of discrete gene therapy have been in the forefront
of bioscientific research for many years far in advance of the project to sequence the complete human genome but although some forms of therapy are already in
operation, the area has seen few fully materialized advances. Despite a public awareness of the theoretical possibilities, and a misapprehension as to the extent of their
use, many of the proposed techniques remain futuristic, either because the relevant therapy is far from perfected, or because its application is currently banned in
human subjects. What is referred to, for example, as gene splicing where damaged sequences or those coded for particular diseases are removed and replaced by
normal sequences is much discussed but remains experimental. Once, however, a technique has been shown to be theoretically possible or to actually work in
animals, its potential cannot be ignored. As with reproductive technologies, the bioethical response has been sustained and somewhat unusually often open to public
debate, a transparency which feminists at least will see as a welcome change from the closed authority of traditional biomedicine. Nonetheless, while that debate has
concerned itself with traditional questions of rights, utility, non-maleficence and so on, it has signally failed to address a problematic in which the security of human
being as an entity of fixed properties tenuous and vulnerable as it always is, I would argue (Shildrick, 2002) is explicitly contested. I do not mean to suggest that
such readily recognized ethical concerns are entirely redundant, nor that there is less ethical urgency than we might suppose. Whatever the status of gene therapy in its
more complex projections, what are already broadly accepted and utilized, in the west at least, are techniques of preimplantation or prenatal genetic diagnosis in
which, respectively, early gametes and embryonic/foetal forms are genetically tested. In the case of IVF or donated gametes only those that are deemed normal are
then transferred to the womb, whilst for existing embryos and foetuses, abortion, or selective abortion if there are multiple implantations, is offered. The increased
sophistication of molecular biology has greatly refined the options available to individuals and couples where the family history of the woman, or her partner or donor,
indicates a probability of genetically related disease or bodily anomaly. Where once the advice might have been to remain childless, more recent forms of genetic
counseling prior to conception are likely to encourage IVF followed by preimplantation diagnosis .
For those already pregnant who are

deemed at risk, the procedures of amniocentesis and, increasingly, chorionic villus sampling, are widely
on offer to western women in the guise of responsible pregnancy management. The assumption is that the pregnant
woman will allow testing of the embryo or foetus and act to eliminate those that are deemed defective. Indeed, it appears to be the case that in some places and the
UK is one the vast majority of physicians will only authorize tests when the woman has agreed in advance to abort when the results are positive for an abnormality.
a kind of quality control procedure is put into action in which pregnancy becomes the putative site
of consumer choice, although it is by no means clear that the modernist notion of individual consent as
choice is really in play. In any case, the available technologies may enable a far less acceptable interpretation. The slide between the
understandable desire to maximize fetal potential to wanting the best baby as such may suggest a new
form of eugenics, but for all that, the conceptualization of the issue in terms of individual agency surely
misses the point. It is not so much the destruction of unwanted gametes and foetuses per se that should concern feminist bioethicists, but the projective
In effect,
manipulation of the corporeal qualities of future populations. For all their high-tech aura, the bioscientific procedures already available perpetuate a familiar scenario .
They are, surely, paradigmatic examples of the kind of disciplinary and regulatory control that Foucault
names as a characteristic of modern biomedicine. The women, though recruited in the role of traditional
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
rational maximizers, nonetheless submit their bodies to surveillance that is ostensibly self-chosen, and do
so in the cause of producing better, healthier babies as defined by normative standards. Given that any proposed
elimination or correction inevitably implies a process of normalization, the bioethical question at stake in all this is whether there is any justification in privileging one
form of phenotype above others. The issue is particularly acute around potential disabilities iconically conditions such as Down syndrome which as Rayna Rapp
points out throws up potential conflicts between feminism and the disability rights movement. In her major qualitative study of amniocentesis in the US where the
procedure is thoroughly entrenched as a right of selfmanagemen Rapp asks: How is it possible to contest the eugenic and stigmatizing definition of disabilities which
seems to underlie prenatal diagnosis, while still upholding the rights of individual women to determine what kind of medical care, and what sorts of pregnancy
decisions, are in their own best interests? . . . Can public policy encompass a position of support for disabled children and their families at the same time that it
supports women who use prenatal diagnosis and abortion to avoid giving birth to children with some disabilities? (Rapp, 2000: 501) Faced with the plethora of tests
that the new technologies enable, women can experience their ethical responsibilities as more complicated rather than simplified. In a few instances the issue is
relatively clear: if the relevant therapy were available and this is particularly true where the issue is correction rather than elimination it would be difficult to justify
non-intervention in cases where a prospective child would otherwise inevitably suffer a painful and early infant death, as in Tay-Sachs disease or thalassaemia, for
example. In reality, however, relatively
few current therapies offer a corrective approach, and in any case most
congenital disabilities or diseases are far more complex in their effect and predictability. Most
bioethicists, dealing in current possibilities, have some concept of balancing the notion of a life worth
living against varying degrees of illness or disability, but it involves a fairly crude hierarchy of difference
that assumes some normative standard. The difficulty is that in many, even most, cases, it is unclear a) whether a gene will be expressed or
simply carried; b) how severe any condition might be; c) the extent to which specific environmental factors will either advance or impede the effect. In any case, even
in those rare instances where genetic analysis can point to certain premature death as with cases of Huntingdons disease which is coded on a dominant gene and is
always fatal it would be impossible to judge whether or not a person predetermined to die in their 40s would have a life worth living. As a projective conceptual
exercise, the standard can only be objective and abstract, based on societal values that are dominant now .
Moreover, the standard presupposes that a knowledge of genetic configurations codes not only for possible or even certain states of disability or disease, but for an
individually invariant human nature. What is left out of account is the phenomenological sense of the mutually constitutive nature of living in the world, whereby
The subject is always irreducibly

embodied, but not as a singularity. What is at stake rather is an open-ended process of becoming in a
world of others that resists the imposition of normative evaluations. As Foucault made clear, biopower
and normative power are intimately intertwined, and operate both on the level of the individual and on
the level of the species (1979: 1413). Precisely that trajectory marks the reach of genetic therapy, which can intend to alter not only singular bodies,
although corporeal form is not separable from qualities of mind, nor is it the sole key to personal disposition .
but the species phenotype as a whole. Unlike procedures directed at genetic variations carried in the autosomal chromosomes, germ-line therapy intends the
manipulation of the genes of the sex chromosomes, with the result that changes will be reproduced in subsequent generations. Given that mutations can always recur
spontaneously, it may not be possible to permanently eliminate what are seen as undesirable genetic traits, but the line of inheritance which is the more usual mode of
transmission can be broken for good. Many conditions could be erased from individual family lines, and over time from the population as a whole, so that the
offending genes would be unlikely to reappear in the gene pool. As proponents of disability rights have pointed out, the desirability of a congenitally sanitized world is
far from self-evident, if only because those whose forms of embodiment would still be atypical by reason of postnatal accident or disease, for example would be
even more likely to face discrimination than at present. By making appeal to the supposed neutrality of scientific endeavour, the researchers engaged on genetic
projects might well respond with the familiar argument that such socio-cultural considerations are beyond their remit, yet much authorized bioscientific discourse
indicates otherwise.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Health
Looking after the health and safety of the population gives the government more control over the
population and justifies surveillance.
Bell 2006
(Colleen, Centre for International and Security Studies, York University,Surveillance Strategies and Populations at Risk: Biopolitical
Governance in Canadas National Security Policy, Sage Journals)
There are two notable characteristics of the policy that illuminate important aspects of modern power
relations. The first is the articulation of the freedom, health and safety of the Canadian population as a primary
security objective. While continuing to share an understanding of the state (and therefore also political
authority) as the solution to the problem of (in)security, the treatment of the population as a core
national security concern represents a departure from traditional interpretations of security, which have
tended to posit states as the primary, and often only, objects. The second characteristic concerns the
emphasis on surveillance. While the policy explicitly devotes only one strategic area to intelligence, further investigation
shows that securing each strategic area relies in large part on the development of routine surveillance
practices. These characteristics inform a security approach that rationalizes Canada both as a sovereign state oriented to ends
means strategies and as a collective population that requires subjection to regulatory mechanisms to secure it from a range of broadly
conceived risks that fit under the equally ambiguous rubric of liberty, health and safety. This article examines Canadas first-ever
national security policy by taking up Foucaults postulation that modern society is marked by biopower, a mechanism of power that is
principally concerned with the management of biological life. As a power focused on life, biopolitics has meant that the
problem of how best to govern has not only been posed in terms of effecting ultimate dominion over a
sovereign territory, but increasingly as an issue of yielding productive services from the citizenry.
According to Foucault, reason of state is no longer confined to the will of the prince, but is government
in accordance with the states strength, which includes the endsmeans instrumental rationality
associated with state survival in a competitive international system conjoined with the observance of
what is governed and how government might improve or enhance the qualities of a population (Gordon,
1991: 910). This study examines how Canadas national security policy is mobilized through discourses and administrative practices
that take elusive risks to the freedom, health and safety of the population as an opportunity for action, and is made possible through a
generalized expansion of surveillance. The biopolitical character of security has greatly reduced the traditionally accepted
distinctions between the state as a military and legitimated actor and the state as a service-providing, regulatory agency for the
management of the population. This not only reinforces the state as a pre-eminent, direct authority, but ushers in a set of
decentralized and indirect mechanisms of rule that are principally activated through population monitoring. The national security
policy demonstrates a form of biopolitical governance that treats the problems for political freedom, equality and democratic
accountability posed by encroaching national security measures as largely negligible in the face of supposedly indeterminable danger.
While illustrating a clear objective to secure the health and safety of the national population from threats, it
does not take seriously the freedoms that may be at stake in such action. The most sustained consideration of freedom,
rather, is the claim that freedom is best protected by the security measures proposed, because dangers to freedom are presented as a
consequence of the threats to which Canada is supposedly subjected, rather than as connected to the governance and security
practices of the Canadian state. Security thus becomes the solution not only to the problem of indeterminate
danger, but also to the problem of freedom. Despite the human-based security concerns upon which the policy is
premised, state-centric security objectives that call upon coercive and militarized tactics are not only left intact, but have found new
sources of legitimacy. Securing the health and safety of the population serves as the principle criterion for
discretionary state power and for risk-profiling motivated by suspicion.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Disease
The States use of fear of a disease outbreak is the discourse used by the state to support its move of
security and emergency control into the private health sector. The plan represents the very fear the
promotes further biopolitical control.
Hunter 2007
(Nan D., Professor of Law and Director, Center for Health, Science and Public Policy, Brooklyn Law School, Public-Private Health
law: Multiple Directions in Public Health, lexis)
Traditionally, we have assumed that the law of public health is essentially the cluster of issues revolving around the operations of the government agencies that
comprise the public health system. The changes in the foundational strata underlying the public health field that I have identified in this article call that assumption
into question. The architecture of governance in the public health field is in flux, with trends moving in multiple and sometimes contradictory directions. Some
government authorities are proposing sweeping authorities for detention and surveillance and pressing for tighter command procedures in responding to all forms
of emergencies. Other policy-making bodies are generating infrastructure partnership models, and yet others are advocating indirect modes of disease control that
will ultimately depend as much on employment law as public health law.
The increasing role of trans-national governance

structures further complicates the field. n173 The changes happening today in public health have broad resonance. Some open up a new
angle of vision into the national security state. Other aspects of emergency planning illustrate subtle technologies of governance that operate at multiple points of
An employer can, in a subtle way, take on the functions of a quarantine agent, even as
individual citizens incorporate new disciplines of health into their daily lives. In these ways, health
emergency planning adds another layer to the biopower of the state, in its potential to shift how we
understand the identities associated with citizenship and regulation . In both branches of the new governance
discourse emerging in public health, economic issues are central. New governance approaches within the health
emergency framework explicitly foreground the principle that a key component of population health
and national security is a healthy and secure economy. Thoughout discussions of infectious disease
emergencies, biological incapacity at the individual level aligns with economic incapacity at the
collective level. The prescriptions of economic health policy are directed to employers, who are advised
to review what their legal obligations are for providing leave, n174 and individuals, who are told to
"consider maintaining a cash reserve." n175 Using a new governance lens to think about the multiple directions for policy-making
public-private intersection.
operating within public health provides a richer sense of how this field is increasingly knit together with broader trends in American government. There has not yet
been substantial crossover between new governance theory and national security analysis. Public health emergency policy presents both sets of issues. The sum of
these developments should also encourage us to rethink how we define the boundaries of a public health system or of public health law. If public [*119] health
law consists of the legal doctrine most fundamental to the operation of the public health system, then its scope will change as the system itself changes, becoming
reconfigured as emergency and security law and expanding into the private sector. Regulating population health is multi-faceted and multi-sectoral and,
Today's
changes in the field of public health take us back in some ways, to fears associated with infectious
diseases that lacked effective cures or vaccines. But these changes also move us ahead toward new understandings of what practices
increasingly, the product of government-private sector partnership. It is also wired into aspects of law that, on their face, do not address health.
constitute government and governance. This dynamism creates challenges for those who analyze and teach public health law, as well as for our students. In the
future, practitioners of what constitutes public health law in these redefined terms will include not just lawyers for traditional public health agencies and public
health care systems, but also attorneys who work in a wide array of private law fields as well. Focusing on theories of governance is one important way to link the
public health field to broader understandings of society, to convey its intellectual richness, and to prepare students for critical practice. From a more theoretical
perspective, public health law offers the opportunity to study the interaction of varying models of governance as they develop, in real time. Policy texts and the
practices they signify constitute a portion of that law, if we understand law to encompass the full range of discourses and institutions that regulate behavior.
Perhaps most significantly, public
health policy has become a venue for insinuating the normalization of

emergency discourse into non-emergency governmental policy-making.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Obesity
The affirmatives impact about obesity is just the same false health claims that government controlled
health practitioners have been telling for years in an attempt to make people follow certain weight loss
norms. This represents the states control of biopolitics spreading into everyday life.
Heyes 2006
(Cressida J. Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, Canada, Foucault Goes to Weight Watcher, Project Muse)
"Losing weight is good for your health." True or false? For many in the over-developed world it is an accepted truth that we are almost all too fat and that losing
weight will, with the exception of a few unfortunate anorexic, ill, or preternaturally thin individuals, have positive health consequences. However, this discourse of
the "war on obesity" relies on a number of elisions and half-truthsor even, as the title of Glen Gaesser's flagship book
suggests, Big Fat Lies (2002). Here, I will assume rather than argue for a number of countercultural truths about weight, dieting, and health that are effectively
First, the great reduction of this debate is the assumption that weight itself is a
stand-in for health, with the corollary false beliefs that losing weight automatically solves health
problems and that gaining weight (or being heavier than a stipulated maximum all along) automatically
creates them. The second myth is that there is a standardized range within which each individual's
weight must fall in order for her to be "healthy." Standardized weight tables are artifacts of actuarial
insurance company definitions that were themselves never based on comprehensive statistical
information. They have changed over the years for no medical reason, and have become a better
measurement of social acceptability than morbidity or mortality. Even those who are "obese" (body mass index over 30) can
defended by other commentators.2
trace many health problems (which may correlate with high weight), to such causative links as lack of exercise, a high sugar diet, and [End Page 128] so on.3
Conversely, one can be fit, healthy, and heavy. Third, a huge majority of diets will fail, in the sense that even those who succeed in losing weight in the short term will
regain it in the medium to long term. The corporate Weight Watchers' website even candidly sells the company as a good investment by saying: "Meeting members
typically enroll to attend consecutive weekly meetings and have historically demonstrated a consistent re-enrollment pattern across many years" (Weight Watchers
2002), while it is a standard trope of published "success stories" that one may join and quit and rejoin a diet program many timesalways, of course, "before it finally
works."4 So, why does the weight-loss industry continue to be a multimillion dollar enterprise? Why are commercial diet programs, diet food products, diet drugs and
now surgeries, and self-help books, services, or websites enjoying booming sales in all Western countries and expanding into new regions? Can the widespread
popularity of attempts to lose weight be understood only as the product of false consciousnessthe result of systematically obscuring the truth about health, weight,
and recidivism? The ongoing popularity of weight-loss programs can be partly explained through ignorance and misconceptions: those who have not tried before have
every reason to believe they will succeed in losing weight and keeping it off, while those who have previously tried and failed believe that different behaviors this time
Most health-care practitioners and policy makers tout the claim

that weight loss in and of itself is good for one's health, and the diet industry funds research, lobbies
medical providers, and advertises assiduously. Given the intensity of the pressure to conform to beauty
ideals, of fat phobia, and of false beliefs about health and weight, much is at stake that may inspire even
the most cynical dieter to try another plan. Finally, the increasingly common knowledge that "diets don't work" has also been obscured by the
around will put them into the magic minority of success stories.
new linguistic conventions diet vendors favor. We are now sold long-established dieting practices under new descriptions, such as "lifestyle change" or "eating
program": "When I finally reached my goal, I was so accustomed to following the Plan that it no longer felt like a dietit felt like a lifestyle," pronounces Stephanie
in her "Success Story" on the Weight Watchers' website (October 15, 2003).5 If "slimming" or "reducing" do not capture the contemporary (female) imagination, then
many popular beliefs

and concomitant dieting behaviors can be explained, in light of my previous observations, using the
language of false consciousness. In its Marxian formulations, the concept of false consciousness implies
that certain social realities are systematically obscured by an internally coherent ideology whose
propagation has material benefits for a dominant group. A systematic set of beliefs about health, beauty,
and weight would indeed appear to conspire to induce a state of false consciousness, [End Page 129] especially
among consumers who are less knowledgeable about the inner workings of the diet industry or medical establishment . This ideology functions to
support oppressive structures: in this case, fat phobia, monomaniacal body aesthetics, and false claims
"lifestyle change" with its aura of enlightenment, progress, and self-improvement surely does. In the language of political theory,
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
about what constitutes good health generate profits for beauty and diet industries, and are, in turn, fed
to health-care providers for whom they often represent a convenient reductionism. Alternative accounts
of weight, food, and health carry little research funding or corporate endorsement. Nonetheless, ideological captivity
in the form of false consciousness cannot explain all of the power of weight-loss dieting as a cultural practice. Many dieters are well aware of the contradictions in this
ideology, yet try diet after diet and yo-yo their weight (which, there is very sound evidence to show, is bad for your health [Gaesser 2002, 14450]). They resent the
profits made by corporations peddling diet services or products, and many women especially will agree that a diversity of body types ought to be celebrated and that
the fashion for thinness is deplorable and oppressive. The sheer magnitude of the contradictions generated by our access to information about the failure rates of
dieting implies that counterdiscourses ought to be more successful than in fact they are. While it is true that being thin (or at least less fat) will, generally speaking,
work to one's advantage in the employment and dating markets (see Solovay 2000, esp. chap. 8 and notes), it is clearly false that anyone can become and remain thin
(or even not fat). A central claim of this article is that the continued popularity of dieting cannot entirely be explained using a model of captivation by false beliefs .
suggest that a false consciousness model, following Marx, must be supplemented by an account that
understands power as both repressive and enabling, following Foucault.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Obesity
The governments control over the weight of the population represents government created norms which
further its biopolitical control. This control of weight eventually leads to people being drawn so far into
self-governance they literally lose all sense of proportion.
Heyes 2006
Similarly, Susan Bordo "examines the normalizing role of diet and exercise by analyzing popular representations through which their cultural meaning is crystallized,
metaphorically encoded, and transmitted." Specifically, interpreting the physical body as representative of the social body, she reads "some dominant meanings that are
connected, in our time, to the imagery of slenderness" as "the text or surface on which culture is symbolically written" (1993, 18687). [End Page 132] The
body shape and size increasingly

being read as a visible indicator of the inner moral self. For Bordo, the failures and contradictions of the
management of appetite symbolize the unstable tensions in consumer capitalism : "As producers of goods and services
slenderness ideal, she suggests, embodies moral judgments of the proper management of impulse and desire, with
we must sublimate, delay, repress desires for immediate gratification; we must cultivate the work ethic. On the other hand, as consumers we must display a boundless
capacity to capitulate to desire and indulge in impulse; we must hunger for constant and immediate satisfaction" (199). The theoretical framework Bartky and Bordo
Their
Foucauldian accounts show how normalization is enacted through ever-finer measurement and closer
surveillance of the subject population. For example, standard height-weight tables are themselves a macrotool for normalizing the populationfor taking a vast and diverse group of people and establishing a
"normal range" to which every individual bears some relationship. Deviation from the norm is then (falsely) read as proof of
behaviors that can be pathologized, just as conformity is (falsely) taken as evidence of health and good conduct . Biopower here thus operates both
at an epidemiological level and at the level of the production of a weight-based moral identity in the
individual. "Docility is a major objective of most successful normalized disciplinary practices," writes
advance can offer a number of more specific insights into the local practices of weight-loss dieting, which were not the object of their original research .
McWhorter (1999, 180), and at the level of the individual weight-watcher it is assiduously cultivated. Any evinced skepticism about Weight Watchers' methods, or
unchastened confession of deviance from the plan, must be actively suppressed lest the house of cards come tumbling down. Most people who attend Weight Watchers
fail to lose weight at all, or quickly reach a plateau and then start to regain. Most of these appear to drop out; of those who joined in my first weeks (identifiable by the
week-by-week leaflets they clutched during meetings), I could identify only one or two four months later. My regular leader, Nancy, obviously had little emotional
energy to spend on those who couldn't make the grade.6 When a member would insist that she had stuck to the plan and still not lost weight, Nancy was endlessly
capable of ad hoc explanations and pseudoscience"Your body is holding on to the weight. It will come off next week," for example. But, when pressed, she could
also become brusque, or scold, reducing a delinquent member to the role of naughty child. I have never been in another adult milieu where discipline was applied to
Thin people apparently share more than a

body mass indexthey also have a whole relationship to the world, a way of thinking. The idea of
playing a part, alone, to oneself, in order to consolidate an identity perfectly exemplifies performativity
theory and the internalizing of hierarchical subjectivities. As McWhorter (1999, 28) says of the insistence that homosexuals
such tiny behaviors and deviance greeted with such serious and inflexible responses from the staff.
iteratively confess their identity, "That's what your sexuality becomes, or maybe always was: a thing to be known, an epistemic object. And that is what you are." As
willing participants in a disciplinary technology, dieters measure and scrutinize themselves far more precisely and conscientiously than those who must be educated
into more reluctant self-monitoring behaviors. The organized diet program is thus a particularly extreme version of panoptic culture, which is why it attracts this kind
of Foucauldian attention. Weight Watchers' current program is exemplary in this regard, requiring that one evaluate the "Points" value of everything consumed.
Members must write down in a food journal everything they eat, along with its Points value, and are also expected to check off six glasses of water, two servings of
milk products, and five servings of fruit and vegetables per day. (Remember: this is the new, liberating plan, with much [End Page 134] greater choice and
flexibility!) The obsession with measuring, recording, and hierarchy extends to weight: scales are calibrated to within 0.2 of a pound, and one's weight is recorded
As members are drawn deeper and deeper into the

culture of self-management through precision measurement, they often lose, quite literally, all sense of
proportion. Thus someone might say, "I lost 0.4 this week," as if this figure indicated anything more than the added weight of a pair of jeans. Other
weekly to this level of precision, with weight loss (or gain) similarly noted.
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commentators cite absurd behaviors around the weigh-in: "I lined up in front of the scale with women who wore flimsy summer dresses and thongs in the dead of
winter in order to weigh less. Actually, the line started at the bathroom, which everyone visited first to make sure they didn't weight an ounce too much, some of them
even spitting in the sink" (Fraser 1998, 138; see also Stinson 2001, 105). Thus a feminist approach to disciplinary power offers a number of valuable insights into this
specific institutional context: the normalization of a population is transformed into an ontology of persons, which is then internalized by those persons as "identities ."
The process is particularly transparent here, in a way that the emergence of sexual identities, for example, is not, partly because height-weight charts and commercial
weight-loss organizations are a postwar phenomenon. 8 Likewise, the disciplinary practices at play in the organized diet program require a particularly fine-grained and
increasingly absurd regulation of food and exercise habits that is very much like the obsessive behaviors commonly associated with eating disorders. Thus the
commercial diet blurs the line between pathology and "normal" eating, even as it attempts to shore it up with the rhetoric of improving one's health. So, is the
popularity of dieting merely a result of rapid and successful internalization of beauty ideals that can be best exploited for profit through the deployment of biopower?
Is diet resistance a matter of exposshow the punters how false their hopes and how abject their participation, and the desire to diet will be regretfully left behind?
The answer in both cases is clearly no. Dieting has a cultural resonance beyond the primarily repressive and disciplinary picture I've painted here.
Baylor Debate Camp
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Link to Obesity
The state attempts to normalize the population by deeming obesity as socially unacceptable leads to total
state control of life where individual ethics and control is unacceptable.
Heyes 2006
The work of Foucauldian feminists on dieting, I will argue, would be more complete if it mirrored the phases of Foucault's own oeuvre, showing how not only
technologies of power but also technologies of the self are engaged in a complex interplay.
The technologies of the self the process of

dieting cultivates expand the dieter's capacities. These capacities, as McWhorter implies, are often
recycled back into disciplinary practices; nonetheless, they have a resonance and potential that could
exceed the regime of normalization that generated them. Observing this process in one very local case study, I hope to show that a
commercial enterprise has co-opted working on oneself in ways feminists need to understand in order to resist. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault made a
thematic transition from his earlier work on technologies of power, to a new emphasis on technologies of
the self, "which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain
number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to
transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality" (1988, 18).
Nikolas Rose has identified three ways of relating to the self: epistemologically (knowing yourself), despotically (mastering yourself), and attentively (caring for
It is the attentive technologycare of the selfthat

Foucault thinks we have failed to understand as a politicized activity, although arguably the vast selfhelp industry capitalizes on our inchoate need in the postindustrial West to develop a satisfying rapport
soi. He returns to the ancients to find ways of living that, although inevitably implicated in disciplinary practices, cultivate a broader repertoire of human
yourself), each of which is a different kind of technology of the self (Rose 1996).
possibilities instead of increasing docility. This is an ethicalas opposed to a moralproject, which returns to the art of living as a project not captured by the
Christian (and academic analytic) philosophical emphasis on prohibitions and commandments. To capture the activities he had in mind, Foucault reclaimed the Greek
term askesisthe struggle to create an art of living that ethically engages the world: For the Greeks the word does not mean "ascetic," but has a very broad sense
denoting any kind of practical training or exercise. For example, it was a commonplace to say that any kind of art or technique had to be learned by mathesis and
askesisby [End Page 138] theoretical knowledge and practical training. . . . This techne tou biou, this art of living, demands practice and training: askesis. (Foucault
2001, 143) Care of the self is not an indulgence, or a distraction from the affairs of the polis, but rather a necessary condition of effective citizenship and relationships.
The notion that diet can constitute a

technology of the self is not at all new. In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault included a lengthy discussion of
ancient views of dietetics, which he suggested was often a more important aspect of the "regimen of
pleasures" than sexual relations (1985, 99139). Rose is right, I believe, that through Foucault we can see that the
relationship between government and assujetissement needs to extend to techniques of the body: a
genealogy of subjectification should be concerned not only with ethics as the permitted and forbidden,
but also with "the ways in which different corporeal regimes have been devised and implanted in
rationalized attempts to enjoin a particular relation to the self and to others" (Rose 1996, 137). Little philosophical
We owe it to ourselves and to others to constitute ourselves as ethical agents through asketic practices.
attention has been paid, however, to the details of these case studies in Foucault's later work, and almost no feminist attention at all. They are generally taken to be
rather droll excurses on the idiosyncrasies of ancient lifestyles, the philosophical purpose of which rests not in their content but in their form. The central medium for
the transmission of asketic advice about diet was (and arguably is now again) the hupomnemata, a word that in its original context has "a very precise meaning: it is a
copybook, a notebook":
Baylor Debate Camp
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Link to Democracy
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Democracies is a means to a common end to refine and subject docile bodies to a inward panopticon,
citizens continually conscious of the biopolitical gaze upon them.
Constable 1991
Marinanne , Foucault & Walzer; Sovereignty, Strategy & the state, Marianne Constable, JD , PhD Social policy Berkely, Professor
Under democratic conditions, "everyone is taught the basic knowledge necessary for an active
citizenship, and the great majority of students learn it." But "simple equality" of this sort is only
appropriate until "the core has been grasped and the common end achieved."6 Because the political community
will want "the best possible advice and service," specialized offices will require further training. "Hence the need for a selection process
aimed at locating within the set of future citizens a subset of future 'experts.' "'6 Hence democracy, as in
Foucault's description of discipline, trains, "in order to levy and select 'all the more." 66 In Walzer's democracy,
voting and arguing serve to distribute and disperse power. In voting, power is anonymous, its units interchangeable and formally equal. Since
"democracy puts a premium on speech, per-suasion, rhetorical skill" and "what we might call the rule of reasons," though, individual citizens who
differ in discursive talent will share in decision making to greater or lesser degrees. Some will be more influen-tial or more effective than others.67
This is no cause for concern though, according to Walzer, for democracy requires not equal power, but equal rights. "Rights here are guaranteed
opportunities to exercise minimal power (voting rights) or to try to exercise greater power (speech, assembly, and petition rights)." Thus rights
guarantee a diversity of opportunities and occasions of power. The cost
of such diffusion is, of course, an eternal vigilance,

reminiscent of Panopticism,6' where citizens are continually on the alert for disruptions and
inefficiencies in the running of their own democratic machine. Political rights to power thus "underpin a
process that has no endpoint, an argument that has no definitive conclusion.""
Link to Democracy
The modern state searches for a democratic society but in a quest where individuals can be so easily sacrificed only
leads to a biological existence under state calculations, this factors are already predicated in democratic societies,
democracy has began to crystallize necropolitics where militaristic power and war machines maintain economic
infrastructures.
Clough 04
Patricia Ticineto, TECHNOSCIENCE, GLOBAL POL ITICS, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM, Social Text t 80, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2004. Copyright 2004 by
Duke University Press. Muse
Biehl draws on Foucault, Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben, retracing the link between biopolitics
and the rise of the modern state, where the demand for the free life, the good life, has
resulted in the drawing of biological life, or bare life, as Agamben calls it, under the control of
the states calculations.37 However, as Agamben sees it, this individualizing of human life by
making it an object of state power also underlies modern democracy, where the individual
seeks to become the subject rather than Future Matters 17 the object of state power. Thus with the
modern state a threat arises of the possible reduction of democracy to totalitarian biopolitical
control: Agambens point of reference is Nazism and the Holocaust. But surely it is not just
the past but the future that draws us to this line of thinking. Achille Mbembe has argued that although
biopolitics has been linked to the modern state and the Holocaust, it is the case that colonialism had already been a form of the
politics of life and death, its mechanisms of biopolitical control intensified in Nazism.38 But this point also is made to suggest that in
neocolonialism, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, biopolitical control has intensified
again and has become what Mbembe calls necropolitics, where politics (state and nonstate
politics) has become the deployment of the right to kill on the basis of enmity within systems
that can only function in the turbulence of a state of emergency. Mbembe points to the sign
of a new machinic assemblage emerging out of turbulence and complexity, where
necropolitics intensifi es biopolitics, that is, when politics is a form of war engaging, if not
provoking, the ongoing activity of what Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari describe as a war-machine. As a
military power that is bought and sold, the war machine arrives in part with the failure of the
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state to maintain an economic infrastructure of political authority, such that war can be
waged by those who have no state but who have gained control over a given territory.
With this form of war, a question is raised as to how bodies, life, and death are related to
power. This question is raised not only because the technologies of destruction are now more tactile,
more anatomical and sensorial. The question also is raised because the practices of
necropolitics, as Mbembe sees it, are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary
apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal
economy now represented by the massacre. 39 The war machine not only kills outright, it
also takes possession of the resources for life in a given territory, an economic function of the
war machine that either disperses populations or immobilizes them, leaving them to a life of
living death. In this context, Mbembe concludes, suicide bombers appear to be a sign of an agency of
resistance. But what of this politics of resistance?
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Link to Bioterror
Baylor Debate Camp
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Bioterror and the attempt to control it stem from biotechnology induced death and life suspension, more
destruction is predicated on destruction in the realm of the war machine
Clough 04
As a human body becoming exploding metal, a suicide bomber takes his or her
life and the others all at once. There is no overcoming, no living through
death in order to become, no gain in the eradication of the other, only the
instantaneous move to the realm of the dead and to the world beyond this world,
where it has become impossible to live, especially for those marked to live
only terror and death. As such, suicide bombers are a sign of the becoming
equivalence of an affect economy with (in) security and surveillance, war and
terror, where biotechnologically induced death and biotechnologically
simulated life meet. We are thus horribly reminded of the necessity for
rethinking a framework of social criticism, of shifting focus from
epistemological concerns to ontological ones. When reporting massive
destruction that already is embedded in, becomes part of, the destruction,
then every surveying of data about costs of war, the numbers of bodies blown
away and those left to die in social abandonment, becomes part of the
turbulence that offers no fixed place, no standpoint on which to authorize
knowledge. When there is no outside of turbulence, an external material world,
thought as a closed system, cannot offer a model of authoritative knowledge
with which to frame social criticism. This is not merely an effect of the
epistemological crisis intensified with cultural studies and late-twentiethcentury critical theories, or a dismissing of an external material world, as
cultural studies and critical theories were accused of doing. Rather, there has
been an ontological shift in thought; the dynamism of matter that has come
with the thought of technoscience, along with turbulence in complex systems,
under far-from-equilibrium conditions, offer themselves for rethinking a framework of
social criticism.
Link to War/Mil Readiness

Warfare has been revolutionized from that of its predecessor in that the
enemy is no longer an affiliation, party, or nation but of religions and cultures,
this war is not one that can be won but merely sustained, such a global war
encompasses all of modern politics dominating in the elites
CHANDLER 09
DAVID, War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of Global War Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Westminster, UK, Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
SAGE Publications, http://sdi.sagepub.com Vol. 40(3): 243262, DOI: 10.1177/0967010609336204
Baylor Debate Camp
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Hardt & Negri (2006: 5) assert that today we are witnessing a general global state of
war, which erodes the distinctions of modern territorialized frameworks of politics and
law: between the domestic and the international, war and peace, and combatant and
civilian. War, in this framework, becomes the key to understanding power relations in
liberal governmental or biopolitical terms of regulation. On the basis of, and reflecting upon, the
declarations of US authorities, Hardt & Negri (2006: 14) understand global war as unending and unlimited struggle to control and
One consequence of this new kind of war is that

the limits of war are rendered indeterminate, both spatially and temporally.
The old-fashioned war against a nation state was clearly defined spatially . . .
and the end of such a war was generally marked by the surrender, victory, or
truce between the conflicting states. By contrast, war against a concept or a
set of practices, somewhat like a war of religion, has no definite spatial or
temporal boundaries. . . . Indeed, when US leaders announced the war against
terrorism they emphasized that it would have to extend throughout the world
and continue for an indefinite period, perhaps decades or even generations. A
war to create and maintain social order can have no end. It must involve the
continuous, uninterrupted exercise of power and violence. In other words, one
cannot win such a war, or, rather, it has to be won again every day. War has thus become indistinguishable from
police activity. Here, global war is understood to encompass the very framework of
modern politics: a war that the dominant elites are alleged to need to wage to
maintain or police their system of biopolitical order. The shift from a policy
discourse of national defence to one of global security is seen, at face value,
as demonstrating the construction of a new global and deterritorialized order
that depends on actively and constantly shaping the environment through
military and/or police activity. Only an actively shaped world is a secure world (Hardt & Negri, 2006: 20). Hardt
regulate the global social and economic order:
& Negri draw freely from the Foucauldian problematic that reads politics to be merely the extension of or another form of war,
thereby inverting (or clarifying) the Clausewitzian proposition that war is the continuation of politics by other means (see Foucault,
War becomes then a generalized concept for political struggle

and the reproduction of power relations.
2003: 15; 2007: 305306).
Link to Capitalism
Global capitalism is surrounded on the biopolitics and in the collectivization of affectivity in the consumption of value,
its biopolitical control leads to a globalized economy regardless of the affirmative insuring the deterritorialized of
human life into statistical populations

Clough 04
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
The reconfiguration of governance across community, national, regional, and international

organizations is being turned over to risk management, militarism, and policing. under an expanded
grid of control, especially through the marketization of affective capacity. As such, control accompanies the
subsumption of affective capacity, or life itself, into capital. That is, the subsumption of labor into capital is now transforming the
Fordist-Keynesian regime of accumulation, when the laborers social reproduction had itself become a force of production and where laborers demands for higher
wages, shorter hours, increased job security, and a raised standard of living for themselves and their families had been met with technological development and the
expansion of consumer markets for the demanded
global capitalism, there is

ongoing investment in technologies, including biotechnologies, and a deepening of the commodification
of human services through their biomedicalization. This is not only the case of the political economies of
the fi rst world; the biopolitics of an affect economy is felt globally with profound effects. Accordingly,
capitalist accumulation has shifted to the domain of affective, subindividual bodily capacities (body
parts, functions, and powers). There is a collectivization or socialization of affectivity, so that affect, as Brian
Massumi (a symposium participant) puts it, must be thought of as an impersonal flow before it is a subjective content.32 The collectivization of
affectivity allows for the realization of value in the modulation of affect, in the realization of the multiple
force of time on bodies, that is, in the affective switching of bodies from one mode to another in terms of
attention, arousal, interest, receptivity, stimulation, attentiveness, action, reaction, and inaction. In an
affect economy, value is not only a matter of consuming products; rather, value is sought in the
expansion or contraction of affective capacity. Therefore, affect is beyond measure. It not only is beyond the measure of the
consumption of use value in the production of surplus value; affect is beyond measure because it is
power or potential that cannot be limited. It faces obstacles, not limits.33 While beyond measure, affect is
susceptible, however, to biopolitical control, or what Massumi refers to as the powering-upor the powering-awayof potential,
such that the effort to capture the intensity of each, often short-lived, outburst of resistance in the struggle
over the biopolitical control is the very stuff of economic productivity in the becoming of a worldwide or
global political economy of affect.34 At the global level, for example, there is a reconfiguration of state power, in relationship to the power of
products and services. With the transformation of the Fordist-Keynesian regime, in what has been called postmodern or
international and regional organizations, including all sorts of NGOs. Of these organizations, those engaged in relief work and the protection of human rights not only
serve at times to provide the moral justification for exceptional political intervention, if not military intervention, overriding national sovereignty; they also allow for
a network of economic flows, effected by and effecting the expansion of technoscientifi c development of information technologies and biotechnologies worldwide.
These organizations are made to risk lending themselves to the expansion of a political economy of
insecurity and control, as they function in the wake of imposed structural adjustment of economies of
debt and are asked to manage the devastating effects. Assisting in making debt more productive by treating it with a microfinanced
affect economy shaped in the demand for human rights and human security policy commitments, these organizations come to play a part in tilting world
political economy to the deployment of biopolitical control. All around the globe, there is an overriding
of a representational politics of recognizing individual subjects in terms of communities of belonging by
a political economy of biopolitical control where human life is being deterritorialized into statistical
populations that become the condition of possibility for the distribution of chances for life and death,
health and morbidity, fertility and infertility, happiness and unhappiness, freedom and imprisonment.
Increasingly, these are the terms in which gender, sexual, ethnoracial, class, and national differences are being embodied as bodies of information and data, which
are circulated globally and financially leveraged on the same scale. Whether looking at the worldwide treatment of HIV/AIDS,
trafficking in persons, the drug trade, or intercountry adoption, all as ways for producing what Laura Briggs (a symposium participant) has referred to as the
biologically suspect, what emerges is a new experiment with governmentality, where the state, market, and technoscientifi c discourses now meet in the deployment
of biopolitical control.35 Pointing to the practices of state and nonstate agencies deploying global and local biopolitics, Joo Biehl (a symposium participant) has
argued that in this experiment with governmentality, there is an intensifying contradiction between a generalized culture of human rights and emergent exclusive
structures through which these rights are realized, biologically speaking, but only on a selective basiswho, for how long, and at what cost? In this context, letting
die is a political action, continuous with the biomedical and political power that makes live.
Baylor Debate Camp
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Link to Homophobia
Attempts by the state to stop homophobia actually increases biopower and re-entrenches the very
homophobia the affirmative attempts to solve for
Zylinska 07
Joanna, Of Swans and Ugly Ducklings: Bioethics between Humans, Animals, and Machines Goldsmiths, University of London, Project Muse
The desire to possess the face from the time before the world was made, which Gilman talks about in relation
to cosmetic surgery, can be translated into a desire for a world without alterity, for the
annihilation of difference and the return to a fantasy moment when the self
was a master of time, space, and language. Even though this fantasy can be
said to arise out of a fear of difference and can be driven by racism, sexism,
or homophobia, I want to suggest that we can also interpret it as an attempt to
escape from the biopolitical regime that marks some bodies as different
racially, erotically, or in terms of their ability to perform well in the labor
market. In other words, we can see it as a psychological defense mechanism
that actually incorporates the splinters of the biopolitical thinking from which
it wants to escape, in the form of racism, sexism, or body- and beautyfascism.
Baylor Debate Camp
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Link to Justice
Sovereign institution of justice through politics furthers biopolitical control of the state
and ends in radical violence
Librett 07
(From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of Testimony Giorgio Agambens Fulfillment of Metaphysics, Jeffrey S. Librett, Professor of German at the University
of Oregon. He is the founding editor of the ejournal Konturen and the author of The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses
Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2000). He is currently finishing a book entitled Orientalist Metaphysics: Typology and Panic in
Modern German Letters.)
If the characterization of the passage from zo to bios stresses the way in which law excludes its subjects,
then the theorization of sovereignty and the homo sacer develops the consequences of the fact that,
although it excludes its subjects, law still remains grounded in its other. According to the paradox of sovereignty that the
state of exception makes explicit, the law, as a merely formal configuration considered apart from its constituting agency, is only able to ground itself on its own
The figure of the sovereign as the one who decides on the state of exception is one of the privileged figures
This sovereign, however, is [End Page 18] always split in two: there is, in
effect, a good suspension of the law, one which grounds law and fulfills it in an origin/end that
comprises something better than the law, such as the laws substantial meaning (for example, the
Fhrer, whose Word has force of law, or Jesus, who brings us the laws essence, faith, and grace); and then there is the bad
suspension of the law, and that which must be made accountable, ideologically and sacrificially, for the
fact that, insofar as law is suspended, not just meaningful content but also chaos and the end of meaning
ensue. Schmitt says, for example, that the state of exception creates an order that must be established prior to the
(re)establishment of the constitution because law cannot be applied to chaos (a claim Agamben navely grants him).
But this claim remains problematic insofar as, for example, the dictators consciousness and his ultimate
lack of control of himself and others in fact always amount to chaos as well as order, as the history of the
Third Reich also proves.10 The chaotic element of the law, its inconsistency, is the flip side of its
grounding in something outside itself: whatever grounds the law from without also ungrounds it (and remains
ungrounded) in itself. Thus, the sovereign who figures as the ground of the law will always be shadowed by a
double, as the one who stands for the ungrounding of the law as such, the material outside of the law
that undoes law, makes it violent, turns it away from justice, and so on. This is why it makes sense that in Agambens
suspension.
for the ground of this self-suspensive character of the law.
account the sovereign is the one who always constitutesas a kind of negative other or alter egothe homo sacer, the other one who is construed as simultaneously
outside and inside the law, the outside of the law that affects it on the inside, as the letter on which the spirit must depend always affects the latter from outside on the
inside.
Agamben registers this thought concretely when, toward the end of the book, he ranges the Jew in
the camps alongside the Fhreramong othersas different figures of the sovereign/ homo sacer double.
On the other hand, what may be confusing in Agambens account is that he sometimes speaks of the exception in terms of the sovereign, sometimes in terms of the
homo sacerbecause both are excepted from the realm of law, both included by way of exclusion. Yet he does not always emphasize with adequate clarity the way in
which, as nonetheless emerges from his analysis, both are two sides of the same nonself-grounding character of the law, perhaps even of its negative ontological
11
The tendency not to be able to distinguish between sovereign and homo sacer, however, as
between the good suspender of the law and the bad suspender of the law (or as between the unification of its
disunity and the [End Page 19] disunification of its unity), will always entail that the sovereign (and the ideology and apparatuses that support
the sovereign) must aggressively pursue and indeed persecute the homo sacer, the sovereigns negative double,
chasing the homo sacer ever more outside the realm of law.12 This is where the sacrificial element, despite Agambens claims to the
foundation.
contrary, will enter. We have thus far seen how the inscription of bare life into the juridicopolitical sphere, in the Homo Sacer project, is at least homologous, if not
the ungroundedness of law

functions for Agamben so as to require the truly dangerous, double supplement of a sovereign and a
homo sacer, as subject of and subject to the law, respectively. Agambens philosophical orientation asserts itself here
identical, with Agambens conception of the inscription of voice into writing. In addition, I have sketched how
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in his negative view of law. The resultant structurethis juridicopolitical dimension of

sovereignty/homo saceris what generates, for Agamben, a broad range of phenomena whose common and
regrettable character is their radical violence. Having reconstructed to this extent the outlines of Agambens recent concerns in relation to
his broader project, the critique of graphocentric metaphysics, I will now explain what I take to be the limitations of this model of the juridicopolitical, the distortions
entailed by the strange mixture of Pauline Christianity and fundamental ontology that comprise Agambens point of departure, his basic philosophical orientation.
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Biopower Links
Link to Justice
Justice decides for our society what is right or wrong. This is institutionalized norms where the state
increases its biopolitical control through defining justice.
Ewald 99
(Foucault and the contemporary scene, Philosophy Social Criticism, http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/25/3/81)
The second point of Foucaults actuality, his contemporary relevance, is concerned with norms, or, perhaps more precisely, measures. One of the questions with
respect to which Foucault has an actuality is the crisis of the sciences, the crisis of knowledges. We are in the middle of a fundamental crisis tied to the crisis of the
sciences, which is the crisis of valuation [expertise]. Foucault was very much interested in valuation, especially in psychiatric appraisals; but in fact, he was always
interested in valuation when he was interested in criminal investigations, examinations, in all the forms of production of knowledge. Todays question
these forms of valuation apparently inscribe themselves in forms of domination and

at the same time have a kind of utility in producing common measures. The norm in Discipline and
Punish is the description of a common measure in a given group, which allows one to say, Here is the
instrument with which we moderns measure ourselves, as we render ourselves comparable,
commensurable. But this question how can one man be commensurable with another? is a philosophically
difficult one. It is the very question of justice. One can only speak about justice, that is to say, equality,
starting from the moment that one introduces a measure, a principle of commensurability. The question
of the norm, for Foucault, was always very closely tied to this idea of the production of a common
measure. Today, and I believe that this is one of our present difficulties, we are precisely experiencing an unprecedented crisis of the measure. We no longer have
which Foucault noted is that
a common measure and we no longer know if we can have one. This is extremely worrying. Because, on the one side, it means that truth-speaking [dire vrai] is
impossible: every valuation, today, is opposed by an equal and opposite valuation. Science is presented in the form of controversies. This is serious because our ethic,
in a sense equally moral as political, since we have known democracy, has been fundamentally tied to the idea that the only valid ethic is a scientific one. If we give up
this idea, many questions will be opened. One example of this difficulty was given at the Rio summit, with the conflict between the signatories of the Heidelberg
declaration and their colleagues.7 The difference between frankly saying everything and saying just anything at all has a fundamental importance for Foucault. In the
measure that we have to admit today that one can say an thing at all and that just anything merits being said or considered (this is a certain manner of exercising the
right to free speech), we are effecting the return of something whose disappearance marked in a certain way for Foucault the beginning of the modern age: the return
of the evil genius. We are in a rather fascinating age where we are no longer exactly the interlocutors or the contemporaries of an infinite and unknowable God that
we are again confronted by an evil genius, by the possibility of extending

doubt to infinity, precisely because of the plurality of undecidable questions among valuations. We are in
an world where one is invited to doubt everything, without having the possibility of discovering a cogito,
nor the possibility of escaping from this infinite logic. I believe that this fundamental difficulty
concerning truth-speaking [dire vrai],which is at the same time a fundamental requirement to introduce
a true speech [dire vrai], is another point where Foucaults work is important.
aids us through the stabilities that he offers, but
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Racism
The Affirmative institution of a plan that spreads biopower cannot solve for
racism because biopolitics is the root cause of racism which leads to violence
Houen 06
(Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker, Theory and EventVolume 9, Number 1, 2006)
If political power is thus increasingly diffused within states, is there some other "special distinction," asks
the distinction between "friend

and enemy," to which "political actions and motives can be reduced" in
general. This distinction between friend and enemy is also applicable to
Foucault's discussion of race and biopolitics in Society Must be Defended. With
biopolitics being directed at the mass life of the population, its ultimate
tendency, states Foucault, is to control "relations between the human race, or
human beings insofar as they are a species" (SMD, 245). Consquently, the spread
of biopolitics also nurtures a growth in racism. For while biopolitics
consolidates the state as a national race, it also draws the livelihood of the
race into economic relations with other nations, other races. The imbrication
of state identity, race, and economics is thus implicit in the sort of "economic
imperialism" that Schmitt describes, an imperialism which Foucault also addresses when he discusses
the history of European colonialism (SMD, 60-1). If the livelihood of the race comes to
involve feeding off other races, the necessity for enforcing the integrity of the
state becomes all the more important. And this becomes a prime cause of
racism, for Foucault: "[Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into
the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must
live and what must die" (SMD, 254). Such racism, he continues, "make[s] the
relationship of war -- If you want to live, the other must die' -- function in a
way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of
biopower" (SMD, 255). But might it not be the case that this power to decide who lives and dies can
Schmitt, that might characterise "the political"? His answer is
also be used by the state as a way of reasserting political control over biopower? And might this not
involve rejuvenating state sovereignty and setting it against biopower's undermining of sovereignty?
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Racism
The Nazi state is an empirical example of Biopower and racism and its
persecution and exclusion of certain races based on false inferiority
Houen 06 (Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker, Theory and EventVolume 9, Number 1,
2006)
Such a state of affairs is precisely what Foucault gestures towards in his conclusions about the racism of Nazi Germany: " The
Nazi state makes the field of life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological
terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other
people, but also its own people" (SMD, 260). This "coextensive" relation is not reducible to one of compatibility,
though. By linking Jews to the evils of usury and international capitalism, the Nazis figured the
Jewish race as a threat from biopower, a biopower threatening the political integrity of the
state. And the extent to which this biopower was figured as anti-statist is the extent to which
the Jews were affirmed not to be political subjects -- hence their status was ultimately
reduced by the Nazis to that of an anti-race, a kind of non-human being. Foucault intimates as much
towards the end of Society Must be Defended: "the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense
Biopower and sovereignty

may be "coextensive," then, but they can also bifurcate: in the case of Nazi Germany, the
state was rejuvenated as sovereign power through figuring and exterminating biopower as
forms of non-political, non-human being. That is not to say that sovereignty and biopower are essentially
of the term: they are threats, either external or internal, to the population [...]" (SMD, 256).
incompatible: in persecuting the Jews, the Nazis were nevertheless invested in formalizing biopower, and they also built up biopower
industries to exterminate Jewish people. As Schmitt argues, then, biopower can also be employed to strip an enemy of political status;
The adversary is [...] no longer called an enemy but a

disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity. A war waged to protect or
in the instance of economic imperialism, he writes,
expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of humanity. 13
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Rights
Expansion of rights granted by state is a limited aspect of freedom. The affirmative acts according to
biopolitics by assuming the position that certain rights are good and should be granted to the citizen.
Tobias 05
(Theory Culture Society 2005; 22; 65, Saul Tobias, Foucault on Freedom and Capabilities)
Among the growing number of theorists who have recently attempted to characterize Foucault as making a positive contribution to political thought, the distinction
between freedom and constraint has proved to be an important, but ultimately, I think, inadequate framework. Reacting to preceding negative and dystopian
readings of Foucault the Foucault of the prison house of discourse approaches to Foucault that have emerged over the last 10 to 15 years emphasize, in one respect
or another, Foucaults commitment to freedom as a political principle. Given the overwhelming forces of constraint that seemed arrayed against the subject and its
The novelty of this new approach

lies in recognizing the imbrications of freedom and power, while distinguishing between situations in
which this relation is conducive to resistance and those in which resistance is systematically blocked. For
these thinkers, freedom is no longer conceived as the absence of constraint, but as the utilization of the
power which circulates in all relations, not least repressive ones, and which is productive as much as it is
constraining. Hence, the organizing framework for discussions of Foucaults political thought has shifted
from the distinction between freedom and constraint, to the distinction between freedom-as-power and
domination. In response to earlier critics such as Nancy Fraser and Charles Taylor, who held that the political efficacy of Foucaults thought was limited by the
freedom, the critical pendulum has now swung in favor of a chastened but hopeful assertion of personal agency.
absence of a normative position concerning the legitimate and illegitimate deployment of power, the notion of freedom-as-power is held to constitute a quasinormative principle underpinning Foucaults work that can orientate political action (see Fraser, 1995; Patton, 1995, 1998; Taylor, 1995). Wendy Brown, in her widely
acclaimed account of the problems and possibilities of contemporary political activism, States of Injury, encapsulates this more recent approach to Foucault in her
for Foucault, insofar as power always produces resistance, the disciplinary subject is
perversely capable of resistance, and in practicing it, practices freedom. Discernible here is the basis for
a curious optimism, even volunteerism in Foucault . . . (1995: 63). Browns position is echoed in the writings of a number of her
assertion that
contemporaries and is part of the concurrence of viewpoints concerning what freedom and its pursuit mean in Foucaults work. First, in contrast to a juridical
conception,
in which freedom is defined in terms of a legislated set of universal rights or entitlements, the
notion of freedom advocated in Foucaults work is described as agent-centered, tending toward
Individualism more than collectivism, and embodied in the very acts of resistance or transgression
carried out by subjugated subjects. For instance, James Bernauer and Michael Mahon write that Foucault s approach focuses
upon the dimension of freedom distinctive of an individuals place or role in life (1994: 1534), while David Owen
characterizes Foucaults politics as entailing, the activity of self-overcoming [that] is constituted through transgressing
social practices (1994: 205). A second feature that supposedly distinguishes Foucaults approach to a
politics of freedom from its traditional predecessors is its emphasis on critical analysis and vigilance. The
interrogation of power cannot conclude with government, that is, with systems of law and legal or extralegal forms of repression, but must extend to governmentality, meaning the modes of organizing knowledge and disciplining bodies that state
apparatuses ma co-opt and employ in the production of subjects. Given this more intricate account of power, Foucaults political philosophy is widely thought to begin
with the assumption that a subtler grasp of the forms of social control that constrain and shape the subject empowers the subject to resist these constraints more
Thomas L. Dumm emphasizes the importance of

vigilance as a precondition for freedom when he writes that: Foucault . . . taught us to be wary of the
institutions through which we are governed. We must always beware of the possibilities that our own
institutional arrangements will encourage the rise of new destructive forces inimical to the possibilities
of our being free. (1996: 153; also see Smart, 1986) For Paul Patton, this vigilance has wider implications for political activism, for it may assist existing
effectively. In the conclusion to his book, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom,
movements for change by distinguishing between those elements of present social reality which remain necessary and therefore unchangeable from those which are
open to change (1995: 357). Finally, the characterization of Foucaults politics in the terms suggested above has helped to simplify the question of the relation
between Foucaults earlier and later thought. The emphasis on self-scrutiny that Foucault draws from the Stoic tradition and which is one of the key features of his
ethical writings becomes part and parcel of the broader social analysis of conditions of domination, considered to be an important objective of Foucaults early work.
Bernauer and Mahon make this connection when writing, in reference to Foucaults description of the care of the self, that Foucaults ethics is an invitation to a
practice of liberty, to struggle and Transgression and that only through such an [ethical] inquiry will the emancipator resources of our specific historical situation be
excavated
(1994 142). Patton describes the work of freedom in Foucault as a process of cultural self-creation, one
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
which seeks to expand the space of possibilities for personal identity (1995: 358) and Dumm similarly refers to a conception
of politics centered upon the ethical activity of self-fashioning: in seeking to make the world habitable, Foucault enunciates a new political theory of freedom, one
that relocates freedom within the realm of politics and in so doing redefines politics as an activity of self-constitution (1996: 3). Through this emphasis on
systemic analysis and self-creation, the later ethical writings are smoothly integrated into a picture of politics which privileges localized struggle through critical
attention and ongoing resistance to the minutiae of domination over grand emancipatory projects that endorse totalizing visions of social transformation.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Federalism
Federalism is not really over rights or power it is over allocating who gets to increase their biopolitical
control and where. Increased federalism actually leads to a world where to be individual is seen as
wrong and everyone is coerced into following their biopolitical ruler much like the prison in the
panopticon
John T. Parry 2005
SOCIETY MUST BE [REGULATED]: BIOPOLITICS AND THE COMMERCE CLAUSE IN GONZALES V. RAICH. AB, summa cum laude, Princeton University JD,
magna cum laude, Harvard Law School. Professor of Law: Lewis & Clark Law School
Another way of making the point is that federalism should not be seen merely as an issue of legal
boundaries between state and federal governments. Nor does it function primarily to protect individual
liberty. Instead, federalism is about allocating an increasing and overlapping government power to
regulate people. Under this account, the struggle in recent federalism cases over state sovereignty and
the appropriate level of dignity and respect to be accorded the states has resonance precisely because of
the specific meaning and significance of sovereignty today. With a broadening and deepening of the
categories in which governments legitimately may regulate has come a kind of turf fight over which
governments will have the greater share of regulatory authorityauthority which they fully intend to
use. In general, that is, the federalism fight is not a dispute in which one government seeks merely to prevent regulation by the other, so that one possible outcome would be lack of
regulation altogether. (Although because challenges to the constitutionality of particular exercises of government power are often brought by individuals, it is easy to forget that fact.) That is
certainly the case with respect to Raich, for California plainly sought to regulate and control the use of marijuana; it just had different methods and goals than the federal government.54 Or
consider the current effort to combat the spread of methamphetamine by restricting access to over-the-counter cold and allergy medications that contain pseudoephedrine. In the absence of
significant federal regulation, several states have limited public access to these over-the-counter medications. The federal government now appears poised to follow suit.55 The only
difference from regulation of medical marijuanaand one of the significant areas of controversy is that the proposed federal statute might not restrict the ability of the states to
Respecting the dignity of the states, then, means respecting their

sovereign capacity to manage their populations. Accepting federal power to regulate increases the size of
the relevant population to be regulated, but I suspect it has little impact on whether regulation takes
place. People disagree, of course, on whether it is better or more efficient to centralize regulation with the federal government or leave it to state or local entities
regulate even more broadly than the federal government.56
that may have advantages in dealing with local conditions. Localized regulation could arguably even be more sensitive to the liberties or freedoms of those being
regulatedalthough if that is the case, then we must consider whether those freedoms and liberties are themselves a subject of regulation and exist at its sufferance.
In a series of lectures given in the mid-1970s, recently collected under the title Society Must Be Defended (which I have adapted for the title of this Article),
Michel Foucault used the term biopolitics to describe the expansion of sovereign power from the
right to take life or let live, to include the right. . .to make live and let die, and he suggested that
this sovereign right operates through general regulation of populations rather than through acts
targeted at specific individuals.57 As he explained, [T]his technology of power, this biopolitics, will introduce mechanisms with a certain number of functions that
are very different from the functions of disciplinary mechanisms. The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. And their purpose is
not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at a level at which these general phenomena are
determined, to intervene at the level of their generality. The mortality rate has to be modified or lowered; life expectancy has to be increased; the birth rate has to be stimulated. And most
important of all, regulatory mechanisms must be established to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general
population and its aleatory field. In a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state
It does not take much effort to see that this description matches the everyday, largely
uncontroversial practices of what we sometimes call the administrative state, even allowing for
differences in the ways the administrative state operates in different societies. Most of the opinions in Raich, as well as
the quotation that opens this Article, reflect the way in which this biopolitical perspective on state powerand thus the idea of federalism that I just
developedhas become pervasive, so that the rational regulation and management of the population in
the aggregate becomes normal, expected, and beneficial by definition. By contrast, the alternative of
individual choiceor even choice through majority rulebecomes irresponsible and inconsistent with
a civilized [read, regulated] society.5
of life.58
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Economy
Biopolitics is rooted deeply into economics not only classifying life as productive, but putting a price
upon that human life as well.
Vatter 06
(Vatter, Miguel. 2006. Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt. Revista de Ciencia Poltica 26 (3):137159. Miguel Vatter is associate professor in the
School of Political Science, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile and co-founder of the Latin American Biopolitics Research Network. His current
areas of research and publication are biopolitics, republicanism, and political theology.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v012/12.2.vatter.html#back)
If Foucaults discussion of liberal governmentality points toward the necessity of a connection between biopolitics and the rule of law (with the associated ideas of
juridical personality, individual responsibility, etc.), as Lemke argues, then it must also be acknowledged that Foucault himself never succeeds entirely in providing
this connection. Lemke criticizes those reconstructions of biopolitics, such as those of Agamben and Negri, which seek the internal connection between law and
biopolitics, because they call into question Foucaults basic distinction between sovereign power (legal domination) and biopower. As a result of this ambivalence with
His discussion of the variations on the

Foucaultian problematic of biopolitics found in Agamben and in Negri/Hardt subsumes the problem of a biopolitics of law under
what can be called a biopolitics of production, and a treatment of the political economy of
biopolitics.viAgamben exploits Foucaults gap between his conception of law and his idea of biopolitics.
Lemke argues that he does so to bring biopower back into the fold of a logic or paradigm of sovereign
power that accounts for why some forms of life are made to live and others are disallowed to the
point of extermination. For Lemke,any such logic or paradigm misses a crucial point in Foucaults biopolitical analyses: the problem with Agambens
regard to the role played by law in the constitution of biopower, the link between the two is not explored in Lemke.
collapse of biopower onto sovereign power is that it necessarily reduces biopolitics to a thanatopolitics. Agamben, says Lemke, is more interested in the logic of death
as the limit of life than in the positive power that forms and transforms human biological life through its disciplining, normalization, securitization, conduct, etc.
If the secret aim of all sovereignty is the production of homini sacri who can be killed without
committing neither crime nor sacrifice, then such sovereign power must be called unproductive,
because bare life is produced only to be repressed and killed. Rather than exterminating bare life
[biopolitics] subsumes bare life under a bio-economical imperative of increasing value
[Wertsteigerung], which is aimed at a maximization of life-chances and the optimization of quality-of-life.
In other words, Agamben fails to acknowledge that biopolitics is essentially a political economy of life (80). For Lemke,
biopolitics must contain within itself a necessary reference to the creation of a surplus of life, making it
irreducible to thanatopolitics. This essential connection between biopolitics and a political economy of
life steers Lemkes discussion towards the thought of Negri and Hardt, explicitly picking up the question of the productivity of biopolitics. The analysis of
empire in Negri and Hardt is an attempt to formulate a conception of biopolitics that mediates between political-juridical power
(sovereignty) and economical power (production) by shifting attention to the generation of surplus
value through cognitive capitalism and immaterial labor which exploit the knowledge, creativity,
affects and language of human beings more than their bodily labor-power. Lemke also criticizes Negris continued
(79).vii
reliance on a Marxist base/superstructure dualism where biopower corresponds to the superstructural juridical power [potere] and biopolitics corresponds to the basis
power [potenza] of the multitude to reproduce its species- or communal-being. Such dualisms are symptomatic of a slide away from a Foucaultian perspective on
biopolitics towards a biopolitical philosophy. For the former perspective, in fact, life does not refer to an ontological substance, to an original and transhistorical
magnitude, as in Negri, but is a social construct, an element of a historical know-how [Wissenspraxis] (98). Calling into question the dualism of empire and
multitude, regulation and free production, Lemke asks: is not every production also always already a production that is regulated in a determined way? (99)
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Economy
Economy has become rooted in the biopolitical spectrum by basing humans on their productivity,
humans are managed in order to become more reproductive machines for biopowers use
Vatter 06
(Vatter, Miguel. 2006. Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt. Revista de Ciencia Poltica 26 (3):137159. Miguel Vatter is associate professor in the
School of Political Science, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile and co-founder of the Latin American Biopolitics Research Network. His current
areas of research and publication are biopolitics, republicanism, and political theology.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v012/12.2.vatter.html#back)
Coopers book treats the relation between biological (re)production and capital accumulation in the United States during the last
thirty years. Her analysis takes off from two themes found in Foucaults work. The first,
in The Order of Things, is that

biology and political economy develop in parallel because (once value is rooted in labor force, as with
Ricardo and Marx) then value also is rooted in the sphere of biological life and its reproduction, since the
latter is presupposed by labor force. The second theme emerges from Foucaults later hypothesis that liberalism should be
understood as the framework within which biopower develops. Coopers investigations bring together and radicalize the implications
of these two themes: on her account, neoliberal economics attempts to efface the boundaries between the spheres of production and
reproduction, labor and life, the market and living tissues (9). The main thesis of Life as Surplus is that neoliberalism
and the
biotech industry share a common ambition to overcome the ecological and economical limits to growth
associated with the end of industrial production, through a speculative reinvention of the future (11).
The neoliberal development of capitalism, starting in the decade of the 70s, targeted biological life as the
novel source of extraction of surplus value. In this sense, the neoliberal economy is essentially a
bioeconomy. This is the first sense in which Cooper speaks of life as surplus. Adopting a Marxist notion of social
contradictions, she also argues that every attempt of capital to overcome limits to its own expansion ends up
creating other limits or contradictions. In the case of the bioeconomy, the extraction of surplus value
from biological life requires that life be manipulated, controlled, and ultimately pushed beyond its
natural limits so to generate an excess or surplus of biological life. Examples range from microbial life
that thrives in extreme conditions, to new immunitary devices and self-assembling artificial life forms, to
technologies of in-vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell lines. Coopers thesis is that all this creation
of biological life in excess of its limits is paid at the price of a deepening devaluation of human lives: the
second main sense in which life functions as surplus. The third dimension also has a Marxist inspiration. Just as, for
Marx, social contradictions express themselves symptomatically in religious beliefs, so too for Cooper the creation of life beyond
the limits of nature in contemporary bioscience is strictly correlated to a shift in the global political economy toward financial or
speculative capital. Todays debt-form relies on faith in the other-worldly understood as faith in the promise of an after-life in this
life, a life beyond the limits of human biographical lives. The Evangelical Right and its cults of the unborn and the born-again
represent one religious symptom of this fundamental change in the economic basis.
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Population Management

Population management and control is a hidden form of biopower that
regulates who lives and who dies
Houen 06 (Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker, Theory and EventVolume 9, Number 1,
2006)
We have already seen how the sovereign's right to decide who lives and dies relates to the power of juridical
and political apparatuses that enforce the state's monopoly on violence. To the extent that biopolitics
instantiates a new means of wresting control over life and death, it clearly arises as the evolution of a new
strand of martial power. As Foucault argues in Society Must be Defended, "Sovereignty took life and let live.
And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization [that] consists
in making live and letting die" (SMD, 247). This does not mean that biopolitics pacifies the thanatopolitics
that Foucault locates at the heart of sovereignty. To the extent that biopolitics takes charge of regulating the
populace's wealth and health, it also takes the lives of individuals hostage. If, as Foucault contends, the
subject is "by rights, neither alive nor dead" (SMD, 240) in relation to the sovereign and disciplinary
institutions, then both the subject's life and death are held in the balance all the more through
biopolitics. There is a new issue implicit here, though; one of anonymization. For Foucault, disciplinary
power is primarily concerned with breaking a "multiplicity of men" into "individual bodies," whereas
biopolitics "is addressed to a multiplicity of men" (SMD, 243). While sovereign and disciplinary power
are charged with policing life as individual subjects, then, biopolitics disenfranchises each individual's
life and death by turning it into a generalized matter of population. If the subject is "neutral" in relation to
sovereign and disciplinary power, s/he becomes a statistic in terms of biopolitics. As Foucault states,
sovereign power maintains an appearance of being enforced "subject to subject" (SMD, 44), even if, in
reality, this necessitates a network of power already being in place. Disciplinary power is similarly
"subject to subject" in appearance -- a criminal is sentenced by a judge, a pupil is instructed by a
teacher. With biopolitics, though, individuals live and die as a result of an anonymous, bureaucratized
regulating that may involve things such as taxation, irrigation, sanitation, etc. In other words, the
biopolitics that anonymizes the death and life of individuals is itself diffuse, exercised through flexible
and floating networks that can be anonymous as the flooding of a river. Is the term "biopolitics" a
catachresis, then? Would it not be more appropriate to refer to a "biopower" that is itself an index of the extent
to which politics has been absorbed by other social and economic relations?
Baylor Debate Camp
Biopower Links
Link to Population Management

Population control and regulation links directly to biopolitics by granting power and authority to the
sovereign which classifies people as a living mass
Forti 06(The Biopolitics of Souls: Racism, Nazism, and Plato, Political Theory 2006;)
In the mid-1970s, Michel Foucault introduced into his analysis of power a new concept, that of biopolitics.
Through this concept he intended to designate a new configuration of relations of domination. From the
end of the eighteenth century onward, political power progressively took over responsibility for the
population, as a living mass. Biopower therefore started to distinguish itself from traditional
sovereign power not just because of its all-inclusive nature; it also addressed directly the productivity
of life. It no longer concentrated on the individual and his property, through the power of the law;
rather it affects directly, and in a positive way, the biological processes of the entire population.
Biopolitics thus began to address (as an object of power) life itself: birth, reproduction, illness, and
death. Through demographic statistics, and through the various techniques of population control, the
life of all and one is, so to speak, invested through and through.

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The formulation of governmentality as a veridical, authoritative discourse for the administration of

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policy-that ascertains the appropriateness of state intervention.

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Link to Education, Medicine, Criminology, Psychiatry

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comprehend the traditional role of school. In short,

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children must never learn to

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referred to his philosophical statement in Les mots et les choses that

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Foundationalism we define abstractly as follows. It views ethical considerations as always grounding,

philosophical theories hold

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Link to Human Rights

Link to Human Rights

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David Chandler 2009

The application of this understanding of

Baylor Debate Camp

Link to National Identity

modernity is characterized by a biopolitics of regulatory controls and

it can justify a kind of authoritative, totalizing

Baylor Debate Camp

Link to National Identity

Baylor Debate Camp

Baylor Debate Camp

moral sanctions might

Baylor Debate Camp

Baylor Debate Camp

To the extent that Medicaid coverage of prenatal expenses is concomitant with

Baylor Debate Camp

Baylor Debate Camp

Link to Western Medical Model

For those already pregnant who are

Baylor Debate Camp

The subject is always irreducibly

Baylor Debate Camp

discretionary state power and for risk-profiling motivated by suspicion.

Baylor Debate Camp

The increasing role of trans-national governance

health policy has become a venue for insinuating the normalization of

Baylor Debate Camp

Most health-care practitioners and policy makers tout the claim

many popular beliefs

Baylor Debate Camp

Baylor Debate Camp

body shape and size increasingly

Thin people apparently share more than a

As members are drawn deeper and deeper into the

Baylor Debate Camp

Baylor Debate Camp

The technologies of the self the process of

It is the attentive technologycare of the selfthat