Biopower Kritik - Index

ADI 2010 1
Labels Suck (K-Lab) Biopower
Biopower Kritik – Index

ADI 2010 2
1NC Shell
A. The biopolitical categories in the visa regime open the applicants to the biopolitics of the
state
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies,
biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_2_31/ai_n29276866/pg_13/
Foucault's writings on the topic of biopolitics ground this analysis. Foucault examined the concomitant
evolution of industrial and institutional techniques of modern governance through an investigation of
how mobile, productive, healthy, moral bodies were constructed, schooled, policed, and harnessed for
labor. (58) His investigation of the how the penal system in particular led into the evolution of a disciplinary
society stopped at the borders of the state, but in principle can be expanded to encompass a biopolitics of
international relations: the management of international bodies. Fundamental to the evolution of the modern
state was the control over mobility of citizens, which Foucault illustrates architecturally in the panopticon
and plague town, Timothy Mitchell within Egyptian schools and urban architecture, and John Torpey through
state passports. (59) What these authors neglect is the international aspect of this control of mobility.
Following work by Barry Hindess, Nevzat Soguk, and William Walters, who describe a structure of
international management of population through the regulation of citizenship, refugees, and stateless
persons, the international control of persons is just as vital to the stability of the modern state system
as the domestic control of mobility. We can see the ways in which the visa system contributes to the
definition and control of international populations: through the ascription of biopolitical
characteristics in terms of labor skill or capitalization, epidemic or health liability, and risk or
normalcy. But, how do mobile individuals come to recognize themselves as part of this population and
engage in self-disciplinary behavior? For an explanation, I turn to the moment of discretion and the
construction of the confessionary complex.
B. Choose a specific link card if applicable

ADI 2010 3
C. The biopolitical framework established by Foucault produces prejudiced boundaries of race

that have become embedded within the current immigration system.
Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the New School, 1995

(Ana L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, p.
6-8, CPG)
While we might comfortably concur with Foucault that a discourse of sexuality was incited and activated as
an instrument of power in the nineteenth century, we might still raise a basic question: a discourse about whom?
His answer is clear: it was a discourse that produced four "objects of knowledge that were also targets and
anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge" (HS:105), with specific technologies around them: the
masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the "hysterical woman," the Malthusian couple, and the
perverse adult. But students of empire would surely add at least one more. Did any of these figures exist as objects of knowledge
and discourse in the nineteenth century without a racially erotic counterpoint, without reference to the libidinal energies of the savage,
the primitive, the colonized -- reference points of difference, critique, and desire? At one level, these are clearly contrapuntal as well as
indexical referents, serving to bolster Europe's bourgeois society and to underscore what might befall it in moral decline. But they were
not that alone. The sexual discourse of empire and of the biopolitic state in Europe were mutually constitutive: their "targets" were
broadly imperial, their regimes of power synthetically bound.
My rereading of The History of Sexuality thus rests on two basic contentions, central to much recent work in colonial studies.
First, that Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political, or economic assertions,
cannot be charted in Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production
of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrasts for what
a "healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body" was all about. Europe's eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality can -- indeed must -- be traced
along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to nineteenth-century technologies of sex. They were refracted through the discourses
of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those
confidences were built, could not be disentangled. I thus approach The History of Sexuality through several venues by comparing its
chronologies and strategic ruptures to those in the colonies and by looking at these inflections on a racially charged ground. But, as
importantly, I argue that a "comparison" between these two seemingly dispersed technologies of sex in colony and in metropole may
miss the extent to which these technologies were bound.
My second contention is that the racial obsessions and refractions of imperial discourses on sexuality have not been restricted to
bourgeois culture in the colonies alone. By bringing the discursive anxieties and practical struggles over citizenship and national
identities in the nineteenth century back more squarely within Foucault's frame, bourgeois identities in both
metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race. Discourses of sexuality do more
than define the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic,
they have mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedimented discourses on
sexual morality could redraw the "interior frontiers" of national communities, frontiers that were
secured through – and sometimes in collision with -- the boundaries of race. These nationalist discourses were
predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the
poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were
worthy of recognition and whose were not.
Nationalist discourse drew on and gave force to a wider politics of exclusion. This version was not
concerned solely with the visual markers of difference, but with the relationship between visible characteristics
and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence. Assessment of these untraceable identity
markers could seal economic, political, and social fates. Imperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized,
metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain
cultural competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn defined the
hidden fault lines -- both fixed and fluid -- along which gendered assessments of class and racial
membership were drawn. Within the lexicon of bourgeois civility, self-control, self-discipline, and self-determination
were defining features of bourgeois selves in the colonies. These features, affirmed in the ideal family milieu, were often
transgressed by sexual, moral, and racial contaminations in those same European colonial homes. Repression was clearly part of
this story, but as Foucault argues, it was subsumed by something more. These discourses on self-mastery were
productive of racial distinctions, of clarified notions of "whiteness" and what it meant to be truly
European. These discourses provided the working categories in which an imperial division of labor
was clarified, legitimated, and -- when under threat -- restored.
ADI 2010 4
D. Biopower and the state are crucial in establishing the supremacy of racism
Foucault, 1997 [Michel, Society Must Be Defended, p. 258 KNP]
I think that, broadly speaking, racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by
appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a
member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. You can see
that, here, we are far removed from the ordinary racism that takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or
hatred between races. We are also far removed from the racism that can be seen as a sort of ideological
operation that allows States, or a class, to displace the hostility that is directed toward [them], or which is
tormenting the social body, onto a mythical adversary. I think that this is something much deeper than an old
tradition, much deeper than a new ideology, that it is something else. The specificity of modern racism, or
what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound
up with the technique of power, with the technology of power. It is bound up with this, and that takes
us as far away as possible from the race war and the intelligibility of history. We are dealing with a
mechanism that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is
obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign
power. The juxtaposition of-or the way biopower functions through-the old sovereign power of life and
death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the
actual roots of racism.
E. BIOPOWER RISKS EXTINCTION

Foucault 84
(Michel, Director of Institute Francais at Hamburg, THE FOUCAULT READER p. 259-260. KNP)
Since the classical age, the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of
power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element
among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under
it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one
dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift
in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life administering power and
to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never
as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes
visit such holocaust on their own populations. But this formidable power of death-and this is perhaps what
accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits-now presents
itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer,
optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise Controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no
longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the
existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the
name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and
the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed.
And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend
increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates
them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now
at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the
power to guarantee an individual's continued existence.
ADI 2010 5
F. The Alt: the AFF is an extension of biopower, we must reject the plan now, or risk
becoming an institution for juridical state power.
Foucault, Professor of philosophy at the college de France 84 (Michel, A Foucault Reader p 63
KNP)
I wonder if this isn’t bound up with the institution of monarchy. This developed during the Middle Ages
against the backdrop of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and
private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function albeit one
whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep. Sovereign, law and prohibition formed a system of
representation of power which was extended during the subsequent era by the theories of right:
political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. Such theories still
continue today to busy themselves with the problem of sovereignty. What we need, however, is a political
philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of
law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that has still to be done. 63
ADI 2010 6
***Links***
ADI 2010 7
Link: Visa Generic Links
Visa requirements control those entering the US
Preliminary empirical work suggests that there are a number of common requirements for visas: a fee
for processing (a remote tax); return tickets (good faith illustration that the applicant's stay is temporary);
statement of qualifications (to distinguish the degree of skilled labor); funds for stay; a health certificate
(declarations that one is not an epidemiological risk: AIDS/HIV; yellow fever; tuberculosis; etc.); and
affirmation of acceptable behavior (declarations that one is not a criminal/felon). Thus, the mobile
subject is configured by the receiving state in terms of health, wealth, labor/leisure, and risk. The
guarantee of the passport is its isomorphic representation of a particular body to a set of governmental
records. The visa application, which always tests and depends on the validity of the passport, attempts to
render the position of the applicant in terms of state, educational, health, and police institutions. As Don
Flynn has suggested, the product of the visa bureaucracy is rejection, and efficiency is determined by rates of
rejection against some imagined norm of regularly occurring fraud. (48)
The visa program exerts biopolitical control over the holding opening them up to state control
over entry
The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the
community. In this structure, the fundamental right of the sovereign is to be able to exclude and define
the limits of its population with little reference to other states or sovereigns. Mobility is structured in terms
of entry, which is made obligatory by citizenship or refugee status, or entirely the discretionary, by
noncitizenship. I want to unpack this discretionary moment that is vital to the delimitation of the population
of the state. From the French vise, meaning having been seen, the visa refers to "(1) the authorisation given
by a consul to enter or to pass through a country, and (2) the stamp placed on the passport when the holder
entered or left a foreign country." (37) In modern usage, it refers to the prescreening of travelers and
represents a prima facie case for admission. (38) The visa in no way guarantees actual admission, which
remains the prerogative of the sovereign and its agents at the border. The visa regime allows for a
delocalization of the border function so that states may engage in sorting behavior away from the
physical limit of the state. (39) In some instances, visas may be applied for and received at the actual border
of a state, but in such cases it is viewed mostly as a revenue generator rather than a security function.
ADI 2010 8
The visa is a way for countries to transfer biopolitical control of its citizens to other
counties
Through the passport, the sovereign who claims one's allegiance asks for entry and protection on
behalf of the possessor; thus entry to the body politic is mediated through the administrative bodies of
the sovereigns. (14) Entry to a sovereign state in which one does not possess nationality is mediated
through the visa process and identity papers (passport, refugee, or stateless travel documents). While the
discussion of individual attachment or allegiance to the state/sovereign is usually understood as citizenship or
nationality, I would argue in the face of material facts on the ground and ethical concerns prompted by the
political consequences of those facts that we must widen our analytical scope to include a multiplicity of
forms of membership in political communities. (15) Jean Bodin defines this important boundary of the
political community: "The mutual obligation between subject and sovereign, by which, in return for the
faith and obedience rendered to him the sovereign must do justice and give counsel, assistance,
encouragement, and protection to the subject. He does not owe this to aliens." (16) At this stage, it is
important to note that the sovereign decision of inclusion/expulsion is irreducible and that the space of
decision is also a space of exception. The bordering process constituted by the decision to
include/exclude is a dialogue between body and body politic requiring the confession of all manner of
bodily, economic, and social information. Borrowing from Alison Mountz, we might speak of the "long
tunnel" of in-between spaces that is constituted by international travel. The gangway between the airplane
and the agent of customs precisely resembles the "camp." (17) The traveler is not simply in between states,
but also denationalized. It is useful to return to the anthropologist's categorization of "threshold rites" to
understand the process of the border. According to Arnold van Gennep, for example, the territorial passage is
divided into three specific rites: pre-liminal rites (the rites of separation from a previous world); liminal or
threshold rites (rites of transition); and post-liminal rites (rites and ceremonies of incorporation into the new
world). (18) The preliminal rites are ones of denationalization, status that is held in abeyance before the
sovereign decision. "Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and
inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical
protection no longer made any sense." (19) The liminal rite of examination, obedience, and confession
presents a challenge to Agamben. The sovereign in his account has no restraints and may simply exert the
power of decision. The border-crosser challenges this in several ways: the decision to include/exclude is
individual and institutional, and the border-crosser presents him/herself to the sovereign, and this element of
agency is totally neglected by Agamben.
ADI 2010 9
Changing the eligibility requirements doesn’t affect the biopolitical control visa policy
exert over people
The field of migration studies has been hamstrung by two dominant approaches: microstudies of migration
networks, and macrostudies of push-pull factors. This article argues for the consideration of a different kind
of micropolitics of power, that of the border itself. We must investigate the legal state of exception at the
border and the ways that these exceptions are instantiated in laws and policies. The interface of the body
and the body politic is hotly contested, and scholars need to take seriously the question of admission and
exclusion to the political community at its border, not solely from an immigration/refugee rights perspective
but from a wider view of the global mobility regime and human rights. This corporealism must also take
into account the management of international populations through biopolitics in creating, classifying,
and policing specific kinds of international bodies, and the way in which political technologies of
individuals such as passports, visas, and frontier control educate mobile subjectivities in kinds of
obedience and auto-confession. We must ask: How does the global mobility regime foster conditions under
which we reorganize ourselves into international bodies and characterize those bodies as national or stateless,
laboring or leisured, healthy or diseased, and safe or pathological? Managing Mobility This is aided by
understanding the visa as part of a global biopolitical system. In the loose visa regime, we see the control of
population through the self-confession of our status as national, working, healthy, and safe bodies
through application procedures. We need to unpack the way in which visa systems erase the middle
ground previously occupied by gastarbeiter programs and shunt economic migrants into the category of
asylum seekers, a category that does little to acknowledge the material basis of well-founded fears of
economic persecution. Some of this work has been done by human rights-based advocacy groups like
Statewatch and Amnesty International, but we also need to conduct close ethnographies of the bureaucracies
responsible for the management of these decisions.
Societies of discipline are becoming stronger

Pisters 05 (Patricia, Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values p.179 KNP)
Two aspects of Empire are important to understand the way in which this global system functions: the society of
control and biopower. The society of control is a concept that has been developed by Gilles Deleuze. Starting from
Foucault's idea of the society of discipline that exercises power by disciplining bodies in institutional practices
and discourses (the family, school, factory, and prison), Deleuze argued that at the end of the second
millennium we have entered a society of control. 5 In a society of control, the power of the institutions has
weakened because its boundaries have become less stable: electronic house arrest “opens” the prison, the factory
is stretching out into the home via home-work, the school is losing its authority in favor of interactive self-
learning, and the family seems to be undermined either by the internal collapse of the Western bourgeois family,
combined with a boundary crossing between public and private via the media, or by the dissolution of the non-
Western family by external forces like (forced) migrations. On the other hand, the power of all these institutions
is even stronger, precisely because they are less tangible. Control is everywhere, although we are no
longer just controlled by a gaze but by codes that contain all kinds of information about us. The moles' tunnels
of the society of discipline (recognizable institutions and discourses of power), says Deleuze, have been replaced by
the undulations of the snake (less recognizable forms of control that “crawl” everywhere). Perhaps the family , as a
modulating, moving concept, might still be very powerful as well, but I will return to this point at the end of this
chapter
ADI 2010 10
The government controls and classifies immigrants after entering the country, exerting
disciplinary power.
Griesbach 10 (Kathleen UC San Diego Immigration Detention, State Power, and Resistance: The Case of
the 2009 Motín in Pecos, Texas)
The differentiation of individuals by documentation is essential in the construction of the “Other.” The
soldierly “tactics” of US border enforcement illustrate the militarization of the national front to keep
out an “Other” whose demographic characteristics have historically been constructed through United States
immigration policies from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and onward in more subtle ways. The
surveillance and at times armed expulsion of others once they enter the US, and not merely if they
enter it illegally, exemplifies the perpetuation of disciplinary power. As Eithne Luibhéid argues,
Clearly, inspection at the border is not a one-time experience but it is rather, as Foucault’s image of the
carceral archipelago suggests, a process that situates migrants within lifelong networks of surveillance
and disciplinary relations Foucault’s discussion of “panopticism” illuminates the evolution of institutions
into disciplinary societies, through the extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout society in “the
formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society”16. The theoretical Panopticon is a place
of constant surveillance, of power transmitted through the knowledge that others are watching. The
Panopticon shows us how “power is exercised, not simply held”17. In Bentham’s Panopticon “each comrade
becomes a guardian.” This calls to mind the Minutemen, the citizen activist group engaged in voluntary
civilian border “defense”. Their interventions in 7 7 , and a great majority of these immigrant detainees are
charged for nothing more than illegal entry.US border enforcement contribute to the “surveillance” of the
border, reinforcing the disciplinary power exercised over would-be immigrants to the United States.
They show that disciplinary power is exercised on all levels of society, well beyond the auspices of the
state. The same spirit of “surveillance” characterizes federal collaboration with local authorities, in the form
of 287 (g) partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement. In 287
(g) partnerships (signed into effect with the Immigrant Nationality Act of 1996, ICE trains local officials
around the US to act in its capacity, aggressively seeking and capturing undocumented migrants within local
jails (“criminal aliens”) and in the local community.18 In this way, the local police become “guardians”,
exerting disciplinary power on behalf of federal officials over immigrants illegally in the United States. The
vast majority of migrants apprehended through these strategies are Mexican1920 The disciplinary power
exercised toward the immigrant population of course doesn’t end at the border; surveillance of
immigrants continues once they enter the country in the context of documentation status and far
beyond official records in social segregation. Immigrants enter the official records on conditional
terms or else stay in the shadows as “undocumented” migrants. Their immigration status determines the
amount of “surveillance” they face from the government, in the sense that legal permanent residents or
other non-citizens are in much greater danger of being deported and can be denied citizenship for any
misstep. The actions of their 8 8 lives (tax activities, criminal record) come under great scrutiny when
they apply for citizenship or for other government benefits. In the pursuit of adjusting or acquiring status,
then, they are voluntarily under government watch throughout the probationary period before
citizenship is established, if it is at all. Differentiation by immigrant status determines the degree of
agency – to vote, to get a higher education, or to walk without anxiety down the street. immigration
control is both a powerful symbol of nationhood and people and “a means to literally construct the
nation and the people in particular ways”21, then differentiation by immigrant status - a way of
exercising disciplinary power - presents many complications to a coherent construction of who belongs
and who is “Other
ADI 2010 11
The biopolitical framework established by Foucault produces prejudiced boundaries of

race that have become embedded within the current immigration system.
Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the New School, 1995

(Ana L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, p.
6-8, CPG)
Several basic questions remain. What happens to Foucault's chronologies when the technologies of sexuality are refigured in an
imperial field? Was the obsessive search for the "truth about sex" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier
confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this "truth about sex" recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically
those working through the language of race? While we might comfortably concur with Foucault that a discourse of sexuality
was incited and activated as an instrument of power in the nineteenth century, we might still raise a basic
question: a discourse about whom? His answer is clear: it was a discourse that produced four "objects of
knowledge that were also targets and anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge" (HS:105), with
specific technologies around them: the masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the "hysterical woman,"
the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. But students of empire would surely add at least one more. Did any of
these figures exist as objects of knowledge and discourse in the nineteenth century without a racially erotic counterpoint, without
reference to the libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized -- reference points of difference, critique, and desire? At
one level, these are clearly contrapuntal as well as indexical referents, serving to bolster Europe's bourgeois society and to underscore
what might befall it in moral decline. But they were not that alone. The sexual discourse of empire and of the biopolitic state in Europe
were mutually constitutive: their "targets" were broadly imperial, their regimes of power synthetically bound.
My rereading of The History of Sexuality thus rests on two basic contentions, central to much recent work in colonial studies.
First, that Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political, or economic assertions,
cannot be charted in Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production
of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrasts for what
a "healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body" was all about. Europe's eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality can -- indeed must -- be traced
along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to nineteenth-century technologies of sex. They were refracted through the discourses
of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those
confidences were built, could not be disentangled. I thus approach The History of Sexuality through several venues by comparing its
chronologies and strategic ruptures to those in the colonies and by looking at these inflections on a racially charged ground. But, as
importantly, I argue that a "comparison" between these two seemingly dispersed technologies of sex in colony and in metropole may
miss the extent to which these technologies were bound.
My second contention is that the racial obsessions and refractions of imperial discourses on sexuality have not been restricted to
bourgeois culture in the colonies alone. By bringing the discursive anxieties and practical struggles over citizenship and national
identities in the nineteenth century back more squarely within Foucault's frame, bourgeois identities in both
metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race. Discourses of sexuality do more
than define the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic,
they have mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedimented discourses on
sexual morality could redraw the "interior frontiers" of national communities, frontiers that were
secured through – and sometimes in collision with -- the boundaries of race. These nationalist discourses were
predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the
poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were
worthy of recognition and whose were not.
Nationalist discourse drew on and gave force to a wider politics of exclusion. This version was not
concerned solely with the visual markers of difference, but with the relationship between visible characteristics
and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence. Assessment of these untraceable identity
markers could seal economic, political, and social fates. Imperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized,
metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain
cultural competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn defined the
hidden fault lines -- both fixed and fluid -- along which gendered assessments of class and racial
membership were drawn. Within the lexicon of bourgeois civility, self-control, self-discipline, and self-determination were
defining features of bourgeois selves in the colonies. These features, affirmed in the ideal family milieu, were often transgressed by
sexual, moral, and racial contaminations in those same European colonial homes. Repression was clearly part of this story, but as
Foucault argues, it was subsumed by something more. These discourses on self-mastery were productive of racial
distinctions, of clarified notions of "whiteness" and what it meant to be truly European. These
discourses provided the working categories in which an imperial division of labor was clarified,
legitimated, and -- when under threat -- restored.
The biopolitics of immigration policy protect the rich, hegemonic privileged of the Western
majority.
ADI 2010 12
Bolaños, Professor of Philosophy at Metropolitan Autonomous University -

Cuajimalpa, 2009
(Bernardo L., http://www.ivr2009.com/admin/ewebeditor/UploadFile/20096816332309.pdf, CPG)
Joseph H. Carens has compared the moral status of unfree peasants under feudalism
(serfdom) with the legal treatment of foreigners in our days: “The current restrictions on
immigration in Western democracies [...] are not justifiable. Like feudal barriers to
mobility, they protect unjust privilege” (Carens 270). It is true that serfs could not leave
the fields of landowners just as many citizens from poor countries can not leave their
native countries to go abroad. Crossing territorial boundaries, even temporarily and for
scientific or cultural purposes, has become a privilege of citizens from rich countries. In
fact, immigration law and its enforcement often tolerate discrimination based on ethnic,
religious, cultural or socio-economic factors. And the fact that all kind of low income
applicants are rejected by consulates reinforces global inequality.
ADI 2010 13
Link: Citizenship
The political technology of citizenship promotes predisposed western views of success and
social norms that unfavorably shape the desires and outcomes of its citizens.
Cruikshank, Ph.D., Minnesota University, ‘99

Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director of Political Theory at the University of Massachusetts,
author of The Will To Empower, 1999, p. 4-5
Liberal democratic governance is premised not so much upon the autonomy or the
rights of individuals as upon their social fabrication as citizens, a fact that is obscured
when citizenship is regarded as a solution. The two normative trajectories of liberal
democratic thought diverge on the question of whether or not the citizen is inherently
rational and self- interested or self-realizing. In either case, however, the liberty of the
citizens is understood to be the limit of liberal governance. It is in those cases where
individuals do not act in their own self-interest or appear indifferent to their own
development as full-fledged citizens that the limit of the liberal state at the threshold of
individual rights, liberty, and pursuits must be crossed.
I find that participatory and democratic schemes -what I am calling technologies of citizenship- for
correcting the deficiencies of citizens are endemic within liberal democratic societies. Technologies of
citizenship operate according to a political rationality for governing people in ways that
promote their autonomy, self-sufficiency, and political engagement; in the classic
phrase of early philanthropists, they are intended to "help people to help themselves."
This is a manner of governing that relies not on institutions, organized violence or state
power but on securing the voluntary compliance of citizens. I argue, however, that the
autonomy, interests, and wills of citizens are shaped as well as enlisted. Technologies of
citizenship do not cancel out the autonomy and independence of citizens but are modes of governance
that work upon and through the capacities of citizens to act on their own. Technologies of citizenship are
voluntary and coercive at the same time, the actions of citizens are regulated, but only after the capacity
to act as a certain kind of citizen with certain aims is instilled. Democratic citizens, in short, are
both the effects and the instruments of liberal governance. Three relatively recent technologies of
citizenship are fully treated here in Chapters 3, 4, and : Community Action Programs under the Johnson administration; the self-
esteem movement; and the reorganization of welfare accounting practices under President Carter which resulted in the emergence
of a new kind of citizen -the welfare queen. Below and in Chapter 2, garbage reform and nineteenth-century self-help schemes illus-
social reform movements aim at accomplishing through volunteerism
trate the extent to which
and gentle coercion what the liberal state cannot do without using force or violating its
limits. Although the scope and impact of a given social reform movement may be short-lived, its techniques for making citizens
do not disappear but are reformed or carried over into new programs.
political itself is continually transformed and reconstituted
My second overarching argument is that the
at the micro-levels of everyday life where citizens are constituted. If power is
ubiquitous, as I assert throughout, then it makes no sense to speak of "the political,"
"the social," "the private," and "the public" as separate domains. The political cannot be
clearly demarcated from other domains without excluding some relations of power.'
Instead of reconceptualizing the political per se, I try to understand how the social
transformation of the political opens new possibilities for political action.
Link: The Visa system uses biopolitical categories

ADI 2010 14
The Biopolitical categories allow for biosocial control about what countries citizen’s do and
look like
Shamir 5 Ronen Sociological Theory Vol 23 June 2005 “Without Borders? Notes on
Golobalization as a Mobility Regime” http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148882
The current global mobility regime, writes Bauman, is based on a distinctive principle of osmosis: "traveling
for profit is encouraged; traveling for survival is condemned" (2002:84). To maintain this osmotic system,
new technologies of social intervention are developed and perfected in tandem with the physical
development of fences, prisons, and gated enclaves. One instance of this osmotic fine-tuning concerns
infinite administrative classificatory expansion. A basic illustration of this is the classificatory scheme
of American nonimmigrant visas. As of 2004, there have been 48 different categories of
nonimmigrant visas to the United States. Thus, for example, the H-2A type of nonimmigrant visa is
applicable to "temporary agricultural workers coming to the United States to fill positions for which a
temporary shortage of American workers has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture," while
the L-1 type of nonimmigrant visa is applicable to "intracompany transferees who work in positions as
managers, executives or persons with specialized knowledge." Thus, classes of people who are typically
barred entry, namely, unskilled laborers, may be granted mobility rights for designated tasks, while
people who become valuable citizens of multinational corporations, namely, corporate executives, are
granted special mobility privileges. In both cases, the visa system allows for the fine-tuning of
movement, carefully sorting out individual identities. In particular, the osmotic system is now geared
toward sorting out those who are deemed necessary to enhance the quality of the labor market from those
who are considered redundant or, worse, a burden. Thus, the continued mobility of high-skilled workers is
considered a vital issue for many rich countries. Accordingly, around 1.1 million people considered high
skilled came to work in the United States in 2000 on temporary stay visas, more than the roughly 850,000
immigrants admitted for legal permanent residence (Jachimowicz and Meyers 2002). Similarly, Germany
introduced a "green card" system to help satisfy the demand for highly-qualified information technology
experts. Through this new immigration program, about 9,200 highly-skilled workers have entered Germany
through August 2001, with 1,935 Indians accounting for the largest group
(http://www.migrationinformation.org). At the same time, millions are barred entry, whether as immigrants
or visitors, on various grounds of perceived threats. In sum, the osmotic system developed under the
guidelines of the global mobility regime must rely not simply on fences but on finely-tuned screening
mechanisms that provide it with its necessary social elasticity. Screening, in turn, relies on that technology of
intervention that I as biosocial
ADI 2010 15
Link: Temporary Work Visas
Temporary visas are forms of biopolitical control that allows people into society but limits
their acceptance into the community
This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and
individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border
examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa
and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community,
and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through
passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a
biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be
international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the
creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of
the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessionary regime. The
global visa regime and international borders are crucial in constructing both international mobile populations
and international mobile individuals.
ADI 2010 16
Link: Work Visa/Work
Using work to determine a person’s usefulness is a form of biopolitical control
Dean, Professor: Macquarie University, 02(Mitchell Dean, “Powers of Life and Death Beyond
Governmentality”, Cultural Values, August 28, 2002)
Summing up this part of the argument, government, understood as the conduct of conduct, is one zone or
field of contemporary power relations. To understand those relations we need to take into account
heterogenous powers such as those of sovereignty and biopolitics. The exercise of power in
contemporary liberal democracies entails matters of life and death as much as ones of the direction of
conduct, of obligation as much as rights, as decisions on the fostering or abandonment of life, on the right
to kill without committing homicide, as well as of the shaping of freedom and the exercise of choice.
Nevertheless, having distinguished this heterogenous field of power, there are key thresholds that
are crossed in which these distinctions begin to collapse. Sovereign violence, its
symbols and its threat, is woven into the most mundane forms of government . The
unemployed, for example, are to transform themselves into active job-seekers or
participate in workfare programs under the sanction of the removal of the sustenance of life. In
contemporary genetic politics and ethics, too, we enter thresholds where it becomes unclear
whether we are in the presence of the powers to foster life or the right to take it. The
biopolitical, the sovereign, the governmental, begin to enter into zones of indistinction
Domestic work is Biopolitical.
Rodriguez 07 (Encarnacion Gutierrez, “The Hidden Side” of the New Economy: On Transnational Migration,
Domestic Work, and Unprecedented Intimacy” Frontiers-A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol 28 KNP)
Negri relates here to the old Greek term "bios" to express the fusion between life and work. In reference to
Karl Marx's notion of labor as productive and reproductive work, we need to consider care and domestic
work as sites of biopolitics, as women are involved in resisting the power of life to make them other
than they know themselves to be (migration and asylum policies, racism, sexism and class position, for
example). While employers look for domestic workers, it quickly becomes evident that these workers
are people, and not just a labor force. Nevertheless, at the time of payment, employers believe that they
have absolute rights over the labor power of the employee. Disrespectful treatment, the exceeding of
personal limits, and the belief that one can take everything away from the care and domestic worker
are therefore common scenarios. This absolute domination by employers is expressed in their behavior
toward employees, something that Ms. Vatu vehemently criticized when she directly addressed her employer:
"So if, I mean I'll just say to the employers out there, if they could just change that kind of attitude that the
person who is coming here is suffering or the person who is coming here, she has to be a slave because we
are paying her."
ADI 2010 17
Link: Competitiveness/Economy Advantages
The discourse of competitiveness is used to legitimatize policy actions through threat

construction
Bristow, School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, 05

(Gillian Bristow, Professor at the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, “Everyone’s a ‘winner’:
problematising the discourse of regional competitiveness”, page 289-291, 4-13-05,
http://joeg.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/285)
The evolutionary, ‘survival of the fittest’ basis of the regional competitiveness discourse
clearly resonates with this evaluative culture. The discourse of competitiveness strongly
appeals to the stratum of policy makers and analysts who can use it to justify what they
are doing and/or to find out how well they are doing it relative to their ‘rivals’. This
helps explain the interest in trying to measure regional competitiveness and the
development of composite indices and league tables. It also helps explain why particular elements of the
discourse have assumed particular significance—output indicators of firm performance are much easier to
compare and rank on a single axis than are indicators relating to institutional behaviour, for example. This
in turn points to a central paradox in measures of regional competitiveness. The key ingredients of firm
competitiveness and regional prosperity are increasingly perceived as lying with assets such as
knowledge and information which are, by definition, intangible or at least difficult to measure with any
degree of accuracy. The obsession with performance measurement and the tendency to
reduce complex variables to one, easily digestible number brings a ‘kind of blindness’
with it as to what is really important (Boyle, 2001, 60)—in this case, how to improve regional
prosperity. Thus while a composite index number of regional competitiveness will attract widespread
attention in the media and amongst policymakers and development agencies, the difficulty presented by
such a measure is in knowing what exactly needs to be targeted for appropriate remedial action. All of
this suggests that regional competitiveness is more than simply the linguistic expression of
powerful exogenous interests. It has also become rhetoric. In other words, regional
competitiveness is deployed in a strategic and persuasive way, often in conjunction with
other discourses (notably globalisation) to legitimate specific policy initiatives and
courses of action. The rhetoric of regional competitiveness serves a useful political
purpose in that it is easier to justify change or the adoption of a particular course of
policy action by reference to some external threat that makes change seem inevitable. It
is much easier for example, for politicians to argue for the removal of supply-side rigidities and flexible
hire-and-fire workplace rules by suggesting that there is no alternative and that jobs would be lost anyway
if productivity improvement was not achieved. Thus, ‘the language of external competitiveness. .
.provides a rosy glow of shared endeavour and shared enemies which can unite captains
of industry and representatives of the shop floor in the same big tent’ (Turner, 2001,
40). In this sense it is a discourse which provides some shared sense of meaning and a
means of legitimising neo-liberalism rather than a material focus on the actual
improvement of economic welfare.
ADI 2010 18
The discourse of competitiveness, although fundamentally flawed, is used to justify policy

interventions
Bristow, School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, 05

(Gillian Bristow, Professor at the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, “Everyone’s a ‘winner’:
problematising the discourse of regional competitiveness”, page 289-291, 4-13-05,
http://joeg.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/285)
The discourse of regional competitiveness has become ubiquitous in the deliberations

and statements of policy actors and regional analysts . However, this paper has argued that it is
a rather confused, chaotic discourse which seems to conflate serious theoretical work on
regional economies, with national and international policy discourses on globalisation
and the knowledge economy. There are, however, some dominant axioms which collectively define
the discourse, notably that regional competitiveness is a firm-based, output-related conception, strongly
shaped by the regional business environment. However, regional competitiveness tends to be defined in
different ways, sometimes microeconomic, sometimes macroeconomic, such that it is not entirely clear
when a situation of competitiveness has been achieved. It is argued here that the discourse is based
on relatively thinly developed and narrow conceptions of how regions compete, prosper
and grow in economic terms. The discourse chooses to ignore broader, nonoutput
related modalities of regional competition which may tend to have rather more negative
than positive connotations. Moreover, it over-emphasises the importance of the region
to firm competitiveness and indeed the importance of firm competitiveness to regional
prosperity. In this sense proponents of regional competitiveness are guilty of what the eminent
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’. In other words,
they have assumed that what applies to firms can simply be read across to those other entities called
‘regions’, and that this is a concrete reality rather than simply a belief or opinion. The result
is that regional economic development policy is ultimately very narrowly focused. Policy under the rubric
of competitiveness is not necessarily about collective territorial economic performance at all—it is
about a particular aspect of a particular subset of activities within that territory. In this sense there is
only commensurability between regions (or different groups of people) so long as you assert that there is
i.e. it is an outcome not of nature or science, but of a normative discourse—which
simply asserts that this is what policy for places should be about. Thus, in spite of being
ill-defined the discourse of regional competitiveness has become firmly ensconced into
regional economic development policy because it provides policy-makers with a means
of justifying particular courses of action. Propelled by powerful business elites and the
neo-liberal consensus, the discourse of regional competitiveness has become a strategic,
rhetorical device that is used to legitimate the decentralisation of economic governance,
supply-side economic interventions and performance measurement imperatives. This
implies that it will be very difficult to shift its current hegemonic position within policy
unless regional institutions and communities themselves become both more aware of
the limitations of competitiveness policies and agendas and more willing to exorcise
them. Therein lies the challenge.
ADI 2010 19
Link: Narratives/ Personal Experiences of other Link
Attempting to narrate for the poor establishes an us vs. them dichotomy that oversimplifies
political and economic context and reinforces stereotypes
Schram, prof social theory and policy @ Bryn Mawr College, 95

(Sanford F. Schram, professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College, 1995, words of
welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty, pg. 46-49 “According
to Michel…in the face of grinding poverty.”)
According to Michel Foucault, most social statistics operate as the science of the state, aggregating social
practices into reified populations, whose mean and range serve to define, rather than reflect, norms and
margins.27 Statistical work most often is used then to identify repetitions that can be used to suggest
ways for regulating individuated behavior to conform to such norms. Yet ethnography also risks
replicating the myth of individua- tion that underlies social statistics. Glazer was hoping for a more up-
close and personal representation that would allow him to capture the "culture of poverty."" The
researcher, like the tourist or the fieldworker in an exotic land, would get to know the "alien other" so as
to see how they were and were not like "us." Yet the "us/them" divide implicit in such a formulation
reencodes the opportunity to read "the poor" as the negative referent they have been historically,
especially for liberal, individualist, capitalist moder- nity, with its insistence on achieving through the
market the identity of a self-sufficient autonomous self. Reading the poor in this way revisits the
opportunity to say good things about "us" by contrast with "them!' Ethnog- raphy of the poor, in Glazer's
hands, would risk becoming a reassuring tale of how the "not poor" are to be understood." Patricia
Cough's critique of ethnography underscores how it glosses over its own animating impulses to make
sense of the viewing subject by inter- preting the viewed object.° Ethnography's realism backgrounds the
psychoanalytic subtext that helps construct the narrative used to depict those who are viewed.
Ethnography's narrative subtext can be read to be about the ethnographer's attempt to break with tradition,
authority, established knowledge, or ascendant empirical understandings by showing how his or her
ethnography makes an authoritative, original, genuinely new contribu- tion. This "oedipal" struggle
invites the reader to identify with the narrative's subtextual insistence to make empirical claims that
suggest that theviewed object can be best understood in coherent terms as an "other" from the
particularviewpoint of the viewing subject. It is for this reason that realist narrativity can be said to
function ideologically. Realist narrativity is ideological for making invisible the relays it produces
between the terms it opposes. Especially important are the relays it produces between those oppositions
upon which bourgeois individualism depends, such as self and society, nature and environment, sexuality
and economy, private and public .... If, then, it is to be concluded that ethnography is informed with an
oedipal logic of realist narrativity, developed through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is
because ethnography treats the subject's struggle for self-knowledge as a struggle to obtain factual
representations ofempirical knowledge." The riddle of how knowledge is constructed is not solved by
trying to make the false choice between allegedly factually objective statistics and authentically pure
experience. Interrogating perspective must be matched by accounting for position, and both must
appreciate the political impli-cations of how discourse narrates what is represented .12 If ethnography
reenacts the psychoanalytic subtext of realist narratives, including other forms of empirical science, it
also must address the positional issue of who gets to do ethnography on whom. In particular, to choose
just one case of particular relevance for studying welfare, what is at work when white, male, middle-
class social scientists are trying through ethnography to make sense of poor women of color?
Ethnography as VoyeurismGlazer was right that ethnographic work would follow in his wake; however,
he hardly could predict that this genre would gain as much popularity as it has. In just the past few
years, there have been numerous works using ethnographic depictions of the poor, including, to name just
a few, Leslie Dunbar's The Common Interest, Susan Sheehan's Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair,
John Schwarz and Thomas Volgy's The Forgotten Americans, Mark Rank's Living on the Edge, Mitchell
Duneier's Slim's Table, Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land, Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children
Here, and William Julius Wilson's work on inner-city African American poor families in Chicago." The
last three of these in particular highlight the limitations of such work. Nicholas Lernann, born and raised
in New Orleans, offers a book that moves back and forth between policy machinations in Washington,
ADI 2010 20
D.C., and the changing fortunes of black families moving from Clarksdale, Mis- sissippi, to Chicago,
Illinois. Revised after earlier articles received criticism, the book jettisons an explicit "culture of poverty"
argument.-14 Instead, by tracing migration from Clarksdale to Chicago and back, Lemann makes a
more understated argument (about two-thirds of the way through the text) nd implies that the legacy of
the sharecropping system broke the AfricanAmerican family and set it on the road to ruin.35 This cultural
explanation is almost smothered by rich narratives of the families he studied. Their lives are hard, Only
some of those who return South seem to get a reprieve. How this narrative underwrites the sharecropping
thesis anymore than the bad statistical work of previous studies is left unexplained. Racism, economic
dislocation, and political
marginalization are mentioned, but the narrative continues to suggest that sharecropping and migration
from the rural South to the urban North were critical factors in making poor, inner- city African
American neighborhoods unlivable. Instead, Lemann remains intent on telling a tale of migration about
southern sharecroppers, all the while backgrounding his own southern roots, which may very wen drive
his insistence to tell a tale of how the South shaped the lives of those who left and those who returned.36
Alex Kotlowitz's ethnography of two young boys, Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers, from the Henry Homer
Homes in Chicago is a withering tale of childhood hardship in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the
United States. Kotlowitz stresses the psychic cost of growing up amid consistent violence, crime, drug
abuse and drug trafficking, clashes with the police, and grinding poverty. In a moving narrative,
Kotlowitz's preoccupation with the physical violence of the immediate neighborhood de- mphasizes the
structural violence the broader society has inflicted on such neighborhoods. Racism, economic
dislocation, and even bureaucratic insensitivity are mentioned, but the violent nature of community life
is the story line. Kotlowitz cares for the boys he studied; he continues to visit them and pays for their
private schooling. In the book's preface, Kotlowitz notes that the children's mother, LaJoe, had a hope,
which Kotlowitz shared, that a "book about the children would make us all hear, that it would make us all
stop and listen."37 His work therefore represents an attempt to overcome the silences that surround the
deterioration of poor inner-city neighborhoods. Yet Kotlowitz's uncontextualized and close reading of
the psychic costs of growing up in a violent neighborhood allows his work to be ap- propriated by white
readers to tell other stories. They are free to use it for self-rationalizations that reinforce stereotypical
notions about poor inner- city African Americans. Kotlowitz's narrative tells white audiences what they
are already predisposed to hear-depravity persists in the inner city."' The white outside observer
chronicles the inside of the alien black culturewith- out suggesting how the outside is implicated in
constructing the inside. bell hooks provides an important point about the need of even the progressive,
antiracist white documentarian to identity himself and the position he adopts: "As critical intervention it
allows for the recognition that progressive white people who are anti-racist might be able to understand
the way in which their cultural practice reiriscribes white supremacy without promoting paralyzing
guilt or denial . William Julius Wilson's most recentwork builds on his earlier The Truly
Disadvantaged.40 This time, Wilson uses survey data and in-depth ethno-graphic studies of amilies in
Chicago to make the case that racism and economic dislocation have contributed to the persistence of
inner-city poverty. Yet a culture of resignation and resistance among some poor persons, par- ticularly
some young African American males, preventsthem from making the most of the few opportunities that
are available." The connection between the story and the conclusion is not obvious. The telling of the tale
is taken by itself as justifying the conclusion. The lure of ethnography is the power of its narrative. To
narrate lives is the privilege to say what they mean. Narrative becomes self-legitimating, especially
through retelling. Wilson's often-repeated narrative is about how the loss of middle-class role models has
allowed many poor inner-city African American youths to forgo committing themselves to the world of
work and achievement. Yet it is surely possible to tell other stories about these same individuals- stories
that stress even the persistence of role models in the face of grinding poverty.'
ADI 2010 21
Link: Generic Law Link
The Government uses laws as a biopolitical control tactic
Higgins 98 (Lesley College Literature Vol. 25)

Foucault argues that whereas "law and sovereignty were absolutely inseparable . . . with government it
is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of
employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics--to
arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such
ends may be achieved" (Foucault Effect95). This tactical deployment of laws can be discerned in
the British government's switch from temporary and specific "Aliens" acts to permanent, future-
oriented "Nationality" acts, designed to exclude a wide variety of changing Others. Facing the pressures
of a post-imperial order, successive governments (irrespective of party) implemented a series of laws
regarding immigration and nationality, beginning with the 1948 British Nationality Act and culminating in
the British Nationality Act of 1981, which modified or nullified the passports held by former colonial British
subjects. 25 The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, for example imposed immigration controls for the first
time on holders of United Kingdom passports when Asian holders of such passports began to emigrate from
East Africa to the Kingdom. The Act extended immigration controls to the holders of United Kingdom
passports issued outside the British Isles unless they or one of their parents or grandparents had been born,
naturalised, or adopted in the United Kingdom itself, or had been registered in the United Kingdom or a
Commonwealth country already independent or selfgoverning in 1948. ( Thornberry5)
ADI 2010 22
Link: Amnesty
Sanctuary is biopolitical
Lippert 4 (Randy Alternatives: Global, local, Political Vol 29)
I first briefly discuss what sanctuary practices reveal about a nonliberal pastoral rationality and
how this specific logic relates to a dominant neoliberalism. Following Foucault‘s account of
sovereign power, I then show how sanctuary is an instance of sovereign power. Sanctuary
suggests that sovereign power is not restricted to the (nation-)state, that it can flow from
other spaces and sources, and that it is not always coercive in nature. This analysis has several
implications for understanding governing society today, the most basic of which is to suggest the
need to allow for a plurality of sovereignties and rationalities in specific contexts. Foucault writes
of pastoral power as a "less celebrated" rationality that reveals itself, following an appearance in
Hebrew literature, in Christian practices of the Middle Ages. (9) Pastoral power, according to
Foucault, is first and foremost about the "care for the life of individuals" and a "constant
kindness." It so happens that providing care and extending kindness on a continuing, often-
individualized basis, is the raison d'etre of sanctuary. Pastoralism's presence is not restricted to
sanctuary, extending as it does to target the marginalized in myriad contexts. Yet it is in sanctuary
practice that a pastoral rationality appears in near-exemplary form. While it can be given only
cursory attention here, sanctuary's theoretical relevance is partially as fertile ground for
interrogating the character of this pastoral mode, its scope, agents, knowledges, and objects. Two
aspects of pastoral power consistent with sanctuary practice are suggested in Foucault’s
statement about the welfare state being "one of the extremely numerous reappearances of the
tricky adjustment between political power wielded over legal subjects and pastoral power
wielded over live individuals." (10) As pastoral governance (11) constituted welfare states, this
rationality is not a leftover of the distant past when Christian churches wielded considerably more
power than they do today. Nor is it continuous with Christian church governance. Thus, Foucault
elsewhere notes: you will say; the pastorate has, if not disappeared, at least lost the main part of its
efficiency. This is true, but I think we should distinguish between two aspects of pastoral power—
between ecclesiastical institutionalization, which has ceased or at least lost its vitality since the
eighteenth century, and its function, which has spread and multiplied outside the ecclesiastical
institution.
The Government who gives sanctuary can take it away

Lippert 4 (Randy Alternatives: Global, local, Political Vol 29)
Foucault writes of the "spectacle of the scaffold": "The sovereign was present at the execution not only
as the power exacting the vengeance of the law, but as the power that could suspend both law and
vengeance." (43) It is in this sense that the granting of sanctuary by a church/community and ministerial
discretion are exceptions and decidedly sovereign in character. The sovereign aspect is also reflected in
ministerial decisions on "humanitarian and compassionate" grounds by the absence of a warning when the
decision will be forthcoming and of any explanation for the decision. In the incidents studied, the decision
appeared suddenly and adopted the uncomplicated form of a "yes" or "no." (44) Further exemplifying this
sovereign character, in granting a reprieve to a family of Algerians who sought sanctuary in Montreal,
the minister announced at a press conference that his decision was "an exceptional measure for an
exceptional situation." (45) This contrasts markedly with routine decisions of the Immigration and Refugee
Board regarding refugee status that correspond to a relatively coherent schedule and are accompanied by
lengthy explanation

Biopower Kritik - Index

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ADI 2010 1

Labels Suck (K-Lab) Biopower

Biopower Kritik – Index

B. Choose a specific link card if applicable

C. The biopolitical framework established by Foucault produces prejudiced boundaries of race

Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the New School, 1995

E. BIOPOWER RISKS EXTINCTION

Link: Visa Generic Links

Visa requirements control those entering the US

Societies of discipline are becoming stronger

The biopolitical framework established by Foucault produces prejudiced boundaries of

Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the New School, 1995

Bolaños, Professor of Philosophy at Metropolitan Autonomous University -

Cruikshank, Ph.D., Minnesota University, ‘99

Link: The Visa system uses biopolitical categories

Link: Temporary Work Visas

Link: Work Visa/Work

Using work to determine a person’s usefulness is a form of biopolitical control

Domestic work is Biopolitical.

Link: Competitiveness/Economy Advantages

The discourse of competitiveness is used to legitimatize policy actions through threat

Bristow, School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, 05

The discourse of competitiveness, although fundamentally flawed, is used to justify policy

Bristow, School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, 05

The discourse of regional competitiveness has become ubiquitous in the deliberations

Link: Narratives/ Personal Experiences of other Link

Schram, prof social theory and policy @ Bryn Mawr College, 95

Link: Generic Law Link

The Government uses laws as a biopolitical control tactic

Higgins 98 (Lesley College Literature Vol. 25)

The Government who gives sanctuary can take it away

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