UMKC-Biopower

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UMKC SDI 2009 Starter Pack

Biopower

Index

SHELL...2-4

Links

General5-6Disability Programs.7Welfare Programs8Homeless.9Statistical Data10Job Programs...11Medical General...12Medical HIV13Medical Elderly Care...14

Medical Prenatal Care..15

Impact

Genocide16Racism17Dehumanization.18

Alternative Extensions.19-20

AT: Permutation...21

Affirmative Answer..22-28

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State control of social services, medical treatment, and welfare program enhance

biopoltical control through technical efficiency, surveillance, and statisticalcalculation. This exercise of disciplinary power creates categories for inclusionand exclusion.

Nielson in 2003Brett, Globalization and the Biopolitics of Aging CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 2,Summer 2003, pp. 161-186

Lifes unfolding is thus constitutively political or, to put it another way, all politics are at a certain level biopolitics. Not coincidentallydoes Foucault refer to Aristotles definition as he invents the term biopolitics to describe the integration, at the beginning of themodern era, of natural life into the mechanisms and calculations of state power: For millennia, man remained what he was forAristotle: a living animal with an additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his

existence as a living being in question. With this affirmation, Foucault initiates a rethinking of political power outside of traditionaljuridical and institutional categories, emphasizing instead the concrete ways in which power penetrates the subjects body and shapesthe overall biological existence of populations. Central to his understanding of biopolitics is an analysis of the way in which thenation-state, from the period of its emergence in the seventeenth century, rationalized the management of social problems with new,technically efficient means: statistics, police, health regulations, and centralized welfare. Through these mechanisms of power, whichFoucault describes as disciplinary, the state moved to ensure obedience to its rule, activating devices of social inclusion and/orexclusion, and structuring the limits and parameters of thought and practice. It is not difficult to see the implications of this notion ofdisciplinary power, and the related concept of governmentality (which describes the combined orchestration of disciplinarymechanisms with other forms of social agency), for the study of aging. With the emergence of modern biopolitics, the production ofknowledge about aging (through medical research, statistical analysis, the human sciences, and the like) becomes intimately linked tothe states efforts to regulate its population (to monitor and administer its propagation and growth, and in particular, to manage theeconomic relations between generations). By highlighting the technological and discursive means by which power invests lifesunfolding, a Foucauldian analysis points not only to the techniques by which the aging body is subjectified but also to the role ofgerontological knowledge in these same processes of discipline and rule

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B. These categories created by the expansion of the States biopolitical control is the

root of violence, racism, and mass slaughter.

Foucault in'76[Michel, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, p. 254-257Trans. David Macey]

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the breakbetween what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, thedistinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, aredescribed as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out thegroups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appearsto be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat thespecies, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to

fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function. Its role is, ifyou like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that youlet more die will allow you to live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill") was not invented by eitherracism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live, you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war-"If you want to

live, the other must die" -function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes itpossible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship ofconfrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are elim-inated,the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I-as species rather than individual-can live, the stronger Iwill be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in thesense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate,or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. This is not, then, a military, warlike,or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done awaywith are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower

system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but inthe elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two.In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a

power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed,

that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. So you can understandthe importance-I almost said the vital importance-of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising theright to kill. If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or inother words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist.When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the riskof death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I think that we are now in a position to understand a number of things. We canunderstand, first of all, the link that was quickly-I almost said immediately-established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power.Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense-or in other words, not so much Darwin's theory itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy ofspecies that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit) naturally became within a fewyears during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discoursein scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for

Continued on the Next Pagewars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words,there was a confrontation, a killing or the risk of death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to thinkabout them in the form of evolutionism. And we can also understand why racism should have developed inmodern societies that function in the biopower mode; we can understand why racism broke out at a number of.privileged moments, and why they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative.Racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in thebiopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By usingthe themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage war on one's adversaries

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but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million (and this is precisely what hasbeen going on since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the nineteenth century), except byactivating the theme of racism? From this point onward, war is about two things: it is not simply a matter ofdestroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race, of destroying that [sort] of biological threat thatthose people over there represent to our race. In one sense, this is of course no more than a biologicalextrapolation from the theme of the political enemy. But there is more to it than that. In the nineteenth century-andthis is completely new-war will be seen not only as a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the enemyrace (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way ofregenerating one's own race. As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become allthe purer

C. The alternative is to reject the affirmative by voting negative: The act of resistance isnecessary to identify and create distance between the States use of biopower andits power over the individual.

Hayden in 99

Sara Associate Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Montana, WOMEN'S STUDIES INCOMMUNITY, Spring, p. 30.

In his early writings, Foucault focused on the ways in which bio-power subjugated the individual, hence leadingsome scholars to criticize his work for implying that "the hold of disciplinary power is total." Toward the end ofhis career, however, Foucault began to emphasize the potential for resistance. Foucault maintained that powerrelations are everywhere-they are exercised in myriad ways throughout the social field. Yet he also asserted that"as soon as there's a relation of power there's a possibility of resistance. We're never trapped by power: it's alwayspossible to modify its hold, in determined conditions and following a precise strategy." From a Foucauldian

perspective, then, resistance does not imply the transcendence of power. Indeed, it is a fallacy to assume that anypractice or discourse can take place exterior to relations of power. Rather, resistance lies in bringing to light theways in which power operates "in an effort to create a critical distance on it." Once we have achieved anunderstanding of how power functions, we can "modify its hold."

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Link Extensions General

Social services that seek to provide health or welfare of the population leads to the expansion of biopolitical

control through regulation and manipulation

Rayner in 2001

Timothy, Biopower and Technology: Foucault and Heideggers Way of Thinking Contretemps 2, May 2001http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/2may2001/rayner.pdf

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, power takes life in charge, covering the entire surface thatstretched...from the body to the population, by a double play of technologies of discipline on the one hand, andtechnologies of regulation on the other.44 We are henceforth in the realm of biopolitical government. Presidingover processes of birth, death, health, and illness, biopolitical government surveys the global mass in the mannerof physician, deploying forms of regulation as required, measures to inculcate positive orientation and productivecoordination, institutions to maintain standards of sanitation, public education, and welfare, techniques to activate

the indolent, strategies to control forms of dissentdeploying, in short, a broad array of techniques of bio-regulation.45 These have the end of establishing economy at the level of population-resource. The wordeconomy, Foucault claims, referred in the sixteenth century to the correct manner of managing individuals,goods and wealth within the family (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children, andservants) and of making the family fortunes prosper.46 By the nineteenth century, it had come to designate a levelof reality proper to the management of statesa complex composed of resources of various kinds, structured notonly through a set of relations established between individuals and things (wealth, territory, intellectual andphysical resources), but also through those relations that individuals establish with one another, and the relationsthey establish with themselves.

The States control over the welfare of the population is the epitome of the sovereignsexpansion of biopolitical control

Nikolopoulou in 2000Kalliopi,SubStance, Issue 93 (Volume 29, Number 3), 2000, pp. 124-131 (Review) Homo Sacer: SovereignPower and Bare Life (review) project Muse.

The individual, reduced to the most concrete and animalistic elements of its life, confronts a power that is alsoreduced to its most disembodied abstraction, to an empty form leaping out of Kafkas narratives. Though initiallythe mere life of the body was considered as the thing most distant from politics, it turns out that the ultimatecriterion of sovereign power consists in the decision over the protection or destruction of a human body. Thus, thefounding moment of Western politics consists precisely in putting mere biological life at stake, in a way thatrenders this life simultaneously subject to welfare promises and death threats. This power over life and deathbecomes the hallmark of sovereignty. In Agambens words, the production of a biopolitical body is the originalactivity of sovereign power (6).

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Link Extensions General

The affirmative is an example of the State use technological data and surveillance to enhance biopolitical

control of a subject by determining distribution and access to resources.

Willse in 2008

Craig, (Program in Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York), Universal Data Elements, or the Biopolitical Life ofHomeless Populations Surveillance & Society5(3): 227-251

In an influential article, Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson designate an emerging surveillant assemblage, orthe coming-together of once independent systems of surveillance. One result of this new assemblage is the productionof what they and others call the data double:

Today . . . we are witnessing the formation and coalescence of a new typeof body, a form of becoming which transcends human corporeality and reduces flesh to pure information.Culled from the tentacles of thesurveillant assemblage, this new body is our data double, a double which

involves the multiplication of the individual, the constitution of anadditional self (Poster 1990:97).

Data doubles circulate in a host of different centres of calculation and serve as markers for access toresources, services and power in ways which are often unknown to its referent (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000:613).

Here, Haggerty and Ericson offer an alternative understanding of information technologies such as HMIS. Pointing tonot only the diffusion, but also the linking up, of surveillance technologies across the social, they argue that thesurveillant assemblage does more than spy upon past actions, as is often the expressed fear of surveillancetechnologies. Rather, these technologies orient toward the future, determining the distribution of access to resourcesand life chances in arenas of health, education, employment, consumption and civic life.

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Link Extensions Disability Programs

The concept of the disabled is a social construct used to show delineation from the normfor the purposes of exercising biopolitical control over what society considers the

abnormal

Galvin in 2006Rose (Professor Murdoch Univeristy, Australia) A genealogy of the disabled identity inrelation to work and sexuality Disability & Society Vol. 21, No. 5, August 2006, pp. 499512

The disabled identity is a particularly illuminating site of subjectification because it has been designedto function as a counterpoint to the norm. Thomson (1997, p. 8) frames this position elegantly whenshe devises the concept of the normate, the superior pole of a binary which names the failedsubject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose markedbodies shore up the normates boundary. The antithetical positioning of disability against the normhas been highlighted in a recent qualitative research project which reveals that work and sexualityare primary sites of identity loss for disabled people (Galvin, 2005a). In keeping with these insights, I

will show how welfare reform and sexual rehabilitation currently function as technologies of the self,which strive to maintain this framework of normalisation and, as such, to maintain firm boundariesbetween the affiliated and the marginalised in contemporary society (Rose, 1996b, p. 340). But firstit is necessary to trace the genealogy of disability in relation to the concepts of work and sexuality

Disability programs seek to normalize disabled people so they may be controlled throughgovernmental programs.


Yet, at the same time that it was perceived as a threat to the social order, disability was vital to itsdelineation and maintenance. Over the past two centuries, disability has retained its integralconnection with work. In particular, the medicalisation of disability has been embedded in aframework that aims to rehabilitate or normalise people with impairments so that they becomecapable of participating in the workforce and, as a consequence, are able to develop the qualities ofself-sufficiency, health, wealth and consumerism that define the ideal citizen. It has also allowed forthe dividing practices that originally incarcerated disabled people in institutions to operate within thegreater community, lessening the need for such overt forms of physical exclusion. And, as disabledpeople emerge[d] from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and [began] to circulatein a free state, the methods of control over their subjectification became more flexible and morediffuse (Foucault, 1977b, p. 211).

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Link Extensions Welfare Reform

Welfare reform is the means by which government seeks to facilitate the reorientation oflong term unemployed citizens to occupations for the purposes of government control of

their bodies for the purpose of production


The two most salient technologies through which the processes of subjectification can be understoodin relation to work and sexuality operate through welfare reform policy and the literature focused onsexual rehabilitation. Both forms of intervention in the lives of disabled people can be seen to betechnologies of the self because they have been devised to

permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain numberof 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. (Foucault, 1988a, p. 18)

As such, welfare reform can be seen to be aimed at facilitating the restoration of passive, dependentindividuals who are at risk of long term unemployment to their roles as active citizens so that theycan once again define themselves as occupationally engaged and self-reliant. Similarly, the sexualcounselling and self-help literature intends to facilitate the development of improved body-esteem,sexual-esteem and sexual technique in accordance with the norms surrounding sexuality. Bothappear to offer emancipatory potential and access to positive forms of identification, which couldultimately lead to the disappearance of disability in its social model sense. However, as will becomeevident, these technologies have limited power to achieve what they promise because they remainindividualistic, paternalistic and normative and, thus, are more inclined to perpetuate the disabling ofidentity than to challenge it.

Welfare reform creates categories of individuals based on ability to work. This allows foridentity construction necessary to enhance biopolitical control.


Since the early 1980s, income support systems have increasingly come under attack because, it isclaimed, they produce a form of dependency and passivity which is self-perpetuating and highlydamaging to the life chances of welfare recipients (FaCS, 2000a, 2000b). Rose touches on this view in

the following description of the subject of welfare reform as construed by neoliberalism. [T]hey arepeople whose self-responsibility and self-fulfilling aspirations have beendeformed by the dependency culture, whose efforts at self-advancement have been frustratedfor so long that they suffer from "learned helplessness, whose self esteem has been

destroyed. (Rose, 1996a, p. 59) However, while it is claimed that this view is conducive to the enrichmentof freedom and opportunity, it opens the way for victim blaming, such that those who fail to achieveindependence through employment are accused of lacking the qualities necessary for self-actualisation. As OMalley (1996, p. 202) argues, the unemployed have a responsibility to upgradetheir skills, self-esteem and marketability and, if they do not succeed and continue to rely on the

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state to deal with the harmful effects of known, calculable and individually manageable risks, theycan only be perceived as feckless and culpable.

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Link Extensions Homeless

The tracking of homeless populations through technological surveillance expands biopolotical control of the

homeless subject as separate from the general population

Willse in 2008


Of course, what HUD considers an information technology, others would consider a technology of surveillance.6 Earlycritics of HUDs program pointed in Orwellian terms to the Big Brother feel of the program, accusing thegovernment of spying upon and tracking a vulnerable population. HUDs response to these accusations emphasizes thatits program does not create a national database of homeless people. Databases are maintained at local levels byContinuums of Care, formalized networks of agencies providing homeless services within a community (See Wong etal, 2006 and Lyon-Callo, 2004:11-23) that may determine what information is shared amongst agencies. HUD, in turn,only collects data at the aggregate level, not at the level of the individual case. The names and social security numbers

of clients, for example, remain at the local level. While this attends to some of the privacy concerns of clients,advocates and critics of surveillance technologies alike, we should nonetheless askwhat, if not a national database,HUD is in fact creating. I argue that its formation of the universal data element is not only HUDs uniquecontribution to HMIS, but its contribution to surveillance systems and governance more broadly. I hope to show thatthe universal data element acts as a connector between two technological forms central to governance todaythedatabase and the networkand thereby allows data to be simultaneously local and national, public and anonymous,databased and networked. As such, the universal data element is significant not as a discrete object, but as a force forarranging technical relationships between technologies, agencies, clients, and HUD. I will furthermore argue that if weunderstand HUDs HMIS program in terms of surveillance technologies, it is a form of surveillance not only or evenprimarily interested in the individual homeless person. If, following one move in surveillance studies, we understandsurveillance technologies as constitutive of the very objects they track, we must ask what is constituted, produced or

organized by HUDs HMIS program. This case suggests that as a mechanism of governance, or a productivetechnology, the HMIS program organizes and makes available for intervention a homelesspopulation that exceeds theindividual, but in which the individual is caught up. The privacy concerns raised by critics are not irrelevant, and theyhave played a role in shaping the universal data elements. But ultimately, the protections provided do not attend to aform of politics operating on a register other than the individual subject with a claim to privacy. Confronting thepolitics of homeless population surveillance requires concerns beyond individual rights

Social services for the homeless is an example of governments use of biopolitical control over a population

Willse in 2008


Individual experiences of finding and maintaining appropriate shelter, or accessing income necessary for survival, areabsorbed into a governance mechanism in which the regulation of the poor, to borrow Piven and Clowards phrase,functions not only as social control, but also as a mechanism for the regulation of social services. Being a target ofhomeless social services here becomes a kind of labor used to produce a populationforgovernance and as governance .

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Link Extensions Statistical Data

Statistical data used to monitor and administer populations is the root of biopolitics in the modern era.

Rayner in 2001Timothy, Biopower and Technology: Foucault and Heideggers Way of Thinking Contretemps 2, May 2001http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/2may2001/rayner.pdf

In terms of the genealogy of biopolitical government, the emergence of disciplinary power was only one part of a double developmentThe second pole of developmentformed somewhat later than the first41arose on the basis of the objectification of human beingsattendant on disciplinary power. Biopolitical government requires this process of objectification, this institutional generation of bodiesas manipulable objects. It is only on the basis of the objectification of human beings on the level of their biological traits thatgovernment can assume the task of the administration of life. In the eighteenth century, the science of statisticswhich had previouslyfunctioned within a monarchical administrative apparatus concerned primarily with the management of state resources42was turnedto the analysis of the state population. With the application of statistical techniques to the government of populations, a new form ofpolitical management came into being: one no longer focussed upon the body of the individual, but:on the species body,...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 bio-politics of the population.43

Statistical analysis or collection of data to measure health and well-being of population leads to

generalizations about categories of individuals necessary to increase biopolitics

Willse and Spade in 2005

Craig (Student in Sociology at the Graduate Center New School New York) Dean Transgender Attorney)Freedom in A Regulatory State 11 Widener L Rev. 309 Found Online

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Link Extensions Job Programs

Job training or employment assistance is a form of biopolitical control used to pushindividuals into easily recognizable categories of rational labor producers.


Obviously work has always played an important role in defining peoples lives and ensuring theirsurvival. The difference in the modern era is that work has taken on a new shape and becomeimmersed in a particular ideological framework and regime of disciplinary mechanisms. Foucault(1980a) argues that, while work has always had a productive function, in the modern era it has takenon two additional functions, the symbolic function and the function ofdressage, or discipline (p.161). Those who could not participate in this new social realm could only be seen to be lacking thesymbolic and disciplinary qualities of the autonomous, rational, market-driven liberal subject and thuswere defined as aberrant. As Jolly (2000, p. 796) argues, [t]he administrative categories of able to

work and unable to work [were developed] to identify those who because they did not, or couldnot, participate in the central system of work were a threat to the social order

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Link Extensions Medical (General)

The affirmative extends medical benefits to a diseased other to control and manipulate them

SINHA 2000ARUSH,Department of Family Medicine University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth Department of Anthropology Southern Methodist University

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), pp. 291-309, The Virtual Gaze of Health Care in the Next Century

A structural approach to understanding health care describes the local and global public and private sector interests that inform it. Itis a means of understanding the ways in which patients' and health care providers' choices are circumbscribed (Anagnost 1995;Morsy 1995; Navarro 1981; Pearce 1995; Singer et al. 1990). In biomedical systems, the healer is the mediator between the elite andthe non-elite, a "locus of hegemony," and health and disease are defined by the elite for the purposes of controlling the non-elite(Csordas 1988; Gramsci 1971). Medicine often defines the "Other" as diseased or unhygienic and, in doing so, places it undermedical control, effecting a means by which to enforce an amassed set of Euroamerican middle-class values (Douglas 1966; Jacobus1990). Like Foucault, political economists are interested in the history of power and the medical establishment. Power is manifestedat various levels in the construction of health. From an anthropologist' s perspective, biomedicine is merely one more ethnomedicalsystem that both has its genesis in and derives its sustenance from Western political, economic, and ideological institutions (Foster

and Anderson 1974). Navarro (1981) describes biomedicine as an extension of capitalist machinations. In biomedicine, the emphasisis upon the worker and the mechanisms of capitalism, namely production (Martin 1991; Reid and Reynolds 1990). One methodological approach topolitical economy is to use Frank's (1967) model, in which the metropolis (core) exploits the satellite (periphery) regions for all types of resources, especially labor,capital, and raw material. With respect to the present inquiry, some of the questions raised by this approach are: (1) how has telemedicine affected the process ofcentralization with respect to capital flows? (2) to what extent do patient health categories correspond with the biomedical definitions and to what extent have they beenmodified by telemedicine? and (3) how is telemedicine informed by the current political and economic climate of health care; specifically, who owns the means of healthcare production? These questions become more complex as those involved in the production of health care become spatially removed from its delivery.

New medical technology designed to incorporate rural and poor populations allows increased government

control and surveillance

SINHA 2000ARUSH,Department of Family Medicine University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth Department of Anthropology Southern Methodist University

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), pp. 291-309, The Virtual Gaze of Health Care in the Next Century

The ability to communicate instantaneously across great distances has definite implications for health care. Previously, the conceptof deterritorialization has been applied to the decoupling of cultures from geographic limitations, for exam ple, in migration studies(Appadurai 1991; Basch et al. 1994). Few have looked at the effects of such a phenomenon on health and the health industry. Thedeterritorialization trend in health care is not sustainable if the hospital or clinic provides spatial and containment functions, such asquarantine (Foucault 1963). Communication has always been a facet of health care, but new technology has made communicationmuch cheaper and now allows biomedicine to interact with previously "remote" populations (Marcus 1995). As Appadurai writes,ethnography describes the new definitions of "locality, as a lived experience, in a globalized, de territorialized world" (1991:196)and allows for the construction of new, virtual "imagined communities" (Anderson 1983). In this instance, a multisite analysis notonly studies the attributes of separate sites, but also the vital quality of the link ages among them (Marcus 1995). The ability todeterritorialize or decouple location from function has surprising effects. First, while the purpose of telemedicine is ostensibly toreach into rural areas, it has done so at the cost of further concentrating health specialists and health resources into the urban areas(Morazin 1997). The second effect, related to the first, is that telemedicine has the ability to further isolate certain populations, such

as reservation-based Native Americans or prisoners in correctional facilities (Bashshur 1997; Bhatara 1995; Hipkins 1997). As moreand more clinic functions go on-line, become virtual, how are the classically defined functions of a clinic affected? How does avirtual clinic achieve containment? Can surveillance and education functions (e.g., "grand rounds") be performed virtually? There isevidence to suggest that clinics are becoming more and more deterritorialized as technologically wealthy institutions seek to spreadtheir influence from the urban into the rural areas. I now turn to a discussion of the current health care environment to which theaforementioned theoretical perspectives might be applied.

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Link Extensions Medical Asst. for the Elderly

Medicalization and control over aging populations is a form of disciplinary control andgovernmenatlity which perpetuates biopolitical control of an aging population

Nielson in 2003Brett, Globalization and the Biopolitics of Aging CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 2,Summer 2003, pp. 161-186

Not surprisingly, Foucaults arguments have proved influential within critical gerontology, which admonishesmainstream gerontology for its narrow scientificity and endorses reflexive methodologies imported from thehumanities, pointing to the historical and discursive construction of knowledge about the aging process. It isnot uncommon for critical gerontologists to refer to Foucaults notions of disciplinary power and/orgovernmentality when accounting for the medicalization of the aging body or the establishment ofinstitutions, government agencies, and professions for the care of the elderly. Criticizing the genderassumptions inherent in traditional medical approaches to aging, Harper invokes Foucaults concept ofdisciplinary technologies to claim that control is attained by producing new norms of later life based on amedical solution to physical and mental decay. Similarly, Higgs acknowledges the relevance of Foucaults

idea of governmentality . . . which can be extended to inform the current debates about citizenship andolder people. But the most thoroughgoing application of Foucauldian thought to the study of aging isStephen Katzs Disciplining Old Age, which analyzes the techniques used by administrative powers toproblematize aged subjects and the games of truth and depth employed by gerontology to know them. Thestrictness of Katzs adherence to Foucault is evidenced by his claim that the prospects of a Foucauldiangerontology quickly become apparent if the word age is substituted in Foucaults captivating phrases on sexand sexuality. As the title suggests, Disciplining Old Age focuses on the disciplinary mechanisms by whichthe production of gerontological knowledge requires the subjectification of aging bodies. To substantiate hisarguments, Katz turns to Foucaults account of disciplinary power in The History of Sexuality. While thisemphasis on disciplinarity allows him to examine how gerontology articulates the knowledge of old age invarious ways, it also limits his attention to another important aspect of Foucaults work, one that remainslatent in the volumes on sexuality and is brought to light by later commentatorsthat is, the argumentconcerning the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control.

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Biopower

Link Extension Medical (Prenatal Care)

Pre-Natal Care leads to state control of health and welfare through comprehensive regulation of the body

Bridges in 2008

Khiara (Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern U.), NORTHWESTERN JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIAL POLICY,Winter 2008, 66.

Following Foucault, 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 toultimately gain a modicum of control over "the level of health" of the population.

STATE-BASED PRENATAL CARE IS A VEHICLE FOR BRINGING PREGNANT WOMEN AND

THEIR FETUSES UNDER STATES BIOPOLITICAL CONTROL

Bridges in 2008Khiara, (Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern U.), NORTHWESTERN JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIAL POLICY,

Winter 2008, 66-67.

Yet, pregnancy is not a legal event. That is, the fact of pregnancy alone does not put the pregnant woman withinthe jurisdiction of the biopolitical state. While the state may desire to exercise its "power over life" by submittingthe expectant mother and her fetus to "an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls," the pregnantwoman is not compelled to surrender herself to such a state project. Again, this is because, at present, the fact ofpregnancy alone does not enable the state to reach the woman and her pregnant body with its biopolitical power.The biopolitical state could achieve the regulation of every pregnant woman by creating a law that mandates thatwomen 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 orotherwise 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 carefrom a physician, nurse practitioner, midwife, or other professional whose services are intended to ensure the birthof a healthy baby and the continued health of the new mother, I am not aware of any law that punishes such awoman's behavior, or lack thereof. In Colorado, a woman who exposes her fetus to controlled substances may befound to have neglected her child and, consequently, lose custody of the infant. And, of course, once a baby isborn, there are a wealth of laws that punish a woman for directly harming or failing to protect her child. But, priorto a baby's birth, there is no law that penalizes a woman for "failing to protect" her not-yet-born child byneglecting or otherwise refusing to have a medically-managed pregnancy.

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Biopower

Impact Extension - Genocide

The ability for the state to manage the health and well-being of the body is the root of wars and genocide.

Giving the power over life to the state legitimizes extermination

Foucault 1978[The History of Sexuality Vol. 1]

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 themgrow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There hasbeen a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administeringpower and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested assimply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloodyas they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocaustson their own populations. But this formidable power of deathand this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force

and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limitsnow presents itself as the counterpart of a power thatexerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to adminis ter, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controlsand comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they arewaged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose ofwholesale slaughterin 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 [people] to be killed. And through a turnthat closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, thedecision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question ofsurvival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to deathis the underside of the power to guarantee an individuals con tinued existence. The principle underlying the tactics ofbattlethat one has to be capable of killing in order to go on livinghas become the principle that defines the strategy ofstates. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence

of a population. Ifgenocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancientright to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scalephenomena of population.

THE STATES ABILITY TO CONTROL THE BODY IS THE ROOT OF WAR, VIOLENCE, AND

GENOCIDE

Rabinow in 94Paul, Professor of Anthropology, Berkeley, THE FOUCAULT READER, 1984, p. 260

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 somany men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasinglytoward 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 todeath is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-thatone has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existencein question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeedthe dream of modem powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated andexercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population

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Biopower

Impact Extension Racism

Biopolitics creates places individuals into categories of value and then allows for the elimination of those

not deemed valuable. This is the root of racist ideology

WHYTE 2004 (PHD CANDIDATE @ MONASH U STATE OF EMERGENCY AVAIL)

In his 1976 lecture series at the College de France, Society Must be Defended, Foucault P ointed to racism as that which reinscribesthe right to kill in the sphere of a state supposedly committed to the fostering of, and care for, life. Foucault argues that in thebiopower systemkilling or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries but inthe elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. 3 As Foucault points out, war today has twofunctions: it exists not only to destroy a political adversary but also to destroy the biological threat, to destroy the sort of threatthat those people over there represent to our race. It is in this context that we should view the recent warnings by a senior Britishmilitary officer that the US occupying forces in Iraq view the Iraqi population as untermenschen (subhuman). In the context of Iraq,we see how this mobilisation of a biological discourse, which as Foucault points out is simply reinscribed onto the notion of thepolitical enemy, is utilised to deadly effect, justifying the indiscrimate targeting of a civilian population conceived as both enemyand subhuman threat, and undoubtedly contributing to the torture, degradation and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.

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Biopower

Impact Extension Dehumanization

Biopoolitics makes life calculable Once we begin to calculate life we necessary must eliminate that which

has no value. This is the root of violenceDillon in 99Michael Dillon, Professor Political Theory at Lancaster, Political theory, Another Justice, 1999, p. 165

Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration withoutindexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of courseto devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensurationeither. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust Howeverliberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable.Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself.For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure:036 But how does that necessity presentitself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the adventof another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being. The event of this lack is not a negative experience.

Rather, it is an encounter with a reserve charged with possibility. As possibility, it is that which enables life to be lived in excesswithout the overdose of actuality.37 What this also means is that the human is not decided. It is precisely undecidable.Undecidability means being in a position of having to decide without having already been fully determined and without beingcapable of bringing an end to the requirement for decision.

Biopower views humans as a resource void of any intrinsic utility.

Boleau in 2000, Philosophy Professor, Seattle U, GENUINE RECIPROCITY AND GROUP AUTHENTICITY,2000, p. 27

According to Foucault, in the current era of bio-power, there is a strong voice in our culture that views the body as

a resource or a machine. Knowledge of the body causes the bodys dispersion into a complex myriad of politicalstrategies and techniques. In contrast to Aristotelian man, who was (for some) self-grounded, Foucault seesmodern man as animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. In other words, Foucaultsees individuals as social creations: no individual is his or her own ground.

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Biopower

Alternative Extensions

Localized resistance to biopolitical control can be successful at reducing the power of the state to regulate

the body.

Boileau in 2000, Philosophy Professor, Seattle, GENUINE RECIPROCITY AND GROUP AUTHENTICITY,2000, p. 60

Based on Taylors reading of Foucault, this search for truth of the self is futile and does not net any knowledge that is independent ofthe power regime. But Foucault believes that we can recognize increases in liberation (which is synonymous with freedom), if wedispense with the search for truth and focus on a new kind of resistance. For Foucault, resistance can be accomplished locally, by theinsurrection of subjugated knowledges and by plebian resistance. As explained in Chapter Three, plebeian resistance acts as the limitand as an inherent counter-effect to the effects of power. But plebian resistance does not expose any kind of independent or ultimatetruth. It only exposes and rearranges power relations. With regard to exposing any kind of ultimate truth, local resistance suffers fromthe dame deficiency as global transformation they both cannot overcome the fact that truth is regime-relative. This plebeianresistance combats the modern power-knowledge-subjectivity formation by creating the are of existence where we act ethically

according to an aesthetic ideal.

REJECTION AND RESISTANCE CAN SERVE AS A CHALLENGE TO THE ABILITY OF THE

STATE TO INCREASE BIOPOLITICAL CONTROL

Peter Atterton, philosophy professor, University of California San Diego, HISTORY OF THE HUMANSCIENCES JOURNAL, 1994, p. http://www.acusd.edu/~atterton/Publications/foucault.htm.

Must we pessimistically assume, therefore, that bio-history, becoming more and more elaborate and powerful, proceeds with more orless unfettered sway without anything being able to interrupt or escape it? The question is not Foucaldian, not least because it presentspower as a sovereign unitary force given at the outset. As we have seen, if bio-power can be understood vectorially as having forceand direction, dominance and strategy, it is only through the resolution of a complex strategical situation within a societal body as amultiplicity of power relations each with their own local aims and objectives. This does not rule out the possibility of different tacticswhose aims would be opposed to dominant alignments as they feature on the side of bio-power. On the contrary, Foucault insists(though it is doubtless in this connection that more research needs to be done) that it is only insofar as opposing tactics 'play the role of

adversary, target, support or handle in power relations', that such hegemonic alignments are possible, by which I take him to mean thatthey serve as a local center around which multifarious disciplinary technologies may coalesce so as eventually to integrate them intoan overall strategy of administrative control. All the same, this does not mean that, prior to their being integrated or resolved in thismanner - operating within what Deleuze and Guattari have called an 'inclusive disjunction,' such as the 'madman' of anti-psychiatry,the bi-sexual, non-Oedipalized child, and so on - these opposing forces, or what Foucault calls 'resistances,' are to be understoodmerely as another element in the functioning of power, i.e. 'only a reaction, a rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination anunderside that is in the end passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. They are disruptive and serve as the source of power's ultimateinstability.

Each individual act of resistance creates a web of revolution necessary to challenge biopolitics

Atterton in 94 (Peter, philosophy professor, University of California San Diego) HISTORY OF THE HUMANSCIENCES JOURNAL, 1994, p. http://www.acusd.edu/~atterton/Publications/foucault.htm.

Foucault considers all these are possible, with appropriate reservations and qualifications: "Are there no great radical ruptures,massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance,producing cleavages in a society... Just as a network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatusesand institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications andindividual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible,somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships."

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Biopower

Alternative Extensions

Microlevel resistance is most effective form of resistance against biopower.

Sawicki 1991Feminist Scholar, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body, pg 24

In other words, by utilizing an ascending analysis Focault shows how mechanisms of power at the microlevel of society havebecome part of the dominant networks of power relations. Disciplinary power was not invented by the dominant class and thenextended down into the microlevel of society. It originated outside this class and was appropriated by it once it revealed its utility.Foucault is suggesting that the connection between power and the economy must be determined on the basis of specific historicalanalysis. It cannot be deduced from a general theory. He rejects both reductionism and functionalism insofar as the latter involvelocating forms of power within a structure or institution which is self regulating. He does not offer causal or functionalexplanations but rather historical descriptions of the conditions that make certain forms of domination impossible. He identifies thenecessary but not sufficient conditions for domination.

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Biopower

AT: Permutations

Attatching Critism to policy goals breeds complacency and gets co-opted

Sawicki 1991Feminist Scholar, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body, pg 27-28

Focusing attention on specific situations may lead to more complete analyses of particular struggles and thus to a betterunderstanding of social change. For example, Foucault was involved in certain conflicts within medicine, psychiatry and the penalsystem. He devised ways for prisoners to participate in discussions of prison reform. His history of punishment was designed to alterour perspectives on the assumptions that inform penal practices. In part, Foucault's refusal to make any universal, political, or moraljudgements is based on the historical evidence that what looks like a change for the better may have undesirable consequences.Since struggle is continual and the idea of a power-free society is an abstraction, those who struggle must never grow complacent.Victories are often overturned; changes

may take on different faces over time. Discourses and institutions are ambiguous and may be utilized for differentends.

The permutation functions as an act of specialization with Biopolitics. This shields the violence inherent in

the system of Biopower which prevents resistance necessary for change

Atterton in 94

Peter, University of California San Diego Philosophy Professor (HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCESJOURNAL, v. 7, http://www.acusd.edu/~atterton/Publications/foucault.htm)

The increasing number of strategies for the administration of bodies since the seventeenth century is concomitant with their becomingmore elaborate and specialized according to how the population is sectioned as a general field of inquiry, the local tactics of powerimmanent to each sector, the reciprocal influence between different sectors, and their attempts to compete with, and distinguishthemselves from, each other. Indeed, the tendency towards specialization may itself be seen in the service of a wider strategy, not onlyto preserve the constitutive knowledges from external criticism, thereby protecting the professional status of the elites who practicethem, but, moreover, to hide the deleterious programs of power they run. This is indeed crucial for Foucault, who claims as self-evident that 'power is tolerable only on the condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.

The plans use of the elite to change the biopolitical system will fail to produce meaningful resistance

McCubbin in 98Michael (Ph.D., and David Weisstub, J.D) (MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE MENTALLY ILL, July, p.http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/mccweiss.html)

If this is true, the solution to poor policy in the mental health system might seem to involve changing the rules ofthe policy game - a sort of macro-system engineering. The obvious problem with this is that the people who canchange the rules of the game are usually the same who benefit from the current rules. Nevertheless, the American

Constitution and the separation of powers among executive, congress and judiciary can at least give rise to thehope, as it did to those who favored litigation in the 1960s and 1970s, that a sort of radical surgical intervention,by means of bringing a constitutional case against an asylum for failing to provide adequate care and treatment,could sufficiently alter the system at a sensitive place as to change the nature of the system

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Biopower

Affirmative Answers - Permutation

Pedagogical and political strategies both locally and centralized are necessary to challenge biower

Giroux 2006

College Literature 33.3 [Summer2006] Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability

Any viable attempt to challenge the biopolitical project that now shapes American life and culture must do more than unearth thepowerful antidemocratic forces that now govern American economics, politics, education,media, and culture; it must also deepenpossibilities of individual and collective struggles by fighting for the rebuilding of civil society and the creation of a vast network ofdemocratic public spheres such as schools and the alternative media in order to develop new models of individual and social agencythat can expand and deepen the reality of democratic public life. This is a callfor a diverse radical party, following StanleyAronowitzs exhortation, aparty that prioritizes democracy as a global task, views hope as a precondition for political engagement,gives primacy to making the political morepedagogical, and understands the importance of the totality of the struggle asit informsand articulates within and across a wide range of sites and sectorsof everyday lifedomestically and globally. Democraticallyminded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of how race, class, power, and inequality in Americacontribute to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the poor, people of color, and working and middleclass people. Thefight for equality offers new challenges in the process ofconstructing a politics that directly addresses poverty, class domination,

and aresurgent racism. Such a politics would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideasand material relations of power as they affect diverse individuals and groups at the level of daily life. Such struggles would combinea democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering workers a living wage and allcitizens a guaranteed standard of living, one that provides a decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the UnitedStates.

PERM SOLVES- POWER IS NOT STATICTHE PLAN CAN BE ACT OF POWER THAT IS

CHALLENGING

Dickinson in 04Edward Ross. Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity. Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148

This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states areregimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not opposites, inthe sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of

organizing it. The concept power should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, andentrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set ofsocial relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity.

And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the various elements ofbiopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies(like totalitarianism or thedemocratic welfare state);they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possibleconstellations of power in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing

potentials.91

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Biopower

Affirmative Answers Link Turn

A Failure to provide social services is the root of the bad aspects of biopower. The plan is necessary to

prevent a failed form of biopolitical control their impact cards discuss.

Giroux 2006College Literature 33.3 [Summer2006] Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability

Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the consequences of the long legacy of attacking big government and bleeding thesocial and public service sectors of the state became glaringly evident as did a government that displayed a staggering indifferenceto human suffering(Herbert2005). Hurricane Katrina made it abundantly clear that only the government had the power, resources,and authority to address complex undertakings such as dealing with the totality of the economic, environmental, cultural, and socialdestruction that impacted the Gulf Coast. Given the Bush administrations disdain for the legacy of the New Deal, importantgovernmentagencies were viewed scornfully as oversized entitlement programs, strippedof their power, and served up as adumping ground to provide lucrativeadministrative jobs for political hacks who were often unqualified to leadsuch agencies. Notonly was FEMA downsized and placed under theDepartment of Homeland Security but its role in disaster planning andpreparationwas subordinated to the all-inclusive goal of fighting terrorists. While it was virtually impossible to miss the total failure of thegovernment response in the aftermath of Katrina, what many people saw as incompetence or failed national leadership was more

than that. Something more systemic and deep-rooted was revealed in the wake of Katrinanamely, that the state no longer provideda safety net for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless. Instead, it had been transformed into a punishing institution intent ondismantling the welfare state and treating the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, and disabled as dispensable populations to bemanaged, criminalized, and made to disappear into prisons, ghettos, and the black hole of despair . The Bush administration was notsimply unprepared for HurricaneKatrina as it denied that the federal government alone had the resources toaddress catastrophicevents; it actually felt no responsibility for the lives ofpoor blacks and others marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirtsof society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about engenderingthe financial rewards and privileges of only somemembers of society, whilethe welfare of those marginalized by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The couplingof the market state with the racial state underGeorge W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle thewelfarestate, eliminate affirmative action, model urban public schools afterprisons, aggressively pursue anti-immigrant policies, andincarcerate withimpunity Arabs, Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyper-neoliberalism is noworganized around the best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or stand inthe way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism, and the neoconservative dream of an American empire. This is what I call thenew biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of lifestragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of humanconcern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longerexisted in color-blind America.

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Biopower

Affirmative Answers Link Turn

The plan is a way to challenge the binary exclusion of those living in poverty. It solves the impact of

biopower better than the status quo or the alternative.

Briggi 2005Charles L. Briggs Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, California Annu. Rev.Anthropol. 2005. 34:26991 Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease

The more easily objects of scientific knowledge can circulate through spheres of communicability, the less freedom people seem toenjoy in traveling between communicable loci. Leading scientists can take a step down the communicability chain, reproducingknowledge in popular publications and broadcasts, often generating collegial suspicion. It is much more difficult to move up thechain. The power of communicable borders to facilitate circulation of knowledge and scientific objects and obstruct that of peoplestrikingly parallels the reconfiguration of national borders as open to capital and goods and selectively closed to people (see Nivens2002). Communicable inequalities operate microscopically, in shaping where people are placed within clinics in relationship tocharts, computers, and diagnoses, and macroscopically, in shaping who gets to be a doctor, who gets to define health and disease,who receives access to health care, and, ultimately, who lives and dies (Hunt 1999; Vaughan 1991; Waitzkin 1983, 1991).Communicability operates through coercion (such as quarantines, medical examinations of immigrants, and prosecutions for fetalendangerment), policies and guidelines (immigration and welfare reforms and NIH funding guidelines, for example), andgovernmentality. My argument is not that communicability constitutes a totalizing system that reaches everywhere and shapes allsocial relations and modes of thought and action. Spheres are multiple, standing in relations of complementarity and competition.Their penetration is never completethey are rather cut (Strathern 1996) and constrained by limits, some of which theythemselves impose by virtue of their own boundary work. Some social sectors lack the symbolic resources needed even to constructthemselves as marginal. Ironically, while they regulate how scientific objects and events can be discovered and reported, spheres ofcommunicability become dependent on those very objects and events (Rabinow 1999). Epidemics and organ transplants, forexample, offer opportunities for extending biocommunicability, but they render existing formations precarious and lead to theircritical scrutiny and possible transformation. In another apparent contradiction, communicability is contingent on peopleswillingness to interpellate themselves in suitable wayslest would-be spheres become irrelevant or ridiculous. Nevertheless, theability of individuals and communities to place themselves in communicable circuits, to draw on available technologies, to position

themselves in favorable locations, and to resist oppressive spheres is shaped by and shapes access to capital, symbolic and material.In short .

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Biopower

Affirmative Answers

The Alternative would result in dramatic cuts to social service program leaving those in poverty to die. The

alternative is merely a conservative attempt to secure resource otherwise allocated to the poor while the

state allows for their death.

Giroux 2006College Literature 33.3 [Summer2006] Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability

The neoliberal efforts to shrink big government and public services mustbe understood both in terms of those who bore the brunt of such efforts inNew Orleans and in

terms of the subsequent inability of the government todeal adequately with Hurricane Katrina. Reducing the federal governments ability to respond tosocial problems is a decisive element of neoliberal policymaking, as was echoed in a Wall Street Journal editorial that arguedwithout irony that taxes should be raised for low-income individuals and families, not to make more money available to the federalgovernment foraddressing their needs but to rectify the possibility that they might not befeeling a proper hatred for thegovernment(Qtd.in Krugman 2002,31).Ifthe poor can be used as pawns in this logic to further the political attack onbiggovernment, it seems reasonable to assume that those in the Bush administration who hold such a position would refrain from usingbig governmentas quickly as possible to save the very lives of such groups,as was evident inthe aftermath of Katrina. The

vilification of the social state and big governmentreally an attack on non-military aspects of governmenthas translated into asteep decline of tax revenues, a massive increase in military spending, and the growing immiseration of poor Americans and peopleof color.Under the Bush administration, Census Bureau figures reveal that since1999,the income of the poorest fifth of Americanshas dropped 8.7 percentin inflation-adjusted dollars ...[and in 2005] 1.1 million were added to the36 million already on the povertyrolls(Scheer 2005). While the number ofAmericans living below the poverty line is comparable to the combinedpopulations ofLouisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas, the Bushadministration chose to make in the 2006 budget $70 billion in newtax cutsfor the rich while slashing programs that benefit the least fortunate (Legumet al 2005). Similarly, the projected $2.7 trillionbudget for 2007 includes a$4.9 billion reduction in health funds for senior citizens (Medicare) and theState Childrens HealthInsurance Program; a $17 million cut in aid for child support enforcement; cutbacks in funds for low-income people withdisabilities; major reductions in child-care and development block grants; majordefunding for housing for low-income elderly; andan unprecedented rollback in student aid. In addition, the 2007 budget calls for another $70 billion dollars in tax cuts most beneficialto the rich and provides for a hugeincrease in military spending for the war in Iraq (Weisman 2006,A10).While President Bushendlessly argues for the economic benefits of his tax cuts, he callously omits the fact that 13 million children are living inpoverty inthe United States,4.5 million more than when Bush was first inaugurated(Scheer 2005).And New Orleans had the third highestrate of children living in poverty in the United States (Legum et al 2005).The illiteracy rate in New Orleans before the flood struckwas 40 percent; the embarrassingly ill-equipped public school system was one of the most underfunded in the nation. Nearly 19percent of Louisiana residents lacked healthinsurance, putting the state near the bottom for the percentage of peoplewithout healthinsurance. Robert Scheer,a journalist and social critic, estimated that one-third of the 150,000 people living in dire poverty inLouisiana were elderly, left exposed to the flooding in areas most damagedby Katrina (2005). It gets worse. In an ironic twist offate, one day afterKatrina hit New Orleans, the U.S. Census Bureau released two importantreports on poverty, indicating thatMississippi (with a 21.6 percent povertyrate) and Louisiana (19.4 percent) are the nations poorest states, and thatNew Orleans(with a 23.2 percent poverty rate) is the 12th poorest city inthe nation.[Moreover,] New Orleans is not only one of the nationspoorestcities, but its poor people are among the most concentrated in poverty ghettos.Housing discrimination and the location ofgovernment-subsidizedhousing have contributed to the citys economic and racial segregation(Dreier 2005).Under neoliberalcapitalism, the attack on politically responsible government has only been matched by an equally harsh attack on socialprovisionsand safety nets for the poor. And in spite of the massive failures of market-driven neoliberal policiesextending from a soaring$420 billion budget deficit to the underfunding of schools, public health, community policing, and environmental protection

programsthe reigning right-wing orthodoxy of the Bush administration continues to give precedence to private financial gain andmarket determinism over human lives and broad public values(Greider 2005).

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Biopower

Affirmative Answers.Your Nazism or genocide impact is ridiculous Biopower can be emancipating. The biopower you criticize

is not the biopower that provides social services.Dickinson in 04Edward Ross. Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity. Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 148

Again, the point here is not that any of the interpretations offered in these pieces are wrong; instead, it is that weare, collectively, so focused on unmasking the negative potentials and realities of modernity that we have constructed atrue, butvery one-sided picture. The pathos of this picture is undeniable, particularly for a generation of historiansraised on the Manichean myth forged in the crucible of World War II and the Cold War of the democraticwelfare state. And as a rhetorical gesture, this analysis works magnificently we explode the narcissistic self-admiration of democratic modernity by revealing the dark, manipulative, murderous potential that lurks within,thus arriving at a healthy, mature sort of melancholy. But this gesture too often precludes asking what else biopoliticswas doing, besides manipulating people, reducing them to pawns in the plans of technocrats, and paving the way formassacre. In 1989 Detlev Peukert argued that any adequate picture of modernity must include both its achievements

and its pathologies social reform as well as Machbarkeitswahn, the growth of rational relations betweenpeople as well as the swelling instrumental goal-rationality, the liberation of artistic and scientific creativityas well as the loss of substance and absence of limits [Haltlosigkeit].65 Yet he himself wrote nothing like such abalanced history, focusing exclusively on Nazism and on the negative half of each of these binaries; and thatfocus has remained characteristic of the literature as a whole. What I want to suggest here is that the function of therhetorical or explanatory framework surrounding our conception of modernity seems to be in danger of being inverted.The investigation of the history of modern biopolitics has enabled new understandings of National Socialism; now weneed to take care that our understanding of National Socialism does not thwart a realistic assessment of modernbiopolitics. Much of the literature leaves one with the sense that a modern world in which mass murder is not happening isjust that: a place where something is not yet happening. Normalization is not yet giving way to exclusion, scientificstudy and classification of populations is not yet giving way to concentration camps and extermination campaigns. Massmurder, in short, is the historical problem; the absence of mass murder is not a problem, it does not need to be investigatedor explained.

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Biopower

Affirmative Answer

EVEN IF YOU WIN A LINK - BIOPOWER DOES NOT FUNCTION IN THE PLAN THE SAME AS

NAZI GERMANY YOU DO NOT HAVE AN IMPACT

Dickinson in 04Edward Ross. Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity. Central European History,vol. 37, no. 1, 148

In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own timeare unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, andthey share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. Andit is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading,because it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes. Clearly thedemocratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it hasnowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychoticlogic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive

regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such asystem can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials andconstraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany. Democraticbiopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible withauthoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear,historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative ofincreasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I thinkthis is theunmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.

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Biopower

Affirmative Answer

Biopower leads to medical advances that save lifes.History proves


Of course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of modernity thatignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give just one example,infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other words, one in every five children diedbefore reaching the age of one year. By 1913, it was 15 percent; andby 1929 (when average real purchasing powerwas not significantly higher than in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.93 The expansion of infant health programs anenormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering projecthad agreat deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an

appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and astonishing this achievement and any number of others like it reallywas. There was a reason for the Machbarkeitswahn of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things werein fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a Wahn (delusion, craziness) at all; nor isit accurate to focus only on the inevitable frustration of delusions of power. Even in the late 1920s, many socialengineers could and did look with great satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish.

Your alternative will fail Resistance to the biopolitics of the state will not end biopowerMultiple avenues existsfor biopolitical control


In any case, the focus on the activities and ambitions of the social engineers in the literature on biopolitical modernity has begun toreach the point of diminishing returns. In the current literature, it seems that biopolitics is almost always acting on(or attempting to acon)people; it is almost never something they do. This kind of model is not very realistic. This is not how societies work. The exampleof the attempt to create a eugenic counseling system in Prussia should be instructive in this respect. Here public health and eugenicsexperts technocrats tried to impart their sense of eugenic crisis and their optimism about the possibility of creating a better raceto the public; and they successfully mobilized the resources of the state in support of their vision. And yet, what emerged quite quicklyfrom this effort was in fact a system of public contraceptive advice or family planning. It is not so easy to impose technocraticambitions on the public, particularly in a democratic state; and on the ground, at the level of interactions with actual persons andsocial groups, public policy often takes on a life of its own, at least partially independent of the fantasies of technocrats. This is ofcourse a point that Foucault makes with particular clarity. The power of discourse is not the power of manipulative elites, whichcontrol it and impose it from above. Manipulative elites always face resistance, often effective, resistance. More important, the powerof discourse lies precisely in its ability to set the terms for such struggles, to deny what they are about, as much as what their outcomesare. As Foucault put it, power including the power to manage life comes from everywhere.105 Biomedical knowledge was notthe property only of technocrats, and it could be used to achieve ends that had little to do with their social-engineering schemes.106Modern biopolitics is a multifaceted world of discourse and practice elaborated and put into practice at multiple levels throughoutmodern societies. And of course it is often no less economisticno less based on calculations of cost and benefitat the level of theindividual or family than it is in the technocrats visions of national efficiency .

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