Biopower Kritik 1

Negation: Biopower Kritik I negate, Resolved: The United States ought to guarantee universal health care to its citizens. A. Framework Definition of Biopower: BIOPOWER IS THE POWER OF THE STATE OVER LIFE Peter Atterton, University of California San Diego Philosophy Professor, 1994 (HISTORY OF THE HUMAN
SCIENCES JOURNAL, v. 7, http://www.acusd.edu/~atterton/Publications/foucault.htm) In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, entitled La Volont de savoir (1976), Foucault works out an immensely powerful genealogical critique of political rationality emerging with the rise of capitalism and the growth of state institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and reaching its culmination in modern technological programs of demographic administration and control. In order to contrast this form of political domination with earlier, pre-Machiavellian, juridico-legal forms, mostly cast

Foucault deploys the term 'bio-power' (Foucault, 1978: 140). This is not the power of life (natural or divine law), but rather the power over life, the power to administrate the life of individuals composite of the social body by way of an increasing tendency towards order, organization, greater productivity and extended police control.
uncynically as instrumental in attaining justice for the good of the citizen and state,

Observation: This kritik is a priori to the affirmatives arguments, thus no refutations of aff arguments are necessary. It is a priori because personal autonomy comes before all things. Waldron: Waldron, Jeremy. MORAL AUTONOMY AND PERSONAL AUTONOMY. MORAL AUTONOMY AND
PERSONAL AUTONOMY.. N.p., n.d. Web/ 10 Nov. 2012.

Each may seek his happiness in his own way. For us- I mean for us modern liberals- this sounds like a principle of autonomy. But on Kants account, autonomy and happiness are supposed to operate in utterly different realms. In the Groundwork, Kant associated autonomy with the wills ability to determine itself in accordance with the form of universality, unconstrained by nature or inclination. Autonomy is the supreme principle of morality, and morality is the direct opposite of the principle of ones own happiness [being] made the determining
ground of the will/ Happiness is about needs and inclinations, and as such it must be regarded as a powerful

I become an autonomous being only when I rise above any concern for happiness and follow the moral law for its own sake.
counterweight to all the commands of duty. Kant says that

Platz http://www.vonplatz.org/documents/Platz%20%20Writing%20Sample%20Kants%20Supreme%20Principle%20of%20Morality.pdf by Jeppe von Platz Jeppe von Platz: On my reading, the metaphysics of morals part of the Groundwork is an analysis of how freedom

and morality

come together in autonomy as the supreme principle of morality.

I have tried to distinguish more clearly than Kant did between the concept, the principle, the validity conditions, and the idea(l)s of autonomy.

Autonomy is moral self-determination. The principle of autonomy is that persons ought to determine themselves to act only for reasons that they could will as principles in the giving of universal law. When analyzed, this principle presents validity conditions of form, content, and source of maxims, and identifies the individual and collective ideals that are realized through free, moral, autonomous being. If my interpretation is correct, it follows: first, that there is only one supreme principle of morality, namely the principle of autonomy; second, that the different formulas are formulas of the same law,

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because each express a requirement of the principle of autonomy; third, that since each is a necessary part of the jointly sufficient set of conditions of autonomous willing, the formulas are not intentionally equivalent; and, finally, that Kant provides no a priori reason that the formulas must be co-extensional.

B. Links 1. The Affirmation inherently uses the United States Federal Government as the actor; since the concept of biopower is the states power over life the USFG has the power over life with healthcare. 2. Public Health is an extension of biopower. Hugh Baxter, Associate Professor of Law, Boston University, 1996 (STANFORD LAW REVIEW, January, p. 456-7) In the closing pages of History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault incorporates his account of disciplinary power into a more general concept: "bio-power," or, the "power over life." Bio-power, Foucault says, includes both disciplinary power over individual bodies ("anatomo-politics") and "a bio-politics of the population." While disciplinary power concerns "infinitesimal" details of bodies and their arrangements, bio-politics addresses more global matters, such as "the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration." 3. Helping programs are used to justify an expansion of government power Kathryn R. Fox, Sociologist, University of Vermont, 1999 (SOCIAL PROBLEMS, February, p. 92)
In addition, in describing and classifying behavior, such discourses justify government intervention into human behavior

Helping programs can shape citizens' self-understandings by imposing a definition of the nature of the self (Prior 1993). In other words, language (particularly accepted scientistic language) can powerfully transform individuals. For example, therapeutic programs that emphasize a distinct moral code may reconstruct individual experience through the act of confessing (Foucault 1980a). Rose (1996b) documents the dominance of "psy" disciplines in governmental practices that compel an ethic of self-reflection and regulation. Introspection alone is insufficient; confession must be performed "in a particular vocabulary" and "according to a particular explanatory code derived from some source of authority" (Rose 1996b:32). This clarifies the link between language and power that can be analyzed empirically in government programs.
(Rose and Miller 1992:185).

C. Impacts

1. Biopolitics inevitably end in violence: Lundborg and Vaughn-Williams, 2011

[Tom, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and Nick, Associate Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick, Resilience, Critical Infrastructure, and Molecular Security: The Excess of Life in Biopolitics. International Political Sociology, Vol. 5. Issue 4. December 2011, 367-383, Accessed Online via Wiley Online Library] Bennetts problematization of the notion of a superior, totalizing structure and her appreciation of the life force of materiality calls for a radical reconsideration of what life itself refers to in the biopolitical problematique. Earlier we noted

biopolitical rule only promotes the form of life that is productive for its own enterprise. On their view, the concern of such rule is the potentiality of some life to become dangerous and therefore detrimental to what living should involve according to the liberal paradigm. It is for this reason that
that for Dillon and Reid liberal

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liberalism, paradoxically, can be characterized as a violent mode of governance that is prepared to kill in order to make life live. In this context, then, life refers not just to something expendable but also to something controllable, calculable, and adaptable within the biopolitical machine. Hence, while acknowledging the unpredictability and
contingency of life, Dillon and Reid rely on a rather limited notion of what life may actually refer toas something that may always become dangerous and emerge as a threat. Consequently, their analysis is red uced to a concern with a

form of life that is forced to obey and adapt within the biopolitical system. 2. Biopolitics allows the sovereign to devalue life to the point where its not politically relevant, allowing it to be eliminated Agamben, 98 (Giorgio, philosopher and bad ass, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 1998, Stanford
University Press) It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain coun-tries, occupies a substantial position in medical debates and pro-vokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicality with which Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that

the sovereignty of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of "life devoid of value" (or "life unworthy of being lived") corre-sponds exactlyeven if in an apparently different direction:---to the bare life of homo sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined by Binding. It is as if every valorization and every "politicization" of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only "sacred life," and can as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every societyeven the most moderndecides who its "sacred men" will be. It is even pos-sible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceptio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and has now in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereigntymoved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being. 3. BIOPOWER MAKES THE EXTERMINATION OF ALL LIFE POSSIBLE Michel Foucault, Director of Institute Francais at Hamburg, 1984 (THE FOUCAULT READER, ed. Rabinow, p. 259260) 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,

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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 atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence.
the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival.

4. Biopower is the root cause of violence, racism, war and genocide. Foucault 76- Professor of the history of systems of thought, at the college de france (Michel, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France,1976) W hat in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It
is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain.

This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create
caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more." I would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live, you must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war-"If you want to live, the other must die" - function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military

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 I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the
or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more inferior species die out,

Biopower Kritik 5 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 away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or

In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the
internal, to the population and for the population. 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 understand the importance-I almost said the vital importanceof racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right 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 in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I think that we are now in a position to understand a number of things. We can understand, 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 of species that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit) naturally became within a few years 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 discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for wars, 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 think about them in the form of evolutionism. And we can also understand why racism should have developed in modern 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 the biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage war on one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million (and this is precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the

war is about two things: it is not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race, of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there
nineteenth century), except by activating the theme of racism? From this point onward, represent to our race. In one sense, this is of course no more than a biological extrapolation from the theme of the political

new-war will be seen not only as a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one's own race. As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer
enemy. But there is more to it than that. In the nineteenth century-and this is completely

D. Alternative: micropolitical resistance The affirmative frames their agency in terms of national politics and the state. This solidifies political identities which make freedom impossible - only a micropolitical focus on personal subjectivity calls into question the root causes of dispossession

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Clifford, 2001 (Michael Clifford, Political Genealogy After Foucault, 2001, pg 144-145)
Perhaps all this sounds too playful for the serious business of politics. In fact, this is just the sort of play required to break through, to fracture, the most oppressive forms of political subjection. A whole range of social problems, from limitations

The constitution of a political identity for ourselves involves the appropriation of values and beliefs that commit us to certain practices-practices that have real political consequences. We alternately lament or praise such consequences with little or no sense that their source lies in part in the arbitrary appropriation or imposition of an identity. We condemn the persecution of minorities, for instance, but how often do we ever
on social opportunities to declarations of war, are in part attributable to processes of subjectivization. really question the endemic processes of differentiation and identification that divides human beings along lines- limits- of race and gender? War is the most tragic of human dramas, we say, even when it is "necessary" to secure our liberty, but to what extent is this necessity tied to an arbitrary drawing of lines- limits- on a map, to the contingency of a national identity that marshals troops for its perpetuation? The

bigot and the dictator are micro- and macrosymbols of our political subjection. We raise our opposition against them willingly, enthusiastically, thinking that freedom consists simply of overcoming their petty, or global, tyrannies. We never think to overcome a much finer, more pervasive, less violent but more pernicious, quotidian form of subjection; that is, we never think to overcome ourselves. Political subjectivity is played out every day in struggles of domination and submission. Real freedom concrete freedom, consists in fracturing the political identities- our liberalism, or conservatism, our patriotism, our individualismthrough which we are bound to, limited by, rationalities that make these struggles necessary. If we can come to recognize the optionality and lack of necessity of given forms of political subjectivity, we might have a point of departure for changing (overcoming) certain kinds of real political relations. If this sounds utopian or idealistic, we have only to consider that most if not all political conflict in this half-century can be understood as clashes of identity. Most political movements in the last forty years in the United States can be understood in these terms. Such movements have been (to some degree) successful in upsetting certain entrenched political identifications that had been the basis of their subjection and domination.