Bio Power Kritik

Planet Debate 2009 – Biopower/Foucault Kritik
Foucault, Biopower, and Social Services............................................................................................................................6

Foucault 1NC Shell............................................................................................................................................................20
Foucault 1NC Shell............................................................................................................................................................22
*** Links ***....................................................................................................................................................................23
Links: Social Services........................................................................................................................................................24
Links: Jobs Programs.........................................................................................................................................................25
Links: Social Service Aid..................................................................................................................................................26
Links: National Service......................................................................................................................................................27
Links: Legal Protections....................................................................................................................................................32
Links: Court Action to Protect Rights...............................................................................................................................33
Links: Court Action to Protect Rights (Cont)....................................................................................................................34
Links: Court Action to Protect Rights (Cont)...................................................................................................................35
Links: Courts......................................................................................................................................................................38
Links: Legal Action...........................................................................................................................................................39
Foucault was correct in seeing the displacement of law as code. In an ethico-political society, government is a
government of souls. Social conduct increasingly privileges moral voice over law. U.S. ally Tony Blair enunciates that
"the scope of the law must itself be limited largely to that which is supported by the moral voice". (Perhaps it is not so
anomalous to see Blair both as a Clinton ally in "Third-Way" policies and as a Bush ally in advocating preemptive
violations of international law. This would be less of a cynical conversion narrative than an implicit logic of post-
disciplinary, advanced neoliberal ethico-politics.) Rose depicts an increasingly moralized governance through ethics:
Ethical foreign policy, ethical banking, ethical investment, ethical agriculture, ethical business, ethical politicians, the
ethic of public service . . . as well as the increasing salience of more traditional ethical disputes in the areas of genetic
technologies and the rights to life and death. The danger of this ethico-politics is in its moralizing, which turns
"openings into closures". Political debate is replaced by "technical management of individual conduct" in order to
"produce politically desired ends". I can find no better depiction of Bush/Ashcroft's America than Rose's description:
"Ethico-politics operates at the pole of morality to the extent that it seeks to inculcate a fixed and incontestable code of
conduct, merely shifting loci of authority, decision and control in order to govern better". Post-9/11 America is replete
with the detritus of ethico-political moralism as detailed by Rose: therapeutic subjectivities bent on claiming their
"natural right to be recognized individually", preemptive logics induced on a perpetual monitoring of risk, new
preemptive forms of individualizing security . All of these instrumentalize a distinct new form of freedom with its
"exemplary sanctions" founded on the interrelation of victim and offender, on the teaching of life skills (which we will
export in the name of "regime building"). Post-disciplinary, ethico-political regimes increasingly instrumentalize
governmentality in the name of "good citizenship.” .........................................................................................................42
Links -- Welfare System Increases Disciplinary Power....................................................................................................43
Agamben Impact................................................................................................................................................................44
...........................................................................................................................................................................................44
Links: Answers to: “Our Program is Decentralized”........................................................................................................45
Links: Public Health..........................................................................................................................................................46
Links: Kritik of Public Health: Public Health Programs Increase Surveillance................................................................54
Links: Kritik of Public Health: Public Health Programs Increase Surveillance................................................................55
Links: Public Health Programs Increase Surveillance.......................................................................................................56
Links: Public Health Programs Entrench Disciplinary Power...........................................................................................58

Links: Prenatal Care...........................................................................................................................................................62
...........................................................................................................................................................................................65
Links: Medicaid.................................................................................................................................................................67
Links: “New” Public Health..............................................................................................................................................69
The new public health takes as its foci the categories of 'population' and 'the environment', conceived of in their widest
sense to include Psychological, social and physical elements. With the development of this perspective, few areas of
personal and social life remain immune to scrutiny and regulation of some kind. Given the scope of the new public
health, and its impact on virtually all aspects of everyday life, there has been surprisingly little critical analysis of its
underlying philosophies and its practices. The new public health has been warmly embraced by people of diverse
backgrounds and political persuasions. It has been represented as the antidote to all kinds of problems linked to modern
life, particularly problems of the urban milieu. The uncritical acceptance of the basic tenets of the new public health is
disturbing in light of the increased potential for experts to intervene in private lives and for established rights to be
undermined. We suggest that this reticence is in itself indicative of the power of the discourse of the new public health
to shape public opinion. In this book, we highlight what we believe are some important dimensions of the new public
health and critically appraise their implications for concepts of self, embodiment and citizenship.................................70
Links: Hygeine Campaigns................................................................................................................................................72
Links: Hygeine Campaigns................................................................................................................................................73
Links: Miscellaneous Health Programs.............................................................................................................................74
Links: Miscellaneous Health Programs.............................................................................................................................75
Links: Public Health Discourses .......................................................................................................................................76
Links: Environmental Health Discourses..........................................................................................................................77
Links: Public Health Discourses........................................................................................................................................79
Links: Public Health Discourses........................................................................................................................................80
Links: Epidemiology .........................................................................................................................................................81
Links: Epidemiology..........................................................................................................................................................82
Links: Science/Health........................................................................................................................................................83
Links: Science....................................................................................................................................................................84
Links: Disease ...................................................................................................................................................................85
Links: Disease....................................................................................................................................................................86
Links: Biomedicine ...........................................................................................................................................................87
Links: Biomedicine............................................................................................................................................................88
Links: Biomedicine............................................................................................................................................................89
Links: “Reproductive Health” ...........................................................................................................................................90
Links: Medicine/Protecting Life.......................................................................................................................................91
Links: Global Liberal Governance.....................................................................................................................................92
Links: Global Liberal Governance (Cont).........................................................................................................................93
Links: Global Liberal Governance (Cont).........................................................................................................................94
Links: International Power/Politics....................................................................................................................................95
Links: International Power/Politics (Cont)........................................................................................................................96
Links: Depictions of Third World Chaos...........................................................................................................................97
Links: Depictions of Third World Chaos...........................................................................................................................98
Links: Multilateralism........................................................................................................................................................99
Links: Securitization........................................................................................................................................................100
Links: Population Management.......................................................................................................................................101
Links: Sovereignty...........................................................................................................................................................102
Links: Sovereignty...........................................................................................................................................................103
Links: Sovereignty (Cont)................................................................................................................................................104
Links: International Law..................................................................................................................................................105
Links: Categorizing People..............................................................................................................................................106
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Links: Categorizing People..............................................................................................................................................107
Links: End of History Discourses....................................................................................................................................108

Links: Technology...........................................................................................................................................................109
Links: Biotechnology.......................................................................................................................................................110
Links: Globalization/Trade..............................................................................................................................................111
Links: Globalization.........................................................................................................................................................112
Links: Information Technology.......................................................................................................................................113
Links: Enlightenment.......................................................................................................................................................114
Links: Geopolitics............................................................................................................................................................115
Links: WTO.....................................................................................................................................................................116
Links: Human Rights.......................................................................................................................................................117
Links: Human Rights Protections....................................................................................................................................118
Links: Truth.....................................................................................................................................................................119
Links: Science.................................................................................................................................................................120
Links: Politics..................................................................................................................................................................121
Links: NGOs....................................................................................................................................................................122
Links: State Action..........................................................................................................................................................123
Links: Critiques of Capitalism.........................................................................................................................................124
*** Answers to Affirmative Arguments ***...................................................................................................................125
Answers to Affirmative Link Turns.................................................................................................................................126
Discourse Key..................................................................................................................................................................135
Impacts: Disciplinary Power is Very Bad........................................................................................................................136
Impacts: Biopower Causes Extinction.............................................................................................................................137
Impacts: Biopower Causes Totalitarianism.....................................................................................................................138
Impacts: Holocaust...........................................................................................................................................................139
Impacts: Holocaust (Cont)...............................................................................................................................................140
Impacts: Biopower Causes War.......................................................................................................................................141
Impacts: Biopower Supports Capitalism.........................................................................................................................142
Impacts: Biopower Supports the State.............................................................................................................................143
*** Alternatives ***........................................................................................................................................................144
Alternative: Chaos...........................................................................................................................................................145
Alternative: Criticism.......................................................................................................................................................146
Alternative: Counter-Movements....................................................................................................................................149
Alternative: Interruptive Politics......................................................................................................................................150
*** Answers to Affirmative Arguments ***...................................................................................................................151
Answers to: “Habermas’ Attack on Foucault”.................................................................................................................153
Answers to: “Habermas’ Attack on Foucault” (Cont).....................................................................................................154
Answers to: “Habermas’ Attack on Foucault” (Cont).....................................................................................................155
Answers to: “Foucault Threatens Feminism”..................................................................................................................156
Answers to: “Porter”........................................................................................................................................................159
Answers to: “Eurocentrism”............................................................................................................................................160
Answers to: “Nihilism”...................................................................................................................................................161
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Answers to: “Foucault Useless”.......................................................................................................................................162

Answers To: “Foucault Useless”.....................................................................................................................................163
Answers To: "Foucault Doesn't Agree With Your K".....................................................................................................164
Answers To: “Postmodernism is Bad”...........................................................................................................................165
Permutation Answers.......................................................................................................................................................166
*** General Extensions ***............................................................................................................................................169
The K Challenges Affirmative Assumptions...................................................................................................................170
Each Individual Key........................................................................................................................................................171
Genealogy Good..............................................................................................................................................................172
Genealogy Good..............................................................................................................................................................173
Discourse Key..................................................................................................................................................................174
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5
Foucault, Biopower, and Social Services

Introduction
There is probably no more relevant kritik on a topic about social services than biopower. Biopower is the
state management of the health of the population and the resolution requires the state to do almost exactly
that – to improve the well being the nation’s “poor.”
Despite this direct linkage, I think it is problematic to write an argument that is simply titled "Foucault" or
“Biopower” (or the combination of the two) for a number of reasons.
First, Michel Foucault did not necessarily have one set of coherent views. In interviews in the early 1980s,
Foucault indicates that many of the ideas he had early in his career he no longer held at the end of his career,
and one can see this as Foucault shifts his focus from archaeology to genealogy, and then, at the end of his
life, to ethics. To simply call an argument "Foucault" assumes that there is a coherent body of work. That is
simply not the case.
Second, it is not clear that Foucault was drawing any particular conclusions from his arguments. Some
scholars claim that he was simply exploring how things are rather than making arguments for how things
ought to be. Arguments presented in debates usually make, or at least imply, the latter claim. It is not clear
that Foucault would support using much of his work in the way that it is used in modern debates, particularly
the convention presentation of biopower as a kritik style-disadvantage (affirmative=biopower,
biopwer=bad).
Third, much of the evidence read in debates on Foucault is drawn from secondary sources whose authors
have interpreted the work of Foucault and applied it to the contemporary era. This is not the work of
Foucault himself, but of other scholars whom he may or may not agree with.
Fourth, there is really no intellectual consensus as to what Foucault was often saying or what the
implications of his work are. Many individuals who have studied Foucault for their whole lives argue
vehemently with one another. Wading into this debate has been somewhat difficult for me because I am not
a Foucault scholar.
Despite these reasons not to write an essay on Foucault, I have chosen to do so for a couple of reasons.
First, it is simply become the accepted title of an argument. The arguments I have included here revolve
around some of the basic ideas that are traditionally associated with an argument called "Foucault." Second,
I think it is useful starting point for many of the ideas that Foucault introduced and also for many of the
ideas that other scholars have chosen to run with and make arguments out of. This essay introduces most of
these arguments, and remainder of the book provides a lot of the evidence that you will need to debate them.
It is important to understand the basic concepts behind Foucault’s work before attempting to understand how
that work is relevant to national service.
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Biopower
The argument introduced in the book is based on Foucault's notion of "biopower." Biopower refers to the
ability of the government to regulate and observe the day to day life of the population. Foucault refers to it
as “regulation of population…,” consisting of “comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and
interventions aimed at the entire social body or at groups taken as a whole” (Foucault, 1978, 145-6).
Specifically, this includes measures to protect the public from threats, such as environmental threats and
security threats, and to collect information on the population. It also includes efforts to manage the
population in order to facilitate the proper functioning of the state and the economy. Efforts to regulate the
population in order to protect them from security threats fit this definition.
Foucault argues that biopower is bad because once the state starts to intervene in the management of the
population the state becomes intertwined with it and is able to press the population into its own service,
either directly or indirectly. Foucault argues that this contemporary acceptance of biopower is what is
responsible for making wars more deadly in this century than ever because now wars are waged not only in
the names of populations but with and through those populations. The power to protect the populations, he
argues, is the same power to annihilate them.
Disciplinary Power
Another “technique of power” (that supports biopower) is “disciplinary power.” Foucault argued that
power produces knowledge. As explained, one of the areas that power manifests itself is in the human
sciences (sociology, psychology, etc). The human sciences (the disciplines) enable the expansion of social
control through power by producing a scientific reasoning/justification for how individuals ought to behave
and how they ought to act. Directing individuals to act in particular ways is a way of disciplining them so
that they behave in particular ways. There is excellent evidence that social scientists (the case workers,
psychologists, and political scientists who will design and participate in any national service program) rely
on the use of this disciplinary power.
Normalization
Normalization is arguably a means of exerting disciplinary power. The only reason that I have separated it
is that I to not think that it is necessarily dependent on the human sciences. Even in a world where the
human sciences do not exist as a justification for normalization, normalization would probably still exist and
it would still be arguably bad to normalize people.
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Power
Although Foucault denied it in the introduction to THE USE OF PLEASURE and in his essay, “The Subject
and Power” in BEYOND STRUCTURALISM AND HERMENEUTICS, claiming that the focus of his work
was on the human subject, much of the secondary scholarship that has been written about Foucault has been
written about what Foucault thought about power. This is the manifestation of the argument in debate, it is
the central idea that I have organized this essay around.
Although we could debate about how central the notion of "power" is to Foucault's work, what is quite clear
is that Foucault thought that power was an important phenomenon to be studied. Foucault's major
observation in regards to power is that power is not something that solely comes from the top-down (from a
King, from a tyrant, from the government), but it is something that arguably inevitably manifests itself in
every relationship at the micro level, even when such power is resisted. In DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH,
Foucault examines how power changed from what he described as the “classical era” -- the 16th and early
17th centuries – to the late 17th to early 19th centuries. In the classical era, power was concentrated in the
state and the governing apparatuses, in the early 17th and 19th centuries that power became concentrated in
the disciplines – asylums, hospitals, schools, and prisons. Foucault argues that power in these settings is
potentially even more devastating because these disciplines are “nonegalitarian and asymmetrical”
(Foucault, 1979, p. 222). These institutions, particularly when they are administered by the state, also serve
to legitimate the state, potentially form a tight, coupling power grip (Foucault, 1980, p. 25).
To challenge power, one should not look toward limiting the state apparatus, but to challenging disciplinary
practices. He writes:
If one wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines and
disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one should turn, but towards the
possibility of a new form of right, one which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time
liberated from the principle of sovereignty (Foucault, 1980, 108).
Much of the general link evidence is based on this notion because it simply argues that attempting to control
power at or through different levels of government is unlikely to accomplish anything and is only likely to
mask any power that may be present.
But, how do this micro-level power get transmitted? Foucault argued that all of the human sciences
(psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics), define people at the same time as they describe them and
work together with certain institutions (psychiatric institutions, schools, prisons, factors, and courts) to have
effects on people.
Foucault gives the example of the panopticon a place power is present but accepted, and hence facilitated.
The idea of the panopticon was popularized by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In this panopticon,
Bentham imagines a system in which discipline is maintained not because someone is always watching a
prisoner but because the prisoner never knows when he is or is not under surveillance. Bentham argues that
since the prisoner never knows when he or she is being watched, the prisoner begins to accept
unconditionally the restrictions that he or she is placed under. These conditions are something that are
unconditionally accepted. Whitaker (1999) explains:
8
The Panopticon is a kind of theater; what is staged is "the illusion of constant surveillance: the prisoners are
not really always under surveillance, they just think or imagine that they are." The point is discipline or
training. As the prisoners fear that they may be constantly watched, and fear punishment for transgression,
they internalize the rules; actual punishment will thus be rendered superfluous (p. 33)
The Construction of the Subject
Arguably, the construction of subjectivity, not power, is the central focus of Foucault’s work. He wrote in
1982 that:
I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my working during the last twenty years. It has not
been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations for such analysis. My objective,
instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made
subjects (1982, p 208)
There is considerable scholarly debate about how Foucault thought our subjectivities are constituted. Some
argue that Foucault argued that the "subject" (normally an individual), is constructed through the identities
that other individuals ascribe to it through language and acceptable social practice. Others (Dews, 1989)
argue that, at least in Foucault’s later works, particularly the HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, v 3, Foucault
argues that the self is more active and autonomous. Gordon (1999) contends that, drawing on Heidegger,
Foucault does agree that the subject has an “ontological freedom” that creates the potential for individual
definition.
Foucault’s theory of subjectivity (how subjects are produced) is intertwined with his theory of power
because subjects are produced through the various manifestations of power that have already been discussed.
To the extent that those manifestations are totally determined by power (as many scholars read the early
Foucault to say), the more difficult it is to escape it.
Genealogies
One important means of work for Foucault was genealogy. It is difficult to define precisely what a
genealogy is, but generally I think it is safe to say that it is an investigation of some practice or institution
that critically evaluates the practices origins and founding ideas.
Some debaters have used genealogies in debates with some success. Mostly these genealogies have simply
articulated the history of something and their success, in my opinion, was largely due to their opponent's
ignorance. Genealogies are not simply histories of something, nor are the prescriptive -- something that
results in a plan. As the evidence in the answer section indicates, they are not history and should not be used
to justify particular policies.
Debating Foucault on the Affirmative
The most important thing to debating Foucault on the affirmative is to try to get the negative to isolate what
specific argument Foucault (or another source) is making so that you can debate that particular argument. Is
the negative's argument a critique of biopower, of disciplinary power, of normalization, or of something
else? As explained in the introductory essay, Foucault's thought was incredibly complex and should not be
simply essentialized as only one argument. If you can pin the negative down to what specific Foucault
9
argument that is being made in the 1NC, you will have a better chance of answering the argument properly
and of preventing the negative from mutating their argument too much in the 1AR.
Second, you should make the negative defend a specific alternative to the kritik. What will the negative do
to escape these power relations? This is a problem that has haunted Foucault scholars for generations. One
common alternative that has been suggested is resistance, but as the evidence in the answer section
indicates, Foucault simply said that resistance increases power, leaving Foucault with no practical alternative
(Fraser, 1989, pp. 27-31). Taylor (1984) and Wolin (1988) also make this argument.
Foucault may not have been haunted by this if his work was descriptive rather than prescriptive. As the
quote that introduces this book explains, a critique, for Foucault, was simply to show what is self-evident. A
demonstration of what is self-evident, however, will not accomplish much in a world of policy-making.
This is the equivalent of the affirmative standing up and reading their harms without a plan or any solvency
evidence.
Third, you should defend the notion that the government still exercises power in a number of problematic
ways that should be restrained. Although Foucault argues that most power has shifted to the micro-level, he
does NOT argue that the power of the government should not be limited or that those powers will simply
re-appear at the micro level. In fact, scholars argue that he says that we should make efforts to control power
at both levels of government - the permutation.
Fourth, you should use Foucault's own theories against the Foucault argument. Foucault argues that power
inevitably invites resistance. He explains that “there (are) no relations of power without resistance”
(Foucault, 1980, p. 142). So, if there is more of X power after the 1AC is read or voted for, that expression
of power will simply be resisted as a matter of course. This is certainly as much resistance as the negative
would be able to offer on their own.
Another theory of Foucault that you can use to fight-off the negative's critique is that because power is fluid
at the micro-level, you cannot simply attack it or criticize it. This is one area that Foucault differed from
other social reformers. Marxists, for example think that all power is concentrated in the moneyed classes
and feminists think men have all the power. Foucault, however, argued that power is manifest in many
different ways and at many different, intertwined levels. Traditional critiques that criticize particular
individuals or groups (such as capitalists) for holding all the power are vulnerable to this argument.
Foucault's own theory of the constitution of the subject also denies many of the implications that negatives
argue. Negatives will usually rely only in part on Foucault's argument and contend that, for example, when
the affirmative labels someone as an "American” they are constituting that person's identity/subjectivity.
The affirmative can steal the show, however, when they ask the affirmative for an alternative. The
permutation to do both enables re-labelling because it, according to Foucault, is what makes the resistance
to the label possible. And, since identity is not permanent and/or objective, a re-constitution of it is always
possible.
Similarly, Foucault argues that power relations are not unchangeable (proving that the permutation can
solve). Foucault describes power relations as “changeable, reversible and unstable.” He says that “they can
modify themselves, they are not give once and for all.” Foucault (1988, 12).
10
Fifth, you should exploit some of the evidence that the negative will likely read to answer the permutation.
Usually, this evidence will make arguments that center around the idea that once you use X you will never
be able to overcome it. If this argument is true, it also takes-out the alternative to the critique. Certainly if
the negative's alternative is able to overcome the status quo, the permutation can overcome the status quo
plus the 1AC. The 1AC isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to the status quo.
Sixth, you should debate uniqueness. Usually, and is the case in this volume, critique shells are presented as
non-unique disadvantages - the affirmative uses/relies on/supports/condones biopower and biopower will
kill everyone on the planet. Well, maybe, but there is lots of biopower now, there will be biopower without
the plan, and the overall effect that the affirmative will have on biopower is likely to be very small at best.
Although the negative will argue that critiques don't have to be unique, you should use the following to
mock them: If this were true, we could run a Malthus Disadvantage when you save one life and simply
argue that the idea of saving lives will cause the earth to eventually have 13 billion inhabitants and cause
global extinction. After all, “It’s not what you do it’s what you justify.”
Seventh, you should argue that much of the “impact” evidence to the critique is intentionally exaggerated by
Foucault in order to drive home his point. There is evidence in the answer section of the book that makes
this argument and Megill (1985, 242-7, 342-6) also makes the argument.
Eighth, you could criticize Foucault from another theoretical perspective. Many feminists have been critical
of Foucault on a number of grounds. Hartstock (1990) and Brodribb (1992) criticize Foucault, and other
postmodernists, for failing to outline an alternative political agenda that will protect their interests. Braidotti
(1994) criticizes Foucault for failing to develop an adequate theory of the subject that will permit political
agency. As described in the section on subjectivity above, if the subject is constituted/determined by outside
forces, agency is not possible. McNay (1991) explains:
The emphasis that Foucault places on the effects of power upon the body results in a reduction of social
agents to passive bodies and cannot explain how individuals may act in an autonomous fashion. This lack of
a rounded theory of subjectivity or agency conflicts with a fundamental aim of the feminist project and to
rediscover and re-evaluate the experiences of women (1991, p. 125).
Not all of the reaction to Foucault’s work by feminist scholars is negative. Bartky (1990) argues that
“disciplinary” practices include cosmetics and fashion and that these practices oppress women in the same
way that other disciplinary practices identified by Foucault do.
Ninth, you should argue that the kritik is a sweeping generalization that attempts to criticize an entire system
of thought. Palmer (2001) notes that “Foucault rejected (in principle, at least) generalization and
universalization in favor of considering specific and particular contexts and environments; and was reluctant
(most of the time) to make universal normative judgments. Throughout his work he explored a wide range
of power relationships operating in different human contexts and spaces at different times” (p. 340).
Debating Foucault on the Negative
When running any kritik, and Foucault in particular, the negative should be able to articulate a relatively
specific alternative. One good alternative to articulate when running a Foucault critique is “social
movements” or consciousness raising. Braidotti (1994) argues that women in consciousness raising groups
have been able to overcome the disciplinary practice of femininity.
11
The ability to articulate a relatively specific alternative will also help the negative overcome the problem
with the “power inevitable argument.” Foucault, for example, argued that reversals in power relationships
are possible through collective resistance if it is executed properly. Explains that “it is doubtless the
strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible” (Foucault, 1978, p. 96).
Specifically, Foucault did speak in favor of feminism. Foucault describes it as a “movement of affirmation”
(Foucault, 1980, 219-20) that has the potential to create new schemes of politicization” (29). Foucault
argues that these new schemes of politization are necessary to challenge power.
Second, you should be sure to explain your link in great detail and to explain the notions of biopower,
disciplinary power, and normalization. Until I took a couple of weeks to sit down and sift through the work
of Foucault, I did not understand what these notions were, and I have judged a good number of Foucault
debates!!!! You shouldn’t assume that your judges have this knowledge and if you want the decision to go
the “right” way, you should explain these concepts to them.
12
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Allen, Amy. (2002). POWER, SUBJECTIVITY, AND AGENCY BETWEEN ARENDT AND
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Beer, Dan. (2002). MICHAEL FOUCAULT, FORM AND POWER.
Han, Beatrice. (2002). FOUCAULT’S CRITICAL PROJECT: BETWEEN THE TRANSCENDENTAL

AND THE HISTORICAL.
Rajan, Tilottama. (2002). DECONSTRUCTION AND THE REMAINDERS OF PHENOMENOLOGY:

SARTRE, DERRIDA, FOUCAULT, AND BAUDRILLARD.
Schaff, K.P. (2002). Foucault and the Critical Tradition. HUMAN STUDIES. v. 25(3), pp. 323-32.
Discourse and Foucault
Beisecker, B. (1992). Michael Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric. PHILOSOPHY & RHETORIC. v.
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Burman, E. (1991). What Discourse is Not. PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY. (4:3), pp. 325-52.
Burr, V. (1995). AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM.
Fairclough, N. (1995) CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: THE CRITICAL STUDY OF LANGUAGE.
Foss, S.K. Gill, A. (1987). Michael Foucault’s Theory of Rhetoric as Epistemic. THE WESTERN
JOURNAL OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION. V. 51, pp. 384-401.
Hook, Derek. (2001). The Disorders of Discourse. THEORIA. June, pp. 41-70.
Parker, I. (1999). DECONSTRUCTING PSYCHOTHERAPY.
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with Discourse Analysis. DISCOURSE ANALYTIC RESEARCH: REPERTOIRES AND READINGS OF
TEXTS IN ACTION.
Sovereignty Links
Sharp, Hasana. (2002). Smash the Sovereign Paradigm! INTERTEXTS. Spring, pp. 98-113.
Governmentality Links
13
Burchell, Graham. (1991). THE FOUCAULT EFFECT: STUDIES IN GOVERNMENTALITY.
Curtis. (2002). Foucault on Governmentality and Population: the Impossible Discovery. CANADIAN
JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY. Fall, p. 505.
International Organization Links
Barnett, Michael. (1999). The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations.
INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION. Autumn. pp. 698-ff.
Global Governance Links
Clapp, Jennifer. (1998). The Privatization of Global Environmental Governance: ISO 1400 and the
Developing World. GLOBAL GOVERNANCE. V. 4, pp. 295-316.
Dillon, Michael. (2001). Global Liberal Governance, Biopolitics, Security, and War. MILLENNIUM
JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES. v. 30(1), pp. 41-ff.
Dillon, Michael. (2000). Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency. ALTERNATIVES:
SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION AND LIBERAL GOVERNANCE. January-March, pp. 126-ff.
Dillon, Michael. (1995). ALTERNATIVES, pp. 330-ff.
Finklestein, L. (1995). What is Global Goverannce. GLOBAL GOVERNANCE. V. 1, pp. 365-72.
Halliday, Fred. (2000). Global Governance: Problems and Prospects. CITIZENSHIP STUDIES. v. 4(1),
pp. 21-ff.
Hardt, Michael. (1998). The Global Society of Control. DISCOURSE. Fall, pp. 139-52.
Weiss, Tomas. (2000). Governance, Good Governance, and Global Governance: Conceptual and Actual
Challenges. THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY. October, pp. 796-ff.
Development Links
Brigg, Morgan. (2002). Post-Development, Foucault, and the Colonisation Metaphor. THIRD WORLD
QUARTERLY. v. 23(3), pp. 421-36.
Defenders of Foucault
Connology, William. (1985). Taylor, Foucault, and Otherness. POLITICAL THEORY. August, pp. 365-
76.
14
Durham, Thomas. (1996). MICHAEL FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM.
Patton, Paul. (1989). Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom. POLITICAL STUDIES. V. 37, pp. 260-
76.
Picket, Brent. (1996). Foucault and the Politics of Resistance. POLITY. Summer, pp. 445-66.
Answers
Fraser, Nancy. (1989). UNRULY PRACTICES. This book is not just about Foucault, but he is discussed
throughout the book. You can use the table of the contents and the index to find specific references.
Habermas, Jurgen. (1987). THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY. In this book

Habermas defends modernity against attacks by critics like Foucault. Specifically, Habermas argues that
Fouault’s genealogical approach undermines meaning and validity, threatening all communication.
Megill, Alan. (1985). PROPHETS OF EXTREMITY. Again, this book is not specific to Foucault, but
Megill does address Foucault’s work in great detail.
Rorty, Richard. (1991). ESSAYS ON HEIDEGGER AND OTHERS. This is a difficult work for the
unfamiliar, but you can find specific criticisms of Foucault in it.
Said, Edward. (1989) Foucault and the Imagination of Power. Ed Couzens Hoy. FOUCAULT: A
CRITICAL READER, pp. 149-56.
Taylor, Charles. (1984). Foucault on Truth and Freedom. POLITICAL THEORY. v. 12, pp. 152-83.
Tayor, Charles. (1989). Foucault on Truth and Freedom. Ed Couzens Hoy. FOUCAULT: A CRITICAL
READER, pp. 69-102.
Foucault and Feminism
General
Balbus, I.D. (1988). Disciplining Women: Michael Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse. AFTER
FOUCAULT: HUMANISTIC KNOWLEDGE, POSTMODERN CHALLENGES. pp. 138-60.
Bordo, Susan. (1991). Docile Bodies, Rebellious Bodies: Foucauldian Perspectives on Female
Psychopathology. WRITING THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE. Ed. High Silverman.
Diamond, I. (1988). FEMINISM & FOUCAULT: REFLECTIONS ON RESISTANCE.
15
MacLeod, Catriona. (2002). Foucauldian Feminism: The Implications of Governmentality. JOURNAL FOR
THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOR. March, pp. 41-60.
McLaren, Margaret. (2002). FEMINISM, FOUCAULT, AND THE EMBODIED SUBJECT.
McNay, L. (1992). FOUCAULT AND FEMINISM.
Munroe, V.E. (2003). On Power and Domination: Feminism and the Final Foucault. EUROPEAN
JOURNAL OF POLITICAL THEORY. January, pp. 79-99.
Sawicki, J. (1991). DISCIPLINING FOUCAULT: FEMINISM, POWER, AND BODY.
Feminists Who Support Foucault
Harstock, Nancy. (1990). Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women. FEMINISM/POSTMODERNISM.

Ed. Linda Nicholson.
Heckman, Susan. (1990). GENDER AND KNOWLEDGE: ELEMENTS OF POSTMODERN

FEMINISM.
Feminists Who Criticize Foucault
Balbus, Isaac. (1988). Disciplining Women. In AFTER FOUCAULT: HUMANISTIC KNOWLEDGE,

POSTMODERN CHALLENGES.
Bartky, Sandra. (1990). FEMININITY AND DOMINATION: STUDIES IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY

OF OPPRESSION.
Bartky, Sandra. (1988). Foucault, Femininity, and Modernization of Patriarchal Power. In Irene Diamond
and Lee Quinby FEMINISM AND FOUCAULT: REFLECTIONS ON RESISTANCE.
Braidotti, Rosi. (1994). NOMADIC SUBJECTS: EMBODIMENT AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN

CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEORY.
Brodribb, Somer. (1992). NOTHING MATTERS: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERNISM.
Balbus, Isaac. (1987). Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse.
FEMINISM AS CRITIQUE: ON THE POLITICS OF GENDER. Eds Seyla Banhabib and Drucilla
Cornell.
Harstock, Nancy. (2000). Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women? In

FEMINISM/POSTMODERNISM.
McNay, Lois. The Foucauldian Body and the Exclusion of Experience. HYPATIA. v. 6, pp. 125-37.
16
Foucault and the Subject
Colwell, C. (1994). The Retreat of the Subject in the Late Foucault. PHILOSOPHY TODAY. Spring, pp.
56-69.
Dews, Peter. (1984). Power and Subjectivity in Foucault. NEW LEFT REVIEW. March-April, pp. 72-95.
Dews, Peter. (1989). The Return of the Subject in the Late Foucault. RADICAL PHILOSOPHY. V. 51,
pp. 37-41.
Gordon, Neve. (1999). Foucault’s Subject: An Ontological Reading. POLITY. Spring. v. 31, p. 395-ff.
Resistance
Fitzburgh, Michael. (2001). Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change. HISTORY AND
THEORY. December, pp. 59-82.
Sharp, Hasana. (2002). Smash the Sovereign Paradigm! INTERTEXTS. Spring, pp. 98-111.
Stratford, Helen. (2002). Micro-Strategies of Resistance. RESOURCES FOR FEMINIST RESEARCH.

Fall, pp. 223-234.
The Subject
Devos, Rob. (2002). The Return of the Subject in Michel Foucault. AMERICAN CATHOLIC
PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY. Spring, pp. 255-81.
General Books About Foucault
Barry, Andrew. (1996). FOUCAULT AND POLITICAL REASON: LIBERALISM, NEO-LIBERALISM

AND RATIONALITIES OF GOVERNMENT.
Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller eds. (1991). THE FOUCAULT EFFECT : STUDIES IN
GOVERNMENTALITY : WITH TWO LECTURES BY AND AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHEL
FOUCAULT.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. MICHEL FOUCAULT : BEYOND STRUCTURALISM AND
HERMENEUTICS. This book is one of the best books on Foucault in terms of academic quality, but it is a
very difficulty read.
Dreyfus, Richard. (1992) BEING AND POWER: HEIDEGGER AND FOUCAULT.
17
Faubion, James D. ed. (2000). POWER / MICHEL FOUCAULT. This is also somewhat of a difficult read,
but it is also very comprehensive and discusses some of the main ideas that we usually end up debating
about.
Flillingham, Lydia Alix. (1993). FOUCAULT FOR BEGINNERS.
Kelly, Michael ed. (1994). CRITIQUE AND POWER: RECASTING THE FOUCAULT/HABERMAS
DEBATE.
Lotringer, Sylvère. (1996). FOUCAULT LIVE (INTERVIEWS, 1961-1984) / MICHEL FOUCAULT.
Popekwitz, Thomas. (1998). FOUCAULT'S CHALLENGE: DISCOURSE, KNOWLEDGE, AND POWER

IN EDUCATION. NY: Teachers College Press.
Rabinow, Paul. (1997). ETHICS: SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH / MICHEL FOUCAULT.
Books and Articles by Foucault
Many of these primary materials are a difficult read. I've organized them in the order that I think you should
try to read them.
(1995). DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON. This is probably the second most
important primary sources for this topic after DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH.
(1983). The Subject and Power. MICHAEL FOUCAULT: BEYOND STRUCTURALISM AND
HERMENEUTICS. Eds. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. pp. 208-226.
(2000). POWER: ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT, 1954-1984, Volume III.
(1981). POWER/KNOWLEDGE: SELECTED INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1972-1977.
(1984). THE FOUCAULT READER.
(1990). THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY: AN INTRODUCTION.
(1994). THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEDICAL PERCEPTION. This is a

very tough read, but after you have tackled some of these other books, you may wish to give it a try.
(1982). ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE. This book is useful reading for understanding some of
Foucault's basic ideas.
(1990). POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE: INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1977-1984.
18
(1994). THE ORDER OF THINGS; AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES.
(1997). ETHICS : SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH (ESSENTIAL WORKS OF MICHEL FOUCAULT, vols
1-3.
(1997). THE POLITICS OF TRUTH.
Journal Articles About Foucault
Aladjem, Terry. (1991). The Philosopher's Prism: Foucault, Feminism, and Critique. POLITICAL
THEORY. pp. 277-91.
Johnson, James. (1997). Communication, Criticism, and the Postmodern Consensus: An Unfashionable
Interpretation of Michel Foucault. POLITICAL THEORY. August, pp. 559-583.
Keenan, Tom. (1987). The "Paradox" of Knowledge and Power: Reading Foucault on a Bias. POLITICAL
THEORY. February, pp. 5-37.
McCarthy, Thomas. (19900. The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School.
POLITICAL THEORY. August, pp. 437-469.
Megill, Alan. (1987). The Reception of Foucault by Historians. JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF
IDEAS. January-March. v. 48 (1), pp. 117-141.
Megill, Allan. (1979). Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History. JOURNAL OF MODERN
HISTORY. September, pp. 451-503.
Meynell, H. (1989). On Knowledge, Power, and Michael Foucault. HEYTHROP JOURNAL. v. 30, pp.
419-432.
Miller, James. (1990). Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty. POLITICAL THEORY.
August, pp. 470-91.
Philip, Mark. (1983). Foucault on Power: A Problem in Radical Translation? POLITICAL THEORY.
February, pp. 29-52.
Racevskis, Karlis. (1993). Interpreting Foucault. PAPERS ON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.

Winter, pp. 96-121.
Shiner, Larry. (1982). Reading Foucault: Anti-Method and the Genealogy of Power-Knowledge.
HISTORY AND THEORY. v. 21, pp. 382-98.
Weberman, David. (1995). Foucault’s Reconception of Power. THE PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM. V. 26,
pp. 189-217.
19
Foucault 1NC Shell

Social service is a means of biopolitical social control
Eric Gorhman, sociologist, State University of New York, NATIONAL SERVICE: CITIZENSHIP AND
POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, p. 113
Social service as a technique of social control has been well documented in America by Frances Fox Piven
and Richard Cloward. They contend that the primary function of relief-giving has been to maintain civil
order in a capitalist economic system. Historical evidence suggests that relief arrangements are initiated or
expanded during the occasional outbreaks of civil disorder produced by mass unemployment, and are then
abolished or contracted when political instability is restored.... [E]xpansive relief policies are designed to
mute civil disorder, and restrictive ones to reinforce work norms. In other words, relief policies are cyclical-
liberal or restrictive depending on the problems of regulation in the larger society with which government
must contend?; j Piven and Cloward argue that this has been the primary function of relief policy since the
New Deal, and they marshal a good deal of evidence in support of their claim.
B. Disciplinary liberalism’s biopower necessitates extermination and annihilation
Michel Foucault, Director of Institute Francais at Hamburg, THE FOUCAULT READER, 1984, p. 259-260.
Since the classical age, the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of
power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among
others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a
power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to
impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of
death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define
itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the
reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody
as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit
such holocaust on their own populations. But this formidable power of death-and this is perhaps what
accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits-now presents
itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer,
optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no
longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence
of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life
necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so
many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn
that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out
destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly
informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the
power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's
continued existence.
20
21
Foucault 1NC Shell

.
22
*** Links ***
23
Links: Social Services
Social services expand psychiatric therapy
POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, p. 112-3
As the twentieth century unfolded, though, this feeling of moral superiority was supplanted by an ethic of
scientific expertise." "Friendly visiting" became "social diagnosis," and the charity organizations
became bureaucratic social work agencies. Servicers became experts on "family adjustment" with
developed "casework techniques.""' Psychiatry was introduced into social work, as was the study of
criminology. A professional subculture emerged, and professional organizations developed. Finally, social
service agencies became bureaucratized, as the principles of organization shifted from "cause" to
"function."" Efficiency became the key virtue of the service organization (arid has become more so in
our time), agencies coordinated their activities more closely, a theory of supervision emerged and a
supervisory function became delineated. Finally a "federation" movement further reinforced these
bureaucratic and professional tendencies. Service had become less a charitable practice and more a
technical means of therapy.~
24
Links: Jobs Programs
The job corps disciplines and normalizes
The Job Corps also was designed to discipline and normalize its corps members as much as it was meant to
give them marketable skills. This is evident from the Residential Living Manual produced by the
Department of Labor for the program. However, such discipline was not particularly harsh, and the authors
of the manual implore the residence directors to involve the enrollees in the discipline and to be "flexible" in
meting punishment." In this sense discipline was democratic: the community, not just the director,
disciplined the offending party. Consequently, social control was most effective as a means by which the
individual could regulate his or her own behavior.
25
Links: Social Service Aid
Social control expands through aid
POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, pp. 113-4
Social control involves different characteristics. Some who are of no use as workers-the aged, the disabled,
the insane-are treated so poorly that they "instill in the laboring masses a fear of the fate that awaits them
should they relax into beggary and pauperism."" Low-wage work is enforced through statutory regulation
and administrative methods." And relief agency practices degrade the relief recipient, for example in the
practice of surveillance. The client is forced to "surrender commonly accepted rights [e.g., to privacy] in
exchange for aid."' The welfare explosion of the 1960s expanded these surveillance and regulative practices
in the name of "relief." One effect of these programs has been to shift the function of relief and service
agencies from the regulation of civil disorder to the regulation of labor.'
26
Links: National Service
National service supports a disciplinary order
Similar tendencies can be found in the federal youth work and service programs of the 1960s. As a number
of supporters testified, an early, unrealized version of VISTA, the National Service Corps, National Service,
Citizenship, and Political Education was designed to spontaneously generate voluntarism." It was not
supposed to be a "political" organization.' Nonetheless, domestic service programs in the early 1960s placed
political and social limitations on participants. In both the Senate and House bills, enrollees were deemed
employees of the federal government, who were required to undergo "security checks" in order to ensure
that their enrollment was "consistent with the national interest."" The President's Study Group on a National
Service Program recommended to the committees that comprehensive selection and testing procedures be
implemented (for "aptitudes" and "attitudes") by trained professionals. "Selection will continue throughout
the training period: a Corpsmen's [sic] performance will be assessed by the instructors, by trained
psychologists, and by the NSC and local project personnel."" The study also recommended background
checks and fingerprinting of all enrollees." Finally, the study advised that a dossier be kept on each
individual. Applicants will be invited to begin training on the basis of their detailed questionnaire-
application; responses to reference-inquiries by those who have known them best in work, school, and.
community activities; the results of their aptitude-placement test, medical examination, and civil service
background investigation.' According to the account given by Michel Foucault, the dossier is one important
criterion of the disciplinary society, for it brings the participants under the gaze of the agency.'.
27
28
National service is a massive socializaiton strategy
In claiming that national service can solve these problems - the deinstitutionalized mentally ill and
unemployed welfare recipients national service emerges as part of an extensive system of socializing
strategies involving not only the servers, but the recipients as well. National service demonstrates that "the
obligations of citizenship will act as a solvent for most of the differences among the various kinds of
national servers
Programs that are designed to socialize instill norms

Finally, if the program is constructed around a principle of socialization, it could reinscribe central American
norms that service is supposed to reform: individualism and the calculation of self-interest. To coerce
individuals into an institution that may ultimately foster individualism is contrary to the spirit and ethic of
citizen service. In sum, coercive service, I argue, is justified only if it meets certain very specific
conditions--conditions allowing for participation and requiring political education.
All service will be juridically defined

All service tasks will be, in some sense, state sanctioned; thus, service will be juridically defined. Those
individuals who serve, who provide care, who contribute to the welfare of the society, without official
designation will not be considered to be providing service. The most significant group excluded, then, would
be parents, especially mothers. Certain tasks (e.g., day care) will be sanctioned precisely to free parents from
their familial responsibilities-and will serve to correct the failures of the family in serving the moral and
psychological needs of the young.
Service programs lead to an intensification of body serveillance

Most importantly, service in this sector, and in institutions such as mental hospitals, is quantitively different
from services in the other sectors. Not only do participants serve the community at large, but they work for
institutions which "work upon" individuals." That is, the service they render involves the violation by the
state of the sovereignty of some individual's body. Such individuals contribute in whatever way to "the
intensification of the body-with its exploitation as an object of knowledge and an element in. relations of
power."" They become part of a system that extracts information from individuals, and uses that knowledge
29
to exercise power. over them. In this sense, they serve institutions that both represent and impose particular
strategies of power upon their subjects.
30
National service leads to massive social and psychological testing
National service could be the largest system of registration developed by federal planners in the past two
decades, and could be organized to maximize the production of services. It would provide social scientists
and government bureaucrats with a large pool for the testing of social and psychological theories. Finally, it
could be the means by which many aspects of the private service sector are brought under further federal
regulatory control. In short, the mechanics of a potential national service reveal a means by which the state
can not only improve the condition of its citizens, but also intervene more fully into the activities of those
citizens. In this chapter, I examine the registration and selection processes by which individuals are
categorized. In the next chapter, I consider programs designed to improve the employability of enrollees.
Part of the registration and selection process will be employment counseling, and in the process of
categorizing and "skilling" the individual, certain lessons are taught, and knowledge is imparted, to and
about, the enrollee.
All national service programs have extensive registration, testing, and evaluation procedures
POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, pp. 80-1
Twenty years ago, then, the first conference on national service considered the possibility of extensive data
collection and testing on participants in a future program. Moreover, in order to achieve this, functions,
operating procedures, and training at all camp sites had to be standardized." All participants in the workshop
agreed to this, regardless of the actual placement process imposed.
Information collection will be magnified by sharing

A national service program could obtain its information from other governmental organizations that are
already conducting registration-like activities, for example, the Social Security Administration, the Internal
Revenue Service, state motor vehicle departments, and state and local boards of education." Seattle's
Program for Local Service exemplifies the procedure in identifying potential volunteers through the State of
Washington's computerized list of licensed drivers." The report also suggests that the military help organize
the plan. For instance, the service agency might test individuals via the Armed Service Vocational Aptitude
Battery (ASVAB) as an "aid in career guidance counselling."' And the Selective Service System can
maintain and process the data, with help from the Employment Services Administration."
31
Links: Legal Protections
Moves to protect humans from oppression via the law is tied into governmentality and
liberalism
Mariella Pandolfi, Anthropology Professor, University of Montreal, INDIANA JOURNAL OF GLOBAL
LEGAL STUDIES, Winter 2003, p. 374-5.
I would thus locate the catalogue of human suffering inscribed by the deployment of "humanitarian"
biopower at the juncture between two conceptual domains: that of "governmentality," which Foucault
defined "as running through the totality constituted by instructions, procedures, analyses, tactics that allow
the exercise of this very specific though extremely complex form of power, which has as its locus the
population and as its essential technical instrument, security apparatuses," and that of the intersection of
rights with biopower as developed by Agamben. The separation between humanitarianism and politics that
we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the
citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations -- which today are more and more
supported by international commissions -- can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and
therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight.
Following Foucault, I view biopower as an articulation of the political with the biological; following
Agamben, this also means recognition of the paradox and the risk implied in the rule of law in modern
democracies.
The law projects power over bare life

DRG/E376 Peter Fitzpatrick, Professor of Law at University of London, THEORY AND EVENT 5.2, 2001,
p. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.2fitzpatrick.html, accessed 5/13/05.
This law which creates homo sacer can be delineated in a preliminary way by emphasizing the obvious: that
homo sacer is sacred. As sacred, homo sacer occupies a meditative domain in-between the profane and the
transcendent beyond. Homo sacer is still of the profane. He fugitively occupies an all-too solid world in
which he can be killed without sacrifice. Yet homo sacer is also of the transcendent beyond. He has already
been sacrificed. These two dimensions can only be combined in homo sacer because of the confident
reference beyond, because of a sacrifice which has brought the beyond into the measure and contingency of
a profane world. The life of this sacred man is 'bare', then, only because it has been consigned to an
empyrean, leaving nothing for it in the profane world but to be killed. Without some such resolving and
pervasively effective reference beyond, beyond life in the world, there is no position surpassing that life
from which it can be observed or rendered as bare. And without that resolving reference, we are left with
what created homo sacer 'in the first place', with law. Law, in this light, is of the sacred. It determinately
combines what is here with responsiveness to what is ever beyond, even if that determination is only and
ever 'for the time being'.
32
Links: Court Action to Protect Rights
Empowering the courts to protect rights won't check modern power
Brent L. Pickett, Professor of Political Science and Chairman of the Social Sciences Department, at Chadron
State College, 2000 (THE SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, July, p. 43)
This reading of Foucault does have deep problems, however. There are many passages Where Foucault
described the state as profoundly dangerous, especially in his writings from the late 1970s and early 1980s
when, perhaps in response to some critics, he began to emphasize the role of the state (1983; 1988a; 1988b).
As mentioned above, it is also unlikely that empowering the state and its agents, the police, courts, and
prisons, in the way required for Foucaultian rights would be an effective way to counter modern power.
Instead, it would most likely increase the regimentation of society. Foucault is on the horns of a dilemma:
the reading that emphasizes revolt as the sole guarantor of rights has deep problems in practice, yet the state
reading, while having some textual support, seems at odds with the thrust of Foucault's reasoning and faces
practical difficulties as well.
The courts and the laws are a form of social control

John V. Walker, University of Toronto, 1999 (SEIZING POWER: DECADENCE AND
TRANSGRESSION IN FOUCAULT AND PAGLIA, http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-
only/issue.994/walker.994)
In effect, the classroom had become something much more than a depositary for academic learning: it was
the site for moral instruction, classification, division, hierarchization, it resembled in microcosm the
principles of normalization, individuation and perpetual judgment that began to permeate society as a whole.
Thus the courts and laws, the previous modalities of social control, now became one part of a more general
disciplinary apparatus where, in a panoramic turn of phrase characteristic of Foucault, "the whole indefinite
domain of the non-conforming" became its focus. And at its various points of intervention - prisons,
workhouses, asylums, hospitals, schools and so on (representing and joining together such apparently
diverse sides of the penal, social welfare and medical systems) - this apparatus became the breeding ground
for a range of "technicians of behavior" to employ a continuous and universal network of scrutiny and
intervention: "this vast mechanism, established a slow, continuous, imperceptible gradation that made it
possible to pass naturally from disorder to offence and back, from a transgression of the law to a slight
departure from a rule, an average, a demand, a norm.
33
Links: Court Action to Protect Rights (Cont)
Rights won't protect against local, disciplinary power
To adequately discuss the idea of a Foucaultian right, it is first necessary to see why Foucault thought that
traditional, liberal rights failed to impede the most important power relations. His critique of rights was
largely derived from the account of power he gave in such works as Discipline and Punish. There he
described a decisive transformation in the forms and locations of power that occurred in the West from the
17th to the early 19th century. Before this change, during the Middle Ages and what Foucault called the
"classical" era, which was roughly the 16th and early 17th centuries, power had largely been a matter of the
state. Yet, the slow development of various techniques of normalization and discipline within asylums,
military barracks, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and prisons, and the subsequent diffusion of those
techniques throughout society, fundamentally altered the nature of power. It led to the modem era where
"power surmounts the rules of right which organize and delimit it and extends itself beyond them" (Foucault,
1980, p. 96). With power now primarily located at levels below the state, rights lost the effectiveness they
had during the classical era. Because rights were (and still are) connected to an archaic notion of power as
vested in the state, which Foucault called the principle of sovereignty, they only limited state power, while
leaving untouched the new disciplines. Liberal rights thus became outmoded. Beyond an inaccurate view of
where power is located in society at large, however, the social contract theory, which has historically
provided the justification for rights, also fails to recognize the actual practice of disciplinary power.
Contracts in general, and social contracts providing for the protection of natural rights in particular, are
fundamentally reciprocal and egalitarian. There are two or more signatories, each of which is equally bound
by the terms of the contract. The sovereign, for Locke, Madison, and others, is given the power to make laws
and to punish transgression of that law, while having limits placed on its power, particularly in regards to
fundamental rights. In contrast to this formal, contractual equality, the disciplines "are essentially
nonegalitarian and asymmetrical."
34
Retention of political rights simply lays the foundation for deeper insertion into the political
life and supports ruling authority
Alain RENON: review of Giorgio AGAMBEN, Homo Sacer, 2000
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/000374.php
Homo Sacer, a human being that could not be ritually offered, but whom one. could kill without incuring the
penalty of murder according to ancient Roman law, is being used in this book as underpinning for a fresh
decoding of the major political difficulty in our century: the rise of the worst sort of totalitarisms, with
nazism at its apex. Giorgio Agamben sheds light on the paradoxical, but inherent link between the Rule of
Law (Etat de Droit) and the State of Emergency (Etat d'Exception). This author invites us to reflect about
"the strange continuum connecting democracy to totalitarism", and describes the trap in which the Western
democracies have fallen, "in gaining (...) rights and liberties in their conflicts against the central(ising)
powers, individuals are each and every time simultaneously laying the foundation for a silent but ever deeper
insertion of their life within the political order of the state, and hereby giving new and even more formidable
power to the ruling authority from which they sought emancipation."
Areas that are protect by rights just become infiltrated by disciplinary power
The disciplines, both on their own and through the human sciences that they serve as the basis for, establish
norms and categories that one must live up to or fall within. If one does not, one is subject to the
micropenalties that the disciplines rely on, even when one is obeying the law. The areas of protected action
and privacy that rights were meant to establish thereby become infiltrated by disciplinary power and its
system of punishments and rewards. The result is that a range of behaviors that were left untouched under
the premodern system of punishment have now become, despite the formal protection of rights, subject to
penalties.
35
Rights maintenance relies on the authoritative structures of the state
Many liberal theorists would at least partially agree with this, given their occasional emphasis on how rights
have to be fought for and then invoked by an assertive, vigilant populace (e.g., Mill, 1962, p. 87). For
instance, this idea is clearly implied in the Declaration of Independence. Given that there are leaders who do
not want to respect citizens' rights, the final guarantee of our rights must be the threat that we will rebel if
they are not respected. Yet, as defenders of more traditional understandings of rights would be quick to note,
the state cannot be entirely avoided, as Foucault in many passages appears to want. Although citizens
ultimately have to want their rights, a system of rights in its daily maintenance must rely on the authoritative
structures of the state.
Rights rely on the power of the state to enforce them

Thus, again referring to the Declaration of Independence, our right of revolution should not be too quickly
asserted. It is only "when a long train of abuses and usurpations... evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute Despotism" that it is permissible for a people to revolt. The legal system is the vehicle for the
promulgation of laws concerning rights, and thus is necessary in all but the exceptional circumstances
described by Jefferson. It helps to clarify who holds which rights against whom. Furthermore, the state
provides the force ensuring the protection of rights, and it is within the legal system that conflicts between
rights bearers are settled.
Rights do not provide equal protection against disciplinary punishment

Rights are, therefore, according to Foucault, incapable of restricting the most important sites of
normalization and production of docile bodies. Although formal, equal rights were gradually extended to
larger sections of the population, they were in fact becoming irrelevant: in the principal institutions of
society, persons were not equal but instead always subject to hierarchies and disciplinary punishment, and
the rights they held did nothing to combat the spread of modem power. Furthermore, precisely because
traditional rights were obsolete, because they were focused on a premodern form of power and viewed
society in terms of contractual relations, they directed attention away from the actual functioning of modem
power. Rights have, therefore, become a system... superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such
a way as to conceal its actual procedures, the element of domination inherent in its techniques.
36
Rights support power through a legitimation of the system
The critique of liberal rights goes beyond the charge of ineffectiveness and misdirection. Foucault also
argued that liberal rights help to support modem power, that they are integral to a system of "brutality"
(Foucault, 1980, p. 95). There are two reasons for this. The first is that the set of institutions that rights help
to legitimate, the laws, courts, police, and prisons charged with protecting citizens' rights, function as a
system of domination. Although these governmental bodies can only exist on a more fundamental level of
disciplines, Foucault argued that they in turn reinforce those basic tactics of power. A rights-based legal
order, then, works through the systematic application of violence through the police and prisons, and
perhaps more important, it helps to reinforce the larger web of modem power that has colonized rights and
the law over the past two and half centuries. The second way in which traditional rights contribute to this
system of domination is that they aid in the "normalization" of persons. The modem, rights-bearing
individual is him or herself a product of power. Rights have typically been justified by an account of what
people are supposed to be by nature. For example, the Lockean rights-bearing self is, by nature, rational,
industrious, and under universal duties to be sociable and have a friendly disposition.
Absolute rights are inflexible and therefore cannot be used to fight state power
Although one would not think that Foucault's new form of right would be a foundationalist or "natural"
account of rights, because that would be contrary to the rest of Foucault's thought, some of his rhetoric does
give pause: "Against power it is always necessary to oppose unbreakable law and unabridgeable rights"
(1981, p. 8). Keenan (1987) quoted a statement by Foucault on behalf of Vietnamese boat people where
Foucault asserted that the misfortune created or unremedied by governments "founds an absolute right to
rise up and address those who hold power" (, p. 21). The overall goal, however, was rather pragmatic in that
Foucault was offering a means to resistance against power. What sort of means, and in what ways, if at all, it
involves a recourse to state power, is an important issue that will be discussed below. Yet this goal of
countering power has significant consequences for the practice of Foucaultian rights. Because modem power
also has multiple opportunities for extension and advancement, rights, too, need to be flexible rather than
fixed.
37
Links: Courts
The court system oppresses the working class
Michel Foucault, philosopher, College de France, POWER/KNOWLELDGE, 1980, p.29-30.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the bourgeois judicial system has always operated to increase
oppositions between the proletariat and the non-proletarianised people. This is the reason that it is a bad
instrument, not because it is old. The very form of the court contains the statement to the two parties, 'Before
the proceedings your case is neither just nor unjust. It will only be so on the day when I pronounce it so,
because I will have consulted the law or the canons of eternal equity'. This is the very essence of the court,
and it is in complete contradiction with the point of view of popular justice.
The judicial and penal apparatus must be totally rejected

Michel Foucault, philosopher, College de France, POWER/KNOWLEDGE, 1980, p.16.
At first sight these are at least some of the ways in which the penal system operates as an anti-seditious
system, as a variety of ways of creating antagonism between the proletarianised and the non-proletarianised
people, and thereby introducing a contradiction which is now firmly rooted. This is why the revolution can
only take place via the radical elimination of the judicial apparatus, and anything which could reintroduce
the penal apparatus, anything which could reintroduce its ideology and enable this ideology to
surreptitiously creep back into popular practices, must be banished. This is why the court, an exemplary
form of this judicial system, seems to me to be a possible location for the reintroduction of the ideology of
the penal system into popular practice. This is why I think that one should not make use of such a model.
38
Links: Legal Action
Legal action boosts state law and the sovereign
DRG/E373 Hugh Baxter, Professor of Law, University of Boston, STANFORD LAW REVIEW, January
1996, p. 476.
It would not have surprised Foucault to find that legal discourse - or at least some forms of legal discourse -
may be linked inescapably to notions of sovereignty. For Foucault, one discourse cannot necessarily be
folded into another. One possible consequence may be that his work cannot always be simply "applied"
directly in legal argument. Foucault designed his analytics of power to deemphasize the state, to show that
the actual exercise of power is dispersed throughout the social order, not concentrated in the state apparatus.
Constitutional law, by contrast, requires those challenging a particular exercise of power to attribute that
power to the state. Further, even in private law contexts, the Realist-inspired strategy for making "private"
power visible is to describe it as a constructive delegation of state power. Foucault's work operates more
readily as a challenge to standard legal constructions of the world than it does as a direct intervention into
conventional forms of legal argument.
Liberal rule maximizes government power

DRG/E374 Mitchell Dean, Head of Philosophy, Macquarie University, CULTURAL VALUES January
2002, p. 119-ff.
In this respect, the notion of government comes to be viewed as exemplifying a key feature of power in
general which Foucault sought to stress after 1976, its operation through freedom (1988; Dean 2001). For
these analytics of contemporary government, Foucault’s characterizations of power (1982) as a structure of
actions upon the actions of others is nowhere better exemplified than in contemporary forms of liberal rule.
These forms of rule activate what Nikolas Rose (1999) has succinctly called, in the title of his recent book,
powers of freedom.
39
Links: Legal Action
Liberal politics are biopolitics
DRG/E375 Mitchell Dean, Head of Philosophy, Macquarie University, CULTURAL VALUES January
2002, p. 119-ff.
My second counter-premise follows from the first, and concerns the nature of liberal democracies. If regimes
of power are constituted through multiform, heterogenous trajectories and zones of power relations, then it is
necessary to remain skeptical of the way in which contemporary liberal forms of rule are understood. It is
my contention here that a liberal understanding of the government of the state systematically underestimates
the manner in which liberal polities are engaged in sovereign decisions and a biopolitics of the population
that concern, in their different and sometimes indistinct ways, fundamental matters of life and death. There
are three aspects of the liberal understanding of the state that are germane to the argument here. All three can
also be viewed in the work of the most vigorous and able defenders of liberalism, such as Stephen Holmes
(1993; 1995). These postulates are that of limited government, of individual liberty, and the anti-
authoritarian character of liberalism. The first means that liberal government is one in which there are
constitutional constraints on the sovereign powers exercised by the state. In liberal-democracies, this can be
presented as constraints on majority rule, popular sovereignty, or the will of the people. The second means
that the principle of this limitation of government is found in the individual freedoms which exist in private
life and in a sphere of civil society separate from the state. The third employs this system of limitations and
rights to distinguish liberalism from authoritarian forms of government. All three postulates are clearly a
part of a liberal conception of government. They are, in other words, part of liberal ways of thinking about
the means and objectives of the use of sovereign powers. They are all, however, easily shown to be a
product of that specific standpoint. In other words, they are a part of the programatic rationality of liberal
constitutionalism. They do not consider the effects of such rationality in the practical domain to which it is
linked.
40
Links: Legal Action
Justice can never be fulfilled
DRG/E377 Mariana Valverde, Professor of Crimonology, University of Toronto, LAW AND SOCIAL
INQUIRY, Summer 1999 p. 658.
In this sense, law is the opposite of justice, since Derrida, following Emmanuel Levinas, argues that justice
"must always concern singularity. Justice, which always involves "an unlimited responsiveness to and
responsibility for the other" cannot be fixed precisely because it is not a state of affairs but rather a
movement toward the particularity of the Other. Using Levinas and Walter Benjamin as his main resources,
Derrida counterposes the calculative logic of law to, the ethical logic of infinity-an infinity no longer located
in human relation to God but rather in here-and-now practices of intersubjectivity. The justice that is
glimpsed in genuine intersubjectivity is a movement that by definition can never be fully accomplished, and
so justice is inherently nonexistent, something that cannot be achieved. The desire for justice is thus destined
to be never fulfilled, insofar as we can never fully know and understand the irreducible specificity of the
other, toward whom we nevertheless have what Levinas would call an infinite responsibility. And yet,
despite its peculiar ontological status, justice is very real in the pragmatist sense: it has real effects. Justice
impels us to constantly critique our own tendency to think that we know what is due to others, that we know
the other.
The legal system creates its own state of exception

DRG/E378 Peter Fitzpatrick, Professor of Law at University of London, THEORY AND EVENT 5.2, 2001,
p. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.2fitzpatrick.html, accessed 5/13/05.
Yet for Schmitt the exception is also imbued with law. Law constitutes the decision-maker and the matters
decided upon, broad as they may be -- 'the public interest or interest of the state, public safety and order, le
salut public, and so on' (Schmitt 1985: 6). Indeed, it is 'the legal system itself [which] can anticipate the
exception and can "suspend itself"' (Schmitt 1985: 14). Admittedly, 'how the systematic unity and order can
suspend itself in a concrete case is difficult to construe, and yet it remains a juristic problem as long as the
exception is distinguishable from a juristic chaos' (Schmitt 1985: 14). In all, although the sovereign 'stands
outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it', and sovereignty remains 'a juristic
concept' (Schmitt 1985: 7, 16). The exception thence becomes unexceptional. It comes to resemble the
involving lineaments of the law itself as these were extracted from my earlier dissection of homo sacer and
the sacred. The exception manifests a similar combining of law's being determinant with its responsiveness
to an exteriority beyond determination, even if the exception is a specific variation of that combining nexus,
or a different 'jurisdictional competence' as Schmitt would have it (Schmitt 1985: 7). Looked at from the
perspective of the norm, the norm as both the normal order and as a particular rule, it is obvious that this
norm cannot be invariant. Instantiations of the norm always entail a transgression of what the norm had
been, entail its becoming 'other' to what it was. The norm, in short, always subsists along with its own
exception. The exceptional, again, is unexceptional. This self-exception is not, or is not just, a matter of the
undermining and the explicit change of the norm. For its sustained integrity, for the norm to remain the
norm, it can neither dissolve in what was 'other' to it nor endure in a stasis where it would become
increasingly unrelated to a world ever changing around it.
41
Links: Legal Action
Legal regimes define the value of life
DRG/E382 Diane Rubenstein, Professor of Government and American studies, Cornell University, CR:
THE NEW CENTENNIAL REVIEW, Summer 2003, p. 325-6.
Foucault was correct in seeing the displacement of law as code. In an ethico-political society, government is
a government of souls. Social conduct increasingly privileges moral voice over law. U.S. ally Tony
Blair enunciates that "the scope of the law must itself be limited largely to that which is supported by
the moral voice". (Perhaps it is not so anomalous to see Blair both as a Clinton ally in "Third-Way"
policies and as a Bush ally in advocating preemptive violations of international law. This would be less
of a cynical conversion narrative than an implicit logic of post-disciplinary, advanced neoliberal ethico-
politics.) Rose depicts an increasingly moralized governance through ethics: Ethical foreign policy,
ethical banking, ethical investment, ethical agriculture, ethical business, ethical politicians, the ethic of
public service . . . as well as the increasing salience of more traditional ethical disputes in the areas of
genetic technologies and the rights to life and death. The danger of this ethico-politics is in its
moralizing, which turns "openings into closures". Political debate is replaced by "technical management
of individual conduct" in order to "produce politically desired ends". I can find no better depiction of
Bush/Ashcroft's America than Rose's description: "Ethico-politics operates at the pole of morality to the
extent that it seeks to inculcate a fixed and incontestable code of conduct, merely shifting loci of
authority, decision and control in order to govern better". Post-9/11 America is replete with the detritus
of ethico-political moralism as detailed by Rose: therapeutic subjectivities bent on claiming their
"natural right to be recognized individually", preemptive logics induced on a perpetual monitoring of
risk, new preemptive forms of individualizing security . All of these instrumentalize a distinct new form
of freedom with its "exemplary sanctions" founded on the interrelation of victim and offender, on the
teaching of life skills (which we will export in the name of "regime building"). Post-disciplinary,
ethico-political regimes increasingly instrumentalize governmentality in the name of "good
citizenship.”
42
Links -- Welfare System Increases Disciplinary Power
Welfare and other social services are key mechanisms of state disciplinary power
Anna Marie Smith, (Prof., Government, Cornell U.), WELFARE REFORM AND SEXUAL
REGULATION, 2007, 5-6.
Official discourse pays lip service to moral instruction, uplift, and correction, but its actual material
investment in what Foucault would call "discipline" remains relatively minimal. Roberts's narrative
foregrounds exclusion, degradation, deprivation, and the infliction of corporeal punishment. By coming into
contact with the State in these contexts, the targeted citizen experiences a severe restriction of her
reproductive rights, the invasion of her privacy and bodily integrity, arbitrary detainment, and the
withholding of relief from herself and her destitute family, even though they are already extremely
vulnerable where food insecurity and housing crises are concerned.
Policing of poor women’s sexuality is a part of the larger state agenda advancing disciplinary
power
REGULATION, 2007, 8-9.
The post-welfare State is withdrawing from the poor only in the sense that it is massively scaling back
redistributive social rights. At the same time, the State is aggressively intervening in the poor mother's
intimate life, and that intervention is becoming increasingly defined in a narrow manner with reference to
her kinship relations and reproductive behavior. Operating -- at this point, at least -- in harmony with the
larger project of disciplining American labor, the State, in the guise of welfare reform, is becoming an
increasingly effective vehicle of sexual policing, calibrated according to a class-oriented, gendered, and
racial profile.
Poor women are the target of state disciplinary power

REGULATION, 2007, 9.
Poor women are extraordinarily exposed to the coercive powers of the State today. Obviously, they are the
ones who bear the brunt of the neoliberal cuts in social programs. In addition, however, they are also the
women who are targeted, first and foremost, where conservative family values projects and disciplinary
interventions are concerned.
43
Agamben Impact
State regulation of sexuality through welfare policy part of the campaign to produce “bare
life”
REGULATION, 2007, 10.
For Agamben, sexual regulation in welfare policy would constitute only one moment within the State's
timeless campaign to produce "bare life." Agamben begins with Aristotle's distinction between life as mere
subsistence, which is a life that could be lived even if one found oneself outside the polis, and the pursuit of
the "good life," which is a life that is possible only for the citizen who is a member of a formally constituted
polis. Agamben interprets this distinction as a tension between two institutional postures that are adopted by
the State toward "the people"; this tension establishes the fundamental structure for any possible
government. In Aristotle's account, the male citizen could perfect himself only within the polis. If he left the
city -- or if his government descended into anarchistic chaos and effectively dissolved itself -- he would
revert back to a life in which his highest good would be nothing more than subsistence, or "bare life." It
appears, then, that one enters the condition of "bare life" only in the absence of government and that the
existence of the State prevents us from descending into an animalistic and subhuman form of life. That
appearance achieves its ideological perfection in modern liberal democratic legitimation discourse, for the
latter promises to safeguard the life, liberty, and happiness of "the people" by prohibiting arbitrary State
intervention. Agamben would argue, however, that the liberal democratic form of governance inevitably
betrays itself. Even as it promises to embrace "laissez-faire," it busily measures its population; tracks
reproductive rates; controls immigration; manages the markets in food, housing, transportation, and energy;
polices the poor; and takes steps to ensure the ready supply of able-bodied military recruits. Ironically
enough, caregiving is thereby politicized, and, for all the ideological disavowal, biopolitics is established yet
again as the essence of governmental interest by the modern nation-State. The latter "assume[s] directly the
care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks."
44
Links: Answers to: “Our Program is Decentralized”
No matter how decentalized, service programs discipline and normalize
`Thus, I premise the following discussion on the fact that, however decentralized, service programs have a
systematic, regulated quality to them, and that the agencies involved do not teach the participants to
challenge that systematization and regulation. Along with everything else service participants are taught,
they will also be taught to conform to organizational behavior-its instrumentality, technocracy, discipline,
and normalization. This is a part of service learning that proponents choose to ignore, and it is the part
obstructing civic education. One can argue that learning organizational behavior is endemic to participating
in any organization, and this may be true. But service programs will not even teach individuals to recognize
organizational behavior when they see it because they believe they are apolitical, because they do not even
recognize themselves as political organizations. This deception bespeaks the uncivic practices of community
service. For, quite simply, it violates the sort of independence of mind that all those who privilege the civic
(from Thomas Jefferson to present-day communitarians) demand of the citizen. A democratic, citizen-run
national service might develop its own organizational norms and standards, but one of them ought to be self-
criticism. Here is where service moves away from socialization and toward education, and where national
service can reflect "American" skepticism toward the government.,
45
Links: Public Health
The quest for health expands the power of the government
Nikolas Rose, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience,
Biomedicine, Biotechnology, THE POLITICS OF LIFE ITSELF: BIOMEDICINE, POWER, AND
SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2007, p. 28
Medicine, that is to say, has been central to the development of the arts of government; not only the arts of
governing others, but also the arts of governing oneself. For at the very moment when health and illness
became amenable to a positive knowledge and to explanations and interventions in terms of the biology of
the organic living body, medics took up their role as experts of lifestyle (cf. Rose 1994: 69-70). As the quest
for health has become central to the telos of living for so many human beings in advanced liberal
democracies, people have come to experience themselves and their lives in fundamentally biomedical terms,
and with the best of intentions on all sides have become bound to the ministrations and adjudications of
medical expertise, and/or those paramedical alternative and complementary forms of expertise that have
partaken of much the same logic
Public health experts expand pastoral power
SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2007, p. 28-9
But the somatic experts involved are no longer simply medical, and their advice and interventions on life
itself extend rather widely. There are nurses, midwives, health visitors. There are the multiple kinds of
therapists, not just psychological therapists but speech therapists, occupational therapists, art therapists,
physiotherapists, and a host of others. There are nutritioniseticians, health promotion experts, remedial
gymnasts, experts on exercise and fitness, and multiple advisers on shaping a form of life in the name of
health. And there are the counselors—addiction counselors, sex counselors, family and relationship
counselors, mental health counselors, educational counselors and, of course, genetic, family planning,
fertility, and reproduction counselors. Of most interest to me here are the new kinds of "pastoral powers"
that are emerging in the context of what Margaret Lock has termed "premonitory" knowledge—that is to
say, the kind of knowledge deployed by genetic counselors, but which might well he extended to encompass
predictive and future-oriented information based upon neuronal evidence such as brain scans that may
indicate risk of future disease or, as some are suggesting, undesirable behavioral traits such as impulsivity
(Lock 2005). The sites of such pastoral power are likely to proliferate in the new age of susceptibility and
presymptomatic diagnoses, as premonitory knowledge with variable levels of certainly, emerges in relation
to more and more "threats to health." This is not the kind of pastoralism where a shepherd knows and directs
the souls of confused or indecisive sheep. It entail a dynamic set of relations between the effects of those
who council and those of the counseled. These new pastors of the soma espouse the ethical principles of
informed consent, autonomy, voluntary action, and choice and nondirectiveness. In an age of biological
prudence, where individuals, especially women, are obliged to take responsibility for their own medical
46
futures and those of their families and children, these ethical principles are inevitably translated into
rnicrotechnologies for the management of communication and information that are inescapably normative
and directional. These blur the boundaries of coercion and consent. They transform the subjectivities of
those who are counseled, offering them new languages to describe their predicament, new criteria to
calculate its possi bilities and perils, and entangling the ethics of the different parties involved. It is in this
sense of managing the present in terms of an uncertain medical future, and in the face of technological
medicine and pastoral expertise, that I have suggested, following Rayna Rapp, that all of us will soon follow
those "ethical pioneers"—AIDS activists and women experiencing new reproductive technologies—in
developing a new pragmatic ethics of vitality and its management.
47
Bioethics professionals simply normalize biopower
Surrounding these somatic experts is another branch of expertise bioethics. Bioethics has mutated from a
sub-branch of philosophy to a burgeoning body of professional expertise. Ethics was once inscribed within
medical personages, imbued by long training and experience at the bedside, and supported by a code of
conduct arid enforced, where required, by professional bodies themselves. For medical researchers, for the
fifty years following World War II and the debate on ethics in the wake of the Nazi doctors and the
revelation of other medical experiments, the ethics of research was ensured by a set of principles and
overseen by research ethics committees. But now—from national bioethical committees, local Institutional
Review Boards, to a whole apparatus of bioethical approved patient information and consent forms for any
medical procedure or piece of biomedical research—we have witnessed a bioethical encirclement of
biomedical science and clinical practice. Similarly, we can observe a bioethical reshaping of the self-
representations of commercial actors in the biotech sectors, especially those involved in pharmaceuticals or
genetic services for patients. In a market driven by the search for shareholder value, where consumption of
medical and pharmaceutical products is itself shaped by brand images and brand loyalty, where confidence
in products is crucial, and where there are spirals of unrealistic hope and manipulated distrust, corporations
engage bioethicists on their advisor boards and use a whole variety of techniques to represent themselves as
ethical and responsible actors." What generates the insatiable demand for bioethics in the political and
regulatory apparatus of advanced liberal societies? One can certainly regard the expansion of bioethics, and
its imbrication within regulatory strategies, as one answer to a kind of "legitimation crisis" experienced by
genetic and other biotechnologies in advanced liberal democracies (Salter and Jones 2002, 2005). Further, as
biotech companies seek to commodify products—DNA sequences, tissues, stem cells, organs—it is clear
that ethics has a crucial function in market creation. Products that do not come with appropriate ethical
guarantees, notably assurances as to the "informed consent" of donors, will not find it easy to travel around
the circuits of biocapital. It is also clear that the routinization of can serve to insulate researchers rather than
to constrain them, and that the now almost inescapable inclusion of ELSI32 considerations in calls for grants
and in successful proposals may, perhaps accidentally, serve to assuage critical voices. Similarly; in those
jurisdictions where bioethicists work in clinical settings, it is clear that they can function to shield medical
authorities, hospital managers, clinicians, and others from the consequences of contested and controversial
decisions, such as those relating to the termination of life support to a putatively brain-dead individual. .
48
Contemporary medicine is based on control of the body and the mind
SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2007, p. 16
Indifferent, perhaps, to this epistemological and ontological radicalism, contemporary biomedicine is

enthusiastically engaged with the biological re-engineering of vitality. Sarah Franklin draws upon the phrase
used by Ian Wilmut, one of the creators of Dolly the sheep, to characterize this engagement: we have entered
the age of "biological control." "This means that we can no longer assume that the biological 'itself' will
impose limits on human ambitions. As a result, humans must accept much greater responsibility toward the
realm of the biological, which has, in a sense, become a wholly contingent condition" (Franklin 2003: 100).
Contemporary medical technologies do not seek merely to cure diseases once they have manifested
themselves, but to control the vital processes of the body and mind. They are, I suggest, technologies of
optimization.
Biopolitics is organized around the idea of public health

SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2007, pp. 24
Biopolitics, here, was not exhausted by sterilization, euthanasia, and the death camps. Many "citizenship
projects" were organized in the name of health. In the education of German citizens in the Third Reich, in
eugenic education campaigns in the United States, Britain, and many European countries, making social
citizens involved instructing those citizens in the care of their bodies—from school meals to toothbrush use,
inculcation of the habits of cleanliness and domesticity, especially in women and mothers, state regulation of
the purity of food, interventions into the workplace in the name of health and safety, instructing those
contemplating marriage and procreation on the choice of marriage partners, family allowances, and much
else. The citizen here was not merely a passive recipient of social rights, but was also obliged to tend to his
or her own body and, for a woman, those of her spouse and offspring While the state would engage in
measures for preserving and managing the collective health of the population, whether this be in seeking to
shape reproduction or trying to eliminate toxins, individuals themselves must exercise biological prudence,
for their own sake, that of their families, that of their own lineage, and that of their nation as a whole.
49
Biomedicine shapes our view of ourselves and our bodies
SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2007, pp. 25-6
Biomedicine, throughout the twentieth century and into our own, has thus not simply changed our relation to
health and illness but hits modified the things we think we might hope for and the objectives we aspire to.
That is to say, it has helped make us the kinds of people we have become. Social theorists have recently
focused on historical transformations in the self, often analyzing these in terms of increasing
individualization and reflexivity. My focus is related by different. I make no claims about changes in human
personality or psychology – this would require a very different type of investigation. My analysis concerns
not what human beings are, but what they think they are: the kinds of human beings they take themselves to
be. And, I suggest, we are increasingly coming to relate to ourselves as "somatic" individuals, that is to say,
as beings whose individuality is, in part at least, grounded within our fleshly, corporeal exister[ce, and who
experience, articulate, judge, and act upon ourselves in part in the language of biomedicine. From official
discourses of health promotion through narratives of the experience of disease and suffering; in the mass
media, to popular discourses on dieting and exercise, we see n increasing stress on personal reconstruction
through acting on the body in the name of a fitness that is simultaneously corporeal and psychological.
Exercise, diet, vitamins, tattoos, body piercing, drugs, cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment, organ
transplantation: the corporeal existence and vitality of the self has become the privileged site of experiments
with the self.
Biological ethnopolitics is based on normalizing how we relate to others
SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 2007, pp. 27
I think this economy of hope is one dimension of a wider shift in what I have termed "ethopolitics" (Rose
1999). By ethopolitics I refer to attempts to shape the conduct of human beings by acting upon their
sentiments, beliefs, and values—in short, by acting on ethics. In the politics of our present, notably in the revival of
communitarian themes,' the ethos of human existence—the sentiments, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of persons, groups, or institutions—has come
to provide the 'medium" within which the self-government of the autonomous individual can be connected up with the imperatives of good
government. If "discipline" individualizes and normalizes, and "biopolitics" collectivizes and socializes,
"ethopolitics" concerns itself with the self-techniques by which human beings should judge and act upon
themselves to make themselves better than they are. While ethopolitical concerns range from those of life-
style to community, they coalesce around a kind of vitaliser, disputes over the value accorded to life itself:
"quality of life," "the right to life" or "the right to choose," euthanasia, gene therapy, human cloning, and the
like. This biological ethopolitics—the politics of how we should conduct ourselves appropriately in relation
to ourselves, and in our responsibilities for the future—forms the milieu within which novel forms of
authority are taking shape.
50
51
Biopolitics is based on extending the power of medicine
These developments in the biomedical government of somatic selves are not primarily mobilized by
politicians, or by the kinds of professionals that were invented over the twentieth century to make liberal
freedom possible—social workers, therapists, personnel managers, and all those others who claimed to
understand how we should live better lives. Biopolitics today depends upon meticulous work in the
laboratory in the creation of new phenomena, the massive computing power of the apparatus that seeks to
link medical histories and family genealogies with genomic sequences, the marketing powers of the
pharmaceutical companies, the regulatory strategies of research ethics, drug licensing bodies committees and
bioethics commissions, and, of course, the search for the profits and shareholder value that such truths
promise. It is here, in the practices of contemporary biopower, that novel forms of authority are to be found?
Health promotion is insidious social control

Beverly Ovrebo, Health Education Professor San Francisco State University, 2000, Promoting Health
Behavior, ed. Daniel Callahan, p. 33-4
Coercive health promotion is social control at its most insidious, reflecting the new healthism, the need to
blame someone, and the pervasive view that people who behave unhealthfully are legitimate targets of
disapproval and punishment. The harm reduction movement offers a socially just alternative, working with
at-risk populations and directly confronting the need to scapegoat, taking the stance that "inflicting harm on
drug users is not a legitimate way to express our disapproval of their behavior." In this new era of disease, a
health care system is required that addresses and is responsive to social inequity; that has the tools and
means to prevent and control infectious disease; and that is guided by the larger vision, values, and structure
of public health. A good start is for managed care to adopt L. Naake's recommendation to the President's
Health Care Task Force, that a specific percentage of total health expenditures be set aside for public
health." Managed care must be guided by the precepts of public health, not market individualism, to
endeavor to "do no harm" and leave no harm in its wake. Market individualism has made public health
unthinkable." The prospect of short-term profits is not worth the price. As AIDS instructs, it comes at the
price of freedoms and the price of health.
52
Public health campaigns are a way for the state to exercise biopower
Deborah Lupton, Social Sciences Lecturer- University Western Sydney, 1995, The Imperative of Health:
public health and the regulated body, p. 6
Foucault identified two dimensions of what he termed “biopower,” or the ways in which power relations
work in and through the human body. The first discursively constitutes the individual body, and is exercised
in interpersonal relations in the medical encounter, while the second exercises disciplinary power over the
body politic, intent on the documenting and regulating of the health status of populations. The focus on this
book, centering as it does on the institution of public health, is on the latter dimension of biopower. Turner
has built upon Foucault’s concept of biopower to construct a conceptual framework which categorizes the
ways in which the state must deal with bodies in space; the restraint of the populations in time; the
regulation of bodies in space; the restraint of the interior body through disciplines; and the representation of
the exterior body in social space. Turner goes on to outline the instiutional subsystems which are responsible
for these categories: for reproduction, patriarchy; for regulation, panopticism; for restraint, asceticism; and
for representation, commodification. The discourses and practices of public health and health promotion
attempt to serve all these functions. For example, arguments of health are used to encourage people to have
more or less children, to seek health care deemed appropriate by the state when undergoing pregnancy and
labor, to desist from or engage in abortion, sterilization or contraception. As I will outline in Chapter, the
concern with the reproduction of the labor force at the turn of the twentieth century was a major impetus for
the public health movement’s focus upon infant mortality and fertility rates. Systems of regulation are
constantly used to survey populations’ health status (the questionnaire is the most obvious example). The
latter two ways outlined by Turner in which the state deals with bodies are also highly relevant to the
activities of health promotion, in its concern with self-surveillance, discipline and control; for example the
discourses valorizing dietary and body weight control in the name of good health first, and good looks,
second.
53
Links: Kritik of Public Health: Public Health Programs Increase
Surveillance
The body is a locale for government surveillance and control
Deborah Lupton, Social Sciences Lecturer- University Western Sydney, 2003, Medicine as Culture, p. 24
For contemporary poststructualist and postmodernist theory, therefore, the body is viewed as “an admixture
of discourse and matter, one whose inseparability is a critical, though complex, attribute.” It is conceived of
as a collection of practices, or “body techniques” which represent and regulate bodies in time and space.
Bodies are regarded as not simply shaped by social relationships, but as entering into the construction of
these relationships, both facilitated and limited by historical, cultural and political factors. The ways in
which the state undertakes surveillance and control of bodies, and how in turn individuals come to self-
regulate and discipline their bodily deportment, are of central interest for the poststructuralist project in
medical sociology. Turner (1992:12) has developed the notion of the somatic society, in which the body is a
metaphor for social organization and social anxieties, the principal field of cultural and political activities.
The regulation, surveillance and monitoring of bodies, of the spaces between bodies, are central to the
somatic society.
54
Links: Kritik of Public Health: Public Health Programs Increase
Surveillance
Public health movement legitimated the regulatory and surveillance powers of the
government to fulfill its duty to promote health
Alan Petersen & Deborah Lupton, Sociology University of Plymouth & Social Sciences University of
Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. 66-7
A heightened concern about the health of populations emerged in the modern European states in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in concert with the emergence of industrialism and the breakdown of
the feudal system. Health became viewed as an element of national policy and a site for the intervention of
government in the interests of maintaining a robust population to support the state’s endeavors. As a result,
a new set of connections was generated between subject and discourse and subject and polity. The public
health movement developed as a response to these new concerns privileging order and human rationality:
“The Enlightenment wrote health onto its banner as a physical-moral category. The concept was politically
so effective and so double-edged because of the interest of the authorities and the national economy in a
self-administered objectification of the self appeared in it as a subjective need of the individual or an act of
philanthropy. (Duden, 1991, p. 19) It was during this period that governmental means of regulating the
population began to shift from overtly coercive methods to those of self-regulation, assisted through the
knowledges and technologies engendered in medicine, education and science. In the nineteenth century the
theories of Malthus and Darwin contributed to both a concern about recording statistically the movement
and reproduction of populations and a focus on constructing and monitoring norms of human behavior. The
human body, through these discourses, knowledges and practices, was constructed as a target of surveillance
and regulation, subject to regular measurement and comparison against statistical norms: “Within this set of
problems, the ‘body’ – the body of individuals and the body of populations – appears as the bearer of new
variables, not merely between the scarce and the numerous, the submissive and the restive, rich and poor,
healthy and sick, strong and weak, but also between the more or less utilizable, more or less amenable to
profitable investment, those with greater or lesser prospects of survival, death, and illness, and with more or
less capacity for being usefully trained” (Foucault 1984a, p. 279). By this process of normalization,
categories of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ or ‘pathological’ bodies and social groups were constructed (see
Chapter 2). Good health came to be regarded as the natural right of all citizens, which it was the duty of the
state to promote and preserve.
55
Links: Public Health Programs Increase Surveillance
“Public” focus of public health deputizes citizens to conduct surveillance and regulation of
other people’s health, and characterizes the health of the community over that of the
individual
This concept of 'good health' recognises the experiential as well as the functional dimension of health:
'health' is the ability to realize personal goals, to exert control over one's life, to engage in self-development.
It is suggested that citizens are thus acting in their own best interests in conforming to the imperatives
issuing forth from the state in relation to 'healthy living': 'In effect the most recent space of surveillance has
been a sort of "political awareness" which might be rendered as subjectivity. It has been the thinking, acting
subject which has been both the object and effect of the new public health in its various manifestations'
(Armstrong 1993, p. 407). Engaging in health-preserving and body-controlling activities such as exercise
and dieting is viewed as protecting citizens from the degeneracies of contemporary society, providing a
means of dispelling uncertainties and demonstrating allegiance to accepted moral norms in the interests of
self-presentation. As in the discourse of war, the process of hardening and toughening individual bodies acts
as a metonym for the toughening of the nation's moral fibre (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987, p. 25). The
regulation and control of the body, it is argued in the new public health, require high levels of knowledge
and self-efficacy to achieve. To this end, some public health documents have begun to refer to the concepts
of 'health literacy' and 'health skills', which are seen to comprise 'personal health knowledge', 'positive
attitudes towards changing behaviour', 'resilience', 'self-esteem' and 'problem solving', 'self-help' and 'coping'
skills (see, for example, Nutbeam et al. 1993, p. 15). Ideal 'healthy' citizens have their children immunised
according to state directives, participate in screening procedures such as cervical cancer smear tests and
blood cholesterol tests (but only when they are deemed to be in the appropriate target group), control their
diet according to dietary guidelines and take regular exercise to protect themselves against such conditions
as coronary heart disease and osteoporosis. Not only do they take steps to protect their own health, but they
are also concerned about the health of others. This dimension of the obligations of the 'healthy' citizen is
highly apparent in discourses about cigarette smoking, which currently emphasise the effects that cigarette
smoke has on other people, especially children. Recent health campaigns have urged citizens to carry out
surveillance in relation to cigarette smoking not only upon themselves, but upon others, in the interests of
protecting the masses from 'other people's smoke', for example by insisting that others do not smoke inside
one's house (Lupton 1995, p. 118). Responsibility for others' health status is also a central argument for
preventive strategies relating to contagious diseases such as HIV infection and hepatitis. As one pamphlet on
AIDS published by the New South Wales Department of Health in 1989 noted: 'It is . . . important that
anyone who has been exposed to HIV should adopt lifestyle and behavioural practices which help to
strengthen the immune system and do not spread the virus to other people'. It is also assumed that it is the
responsibility of 'healthy' citizens to be aware of their HIV status. This awareness is only the first step of a
self-maintenanceprogram. If individuals negative for HIV antibodies, it is asserted that they should take
steps td reduce their chance of contracting HIV by engaging in safer sex practices and avoiding the sharing
of needles to inject drugs; if they are positive, they are exhorted to engage in activities to reduce the effects
56
of positivity on their bodies and to avoid passing on the virus to others. Goals and targets for public health
expressed in such terminology as 'reducing mortality from lung cancer by 12 per cent by the year 2010' (see,
for example, Nutbeam et al. 1993) are couched in terms that express the community's health status over that
of the individual's health status. As observed in Chapter 2, such a target may be reached by infinitesimal
improvements in the individual (for example, an extra month of life) but result in statistics that appear
beneficial at the population level. As this suggests, in the new public health discourses devoting attention to
one's health status is not only represented simply as an individual action but is also commonly sited within
the context of a community, city or nation. As one writer has put it: 'Promoting the health of a community
means developing and supporting the will and capacity of people to understand and work towards their own
specific health needs . . . The central aim is to involve the entire community in an effort to promote the
health of all groups within a geographical area.'
57
Links: Public Health Programs Entrench Disciplinary Power
Public health messages become a form of disciplinary power – covert control through
self-policing
public health and the regulated body, p. 10-1
It is clear that public health and health promotion may be conceptualized as government apparatuses. The institution of
public health has served as a network of expert advice, embodied in professionals such as doctors and health promoters,
who have dispensed wisdom directed at improving individuals’ health through self-regulation. As Turner points out,
medicine and public health have strongly coercive elements in that they set out to shape and normalize human
behaviors in certain ways. Indeed in contemporary western societies they have replaced religion as the central
institutions governing the conduct of human bodies. However these institutions, like the educational system and
religion, are often not recognized as coercive because they appeal to widely accepted norms and practices. While the
institutions of public health and health promotion often display very overt signs of the state’s attempts to shape the
behavior of its citizens, where this attempt at control becomes invisible is in the justification used. In the interests of
health, one is largely self-policed and no force is necessary. Individuals are rarely incarcerated or fined for their failure
to conform; however they are punished through the mechanisms of self-surveillance, evoking feeling of guilt, anxiety
and repulsion towards the self, as well as the admonitions of their nearest and dearest for “letting themselves go” or
inviting illness. Therefore it is not the ways in which such discourses and practices seek overtly to constrain
individuals’ freedom of action that are the most interesting and important to examine, but the ways in which they invite
individuals voluntarily to conform to their objectivities, to discipline themselves, to turn the gaze upon themselves in
the interests of their health. The imperatives explicit in health promotional activities initiated and carried out by state
bodies are supported by a proliferation of agencies and institutions, including commodity culture, the commercial mass
media, the family, the educational system, advocacy groups and community organizations. Those individuals who are
part of the framework of public health making judgments about relative states of health and normality include – in
addition to medical practitioners—teachers, social workers, public and private bureaucrats, parents, community action
groups, economic advisers and epidemiologists. Some of these agencies and individuals deliberately and consciously
set out to uphold state activities; others are vigorously opposed. While they have different and often competing
objectives and tactics, all these agencies and institutions often articulate common discourses and encourage certain
practices concerning the primacy of health and the importance of rational action. All are directed at constructing and
normalizing a certain kind of subject; a subject who is autonomous, directed at self-improvement, self-regulated,
desirous of self-knowledge, a subject who is seeking happiness and healthiness. All depend upon a limited collection
of valorized knowledges and experts to support their claims. The major concerns of institutions, groups and individuals
in contemporary western societies revolve around the regulation of bodies in space, the monitoring of the surfaces of
bodies and the relationships between bodies. But governmentality is not just directed at bodily practices, but at the
very constitution of the self. In late modernity, our personalities, our subjectivities, our relationships with others, while
considered ‘private’ by most people, are intensely governed, such that even aspects of the self deemed intimate and
individual such as thoughts and feelings are socially organized. In the first volume of History of Sexuality (1979),
Foucault uses the example of sexuality, which he argues has been subject to a web of surveillance emerging from the
state and elsewhere. Rather than issues of sexual behavior being repressed, constituted as problems, subject to
incessant public discussion and discourses of regulation. Sexuality, and the sexual body, have therefore been produced
by the discourses of medicine, psychiatric and public health, among others.
58
Disciplinary power nature of public health masks its coercive and regulatory aspect by
making it appear voluntary
Deborah Lupton, Social Sciences Lecturer- University Western Sydney, 2003, Medicine as Culture, p. 35-6
The dialectic of public health is that of the freedom of individuals to behave as they wish pitted against the
rights of society to control individuals’ bodies in the name of health. For public health, the utilitarian
imperative rules. Disciplinary power is maintained through the mass screening procedure, the health risk
appraisal, the fitness test, the health education campaign invoking guilt and anxiety if the advocated
behavior is not taken up. The rhetoric of public health discourse is disciplinary; health is deemed a universal
right, a fundamental good, and therefore measures taken to protect one’s health must necessarily be the
concern and goal of each individual. Initiatives to encourage individuals to change their behavior, to know
their risks and therefore seen as benevolent. Thus, in being aware of the public gaze, the individual
unconsciously him- or herself exerts disciplinary power, both over others and over the self through self-
regulation. In this process, power relations are rendered invisible, and are dispersed, being voluntarily
perpetuated by subjects upon themselves as well as upon others: “Subjects thus produced are not simply the
imposed results of alien, coercive forces; the body is internally lived, experienced, and acted upon b the
subject and the social collectivity.”
Public health discourse convinces people that actions to promote the public good also
promote individual health – external imperatives internalized as private interests
The contemporary virtuous 'healthy' citizen, therefore, aligns personal satisfaction with the public good.
Thus, the avoidance of drunk-driving and of smoking and the adoption of the practice of seatbelt wearing are
about both the health of the citizen and the citizen's needs to protect others--either their health or the public
purse. The self is never lost in this discourse, however; its needs are never abandoned for those of the polity.
The ethic of restraint that is phrased in this discourse is not based on the asceticism of self-denial or
obedience to an authoritative imperative, but rather is supported through a narcissistic approach of 'caring
for and about oneself', maximising the body's capacity for both productive labour and self-fulfilment and
development (Singer 1993). Through the new public health discourses (among others), external imperatives
are internalised as private interests. Discourses on dental hygiene and care, for example, have continually
emphasised the responsibility of the individual (or in the case of children, of their mothers) to conform to
expert advice consonant with the imperatives of govetomentality (Nettleton 1991). These norms about dental
care have become naturalised in the family: children are taught how to brush their teeth, and at which
prescribed times, from infancy. As adults, individuals continue to brush their teeth as an everyday habit,
often with little reflection on the reasons why they do so. The practice has become a habit, a practice of the
self perpetuated not by the dictates of external imperatives but by the individual's habits of everyday life.
While the overt rhetoric of the new public health is directed towards appeals to the notion of the 'civil
59
citizen' in its emphasis on self-regulation and self-control, there remains a notion that the state should
sometimes step in to guide or even control its citizens that has resonances with early public health
philosophies. The state still takes a largely paternalistic approach to the task of monitoring and regulating its
citizens' health, albeit cloaked in the discourse of individual and community 'voluntary participation'. Public
health represents the state as the agency responsible for guarding and ensuring the health of the populace. As
Sears notes, 'modern Public Health has, from the outset, been identified with the state. Indeed, the very
conception of "Public Health" centres around the state, whether explicitly or implicitly' (1992, p. 64). Most
of the new public health activities are sponsored by the state on behalf of its citizens, generally administered
through bureaucratic health departments and often enshrined in legislation that includes penalties for non-
compliance.
60
Public health is about the exercise of disiplinary power
Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. 26
As should now be apparent, the new public health can be seen to involve much more than simply concern
about 'health', as it is narrowly understood, or about achieving some 'essential' state of individual or
collective well-being and happiness. Above all, it is about the exercise of a particular form of power: one
that presupposes and employs the regulated freedom of individuals to act in one way or another. As such, it
has implications for subjectivity that go way beyond what might generally be implied by the 'improvement
of health'. In the following chapters we focus more specifically on a number of integral discourses, strategies
and practices in the new public health: epidemiology, 'risk', the notions of the 'healthy' citizen and 'the
environment', the 'healthy' city, and community participation.
Public health promotion relies on disciplinary power to coerce people into adopting the so-
called “healthy” behaviors, and to vilify and blame them if they do not
The nineteenth century emergence of biomedicine as a highly rationalized, “scientific” body of knowledge
supported the view of the body as subject to the will of humans. Given the shared project of biomedicine
and public health to improve health status, to rid the body (both individual and social) of disease, and to
promote the perception of disease and illness as irrational, chaotic, a failure of human control, it is not
surprising that the logic and discourse of public health continues to reproduce the ideal of the highly
rationalized body dominated by the conscious will. Just as the germ theory of disease represents the body as
an armed fortress, protecting itself against invasion by microscopic enemies (viruses and bacteria), or even
from self-destruction via auto-immune disease, health promotional discourse often represents the enemy as
the failure of self-control, the invasion of weakness, lack of self-discipline against which the individual
should be ever-vigilant. The moralism that is extended to people who become ill because they have allowed
themselves to be “invaded” is also extended to those who allow the entry of disease by failing to regulate
their “lifestyle” with sufficient discipline. Similarly, the notion of the individual body as besieged by self-
destruction is expanded in public health discourse to the concept of the social body, the health of which must
be protected by its individual members acting responsibly to keep out disease: “It is as if disturbing social
events can be controlled y individuals imposing upon themselves regimes of discipline and healthful living.”
61
Links: Prenatal Care
Pre-natal care allows state to extend its control and regulation
Khiara Bridges, (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 to
ultimately 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
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
within the jurisdiction of the biopolitical state. While the state may desire to exercise its "power over life" by
submitting the expectant mother and her fetus to "an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls,"
the pregnant woman is not compelled to surrender herself to such a state project. Again, this is because, at
present, the fact of pregnancy alone does not enable the state to reach the woman and her pregnant body
with its biopolitical power. The biopolitical state could achieve the regulation of every pregnant woman by
creating a law that mandates that women receive prenatal care either from state actors or from persons that
must otherwise answer to the state. However, at present, such a law does not exist. Indeed, there is no law in
the United States that makes criminal or otherwise penalizes a woman's failure to submit herself to any kind
of prenatal care during her pregnancy. That is, should a woman undergo the forty weeks of pregnancy
without ever having sought and/or received medical care from a physician, nurse practitioner, midwife, or
other professional whose services are intended to ensure the birth of a healthy baby and the continued health
of the new mother, I am not aware of any law that punishes such a woman's behavior, or lack thereof. In
Colorado, a woman who exposes her fetus to controlled substances may be found to have neglected her child
and, consequently, lose custody of the infant. And, of course, once a baby is born, there are a wealth of laws
that punish a woman for directly harming or failing to protect her child. But, prior to a baby's birth, there is
no law that penalizes a woman for "failing to protect" her not-yet-born child by neglecting or otherwise
refusing to have a medically-managed pregnancy.
62
State regulation of pregnant women simultaneous with prenatal care
To distill the central theme of the above exposition: for the uninsured poor, state regulation is simultaneous
with prenatal care. Foucault's theorization of the carceral is helpful in understanding the significance of this
fact. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that the classical-era scaffold, which could demonstrate the
immense power of the sovereign only by destroying the body of the prisoner, was replaced by the instrument
of the modern-era prison--the consummate vehicle for acting on the heart, thoughts, will, and inclinations of
the prisoner. It produced docile bodies through a technique that combines constant surveillance with the
precise management of the prisoner's body in space--both physical and temporal. The Panoptican, the prison
par excellence, dramatized and epitomized the operation of power in the modern age: the prisoner, whose
body is always capable of being seen, bears this knowledge and, in turn, becomes the agent of his own
discipline and oppression.
Prenatal care services are a mechanism for bringing pregnant women under state control
In sum, the fact of pregnancy alone does not bring a woman within the jurisdiction of the state. Yet, the fact
of pregnancy combined with the woman's attempted receipt of state aid not only brings a woman within the
state's jurisdiction, but also becomes an opportunity for the state to create a legal subject whose private life
is exposed to state supervision and surveillance. In this way, Medicaid and PCAP programs function to
create legal subjects of pregnant women--bringing them within the jurisdiction of the biopolitical state,
making them and previously invisible (some would say "private") elements of their lives visible, exposing
them to state oversight, and ultimately baring them to the potentiality of state-sanctioned violence.
63
State-based prenatal care services brings women into expansive state regulatory apparatus
I have hoped to demonstrate that attempting prenatal care with the assistance of state aid initiates women
into an expansive state regulatory apparatus that far exceeds the purview of that care. This is significant
because it demonstrates how class operates to differentially produce populations--generating the poor (not
infrequently composed of people of color) as a group whose private lives are not respected as spheres into
which the state ought not to tread. Additionally, the simultaneity of prenatal care and state management,
intervention, and oversight is also significant because Medicaid coverage arguably produces the bodies of
poor women--as a class--as problematic entities. That is, Medicaid coverage produces poor, pregnant women
as possessors of unruly bodies.
Prenatal care services for the poor brings pregnant women under state surveillance
The prenatal healthcare provided by Medicaid, by statutory mandate, is premised on constant surveillance of the
pregnant body--a body whose health appears to be capable of failing at any given moment. This is in line with what
medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd termed the "technocratic model of childbirth"--within which "the female
body is viewed as an abnormal, unpredictable, and inherently defective machine." I would like to expand Davis-Floyd's
argument to encompass the nine months that precede labor and childbirth; hence, I argue that the regime of prenatal
care described above is a function of a "technocratic model of pregnancy"; accordingly, Davis-Floyd's "technocratic
model of childbirth" would represent the final stage of a larger ideology of the pregnant body. It is a body whose ability
to process sugar may suddenly disappoint, whose blood pressure may dangerously climb, and whose weight gain (or
lack thereof) may indicate some unspecified complication. It is a body that is deficient in nutrients, for both itself and
the body of the fetus that it carries within; hence, prenatal vitamins are prescribed to it, and it is enrolled in WIC to
enable its acquisition of "iron-fortified adult cereal, vitamin C-rich fruit or vegetable juice, eggs, milk, cheese, peanut
butter, dried beans/peas, tuna fish and carrots." It is one that is always already susceptible to pathogens in the form of
bacteria and viruses; hence, it must be screened for their presence. Indeed, the pregnant body produced by Medicaid is
so greatly susceptible to sexually-transmitted pathogens (i.e., gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and HIV) that it must be
doubly screened for their presence during pregnancy, and once again six weeks after the woman gives birth. The body
produced by Medicaid is one whose interior should be made visible to the naked eye via technological interventions;
subsequent thereto, women are rewarded with fuzzy black-and-white images of their insides. Lastly, the look of the
place should not be disregarded: that is, the Medicaid-produced pregnant body is one that is appropriately treated in
antiseptic examination rooms by physicians, nurse practitioners, and midwives who wear white lab coats. This body
should be led down white-walled, white-tiled corridors by gloved and uniform-wearing medical assistants. The body
should be exposed, unavoidably, to the smell of disinfectants, cleaning solutions, sanitizers, and sterilizers.
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Biomedical discourse on pregnant women profoundly disempowering
The understanding of the pregnant body within biomedical discourse has been convincingly described as
disempowering to the woman upon whom it is enacted. Historian Barbara Duden's work in this area is
instructive. She argues that women's experiences of pregnancy in the modern era are held hostage by the
"fetus"--a biological fact that is taken to be best administered within the biomedical paradigm. A woman's
fetus, however, is only accessible to her via technological processes that are held in monopoly by medical
professionals. Thus, the fetus "disembodies" a woman's perceptions and "forces her into a nine-month
clientage in which her 'scientifically' defined needs for help and counsel are addressed by professionals."
Duden compares this experience of pregnancy with those of women who have been protected from the
"fetus" by historical happenstance and/or their subordinated socioeconomic positioning within global
capitalism. She describes the pregnancy of the mother of a poor, recent immigrant living in Harlem as much
more "sensual, warm, touchable, familiar." Pregnancy--before the advent of photogenically-produced fetuses
and tests that can detect the presence of Human Chorionic Gonadotropic [HCG] hormone--was a more
embodied, personal event. Knowledge of it resided with the woman who sensed it; further, a woman's
pregnancy was only made known to others through her announcement of it. Duden argues that "the fetus"
has altered this. Pregnancy was once an intensely intimate, bodily event about which the pregnant woman
knows best--a publicly recognized, haptic state of woman known essentially through her testimony. It is now
a condition that professionals first confirm, then manage, for a woman.
Prenatal care brings women under state surveillance - disempowering

A poor woman may experience the disempowering and dependency-producing effects of a medically-
managed pregnancy as yet another demonstration of her powerlessness within society. Indeed, prenatal care
so delivered may be understood as a disciplinary mechanism that educates poor women about their status
within society and the behavior expected of those that so occupy that station. Specifically, being poor is
about being dependent on others, about submitting oneself to surveillance, about being problematized. Being
poor is about putting oneself within the charge of someone who can meet the needs that one lacks the ability
to satisfy for oneself.
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State-based prenatal care brings pregnant women under state biomedical control
Prenatal care within the Medicaid regime can be understood to proceed from the assumption that the errors
and risks within the poor, pregnant body (which are invariably "there" and must be detected via constant
screens and tests) can only be remedied by medical science. The poor body, then, is one that is exposed to
bacteria and viruses; hence, antibiotics, antiviral medications, and vaccinations are administered. The poor
body is one that is malnourished; hence, WIC, and the concomitant prescription of prenatal vitamins and
recommended consumption of meat and dairy, are provided. The poor body is one whose reproduction is
dangerously unrestrained and, yes, unruly; hence, the parade of contraceptives placed in front of the post-
partum body n84--ranging from the lower-intervention condoms to the intensely high-intervention Depo-
Provera injection. The consequence, I believe, is a medicalization of poverty. Poverty is treated as a
condition that produces ailments and disorders all rectifiable, or at least managed, through the application of
medical science. In this way, the poor are treated as biological dangers--to themselves, to their fetuses, and
to the society within which they exist.
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Links: Medicaid
Medicaid medicalizes management of pregnant women through prenatal care services
SOCIAL POLICY, Winter 2008, 100-101.
Indeed, Medicaid's profoundly medicalized management of pregnancy, and the simultaneous production of
poor, pregnant women as biological dangers, might be understood as an admission by the state of the unjust
nature of capitalism and the class structure that is its sine qua non. Essentially, the state assumes that the
poor, pregnant body that presents itself to the obstetrics clinic is one that has not had the benefit of regular
(or, even irregular) medical check-ups--an assumption that is especially true for the "undocumented"
pregnant bodies that present themselves at Alpha. The battery of tests to which patients must submit
themselves might be understood as a corrective to the years of medical inattention that poverty and the
absence of health insurance compel. The function of every organ and every system is assessed because class
inequality dictates that their health would not have been established previously via periodic evaluations--a
comfort that the insured enjoy. Indeed, it is not entirely unreasonable to assume that an aggressive medical
gaze is appropriate for the uninsured. These are women who do not have the benefit of annual Pap smears to
detect abnormal cervical cell growth. These are women who do not have the luxury of having a urinary tract
infection diagnosed before it becomes asymptomatic and manifests itself as kidney malfunction. These are
the women who do not have the advantage of being told if that lump in the breast really is nothing to worry
about.
Medicaid’s prenatal care services acknowledge the unjust nature of capitalist exploitation
All of this is to say that Medicaid's tenacious management of pregnancy performs a confession: it confesses
that capitalism and the poverty that is its effect create a state of affairs inside of which common and curable
ailments within the poor body go undetected. The insistent medical manipulation of the pregnant body
mandated by Medicaid can be understood as an attempt to rectify that situation; however, within that attempt
is an implicit acknowledgement of the unjust nature of the class structure of this capitalist society.
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68
Links: “New” Public Health
“New” public health still grounded in the same biopower, surveillance, normalizing gaze
focus of the “old” public health
The histories written by social constructionists and Foucault and his followers have demonstrated that a
close analysis of the emergence and development of the public health movement reveals not a steady
progression from primitive, “unenlightened” thought to “modern” ideas and practices, but a series of eras
characterized by regressions and political struggles. Their histories have shown that while it is standard to
describe the “old” public health and the “new” public health as related but very different traditions, much of
the discourses and practices of the “old” public health movement can be currently seen in the “new” public
health. They have also revealed that for centuries the institutions of medicine and public health have been
central in constituting the “normalizing gaze” as part of the mass observation and social regulation. This
chapter primarily draws upon the insights of such histories to discuss the key problems identified and
constructed by public health and the strategies of surveillance and regulation developed to govern these
problems. The history and philosophy of the public health and social hygiene movements as they emerged
in the eighteenth century in western societies are reviewed, with a particular focus on Britain and continental
Europe as the “birthplaces” of the public health/sanitary movement. The discussion begins with medieval
attempts to respond to epidemics, moving onto the Enlightenment and the emergence of the social hygiene
movement, then to the implications of the discovery of the microbe for public health practice. The chapter
focuses in particular on the ways in which the bodies of individuals have been constructed and regulated via
the discourses and practices of public health in its various forms, centering on the constitution of such
problems as dirt, miasma, odor, sexuality, reproduction, childhood and the family as matters requiring the
attention and expertise of public health reformers.
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Broad discourse of the new public health justifies ever expanding government intrusions into
people’s lives
Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. ix-x
The new public health takes as its foci the categories of 'population'
and 'the environment', conceived of in their widest sense to include
Psychological, social and physical elements. With the development
of this perspective, few areas of personal and social life remain
immune to scrutiny and regulation of some kind. Given the scope
of the new public health, and its impact on virtually all aspects of
everyday life, there has been surprisingly little critical analysis of
its underlying philosophies and its practices. The new public health
has been warmly embraced by people of diverse backgrounds and
political persuasions. It has been represented as the antidote to all
kinds of problems linked to modern life, particularly problems of
the urban milieu. The uncritical acceptance of the basic tenets of
the new public health is disturbing in light of the increased
potential for experts to intervene in private lives and for
established rights to be undermined. We suggest that this reticence
is in itself indicative of the power of the discourse of the new public
health to shape public opinion. In this book, we highlight what we
believe are some important dimensions of the new public health
and critically appraise their implications for concepts of self,
embodiment and citizenship.
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New public health’s attempt to avoid victim blaming and shift from the biomedical model
redefines many areas of personal life as health-realted
It is evident, however, that a comprehensive conception of public health has emerged that is directed not to
specific services, forms of property, or types of problem, but rather to a level of analysis: the population
(Frenk 1993, p. 472). Clearly, the category of 'population' has become the object and target for increasingly
detailed knowledges and strategies. Thus, according to Ashton and Seymour, “the new public health is an
approach which brings together environmental change and personal preventative measures with appropriate
therapeutic interventions, especially for the elderly and disabled. However it goes beyond an understanding
of human biology and recognises the importance of those social aspects of health problems which are caused
by life-styles. In this way it seeks to avoid the trap of blaming the victim. Many contemporary health
problems are therefore seen as being social rather than solely individual problems; unnderlying them are
concrete issues of local and national public policy, and what are needed to address these problems are
'Healthy Public policies—policies in many fields which support the promotion of health. In the New Public
Health the environment is social and psychological as well as physical. (1988, p. the 21) This definition
emphasises a number of themes to be found in conceptions of the so-called new public health: a shifting
away from the biomedical emphasis on the individual towards a focus on 'social' factors, particularly
'lifestyle', in the aetiology of problems; a recognition of the multidimensional nature of problems and of
required solutions; and particularly the adoption of a broad concept of the determining 'environment' that
includes psychological, physical and social elements. It should be noted, however, that some definitions of
the new public health are restricted to environmental concerns and exclude publicly provided personal health
services such as maternal and child care, and even preventive services such as immunisation or birth control
(see, for example, Nutbeam 1986, p. 122). Since the late 1980s, and especially after the 1992 United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, attention has
increasingly focused on the health impacts of human intrusions into the 'natural' environment. There has
been a proliferation of expert knowledges and activities (that is, publications, conferences, and governmental
inquiries and commissions) focusing on the new environmental threats, or 'risks', posed in particular by
industrial activities and rapid population growth, especially in urban areas; for example, the health effects of
energy use and land degradation (WHO 1992a; National Commission on the Environment 1993; Ewan et al.
1991; National Health and Medical Research Council 1992). More will be said on this later in this chapter,
and in other chapters. The point to be stressed at this juncture is that the dual emphases on 'population' and
on a broad concept of 'environment' that goes beyond national boundaries have redefined many areas of
personal life as 'health related'
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Links: Hygeine Campaigns
Hygienic public health messages key aspect of biopower
Concepts of body imagery are central to an understanding of the ways in which individuals experience the
lived body and its relationship to the environment. Policing the boundaries of the body by maintaining strict
control over what enters and what leaves the body’s orifices is an integral aspect of biopolitics. These
Actions often center around symbolic conceptions of hygiene, cleanliness and dirt, and are inextricably
intertwined with notions concerning societal order and control. As Douglas notes, the individual’s ideas
about what constitutes “dirt” and the body’s relationship to dirt are symbolic of the need to maintain control
of the body politic. “…dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute as dirt; it exists in the
eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do
our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends
against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment.”
Public health discourse justifies regulation of those seen as dangerous and unclean --
otherizes
Definitions of dirt and those things or people who are considered “unclean,” are highly suggestive of
symbolic anxieties, fears and repulsions. As Douglas notes, “if we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene
from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place.” At the deeper level
of meaning, then, public health has been directed at attempts to police body boundaries, to guard the
integrity of the public body against the disorder threatened by dirt. In public health discourses, dirt, whether
visible or in the invisible form of microbes, equals disease, and the hygienist ideology thus supports the most
overt attempt at social regulation. The dirty body is a horror, a source of loathing and disgust, a thing whose
boundaries are leaky and uncontrolled and threaten to contaminate others; its apotheosis is the corpse. The
rituals of hygiene, directed both at the private body and the body politic, have remained vital in maintaining
the distinction between spaces and bodies. On the inside of the boundary lies social order, “Us,” while the
outside is “a twilight place of outcasts, danger and pollution.”
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Links: Hygeine Campaigns
Public health campaigns promote body mccarthyism with an irrational fear of and obsession
with dirt and germs
Current television advertisements in Anglophone countries for household cleaners and disinfectants continue
to make such claims for “protecting” the health of the household, especially that of young babies, who are,
considered particularly susceptible to the ravages of evil “dirt” and “germs.” There is a particular obsession
with the cleanliness of lavatories, as demonstrated by the bewildering range of commercial cleaners which
are marketed as having the sole purpose of disinfecting lavatory bowls, seats and S-bends, with cleanliness
usually displayed by a bright blue chemical – being released every time the lavatory is flushed. Such fear
and anxiety about germs and dirt is ironic, for in contemporary western societies members of the public are
exposed to far less risk from deadly bacteria and viruses than in previous generations: “Yet the fear of germs
– codified during the Lysol and plastic-packaged 1950s – verges on mass psychosis. Germs are bad guys;
foreign, unnegotiable, dangerous” The contemporary obsession with clean bodily fluids has been termed
“Body McCarthyism” and viewed by critics as an hysterical new temperance movement that targets the
body’s secretions and which expresses anxiety over the invasion of the body by viral agents. It has been
argued that such anxiety concentrated upon eliminating “Germs” and “Dirt” reveals deeper concerns about
the integrity of the body in an age in which potential contaminants are invisible, and where epidemics such
as HIV/AIDS have served to heighten fears about the maintenance of body boundaries. For the Krokers and
colleagues, panic was the dominant adjective and theme of the late twentieth century, as in the terms panic
sex, panic art, panic ideology, panic noise, panic theories, panic eating, panic fashion, and panic bodies.
They see burnout, discharge and waste as the characteristic qualities of the post-modern condition and the
body as portrayed in popular culture as both a torture chamber and a pleasure-palace. They describe the
diseases receiving attention at the end of the twentieth century – anorexia, HIV/AIDS and herpes – as
“poststructuralist diseases, tracing the inscription of power on the text of the flesh and privileging the ruin of
the surface of the body.”
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Links: Miscellaneous Health Programs
Aids prevention paradigm grounded in coercive public health
Beverly Ovrebo, Health Education Professor San Francisco State University, 2000, Promoting Health
Behavior, ed. Daniel Callahan, p. 24
Also new are the diseases of our age. We have entered the era of emergent and reemergent infectious
diseases, for which AIDS is just the forerunner. The AIDS prevention paradigm, which emphasizes health
promotion in lieu of traditional public health protections, evolved in part in reaction to perceived threats
posed by coercive public health measures for the control of communicable disease.
Women’s value couched in terms of their reproductive contribution to society

Women in Western societies have been principally represented as citizens in terms of their contribution to
the bearing and raising of children and the care of husbands and other family members. The woman as
'healthy' citizen, therefore, is understood as a resource for the reproduction and maintenance of other
'healthy' citizens. Such participation in citizenship does not fall into the notions of civil or political
citizenship. Rather, it is an understanding of citizenship that revolves around contributing to the welfare of
society through private actions (childbearing and domestic labour).
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Links: Miscellaneous Health Programs
Humanitarian assistance grounded in liberalism only focuses on acute instances of suffering –
leaves social-context of ill health to the jurisdiction of the nation state to address
Miram Ticktin, Professor of Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, 2006, Medicine at the Border:
disease, globalization, and security, 1850 to the present, ed. Alison Bashford, p. 130-1
Is humanitarianism inherently flawed in its ethical goals? Uday Mehta helps to explain how these
limitations might derive from the exclusions built into the notion of universalism, as embodied by liberalism,
and in particular, liberal imperialism. He suggests that the base standard of universal human nature
described by Locke, what the calls “the anthropological minimum”—that humans are equal, free and
rational from birth – is in fact too minimal, and too devoid of context to be substantiated. In other words, it
ignores the specific cultural and psychological conditions woven in as preconditions for the actualization of
these capacities. It assumes certain characteristics are common to all human beings, with which they are
born—it does not leave room for their development. It takes human beings out of all sociological or
historical context, again in order to fix a universal set of characteristics about human nature. This
anthropological minimum therefore allows for strategies of exclusion based on implicit diversions and
exclusion in the social world. If one does not exhibit the expected characteristics of human nature – for
instance, if one behaves in a way that is differently rational, and hence unrecognizable in liberalism’s terms
– liberal universalism locates this outside of the anthropological minimum, and hence, outside the category
of human. For example, Mehta explains how, in the British Empire, Indians were treated as inferior, and
therefore governed without freedom because their purported “inscrutability” led to the belief that they were
like children, lacking in appropriate rationality. Without rationality, according to the British interpretation
of the anthropological minimum, one could not be counted as fully equal, or, for that matter, fully human.
In other words, because Locke neglected to qualify the context of his concept of universal human nature,
exclusions based on the different qualifications of “human nature” were justified. Humanitarianism protects
a similar universal, but minimal and acontextual vision of life, in this case, defined by the capacity to suffer.
As such, it also allows for the differential and unequal treatment of people who are not recognized within
this minimum, historically contingent standard. If undocumented immigrants – or refugees or victims of war, for that
matter – have their lives saved by humanitarian action, it is not clear what notion of life this entails. Does the life saved
come with cultural attributes, political attributes, these qualifications belong to the political realm. They are not part of
the humanitarian mission, which responds to suffering in its most rudimentary and often biological forms, such as
hunger and disease. As Redfield suggests, “humanitarian action can preserve existence while deferring the very dignity
or redemption is seeks.” Indeed, by responding only to emergencies, limiting action to a temporal frame of the present
and therefore deferring political solutions, humanitarianism can only defend a minimal existence. And, when different
forms of suffering are not recognized by the conceptual framework employed by humanitarian workers, they are not
responded to: that suffering is placed outside the minimal conditions requiring response, as is the case of Mehta’s
liberal universalism. Such people are thus similarly located outside the definition of human. In this form of
minimalism, too, there is room for exclusions and hierarchies. Thus, the universalism of humanitarianism only
works for a very basic notion of humanity; the rest is qualified and protected or stopped from crossing
borders by the political context in which each person is found—which in our contemporary world, remains
the nation-state.
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Links: Public Health Discourses
Public health discourse emphasizing equality, justice and empowerment obscures its
grounding in modernism and hierarchy of experts
Many people have thrown their support behind the new public health because they are genuinely concerned
about such issues as inequalities in health, lack of access to health care services, the constraints of
bureaucracy, professional dominance, the limits of biomedicine, and environmental degradation, and are
seeking an alternative vision of a 'healthier', 'more sustainable' society and ecosystem. Part of the broad
appeal of the new public health is undoubtedly due to its adoption of a language of 'empowerment' and a
rhetoric advocating social and environmental change. We have argued, however, that the moral and political
implications of the new public health apparatus tend to be obscured by a post-Enlightenment modernist
discourse that emphasises the role of science and rationality in social progress and the liberation of the
human condition. The arguments and evidence presented in this book indicate the need for a more critical
appraisal of the new public health, whose agenda has been largely set by professional experts and is closely
aligned with official objectives. New public health knowledges and related practices have implications that
may not be in accordance with what its supporters envisage>
Public health “empowerment” discourse fails to critically evaluate how public health
reproduces power relations
Like much of the contemporary writing on the new public health, the form of narrative adopted here would
seem to have more to do with confirming what has already become largely orthodoxy in thought and
practice rather than with developing a critical understanding of fundamental assumptions. For instance,
there has been no questioning of the fact that the Healthy Cities project was initiated by a group of
experts and bureaucrats who have remained 'wedded to a conventional (and modernist) view that science
can both liberate the human condition and provide legitimation for the political processes of so doing'
(Davies & Kelly 1993, p. 7). We discuss in Chapter 5 how these modernist assumptions inform
thinking about the city. In their failure to appraise critically the narratives of progress that underlie and
support many of the projects of the new public health, public health advocates can be accused of
leaving unexamined and intact the power relations that these narratives both reproduce and help to
sustain. Given the centrality of the concept of 'empowerment' in the discourse of the new public health,
health promoters have offered surprisingly little analysis of power relations as they pertain between, for
instance, experts and non-experts, populations of the wealthy 'developed' countries and populations of the
poor “developing” countries, men and women, and heterosexuals and gay men and lesbians (for a
critique of “empowerment,” see particularly Chapter 6).
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Links: Environmental Health Discourses
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH DISCOURSE POSITS THE ENVIRONMENT AS A DOCILE
SUBJECT OF TECHNOLOGICAL MANAGEMENT– THIS WAY OF KNOWING THE WORLD
IS AN EXERCISE OF INSTITUTIONAL POWER.
LUKE Professor of Political Science – Virginia Polytechnic 1996,

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim514a.htm
This investigation's approach to some specific environmental discourses circulating through modern
research universities may offend some in the academy because it asks how involved, and in what ways have
academicians become implicated, in causing the current ecological crisis, even though they might believe
themselves to be ameliorating it. The cultural politics of environmental discourse, however, can be studied
most effectively by following the actors back to their sites of professional-technical training at schools of
environmental studies or colleges of natural resources. This is where the heterogeneous engineering cultures
of mainstream environmentalists--or conventional understandings manifest in the acts and artifacts of these
social groups--are both produced and reproduced. As this discussion illustrates, here is where one can
discover how and why environmental studies are shaped by its disciplines of heterogeneous engineering as
every environmental professional gets his or her education to protect and manage the Earth. A few may be
engaged, on the one hand, by dreams of preservationist restoration ecology, but most others are devoted, on
the other hand, to vast projects of conservationist eco-rationalization in which Nature's forests, lands, and
waters technocratically are to be reengineered as vast terrestrial infrastructures for resource/risk/recreationist
managers to administer. There are limitations to this analytical approach. On one level, it cannot delve
beneath the manifest intentions of such schools and colleges as they portray themselves in their own
literature. One must assume that they are what they profess to be, and actually do what their documents
promise. On a second level, it cannot catch any resistances or all deviations from the official institutional
line, which clearly are always afoot in any academic institution. Many courses carry bland descriptions of
totally conformist approaches, but their instructors and students may very well follow none of them when
their classes actually convene. And, on a third level, it does not consider how state or corporate power
centers, in the last analysis, often will ignore or belittle academic knowledge, because its guidance
contradicts what their organizational powers can, or will, in fact, do against all informed advice to act
otherwise. So well-trained professionals, even when armed with sound science, can be flouted to serve the
expedient goals of far more naked power agendas. Nonetheless, even this very tentative survey of the
professional-technical practices fostered at schools of environmental studies discloses a great deal about how
technoscience discourses frame regimes of discipline in the everyday workings of governmentality. Power
and knowledge are pervasive forces whose agents often move in quite different channels sometimes tied to
interlocked, but at other times not thoroughly networked, social structures. Universities provide an unusual
opportunity to view them working more in unison and out in the open as the formal knowledges needed by
power centers are imparted to new generations in the ruling, owing, knowing, or controlling elites; and, at
the same time, those specific power agendas required to define, implement or reproduce knowledges and
their truth systems quickly get adopted through university programs of study and research. Therefore, this
analysis has only begun the examination of discursive frames and conceptual definitions for common
theoretical notions, like "the environment," "environmental studies," or "environmental sciences."
Nonetheless, contemporary American universities are giving Nature a new look as "the environment" by
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transforming their formal knowledges about its workings into the professional-technical practices of a
managerialistic "environmentality" in their schools of the environment or colleges of natural resources. The
heterogeneous engineers behind fast capitalism's environmentalizing regime must advance eco-knowledges
to activate their command over geo-power as well as operationalize a measure of operational discipline over
environmental resources, risks, and recreationists in their reconstruction of contemporary governmentality as
environmentality. Like governmentality, the disciplinary articulations of environmentality now center upon
establishing and enforcing "the right disposition of things" by policing humanity's "conduct of conduct" in
Nature and Society. Nature loses any transcendent aura, however, as its stuff appears preprocessed in the
academy as mere "environments" full of exploitable, but also protectable, "natural resources" that university
faculty and post-graduate students study continuously in order to rationalize how particular research-
oriented and management-oriented applied sciences can get down to the business of administering their geo-
power processes as terrestrial fast capitalism's "natural resource systems."
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Multi-sectoral nature of public health legitimates government and expert involvement in
diverse areas of life
The shorthand term used to designate those policies designed to support the entrepreneurial actions of
individual and collective subjects—'healthy public policy'—is seen by its advocates as a key part of the new
public health (Draper 1991, p. 17) (see Chapter 5). According to the rhetoric, such policy is “multisectoral”
in scope; that is, it is not confined to the conventional sphere of public health policy. It is also collaborative
in strategy, involving many levels and areas of government, voluntary, economic and community groups
(Milio 1986, p. 9). At least in principle, this has brought together and legitimated the involvement in health
of a vast array of experts from such diverse areas as transport planning, engineering, architecture,
agriculture, banking, social work, media studies, town planning and other areas of local government. It has
also led to the emergence of a new conception of the domain of expert practice, encompassing “political”
action (for example, lobbying politicians, involvement in local action groups) as well as the production and
application of “impartial” scientific knowledge. Community action and “community” participation have
emerged as key concepts in the new public health, reflecting a more general concern with developing a non
state-based sphere of “the political” and with nurturing local autonomy (see Chapter 6).
Public health discourses reproduce divisions between “healthy” and “unhealthy” states –
constructs ill health as abnormal
As these documents suggest, like medical discourses, public health and health promotional discourses
continually seek to emphasize and reproduce the divisions between healthy and unhealthy states and social
groups. In health promotion discourses, members of the population, or “consumers” as they are often
referred to, are represented as experiencing a lack. Notions of the “healthy self” are constructed not only
through comparison of one’s internal state, but comparison of oneself with “unhealthy” others who embody
the characteristics falling outside the “healthy” self. As such, those individuals who do not achieve a
permanent state of “good health” are constructed as abnormal, requiring the attention of the health care or
health promotion system. Health status becomes something that consumers must continually monitor and
evaluate, so as to be aware of their needs and wants and to take the appropriate steps to satisfy them. This
discourse draws upon the rhetoric of marketing: “clients” or “consumers” are provided with health
promotional services, just as the ill are provided with biomedical services. There is no coercion involved:
consumers are “free” to make their own choices on the information provided them, and change because they
“want to.”
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Fear-based public health education campaigns strengthen disciplinary power
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the concerns of public health have remained firmly fixed on
controlling bodies, but have moved from containing infectious disease to exhorting people to take
responsibility for maintaining personal bodily health. Contemporary public health directed at “health
promotion” narrows its focus on the individual by associating the so-called lifestyle diseases with individual
behaviors. Health promotion rhetoric maintains that the incidence of illness is diminished by persuading
members of the public to exercise control over their bodily deportment. Health education is a form of
pedagogy, which, like other forms, serves to legitimize ideologies and social practices by making statements
about how individuals should conduct their bodies, including what type of food goes into bodies, the nature
and frequency of physical activities engaged in by bodies, and the sexual expression of the body. Self-
control and self-discipline over the body, both within and without the workplace, have become the new work
ethic. State-sponsored health education campaigns in the mass media are conducted to warn the public
about health risks, based on the assumption that knowledge and awareness of the danger of certain activities
will result in avoidance of these activities. Such campaigns proliferated in the mid-to-late 1980s in Britain
and Australia, warning of the dangers posed by HIV infection. Britons were warned, “Don’t Die of
Ignorance” and were asked, “AIDS: How Big Does it Have to be Before You Take Notice?” in television
and print advertisements featuring apocalyptic and forbidding images of coffins, tombstones, icebergs and
volcanoes to signify looming, large-scale disaster. The notorious “Grim Reaper” mass media campaign was
run in Australia, using a horror-movie genre employing the image of the symbol of death laying waste to
ordinary Australians. The campaigns attempted to create awareness of the risks of HIV/AIDS by shock
tactics and fear appeals, linking sexuality with guilt and death and positioning the public as ignorant and
apathetic and the state as the guardian of morals in the name of preserving the public’s health.
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Links: Epidemiology
Epidemiology performs regulatory and surveillance functions
Epidemiology thus performs a number of regulatory and surveillance functions: not only is it active in the
‘discovery’ of disease-causing factors using ‘scientific’ methods, but it also performs evaluative and policy
roles in establishing and ordering conditions and social groups in terms of importance and greatest risk,
prescribing solutions and interventions and monitoring preventive health care delivery. Epidemioilogical
research is used as the basis for the development of health care programs, the allocation of resources and the
development of relevant legislation.
Epidemiology justifies expanded control over individuals and surveillance

The public health movement in the late nineteenth century developed a new rationale for the surveillance of
bodies in the interests of gathering information to target better the health problems of populations. The
emergence of the field of epidemiology, focused upon the documenting of patterns of disease across groups,
intensified such practices, involving constant record-taking, measuring and reporting back to a system of
government agencies. The medico-social survey became an important instrument in the disciplining of
populations, “an instrument of order and control, a technique for managing the distribution of bodies and
preventing their potentially dangerous mixings.” Disease became constituted in the social body rather than
the individual body, and deviant types were identified as needful of control for the sake of the health of the
whole population. As a result, by the early twentieth century everyone became a potential victim requiring
careful monitoring: “The new social diseases of the twentieth century, tuberculosis, venereal disease and
problems of childhood, had been reconstructed to focus medical attention on ‘normal’ people were
nevertheless ‘at risk.’”
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Links: Epidemiology
Public health reliance on experts to identify problems and solutions serves the goal of making
people “governable”
Expertise plays a crucial role in political rule in modernrn societies, by rendering a multiplicity of social
fields governable through detailed documentation, classification, evaluation and calculation (Johnson 1993).
Foucault has demonstrated how the human sciences emerged in the nineteenth century as part and parcel of
the development of an extensive system of moral regulation of populations, which has involved making
human beings the objects of the exercise of power. New specialist knowledges such as medicine, sociology
and psychology, and new institutions such as prisons, schools and hospitals, were part of an expanding
apparatus of control, discipline and regulation that involved micropolitical processes whereby individuals
were encouraged to conform to the morals of society. These knowledges turned power from an external
economic and political force into a form of rule based on 'the administration of bodies and the calculated
management of life' (Foucault 1980, p. 140). Commenting on the techniques of rule in neo-liberal societies,
Rose and Miller note that: “The vital links between socio-political objectives and the minutiae of daily
existence in home and factory were to be established by expertise. Experts would enter into a kind of double
alliance. On the one hand, they would ally themselves with political authorities, focusing upon their
problems and problematizing new issues, translating political concerns about economic productivity,
innovation, industrial unrest, social stability, law and order, normality and pathology and so forth into the
vocabulary of management, accounting, medicine, social science and psychology. On the other hand, they
would seek to form alliances with individuals themselves, translating their daily worries and decisions over
investment, child rearing, factory organization or diet into a language claiming the power of truth, and
offering to teach them the techniques by which they might manage better, earn more, bring up healthier or
happier children and much more besides.” Public health expertise can be seen, then, as a particular example
of a more general deployment of expert knowledge for shaping the thoughts and actions of subjects in order
to make them more useful and 'governable'. In order that subjects be governable, however, social life needs
to be rendered into a calculable form; for example, in the form of reports, pictures, numbers, charts, graphs
and statistics. Those material conditions that enable thought to analyse an object, which Bruno Latour calls
inscription devices, translate reality into a form in which it can be debated and diagnosed. Public health has
developed many techniques for defining and circumscribing a governable terrain, and in this respect expert
'theories' play a decisive role.
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Links: Science/Health
Public health is grounded in science
Michael Merson et al, Dean of Public Health, Yale, 2001, International Public Health: Diseases, Programs,
Systems, and Policies, eds. M. Merson, R. Black & A. Mills, p. xviii
One of the most unique characteristics of public health is its grounding in a multitude of sciences. These
include the quantitative sciences of epidemiology and biostatistics; the biological sciences concerned with
humans, microorganisms, and vectors; and the social and behavioral sciences, including economics,
psychology, anthropology, and sociology. The latter have received more attention in recent years, as greater
importance has been placed on defining and directing prevention efforts toward the economic, social and
behavioral determinants of illness and not only at individuals deemed at high risk for a particular public
health problem. A similar growth in those trained in the managerial sciences in public health stems from the
current debates on the organization and financing of health services in countries rich and poor. No doubt
that in the future, with the human genome now fully cloned, public health efforts will need to apply the
recent advances in genetics toward prevention of illness and disease, while being sure to protect the
confidentiality rights of individuals. It is evident that the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of
public health requires partnerships among those with diverse experiences and perspectives.
Public health utilizes science and rationality to perpetuate disciplinary power

Western Sydney, 2002, The New Public Health: health and self in the age of risk, p. xii-xiii
Our analysis begins in Chapter 1 with the recognition of the fact that the new public health is at its core a
moral enterprise, in that it involves prescriptions about how we should live our lives individually and
collectively. Although professional experts justify their interventions in the name of objective, 'disinterested'
science, they selectively order knowledge in such a way that some categories and some utterances and actions
are privileged above others, and therefore seem more natural and logical. As we explain in this chapter, belief in the powers of
science, in progress through science, and in rational administrative solutions to problems is central to the post-Enlightenment
modernist tradition and finds expression in the philosophies and practices of the new public health. Much of our critical analysis is,
therefore, oriented to the new public health as a modernist project. Following Michel Foucault, we contend that in modern societies
power operates not so much through repression, violence, direct coercion or blatant control as through the creation of expert
knowledges about human beings and societies, which serve to channel or constrain thinking and action. Expertise plays a crucial role
in modern systems of power through the creation of knowledge about the 'normal' human subject. The notion of repression implies
the use of naked force to coerce subjects into adopting some officially defined line of action. It is clear, however, that in modern
societies power operates largely through a diffuse and diverse array of sites, utilising the agency of subjects so that they largely
govern themselves voluntarily as particular kinds of persons. In the public health arena, experts have assisted in this process of self-
governance through the advice they offer and through seeking to promote social institutions that facilitate 'healthy' choices. The area
of citizen rights and responsibilities is an important terrain in the playing-out of these relations of power and knowledge, and can be
seen to reflect changing relations of power in modem societies.
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Links: Science
Public health relies on the same scientific basis as the biomedical model and employs the same
dependence on surveillance as a means of exerting power
Public health and scientific medicine are traditionally archetypal modernist institutions. That is, both
projects depend on “science” as the bulwark of their credibility and social standing, and share a similar
belief in the powers of rationality and organization to achieve progress in the fight against illness and
disease. That both public heatlh, and scientific medicine demonstrate a modernist approach is not suprising,
given that they emerged at a similar time in history, the post-Enlightenment period, which was characterized
by a turning away from the “superstitition” of religion to the power of human thought as a means of control
over the vagaries of nature. A classical modernist approach views public health as a progressive activity,
drawing on the available expert knowledges, of the public by improving their health status. It relies upon
the setting of goals and objectives and the measurement of “outcomes” and “efficacy” (as the current jargon
has it). Public health, as a modernist enterprise, depends upon enumeration and surveillance as a means of
countering the fear engendered by illness, disease and death, seeking to establish and maintain order in the
face of the disorder of ill bodies.
Scientific approach to disease control is the basis for surveillance

Bernard J. Turnock, Clinical Professor Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of
Illinois, 2001, Public Health: what it is and how it works, p. 23
Public health action to control infectious diseases is based on the nineteenth-century discovery of
microorganisms as the cause of many serious diseases (eg, cholera and TB). Disease control resulted from
improvement in sanitation and hygiene, the discovery of antibiotics, and the implementation of universal
childhood vaccination programs. Scientific and technologic advances played a major role in each of these
areas and are the foundation for today’s disease surveillance and control systems. Scientific findings also
have contributed to a new understanding of the evolving relation between humans and microbes.
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Links: Disease
Modern conception of “disease” represents scientific and other ontological concepts
Assen Jablensky, World Health Organization, 2005, Understanding the Global Dimensions of Health, eds. S.
Gunn, P. Mansourian, A. Davies, A. Piel & B. Sayers, p. 232
Any discussion of the concept of disease must proceed from the recognition that the phenomena of health
and disease cannot he adequately described and accounted for in terms of naturalistic concepts, as can, for
example, the objects of physics or cell biology. Disease is not just "out there"; it is a generic abstraction of
multiple classes of observations ranging from a variety of subjective experiences to objective
measurements. Concepts of disease serve as explanatory models for a significant and existentially salient
segment of "the human condition"; as such they are shared by cultures and, within cultures, particular
groups (e.g., professional vs. lay public) may endorse different varieties of the concepts. Values and beliefs
are, therefore, intrinsic components of disease concepts. Recognition of the cultural roots and societal
functions of the disease concept should lead to an awareness of the co-existence of different variants of the
generic concept (which, insofar as anthropological research can enlighten us, is likely to be universal—
Duhos, 1968). The "scientific" concept of disease, therefore, can be described and studied as one (a
particularly influential one at that) among many such variants. The quotation marks point to the
relativity of the term "scientific" when applied to the paradigm of disease underlying the medical
enterprise. Its philosophical underpinnings can be traced to several different traditions, so that the "modern"
concept of disease can be seen as a hybrid of ideas, or as an intersection of quite diverse ontological
schemata.
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Links: Disease
Medical practitioners have seized the power to discover and define the “medical” condition of
patients
By the turn of the twentieth century, the views of the patient had lost their relevance and power in the
medical encounter, and the responsibility for discovering and labeling illness had become the preserve of the
medical practitioner. The disease had become more important than the person who harbored it. However,
Armstrong (1984) notes that by the 1950s, the medical gaze was in a state of transition. At this time, he
asserts, the passivity of the patient under the medical gaze was beginning to be challenged. While disease
was still seen to exist within the human body, discovered through interrogation of the patient, there was a
second strand to medical perception that viewed illness as existing in the social spaces between bodies.
Clinical method now required techniques to map and monitor this space, demanding that the patient’s view
be heard. Armstrong contends that the exhortations upon doctors to devote more attention to the social
context of illness merely extended medical surveillance into all areas of patients’ lives: “The patient’s view
was no longer a vicarious gaze to the silent pathology within the body but the precise technique by which the
new space of disease could be established: illness was being transformed from what was visible to what was
heard. The patient’s view was not, in this sense, a discovery or the product of some humanistic
enlightenment. It was a technique demanded by medicine to illuminate the dark spaces of the mind and
social relationships.” The patient’s compliance to medical orders came under question, and it was accepted
that obedience to medical advice could no longer be assumed. Patients were ascribed personalities and were
not simply viewed as objects. The central problem was perceived as being one of communication, and by
the 1960s and 1970s “effective communication” between health care professional and patient was
championed in the medical and social science literature to “improve” patient compliance, and a concern with
patient satisfaction manifested itself in the literature (Armstrong, 1984).
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Links: Biomedicine
Medical interventions foster the surveillance and regulation of the body necessary for
biopower
As previously noted, the writings of Foucault, as well as feminist critiques, have been extremely influential
in establishing the current interest in the body in sociological, historical, philosophical and anthropological
scholarship. Foucault was interested in establishing an historical “genealogy” of the discourses surrounding
and constituting contemporary medical practices. For Foucault and his followers, the body is the ultimate
site of political and ideological control, surveillance and regulation. He argues that since the eighteenth
century it has been the focal point for the exercise of disciplinary power. Through the body and its
behaviors, state apparatuses such as medicine, the educational system, psychiatry and the law define the
limits of behavior and record activities, punishing those bodies which violate the established boundaries, and
thus rendering bodies productive and politically and economically useful. In his historico-philosophical
accounts of the development of medical knowledge in France, Foucault identifies the establishment of the
medical clinic and teaching hospital in the late eighteenth century as a pivotal point for ways of
conceptualizing the body. He views medicine as a major institution of power in labeling bodies as deviant
or normal, as hygienic or unhygienic, as controlled or needful of control. In The Birth of the Clinic (1975)
Foucault refers to the “anatomical atlas” that is the human body constituted by the medico-scientific gaze.
He argues that in the late twentieth century, this notion of the body was accepted with little recognition that
there are other ways of conceiving of the body and its illnesses. According to Foucault, as medical practices
changed in the late eighteenth century, the introduction and routine adoption of the physical examination, the
post-mortem, the stethoscope, the microscope, the development of the disciplines of anatomy, psychiatry,
radiology and surgery, the institutionalization of the hospital and the doctor’s surgery, all served to
increasingly exert power upon the body. At the same time, bodies were subjected to increased regulation,
constant monitoring, discipline and surveillance in others spheres, most notably the prison, the school, the
asylum, the military and the workshop. The medical encounter began to demand that patients reveal the
secrets of their bodies, both by allowing physical examination and by giving their medical history under
questioning by the doctor: “The patient had to speak, to confess, to reveal; illness was transformed from
what is visible to what was heard.” For Foucault, the medical encounter is a supreme example of
surveillance, whereby the doctor investigates, questions, touches the exposed flesh of the patient, while the
patient acquiesces, and confesses, with little knowledge of why the procedures are carried out. In the
doctor’s surgery the body is rendered an object to be prodded, tested and examined. The owner is expected
to give up his or her jurisdiction of the body over to the doctor. In severe cases of illness or physical
disability the body is owned by the medical system, while in mental illness the body is the apparatus by
which the brain is kept restrained, often against the owner’s will.
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Links: Biomedicine
Medical power is more in line with disciplinary power – deployed by every individual in their
interactions with others
There are a range of political positions taken by scholars adopting the social constructionist approach (Burk,
1986). Some view medical knowledge as neutral, while others emphasize the social control function of
discourses, arguing that such knowledge and its attendant practices reinforce the position of powerful
interests to the exclusion of others. However, social constructionist scholars generally avoid viewing power
as being wielded from above and shaped entirely by the forces of capitalism, recognizing instead a
multiplicity of interests and sites of power. The notion that medicine acts as an important institution of
social control has remained, but the emphasis has moved from examining medical power as an oppressive,
highly visible, sovereign-based power, to a conceptualization of medicine as producing knowledges which
change in time and space. Those adopting the social constructionist perspective argue that medical power
not only resides in institutions or elite individuals, but is deployed by every individual by way of
socialization to accept certain values and norms of behavior.
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Links: Biomedicine
Medical discourse facilitates invisible disciplinary power
Foucauldian approaches stress that power in the context of the medical encounter is not a unitary entity, but
a strategic relation which is diffuse and invisible. Power is not necessarily a subjugating force aimed at
domination which itself is vulnerable to resistance, but rather is closer to the idea of a form of social
organization by which social order and conformity are maintained by voluntary means. Power is therefore
not only repressive, but also productive, producing knowledge and subjectivity. Discipline acts not only
through punishment, but through gratification, with rewards and privileges for good conduct. Both the
doctor and the patient, for example, subscribe to the belief of the importance of medical testing, constant
monitoring and invasive or embarrassing investigative procedures in the interests of the patient. Explicit
coercion is generally not involved; patients voluntarily gives up their bodies to the doctor’s or nurse’s gaze
because that is what people are socialized to expect. Of course, there are instances where surveillance of
bodies may occur violently, such as in prisons, police stations and psychiatric institutions, but control also
takes place through less openly aggressive means, through cultural and personal values and norms . The
Foucauldian notion of medical power thus extends the medical dominance thesis of the political economists
by viewing power relations in the medical encounter as even more pervasive, and even more subtle, simply
because power is ‘everywhere,” enforced as much by individuals’ unconscious self-surveillance as by
authority figures.
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Links: “Reproductive Health”
A focus on reproductive health expands biopolitics
Considerations of the absence, termination, or prevention of life are not absent in contemporary biopolitics:
we need only to think of contraception, abortion, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, debates about the right
to die, and much more. And the different values attached to different forms of life are even more evident if
we consider the vast geographical discrepancies in morbidity and mortality that existed as we entered the
twenty-first century. At the end of the twentieth century some 12.2 million children under five years of age
in less developed countries died every year—equal to the combined total population of Norway and Sweden
-- per child. A person in Malawi had a life expectancy of thirty-nine years; in the most developed countries
life expectancy was twice this at seventy-eight years. This is "letting die" on a massive and global scale.
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Links: Medicine/Protecting Life
Modern medicine is used to strengthen governmentality
Francois Debrix, Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations Florida International University,
RE-ENVISIONING PEACEKEEPING: THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE MOBILIZATION OF
IDEOLOGY, 1999, p. 197-8)
Michel Foucault has eloquently shown how the medical gaze is embedded in issues of sovereignty and
governmentality. Medical observation facilitates the delineation of geographic and epistemic spaces that are
used by sovereign entitles (often, state apparatuses) to govern their subjects. Lines of physiological
demarcation (ascribing the lepers to specific towns, quarantining the victims of epidemics), creating a social
hierarchy of classes that are the most likely to suffer from such and such disease, etc.) are easily mutated
into the contours of socially ascribed places that then form an accepted separation between the normal and
the pathological, the safe and the hazardous, the tame and the wild. By displaying sociopshysiological
categorizations, medical knowledge is a support for the formation of the sociopolitical order.
The power to destroy life is the founded on the power to protect it

D. Milchman, Philosophy Professor, Queens, PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM, v. 22, 1, 2000, p.
110-111
Where the philosophical discourse of modernity insists on separating the power to care for and protect life
incarned in the governmentalized state, and the propensity to inflict mass death, Foucault’s lifelong
mediation on power has made it possible to see the inextricable connection between the two: “the power to
expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued
existence.” It is his ability to expose this dark underside of modernity that makes Michel Foucault a central
figure both in comprehending the event of the new Holocaust and in foreseeing the very real danger of
possible new holocausts to come.
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Links: Global Liberal Governance
Global liberal governance extends modern forms of power
Rasa Ostrauskaite, 2002 (RUBIKON E-JOURNAL, May,
http://venus.ci.uw.edu.pl/~rubikon/forum/ostrao.htm)
If doubts as to the particular structure of this paper may still linger, I hope to dispel them by showing that
power, be it at the national or on a global level, circulates according to the same logic. Having described its
circulation in abstract, then with a reference to national level, I shall move now to the description of its
dynamics at global level. To start off my discussion on ‘global liberal governance,’ I shall quote a passage
by Michael Dillon and Julian Reid that exemplifies their novel approach: This term of art [global liberal
governance] refers to a varied and complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the
administration and production of life, rather than in threatening death. Global liberal governance is
substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and dynamics of populations so
that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life chances. In this great plural and
complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable intensification and extension, via liberal
forms of power, of what Michael Foucault called the ‘great economy of power.”
Global governance embraces the same ordering principles that sovereignty does
The question that is present, although not yet explicitly articulated in order to avoid reification of the
traditional oppositions such as between sovereignty and interdependence, is what is the role of the state in
this self-reproducing operation of power which we softly entitled ‘global liberal governance.’ En passant, I
suggest that an answer to this question requires a brief explanation of how sovereign power which manifests
itself through the state works. Sovereign power institutes emergency in the form of exception: by clearly
drawing boundaries between the inside and the outside it secures and orders social relations of the inside in a
particular way whereby replacing uncertainty and ambivalence with truth and predictability. While
conflating sovereign power with biopolitical power, global liberal governance likewise embraces the same
ordering principle and, as a result, could be seen as instituting a state of emergency, although now at the
global, rather than at state level. Yet since the bifurcation into order and chaos, ‘us’ and ‘them,’ or justice
and anarchy is far more problematic at the global level, “global liberal governance is [instituted as] a
continuous state of emergence rather than a continuous state of exception.”
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Links: Global Liberal Governance (Cont).
Global liberal governance is a complex system of power that administers life
Michael Dillon, University of Lancaster, 2001 (MILLENNIUM: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES, v. 30(1), p. 41)
Intimately tied with the globalization of capital, but not entirely to be conflated with it, has emerged a new
and diverse ensemble of power knows as global liberal governance. This term of art refers to a varied and
complex regime of power, whose founding principle lies in the administration and production of life, rather
than in threatening death.
Global liberal governance uses biopower to administer life

STUDIES, v. 30(1), p. 41)
Global liberal governance is substantially comprised of techniques that examine the detailed properties and
dynamics of populations so that they can be better managed with respect to their many needs and life
chances. In this great plural and complex enterprise, global liberal governance marks a considerable
intensification and extension, via forms of liberal power, of what Michael Foucault called the ‘great
economy of power’ whose principles of formation were sought from the eighteenth century onwards, once
‘the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men emerged. Foucault called this kind of
power - the kind of knowledge/power that seeks to foster and promote life rather than the juridical sovereign
kind of power that threatens death - biopower, and its politics biopolitics.
Global liberal governance pursues the administration of life

STUDIES, v. 30(1), p. 46)
However, where liberal internationalism once aspired to some ideal of world government, today global
liberal governance pursues the administration of life and the management of populations through the
deployment of biopolitical techniques of power. This is not to argue that one face of liberal power has
overcome the other. On the contrary, there is a confluence rather than a supercession of powers here. The
resultant mixture is a complex one precisely because it represents the convergence of different forms of
power and increasingly also different conceptions of knowledge.
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Links: Global Liberal Governance (Cont)
Global governance extends biopolitical power by defining subjects
STUDIES, v. 30(1), p. 48)
Although the liberal account of government is premised upon the assumption that populations have
dynamics, needs, propensities and features independent of the mode of inquiry that has assembled them as
subjects and objects of its knowledge, specific populations do not come pre-formed. They arise as the
populations that they are in accordance with a principle of concern or enquiry. Indeed on of the
distinguishing characteristics of global liberal governance is the variety of ways in which populations are
defined as the subjects/object of all kinds of global biopolitical power/knowledge concerns. Thus they are
not merely defined by ‘national’ features, but also by markets, consumption, production or rights. More
generally, biopolitical global development and aid policies constitute a complex population that one might
call ‘the global poor.’
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Links: International Power/Politics
International power is used to create and manipulate calculable subjects
Michael Dillon, University of Lancaster, 1995 (ALTERNATIVES. V, 20, p. 340-1)
I would maintain, with Foucault, that (inter)national power in the modern age is at least as much a matter of
inventing all manner of subject positions, especially political subject positions, that are capable of bearing
and exercising “a kind of regulated freedom,” as it is one of allowing expression to, or of imposing
constraints upon, what are though to be antecedently existent political and economic subjects. In short, it is a
complex exercise in “taking charge” of life, as much as it remains, also, a complex regime that wields power
over death. Hence, political power is exercised globally today through a profusion of shifting alliances
between many derived projects and enterprises designed to effect self-government in manifold aspects of the
political, economic, and social behavior of populations, as well as of individual conduct. These operate at
every level of political life (so-called national, international, [inter]national, and global), producing multiple
overlapping and superimposed matrices of power/knowledge. And they operate primarily by constituting
calculable agents and calculable spaces through the development and application of technologies of
calculation. States, for example (the same may be said for any “actor” in the domain of [inter]national
politics), are not merely the bearers of power, but subject, as all subjects are, to those productive
(inter)national protocols and regimes of knowledge that themselves empower them as subjects. States
themselves are both the product of mobile and plural mechanisms of calculations of devices for the
production of political subjectivity as well as collections of devices by which such subjectivity can be
produced and graduated for other subjects - including other states.
International politics is the intersection between juridical and disciplinary power

Michael Dillon, University of Lancaster, 1995 (ALTERNATIVES. V, 20p. 341)
I would argue, then, that (inter)national politics is as much about constituting calculable subjects operating
in calculable spaces as it is about the traditional features that preoccupy its dominant realist and neorealist
modes of interpretation. And I would go further to argue that (inter)national politics is a prime site of
intersection between juridicoterritorial and disciplinary power, and consequently a rich source of the tension
between them.
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Links: International Power/Politics (Cont)
International politics is about the production of calculable subjects
Michael Dillon, University of Lancaster, 1995 (ALTERNATIVES. V, 20p. 341)
Because the (inter)national system - its (inter)national law, diplomatic practices, treaties, economic
regulatory regimes, alliances, states, governmental, non-governmental quasi-governmental, and other
“actors” - is not only a theater of conflict between sovereign subjects ultimately governed by the sanction of
violent conflict that they wield against one another, and over their own subjects; it is also an expression of
governmentality, a dense production of calculable subjects operating in calculable spaces according to
calculable dynamics in the positive, and productive, microscopic ordering of life. Calcuable subject and
calculable spaces have, however, to be brought into presence, sustained, and refined. Such
calculable/calculating subjects inhabiting the calculable spaces of (inter)national relations are the contingent
accomplishments, therefore, of the conjunction between sovereignty and power/knowledge. The power
politics of the traditional vocabularies of international relations, indeed, appear often only to be an
expression of the effort that goes into the very process of subjectification and objectification that
characterizes the operation of governmentality. And international relations, itself, appears often only to be an
integral part of the production, dissemination, and means of ensuring the consumption of them.
The international system of states is a site of governmentality
Michael Dillon, University of Lancaster, 1995 (ALTERNATIVES. V, 20, p. 343)
This governmentalization of the state has been a long-standing if somewhat neglected feature of
(inter)national politics. Indeed, without the governmentalization of the state, and also of the system of
relations between states upon which individual states crucially depend for their own constitution and
survival, there would be no (inter)national system of states. Just as the state is a site of governmentality, so
also is the (inter)national system of states.
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Links: Depictions of Third World Chaos
Depictions of the south as “anarchic” are used to justify disciplinary liberalism
IDEOLOGY, 1999, p. 29)
Disciplinary liberalism – arguably, the dominant ideology/discourse of contemporary international relations

– builds upon such a commonly accepted vision of what may be called an “anarchic south” (which, more
and more so today, includes the former communist bloc countries of Europe and Central Asia) versus a
supposedly well-ordered and stable north (which mostly refers to the old “Western bloc”) to justify its will
to “enlighten” global politics. In such an ideological perspective, the figure of Hobbes, mobilized in
international relations theory to underscore the importance of a dialectic of order versus anarchy, is
complicity in the disciplinary liberal strategies. Although I offered the philosophical example of Rousseau as
a foundation for disciplinary liberalism in the introduction, I suggest that the specific “order versus anarchy”
debate that continues to delineate the space of (disciplinary liberal) international affairs in a post-cold war
era can best be explored by turning to another liberal tradition, that of Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan.
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Links: Depictions of Third World Chaos
Pictures of anarchy and instability are used to justify u.n. peacekeeping
IDEOLOGY, 1999, p. 53)
It may be the case that the new World Order requires a new word order. A new “right ordering of names” is
required to rediscover order out of the post-cold war’s global instabilities. Such a discursive project is
exactly what Boutros-Ghali is hoping to inaugurate with the two above-quoted statements. Interestingly, just
as Hobbes was arguably establishing the “state of nature” as a “dire prospect’ that everyone would want to
stay away from and “from which his radical presumptions (could) be judged a worthy pursuit,” Boutros-
Ghali needs to brandish the banner of insecurity, and absolute danger in order to, later, by way of contract,
justify the necessity for a new formulation of international order (which he believes he has discovered). The
second of the two quotations already makes the passage of the “new anarchy” to potential order under the
form of a promise to come. This new promise of order, this new way of taming “anarchy,” is the subject of
Boutros-Ghali’s seminal work, his AGENDA FOR PEACE. In AGENDA FOR PEACE, Boutros-Ghali
revels the secrets of the new recipe of international order: globalization, the UN, and peacekeeping.
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Links: Multilateralism
Assertive multilateralism will boost global governance
Development & Peace Foundation, 2001 (UNILATERALISM V. MULTILATERALISM, http://sef-
bonn.org/sef/publications/pol-pap/no16/text.html)
Return to a "assertive multilateralism" would not only improve the chances of global governance, i.e. of a
cooperative approach to dealing with global problems, it would also tend more to strengthen than weaken
America's global leadership.
Unilateralism undermines global governance

Development & Peace Foundation, 2001 (UNILATERALISM V. MULTILATERALISM, http://sef-
bonn.org/sef/publications/pol-pap/no16/text.html)
Unilateralism is blocking the development of a multilateral architecture of global governance. It is not only
detrimental to a culture of cooperation, it is also costly. Cooperation and burden-sharing save political and
financial expenses. And global problems can no longer be solved by a powerful hegemon. United States
refusal to cooperate provokes other countries to refuse their cooperation in dealing with problems that affect
the hegemon itself. Yet the willingness to cooperate is given only when all negotiating partners can expect a
fair reconciliation of interests. It would therefore be in the enlightened self-interest of the US to put more of
its trust in partnerly cooperation, in this way reducing the resistance that any hegemonic claim to leadership
inevitably entails.
99
Links: Securitization
“Security” is the foundation of disciplinary power
Anthony Burke, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, St. Lucia,
2002 (Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Jan-March 2002 v27 i1 p1(27) Aporias of security)
Colin Gordon argues that Foucault treats security here not merely as a self-evident object of political power
but "as a specific principle of political method and practice, distinct alike from those of law, sovereignty and
discipline, and capable of various modes of combination with these other principles and practices within
diverse governmental configurations." He goes on to argue that, for Foucault, security, from the eighteenth
century on, "tends increasingly to become the dominant component of modern governmental rationality: we
live today not so much in a Rechtsstaat or disciplinary society as in a society of security."
Discipline and security are interdependent - liberalism supports both

Anthony Burke, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, St. Lucia,
2002 (Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Jan-March 2002 v27 i1 p1(27) Aporias of security)
This generated a political problem: to discover a form of government that--recognizing that no sovereignty
can fully comprehend the totality of the economy or regulate every act that may have an economic effect--
must still seek to do so. It was at the appearance of this problem that Foucault sited the junction of security,
discipline, and population--a mix of rationalities that might more fully grasp this uncertain political space.
Thus, he argued, "liberty is registered not only as a right of individuals legitimately to oppose ... the
sovereign, but also now as an indispensable element of governmental rationality itself." This engendered a
drive for flexibility, mobility, and vigilance: as Bentham declared, "Economy has ... many enemies," and,
hence, security "requires in the legislator, vigilance continually sustained, and power always in action, to
defend it against his constantly reviving crowd of adversaries." In short, the new, open space of liberalism
had engendered a prophetic paranoia: the theme of a new productivity of political power that simultaneously
reaches into the heart of the citizen and multiplies its own spatial reach.
100
Links: Population Management
Governmentality includes population management through science and secular humanism
Gary Wickham, Senior Lecturer, Sociology Program, Murdoch University, 2000 (CHICAGO-KENT LAW
REVIEW, v. 76, pp. 917-8)
Foucault's reformulation of the concept of discourse derives from his attempts to provide histories of
knowledge which are not histories of what men and women have thought. Foucault's histories are not
histories of ideas, opinions or influences nor are they histories of the way in which economic, political and
social contexts have shaped ideas or opinions. Rather they are reconstructions of the material conditions of
thought or "knowledges." They represent an attempt to produce what Foucault calls an archaeology of the
material conditions of thought/knowledges, conditions which are not reducible to the idea of
"consciousness" or the idea of "mind." The Foucault who inspires this part of our book is the Foucault who
is interested in government alongside power, the Foucault who uses the neologism "governmentality" to
capture the dramatic changes in techniques of government developed in the western world from the
eighteenth century onwards. This may not be the most popular Foucault, but we take it to be the most
rewarding Foucault for those, like ourselves, interested in new directions for the sociology of law. We are
inspired not just by Foucault's direct discussion of governmentality ... but also and more importantly by the
work of others heavily influenced by Foucault's work on this notion which is contributing to a distinctive
approach ... . We offer a sketch of governmentality here ... such that we allow the reader some insight into
the richness of the Foucaultian work in the area ... In simple terms, governmentality is the dramatic
expansion in the scope of government, featuring an increase in the number and size of the governmental
calculation mechanisms, which began about the middle of the eighteenth century and is still continuing. In
this way, governmentality is about the growth of modern government and the growth of modern
bureaucracies ... the moment where Foucault meets Weber ... . This simple definition is useful up to a point,
but it does not capture enough of the subtlety of Foucault's concept. It does not, for example, allow us to
follow closely Foucault's periodisation. While government and its mechanisms have indeed boomed from
the eighteenth century onwards, this period is hardly unique in the history of widespread, sophisticated
governmental techniques. Ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome and many examples from both the
Western and Eastern worlds in the period from the fall of Rome to the middle of the eighteenth century all
mark boom times for just such government; all these examples could be regarded as instances of
governmentality were we to use only this simple definition ... . To enhance this simple definition such that
the nuances of Foucault's governmentality are more easily recognized, we suggest a series of interconnected
definitions around the following themes: the emergence of the reason of state; the emergence of the problem
of population; the birth of modern political economy; the move towards liberal securitization; and the
emergence of the human sciences as new mechanisms of calculation.
101
Links: Sovereignty
Sovereignty is based on biopower
MODERNISM/MODERNITY, 1999 (V. 6, pp. 162-3))
The central claim in Giorgio Agamben's latest book to be translated into English (the Italian original was
published in 1995) is extremely provocative: the concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for the exercise
of power in western politics, including contemporary liberal democracies. He pursues his argument not
through historiographical inquiry but, rather, through what he calls an "historico-philosophical" analysis of
nothing less than the fundamental structure of sovereign power as exercised in the West from Aristotle to the
present Through primary reference to Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, the book defines sovereignty as a
relation of exclusionary inclusion between the sovereign power and what Agamben terms "bare life." Bare
life ("la nuda vita") is something like "life in general" or "pure being," as opposed to the "way of life proper
to men." Within the context of the sovereign relation, bare life is the part of the political subject's existence
excluded from the juridical order instituted by the sovereign power. Nevertheless, this exclusion of bare life
from the juridical order in fact constitutes a hidden inclusion with relation to sovereign power because the
sovereign power must, in order to be able to manifest its absolute authority at any given moment, reserve the
right to suspend the juridical order it instituted. Thus the thing upon which sovereign power exercises its
absolute, extra-juridical power within the state of exception is the very thing that was excluded at the
moment of juridical institution: bare life. Paradoxically, then, bare life is "the element that, in the exception,
finds itself in the most intimate relation with sovereignty."
The fundamental activity of the sovereign is the production of bare life

Review in Radical Philosophy by Andrew Norris: “The exemplary exception - Philosophical and political
decisions in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer”, 2003,
Similarly, biopolitics is not, as Foucault sometimes suggests, incompatible with sovereign as opposed to
disciplinary power; nor is it a distinctively modern phenomenon. Instead it is the original form of politics:
'the fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and
as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.'
102
Links: Sovereignty
The concentration camp is a manifestation of the sovereign’s exercise of biopower
Review in Radical Philosophy by Andrew Norris: “The exemplary exception - Philosophical and political
decisions in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer”, 2003,
As this cutting defines the political, the production of the inhuman - which is correlative with the production
of the human - is not an activity that politics might dispense with, say in favour of the assertion of human
rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but
instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: 'today it is not
the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.'
State sovereignty upholds state control of bare life

Dillon, Lancaster Politics Lecturer, ALTERNATIVES, 20002, v. 25, p. 132
Four our purposes, Agamben’s analysisdiscloses a certain comparability in the operation of sovereign power
and the power/knowledge that Foucault termed governmentality. Not only are they both a strategic form of
power, they each operate by effecting a kind of “phenomenological” reduction. Both claim to reduce life to
its bare essentials in order to disclose the truth about it, but in so doing actually reduce it to a format that will
bear the programming of power to which it must be subject if the power of sovereignty (or, as we shall see,
that of governance as well) is to be inscribed, instituted, and operated. Life is not of course “natural” life,
whatever that may be. It is in every sense the life of power. But since we are talking different operations of
power, we are also talking different forms of life; modalities formed by the different exercises of reduction
through which each operation of power institutes and maintains itself. Each form of life is the “stuff” of life
but in dissimilar ways. That is what we mean when we say that sovereignty and governmentality reproduce
life amenable to their sway. It is not uncommon for a form of life thus reproduced to desire the processes
that originate it. Sovereign and governmental powers alike each also therefore work their own particular
powers of seduction on the subjects of power that they summon into being.
103
Links: Sovereignty (Cont)
Sovereign power is used to extend disciplinary power
Amy Allen, Dartmouth, 2002 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES, June, p.
131)
According to Foucault, disciplinary power ‘ought by rights to have led to the disappearance of the grand
juridical edifice created by that theory’. But this is precisely what hasn’t happened. Instead, the notion of
sovereignty has been superimposed upon disciplinary techniques in such a way that the dark and nefarious
nature of these techniques has been concealed. In the modern era, sovereign power has not disappeared, but
has simply changed forms: no longer vested solely in the person of the King, it has been democratized,
transformed into the foundational and legitimating power of the people, a power that is codified in the
principle of popular sovereignty. However, this democratization has functioned to conceal the disciplinary
power that is actually the seamy underside of such democratized sovereign, juridical power. As Foucault
puts it: in our own times power is exercised simultaneously through this right [grounded in the notion of
popular sovereignty] and these [disciplinary] techniques and . . . these techniques and these discourses, to
which the disciplines give rise, invade the area of right so that the procedures of normalization come to be
ever more constantly engaged in the colonization of those of law.
Sovereignty must be challenged to control disciplinary power

James Johnson, teaches social and political theory al the University of Rochester, 1997 (POLITICAL
THEORY, August, p. 559).
Resistance trades upon a number of affirmative possibilities. Foucault locates these possibilities within a
quite specific understanding of the relations that obtain between intellectuals and political movements. As he
explains: If one wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines
and disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one should turn, but towards
the possibility of a new form of right, one which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time
liberated from the principle of sovereignty.
104
Links: International Law
International law & relations reproduce disciplinary power on a global scale
Michael Dillon, U Lancaster, 1995 (ALTERNATIVES, v. 1995, pp. 340-1)
I would maintain, with Foucault, that (inter)national power in the modern age is at least as much a matter of
inventing all subject positions, especially political subject positions, that are capable of bearing and
exercising “a kind of regulated freedom,” as it is one of allowing expression to, or of imposing constraints
upon, what are thought to be antecedently existent political and economic subjects. In short, it is a complex
exercise in “taking charge” of life, as much as it remains, also, a complex regime that yields power over
death.
105
Links: Categorizing People
Categorization of individuals produces biopower
Sara Hayden, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Montana, WOMEN'S
STUDIES IN COMMUNITY, Spring 1999, p. 30.
Power, according to Foucault, is not just repressive, it is also constitutive. It functions not only through
"censorship, exclusion, blockage, and oppression" but also through its ability to shape our understandings,
beliefs, and desires. Bio-power is a constitutive form of power that takes as its object human life.
Fundamental to biopower's operation are the processes Foucault refers to as "individualization" or
"subjection." He writes: This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the
individual, marks him [or her] by his [or her] own individuality, attaches him [or her] to his [or her] own
identity, imposes a law of truth on him [or her] which he [or she] must recognize and which others have to
recognize in him [or her]. Bio-power is put into place through the process whereby individuals become
subjects--subjects capable of self-knowledge and subjects knowable to others. Foucault discusses the
subjectification of individuals in terms of two separate modes. In his middle work, he claims he "studied the
objectivizing of the subject in what [he calls] ... `dividing practices.' The subject is either divided inside
himself [or herself] or divided from others. This process objectivizes him [or her]" Dreyfus and Rabinow
describe this process: "the body is divided up into unities, for example, the legs and arms. These are then
taken up separately and subjected to a precise and calculated training. The aim is control and efficiency of
operation both for the part and the whole." Thus the body is "disciplined" and the knowable subject is made
productive and efficient.
Categorization & labeling mean power is retained

Thomas Szasz, State University of New York Psychiatry Professor, CRUEL COMPASSION, 1998, p. 184.
So long as psychiatrists control the definition of what constitutes a home for the mental patient, it is absurd
to speak of psychiatric reforms. Consider the situation into which Forster was placed: "One psychiatric nurse
who had cared for him said last week: 'For 30-odd years Rodney had been totally protected. He only had to
get out of bed in the morning, eat three meals, and get back into bed again.'...Forster had enjoyed his
protected life there-with regular excursions to a betting shop and a summer holiday with fellow
patients...and he was anxious not to lose contact with the friends he regarded as family." The forcible
eviction of desocialized patients from mental hospitals is a moral scandal on par with the forcible
involuntary mental hospitalization of persons who are not desocialized. The responsibility for both rests
squarely on the shoulders of psychiatrists.
106
Links: Categorizing People
Classification is an extension of power
Ian Hurd is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, 1999
(INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION, Spring, p. 379)
Consider the evolving definition of "refugee." The category "refugee" is not at all straightforward and must
be distinguished from other categories of individuals who are "temporarily" and "involuntarily" living
outside their country of origin - displaced persons, exiles, economic migrants, guest workers, diaspora
communities, and those see king political asylum. The debate over the meaning of "refugee" has been waged
in and around the UNHCR. The UNHCR's legal and operational definition of the category strongly
influences decisions about who is a refugee and shapes UNHCR staff decisions in the field - decisions that
have a tremendous effect on the life circumstance of thousands of people. These categories are not only
political and legal but also discursive, shaping a view among UNHCR officials that refugees must, by
definition, be powerless, and that as powerless actors they do not have to be consulted in decisions such as
asylum and repatriation that will directly and dramatically affect them. Guy Gran similarly describes how
the World Bank sets up criteria to define someone as a peasant in order to distinguish them from a farmer,
day laborer, and other categories. The classification matters because only certain classes of people are
recognized by the World Bank's development machinery as having knowledge that is relevant in solving
development problems. Categorization and classification are a ubiquitous feature of bureaucratization that
has potentially important implications for those being classified. To classify is to engage in an act of power.
107
Links: End of History Discourses
Discourses of end of history and peace cement hegemonic biopower by denying the need for
additional change
Hasana Sharp is a graduate student in the philosophy department at Pennsylvania State University, 2002
(INTERTEXTS, Spring, p. 98)
Foucault explains, in the lectures, that war emerges as a discursive strategy at a time when it is waning
significantly as an historical reality. At the same time, sovereignty disappears as a form of government and
persists stubbornly as our image of power (see Stoler 64; and "Defendre? Foucault advocates that we
maintain the discourse of war and understand social relations as decentered, conflictual and agonistic. He
claims that we "must recover perpetual war . . . with its dangers and events," if we are to be prepared to fight
it. Hence he makes two somewhat paradoxical claims: war exists less and less as an historical reality, yet
social relations will always be and have always been relations best understood as a subterranean war. Yet
sovereignty, or more precisely, what it names in terms of a discursive strategy and grid of intelligibility,
ought to be abandoned, submitted to "the theoretical guillotine,” even though it seems to have a similar
structure as a waning "historical reality." For Foucault, a discourse of sovereignty cannot exist alongside a
discourse of war. Of course, we know that in the case of Hobbes war and sovereignty are juxtaposed
forcefully, but as a strategy to eliminate war, render revolt impossible, and supplant it with the harmony and
peace of absolute sovereignty ("Defendre" 83-4). Foucault favors a discourse of permanent war, and is
interested in the war of the races, precisely because it is a discourse of revolution. In his words, "I would like
to show how an analysis of this kind articulates forcefully, both hope and an imperative and politics of revolt
or of revolution. Foucault warns that only "the adversaries want to make you believe that we are in an
ordered and peaceful world. Similarly, Michael Hardt remarks that the discourse of Fukayama wants to
claim that "[the end of History has ushered in a reign of peace" so that any alternative to current social
relations remains unthinkable. Hence as a counterstrategy against the hegemony of biopolitics--hegemony
here understood as the pervasiveness of its practices and control over the (global) social body-we must think,
speak and act on the terrain of war and permanent agonism.
108
Links: Technology
Applying technology to treat modern problems expands biopolitics
Bio-politics is about how medicine comes to be in the business of policing societal expectations and of
imposing certain standards of performance upon the individual. Modem medicine finds itself capable of
acting as such because we have tacitly agreed that to be a normal member of society is to be surveyed and
measured by a calculating medical eye. This medicalization is, according to Foucault, a mechanism that
erodes the status of the individual while it simultaneously consolidates the power of a professional,
technocratic hegemony. This encroachment of technology into everyday life is, in Foucault's view, the
exercise of bio-politics.
109
Links: Biotechnology
Biotechnology expands biopower
Kaja Finlker, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 2002 (CURRENT
ANTHROPOLOGY, April, p. 271)
The intersection of biomedicine and the market inevitably gives rise to disputes on the storing, exchange,
control, and ownership of human bodily information and material, including blood, gametes, enzymes,
tissues, and organs. While parts of the body (organs, hair, skin, and nails) have long been isolated, marketed,
and exploited to build up knowledge of physiology (Foucault 1973), the politicization and commodification
of the body have recently increased as a result of a complex series of political and technological
developments. Not only has the "bare life" of the human body become the center of totalitarian politics
(Agamben 1995) but ongoing developments in biotechnology and bioinformatics are opening up an entirely
new world of "biosociality" (Rabinow 1996a). These developments are transnational and occurring at an
exponential rate, and they have taken place in a social environment where partnership of science and the
market is considered the most efficient means of advancing knowledge and human well-being (Fox and
Swazey 1992, Komesaroff 1995, Titmuss 1997 [1970], Starr 1998). Genes, some people have argued, will
be "the currency of the future" (see Nelkin and Andrews 1998). Modern biopolitics shifts the focus to bodily
information, genes, enzymes, and DNA sequences; the critical issue in postgenomic research, after the
sequencing of the human genome, is the use and control of the information that can be derived from body
components rather than the components themselves. Body components and information--genealogies,
medical records, and genetic data on individuals and entire populations--are quickly absorbed into the
marketplace, where they are exchanged as commodities. As a result, "the boundaries of what used to be
perceived as basic research on the one hand and its medical applications on the other have been blurred in an
unprecedented fashion" (Rheinberger 1995: 255).
110
Links: Globalization/Trade
Global commerce increases population management
STUDIES, v. 30(1), p. 46)
In addition, and especially in anticipation of the arguments advanced by the biopolitical strategic discourses
that we examine later, it is important also to quote his observations of the long-standing historical
connection between forms of economy, biopolitics and war. At the junction of these two great technologies,
and as a shared instrument, one must place commerce and monetary circulation between the states:
enrichment through commerce offers the possibility of increasing the population, manpower, production,
and export, and of endowing oneself with large, powerful armies.
Marketization is a more subtle, but still effective, form of social control

Having conceptualized power not only in terms of domination and oppression but also in terms of regulation
and formation of subjects, how do we establish the link between techniques of domination and techniques of
the self? In other words, what is the relationship between political rationalities - as ways of thinking and
acting upon one another and ourselves - and particular practices of the self or making up governable
individuals? Scholars whom we conveniently label as representing the Foucauldian governmentality school
maintain that recent governmental trends are strongly conditioned by neo-liberal political rationalities which,
inter alia, influenced the shift away from welfarist policies and are balancing on the threshold which could
be titled as ‘the death of the social. Put differently, neo-liberalism managed to transform a series of
governmental techniques which now present themselves as a new mode of governmentality that effectively
links two strategies: marketization and direct control. The contemporary governmentality may symbolize a
welcomed shift away from ‘top down’ domination towards a ‘distantiated’ relationship between the center of
decision-making and a number of non-political (public sector) institutions/managers. Nevertheless, the
Janus-faced character of modern governmentality may prove far less ‘neutral’ or ‘innocent’ when considered
through examining concrete situations which might even lead to rhetorical, albeit still worth considering,
questions: ‘makeover or takeover?
111
Links: Globalization
Globalization does not prevent the use of force
APORIA JOURNAL 2002, http://aporiajournal.tripod.com/detention.htm (PlanetDebate1518)
It is what must be fought for in an age when globalization breaks down economic barriers to national
sovereignty, but does nothing to undermine nations' monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
112
Links: Information Technology
Information technologies extend biopower
STUDIES, v. 30(1), p. 49)
In contemporary liberal societies the net-like circulation of power locally as well as globally has generalized
this concern for knowledge. Biopower has become informational. This does not simply mean that it operates
through digitized and integrated computer-mediated communication and surveillance technologies.
Information is now regarded as the principle of formation of life itself. That move has been both cybernetic
and molecular, a function of the way the information and the life sciences now install information at the
center of the organization and the functioning of life.
113
Links: Enlightenment
Enlightenment ethics support disciplinary power
Marie Ashe, Professor of Law, Suffolk University Law School, 2001 (RUTGERS UNIVERSITY LAW
JOURNAL, Winter, p. 466-7)
There arose, alongside the development of the prison as an institution, "an explicit, coded and formally
egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative
regime." This establishment of juridical process, with its seeming objectivity, would assist in veiling its
allocation of dominant political power in the bourgeoisie. "Carceral practices," Foucault insists,
accomplished ends that might otherwise have been beyond the reach of the juridical process. The Panopticon
model "continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective
mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The
"Enlightenment,' which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines."
114
Links: Geopolitics
Geopolitics is based on surveillance
Simon Dalby, Institute of International Relations, University of British Columbia, 2000 (A CRITICAL
GEOPOLITICS OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, http://www.ciaonet.org/isa/das01/)
Geopolitics is partly about matters of surveillance over fixed spaces and supposedly permanent boundaries.
It is a mode of knowledge that often acts to fix the contingencies of history and society in a discourse of
aspiration to permanence, whether of the nation or the state. But this securitized vision of boxes and
boundaries, impermeable spaces and external threats is part of a larger modern subjectivity of detached
knowledgeable omniscience . The geopolitical gaze of modernity is also the gaze of the detached rational
actor, the individual human with impermeable boundaries, protected by a knowledge that assumes an intact
stable interior space as the ontologically sovereign subject given of existence which is endangered by
numerous external threats. This securitized subject parallels the geopolitical assumptions of the modern state
as the knowledgeable surveillance system policing the untroubled territory within its boundaries to keep
external threats at bay. It follows by logical extension that such orderliness should be extended in the
international arena too under the guise of global governance and various surveillance systems linked to the
United Nations and other international liberal agencies.
115
Links: WTO
The wto uses surveillance strategies to sustain control
Simon Dalby, Institute of International Relations, University of British Columbia, 2000 (A CRITICAL
GEOPOLITICS OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, http://www.ciaonet.org/isa/das01/)
But at least some of the activists were able to make the connection between the lack of democracy that they
objected to at the WTO, and the suspension of civil rights caused by the invocation of the state of emergency
in the city. Media images of "robocops" using violence against demonstrators suggested a militarized new
world order as the violent face of the WTO and reminded those who may have forgotten that the
contemporary liberal economic order was built on the basis of military power. Enforcement of its mandate
apparently required the violent removal of human obstacles to its agenda. Once again people in the way of
globalization have to be forcefully removed. Television pictures of bus loads of arrested people who were
refusing to cooperate with the police in allowing themselves to be processed through the arrest procedure
suggested both the limits of carceral strategies, and the importance of such forms of resistance in
contemporary struggles. While surveillance is effective in monitoring street behavior, the territorial
strategies of control require other legal and administrative procedures to be completely effective. This
suggests once again the limits of the preferred territorial strategies of police power.
116
Links: Human Rights
The language of human rights is rooted in the structures of domination
DRG/E379 Anne Caldwell, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Louisville, THEORY
AND EVENT 7:2, 2004 p http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html, accessed
5/12/05.
The apparently emancipatory, law bound discourse of human rights thereby finds itself implicated in very
old paradigms of domination. The relation is similar to the way that early modern discourses of rights
proved complicit with novel forms of surveillance and regulation. The language of human rights does not
stand outside the crises such rights are invoked to counter; it does not stand outside the sovereign powers
that produce life as endangered. Neither natural nor exceptional, humanitarian crises belong to a "structure
of permanent emergency" which has become "objectified in institutional arrangements" Arendt's account of
the fate of those caught in such institutional arrangement remains decisive. As she observes, "contemporary
history has created a new kind of human beings -- the kind that are put in concentration camps by foes and in
internment camps by their friends.” Such permanent "ad hoc" arrangements indicate the extent to which
states of exception are increasingly interwoven with law. Nothing has become more "normal" than the
creation of internment camps for refugees and displaced persons. Those arrangements have the desired effect
of placing camp inhabitants outside the framework of international law and domestic law so as to avoid
obligations of asylum and legal rights to refugees.
Claims to act on human rights extend power over life

5/12/05.
The complexity of the relationship between bio-sovereignty and humanity is most evident in the issue of
humanitarian interventions. If such interventions limit nation-state sovereignty, they serve as a ground for
bio-sovereignty. Every potential case for intervention -- whether or not it is acted upon -- raises as a question
the status of life, and calls for a sovereign decision on life. The post-sovereign world of bio-politics
described by Foucault now takes on a new meaning. Foucault argued that in modernity, man's politics placed
his existence in question. If, as Agamben argues, sovereignty maintains its power by deciding on the status
of life, then a world in which politics places life in question by retaining the power to decide its fate, is not
post-sovereign. It is the open expression of the sovereign ban or exception. Human rights, from this
perspective, is the discourse of life in a state of permanent crisis. Moreover, human rights and sovereignty
share the same referent: an indeterminate and precarious bare life. Agamben therefore asserts humanitarian
organizations, "despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight"
Humanitarianism, speaking for the very life sovereignty grounds itself in, provides the justification for the
"exceptional" measures of sovereign powers. Today's "moral interventions," exemplified in the work of
NGO's who categorize and call attention to human rights violations, prefigure "the state of exception from below" (Negri and
Hardt 2000; 36). This complex situation, in which humanitarianism and sovereignty work together, should not be taken as a
condemnation of humanitarianism. It is rather a sign of the failures of a tradition which requires humanitarianism while reducing its
effectiveness.
117
Links: Human Rights Protections
Human rights are only protected as far as the sovereign wants to protect them
5/12/05.
Agamben's account of the emergence and development of our tradition's definition of politics is useful
precisely because it can help us account for the paradoxical effects of apparently inclusive and beneficial
categories. The concepts of bio-sovereignty and homo sacer provide us with the tools to understand a power
and a life of ambiguous character. Bio-sovereignty, structured by the exception rather than law, is of a
different order than liberal power. It is grounded not in a life or set of rights outside of itself, which it is
compelled to respect and protect, but in the incorporation of life within its field of power. The basis of bio-
sovereignty in the incorporation of life means its relation to humanity is neither one of simple support, nor
simple opposition. The rights of humanity are as contingent as the rights the people of the nation-state were
once ascribed. Human life, like the life of the nation-state citizen, "is kept safe and protected only to the
degree to which it submits itself to the sovereign's (or the law's) right of life and death."
118
Links: Truth
"Truth" is merely a tool of domination
J.G. Merquior, Professor of Political Science, University of Brasilia, FOUCAULT, 1985, p.101.
Thus at bottom Foucault follows Nietzsche in his view of reality (there is not truth, there are only
interpretations) but not in his view of history. Or rather, what he borrows from Nietzsche, as far as history Is
concerned, is just a formal perspective: genealogy, namely, the problem of the emergence and descent of
cultural phenomena. In genealogy, old cultural forms receive new functions, like the lazar houses
transformed into asylums or the monastic cells converted into prison cages. Genealogy casts light on the
pragmatism of history, on the human capacity to pour new wine into old cultural bottles. And it sees it all, of
course, from the viewpoint of power, with truth debased to the role of an aid -- or a mask -- of domination.
Foucault sees truth as expressing the will to power

By searching for a genealogy of the modern subject, Foucault was automatically defining an angle where
knowledge is enmeshed with power. Thus his pursuit of the modern subject through forms of knowledge as
well as practices and discourses had to concentrate on what he calls power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir), a
Nietzchean perspective where all will to truth is already a will-to-power. And the more he delved into
spheres of practical knowledge on the subject, the more he found technologies of the self waiting for
analysis. At the end of the day, as Colin Gordon notes, Foucault developed a concept of power as able to
take the form of a subjectification as well as of an objectification'. The self as a tool of power, a product of
domination, rather than as an instrument of personal freedom -- this became Foucault's main theme after
Discipline and Punish.
119
Links: Science
Foucault sees science as a tool of domination
There is, nevertheless, another aspect, no less decisive, which makes I'oucault truly akin to Nietzsche. It
deals not with their different historical temper (pessimist against optimist, lover or hater of the
Enlightenment) but with their common epistemological stance. Of the three masters of suspicion, it was
precisely Nietzsche who taught us to distrust reason and truth. Now Foucault is also deeply suspicious of
truth-claims; to him, every knowledge, even science, is a tool of the will to power. Epistemes are merely
species of the genus power apparatus; particular branches of knowledge obey strategies of domination, in
fact 'invent' their objects so that man and earth can be better controlled. Reason is a technology of power;
science, an instrament of domination.
120
Links: Politics
Political power is inevitably a form of violence
Michel Foucault, philosopher, College de France, POWER/KNOWLEDGE, 1980, p.90.
This reversal of Clausewitz's assertion that war is politics continued by other means has a triple significance:
in the first place, it implies that the relations of power that function in a society such as ours essentially rest
upon a definite relation of forces that is established at a determinate, historically specifiable moment, in war
and by war. Furthermore, if it is true that political power puts an end to war, that it installs, or tries to install,
the reign of peace in civil society, this by no means implies that it suspends the effects of war or neutralises
the disequilibrium revealed in the final battle. The role of political power, on this hypothesis, is perpetually
to reinscribe this relation through a form of unspoken warfare; to re-inscribe it in social instituticns, in
economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and everyone of us.
Politics is the continuation of war

Michel Foucault, philosopher, College de France, THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOLUME ONE,
1978, p.93.
Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still
wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this
multiplicity of force relations can be coded -- in part but never totally-- either in the form of "war," or in the
forn of "politics"; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other
for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations.
121
Links: NGOs
Ngos exercise biopolitical control and are colonial organs of the west
APORIA JOURNAL, 2002 http://aporiajournal.tripod.com/detention.htm
When N.G.O.'s and humanitarian institutions step in to occupied countries, the biopolitical regulation of
"births and mortality, the level of health and life expectancy" swings into full effect. Introducing such
seemingly innocuous organizations can radically alter the bureaucratic and at times, the cultural constitution
of a country, and must be seen as the first step in neo-colonialist projects by the West.
122
Links: State Action
Policy action is based on the goal of the state to administer every day life
Brown, THE LATER FOUCAULT, ed. Moss, 1998, p. 41
While Foucault invests genealogy with the possibility of emancipating intellectual inquiry from certain kinds
of position taking, and deploys it to question certain conventional Left positions (for example, those of
Marxism, Maoism, social democracy and liberation politics bound to social identity), he is equally
concerned to separate such inquiry from policy concerns. In his genealogy of “pastoral power,” Foucault
provocatively links policies with policing (and policy studies with the aims of a police state) through a study
of the emergence of Polizeiwissenschaflt, a term connotating both the policy science and the police science.
Through this genealogy, Foucault cats the very preoccupation with policy – formulating it, influencing it,
studying it, as the less limitations of reformist policies (the conventional left critique) than a symptom of a
contemporary political rationality that renders quite normal the state administration of everyday life.
Foucault’s genealogy of the political rationality which fuses Polizeiwissenschafl with raison d’et shows how
reason of a state’s problem of calculating detailed actions appropriate to an infinity of…contingent
circumstances is met by the creation of an exhaustively detailed knowledge of the governed reality of the
state itself, extending (at least in aspiration) to touch the existences of its individual members. The polices
state is also termed the state of prosperity. The idea of prosperity is the principle which identifies the state
with its subjects.
The state reproduces medical dominance

Deborah Lupton, Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy, Charles Sturt University,
FOUCAULT, HEALTH AND MEDICINE, Ed. Alan Petersen and Robin Bunton, 1997, p. 100
In contrast, Foucauldian scholars tend to argue that the clinical gaze is not intentional in terms of originating
from a particular type of group seeking domination over others. There is not a single medicine but a series of
loosely linked assemblages, each with different rationalities (Osborne 1994: 42). Foucault and his followers
have emphasized that the fields and concerns of medicine are diverse and heterogeneous, taking place at
sites such as workplaces, schools, supermarkets and homes as well as the clinic, hospital or surgery. The
state is, of course, involved in the reproduction of medical dominance, including regulating the conditions
for the licensing of medical practitioners, but there are also other agencies and institutions involved beyond
the state, and indeed the interests of the medical profession and those of the state often clash.
123
Links: Critiques of Capitalism
Power does not come from the top-down; looking for the repressor is a failed and misdirected
solution
Phelan, Philosophy Professor, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, 1998, (34(2), p. 12
The effect of the Foucauldian analysis of discourses is to call into question the usual picture of oppression as
an opposition between a hegemonic, repressive force and an underclass possessing an unspoken truth. If
power flows not simply top down, but from the bottom up, in capillary fashion, if it is not centralized but
local and diffuse, then we cannot expect to capture it by means of a centralized, systemic theory such as
Marxism or liberalism.
Critiquing power from the top-down is useless – that isn’t where it comes from
Boleau, Philosophy Professor, Seattle U, GENUINE RECIPROCITY AND GROUP AUTHENTICITY,
2000, p. 30
Foucault also argues against Marxist theories which hold that power is held in the hands of the dominant
class. According to Foucault, because power relations so thoroughly permeate society and are reciprocally
conditioned by both the dominant and the dominated, thus producing certain patterns of action, it is
inaccurate to say that power can be possessed, that it is merely repressive, or that it is applied from only the
top-down. Rather, it plays a “directly productive role.” Everyone participates in the overall strategy,
including those who dominate and those who are dominated; thus, domination is not the essence of power.
According to Foucault, then, power is best viewed as a set of patterns, or a matrix, of unequal relations of
force in a given society at any point in time.
Class relationships do not drive power relationships

Smart, Lecturer, FOUCAULT, MARXISM, AND CRITIQUE, 1983, p. 841
In Foucault’s view the mechanisms, techniques, and procedures of power were not formed or invented by
the bourgeoisie, they were not the creation of the intentions of a class seeking to exercise effective forms of
domination; rather mechanisms, techniques, and procedures of power were adopted or deployed from the
moment that they revealed a political and economic utility for the bourgeoisie. Therefore, “(i)t is only if we
grasp these techniques of power and demonstrate the economic advantage or political utility that derives
from them in a given context for specific reasons, that we can understand how these mechanisms come to be
effectively incorporated into the social whole.” This orientation to analysis allows for an unprejudiced
exploration of the grounds on which specific mechanisms, techniques and procedures of power may achieve
a degree of economic and political utility for dominant state apparatuses, oligarchies or ruling classes.
However, whiles it is evidence that there is an acceptance of a possible interconnection between politics and
economy, the analysis of power is not reduced to the general terms of reference of a global theory of the
capitalist mode of production and its laws of motion or operation. Rather, analysis proceeds under the
assumption that there can be no general theory of the connection between power and economic relations,
that connections have to be determined through analysis.
124
*** Answers to Affirmative Arguments ***
125
Answers to Affirmative Link Turns
Violence is endemic to liberal societies
DRG/E383 Andrew Neal, Philosopher, Keele University, FOUCAULT IN GUANTANAMO, 2004, p.
http://www.libertysecurity.org/article199.html, accessed 5/13/05.
What I would like to do here is make some initial moves towards understanding the new glass we find ourselves
looking through. I want to begin to understand how and why these claims to newness, exceptionality and necessity have
proved powerful enough to bring about and legitimate some very exceptional practices. I specifically want to focus on
the employment of torture by U.S. agents and the increased legitimacy these practices have been accorded in that
country. Such practices do not appear to have hurt George W. Bush’s re-election battle. Indeed, the lack of concerted
criticism of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in John Kerry’s campaign seems to reveal a national legitimacy to such
practices. In this inquiry I hope to provide what Zizek calls ‘red ink’ - the critical language by which we can articulate
our outrage and opposition to those practices. It is true that there is nothing new about torture; it is an all-too familiar
practice in many countries. So why pick on American torture? There is moral outrage and horror of course, but why
should they be raised so markedly in the American instance and not in untold others? We must avoid the argument that
such acts are not expected of Americans, of the ‘civilized world’. The colonial subtext of that narrative is patent. We
should instead begin on the basis that there is nothing new about the violence of purportedly liberal regimes and their
conflicting claims to be guided by high principles. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued in 1947, invoking Marx in turn, that
The purity of principles not only tolerates but even requires violence...It is not just a question of knowing what the
liberals have in mind but what in reality is done by the liberal state within and beyond its frontiers. Where it is clear
that the purity of principles is not put into practice, it merits condemnation rather than absolution. Although liberal
states preach peace and rights, they are in material and historical terms very violent. One should not judge a state or
society by its principles alone but also by its practice, and indeed, such principles often ultimately rest on such
practices. It is commonly accepted that U.S. agents have engaged in torture in numerous locations and at numerous
times throughout 20th century history. Current practices can certainly be seen as the continuation of a violence that is
endemic to liberal societies. Nevertheless, there is today something new that invites fresh condemnation and criticism.
The way such practices are being carried out is different to before. What appears acceptable and legitimate to many
today would not have been before September 11th 2001. We might begin by sketching some of the reasons why current
practices appear to be to different to previous forms of liberal violence. First and foremost is the global sovereignty that
is asserted by such acts. There has been much reporting and speculation about the practices that go on in Guantanamo
Bay. Of course, such claims are difficult to verify, but that is not of great importance here. What is important is that
Guantanamo Bay is no deadly secret. Whatever practices are taking place there, they are done with a globally projected
air of impunity. This asserted impunity is an asserted sovereignty. It is an assertion that the United States is an
exception to the rule, that it need pay no heed to international law or norms. It is an assertion that it fears or expects no
serious sanction. The camp’s intended status as a place of exception beyond U.S. law has been made public knowledge.
U.S. agents, and perhaps third parties on their behalf, could be detaining and torturing untold numbers in secret
locations across the globe, and there have been many suggestions that this is indeed happening. However, the existence
of Guantanamo Bay has been officially publicised. Although the happenings inside Guantanamo are carefully guarded,
the camp’s very existence is for domestic and global public consumption. The apparent popular legitimacy of American
torture also characterises the present predicament. There is a great symbolic investment in the institution of
Guantanamo Bay. The discourse of strength and ‘taking the gloves off’ has clearly been successful. George W. Bush
has now won electoral endorsement of his policies and the way he is waging the so-called ‘war on terror’. This suggests
that current American practices have popular legitimacy.
126
Liberal societies will not prevent torture – it is not inconsistent with their values
DRG/E384 Andrew Neal, Philosopher, Keele University, FOUCAULT IN GUANTANAMO, 2004, p.
http://www.libertysecurity.org/article199.html, accessed 5/13/05.
More disturbingly there has been what is referred to as a ‘public debate’ on torture in some intellectual
circles and in the American media. One startling example of a contribution to this debate can be found in a
recent collection of essays by the popular philosopher John Gray, in which he argues for the incorporation of
torture into legal systems. In what is revealing language, he attributes the dubious credit of initiating this
debate to America’s most celebrated defender of civil liberties... Professor Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz
argued in media interviews that nothing in the U.S. Constitution explicitly forbids the use of torture. Gray
enthusiastically proclaims that The world’s finest liberal thinkers are applying themselves to the design of a
modern regime of judicial torture. At a time when civilization is under daily threat, there can be no more
hopeful sign. Gray argues that rather than pushing torture into darkened cellars to hide its moral stain (an
outmoded historical relic, apparently), it should be incorporated into law. This is preferable for liberal
societies and for the universal values they embody because the rule of law is a core liberal value. Torture
was vilified by Enlightenment thinkers for its association with arbitrary power. Today is different, he argues,
because torture will be used to defend the liberal civilization that those thinkers dreamt of, which now exists
in the United States. Gray does not represent a braying mob led astray by jingoistic leaders. He represents
the unshakable sense of moral superiority that lies behind the legitimacy accorded to current American
practices. Gray is at least right in his claim that part of the Enlightenment criticism of torture was that it was
tied up with arbitrary power. Clearly, he does not believe that the present use of torture is tied up with
arbitrary power today. This is of course highly debatable. More profoundly, what Gray’s argument reveals is
that recourse to the language of rights is now highly problematic as a strategy of opposition. Gray represents
the argument that torture is a defence of rights and liberal (and therefore, according to him, universal)
values. Today, Gray argues, torture is used to defend free societies from attack by their enemies. Torture is
now the defence of rights against the enemies of rights, the defence of freedom against ‘the enemies of
freedom’. It seems that we might need to go beyond Merleau-Ponty’s wisdom and question liberal societies
not just on their actual practices, but also on the principles that are now at the service of, and served by,
those practices. There is a danger that if we simply try to reassert liberal values we will, at best, enter into a
rhetorical battle that we will lose, or, at worst, strengthen the discursive weapons of the new liberal
crusaders. Gray is right that Montesquieu and Voltaire used the language of rights against sovereign power.
Today, however, the language of rights is sovereign.
127
Regulating the top is not an effective way to control biopower
Michael Hart (Negri’s buddy), Interview, 2003,
There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our critique of Agamben's (and also
Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a
notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense,
the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva,
although cast on a very different register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are
interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the struggles over forms of life.
The state is an apparatus of domination

Michael Hart (Negri’s buddy), Interview, 2003,
There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty. Our critique of Agamben's (and also
Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a
notion of biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over life. (In this sense,
the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva,
although cast on a very different register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are
interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the struggles over forms of life.
Removing public regulation does not solve private control

Melanie White and Allan Hunt warn us, however, that “the choices forced on subjects can be highly
coercive.” This is precisely because the boundary between the private and the public disappears, since the
regulation of personal conduct becomes intrinsically linked to the regulation of political and civic conduct.
Power thus “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies, and inserts itself into their
actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes, and everyday lives.” Given the extent to which we
believe that the distinction between the unregulated private and liberally regulated public is important, we
have to conclude that we have become trapped in the ‘paradox of freedom.’
128
Indirect mechanisms still result in control
Yet, as Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose forcefully argue, problematization of top-down managerial control is
usually achieved at the expense of locating ‘indirect’ mechanisms which play a very important role in
fabricating and maintaining (self)-government. In other words and especially in the case of governing
economic life, ‘indirect’ mechanisms seek “to act upon and instrumentalize the self-regulating propensities
of individuals in order to ally them with socio-political objectives.”
Neo-liberalism limits reflection outside itself

I shall begin my discussion on rationalities of neo-liberalism with two quotations from Zygmunt Bauman’s
book In Search of Politics for they nicely delineate the space in which I would like to situate myself and
which I shall try to explore in more depth. What makes ‘the neo-liberal world-view sharply different from
other ideologies - indeed, a phenomenon of a separate class - is precisely the absence of questioning; its
surrender to what is seen as the implacable and irreversible logic of social reality.” Bauman concludes this
idea by postulating that “[i]deology used to set reason against nature; the neo-liberal discourse disempowers
reason through naturalizing it.” Neo-liberalism thus becomes a ‘regime of truth’ which justifies everything,
including its own raison d’être, with ‘progress’ and ‘rationalization.’ As a result, the political space which in
principle provides room for questioning or reflexivity, to use a more general term, has been sharply reduced
or, as some would claim, “the concepts of the political and the non-political become blurred,” just as the
concepts of private and public, as we shall see later. Although it would be too pretentious and unrealistic to
purport to provide a comprehensive answer within the confines of such a paper, I shall try to briefly look
through the lenses designed by the Foucauldian governmentality school, so as to theoretically establish how
the rationalities of neo-liberalism are reproduced and institutionalized.
129
Grounding liberation from modernity in modernity fails
Aladjem, Philosophy, Harvard University, POLITICAL THEORY, v. 19(2), 2000, p. 279
Of course, that resistance to the categories of Enlightenment reason poses an extraordinary dilemma for all
postmodern criticism. Not only were such “foundationalist” categories as “truth,” “essence,” “human
nature,” “rationality,” or “consciousness” the instruments of modern power, they have also been the tools of
criticism that hold the promise of “liberation.” Hence there is reason to suspect that the liberation from
modernity that is grounded in the assumptions of modernity may repeat the same mistakes. Says Foucault,
“I’ve always been a little distrustful of the general theme of liberation, to the extent, that, if one does not
treat it with a certain number of safeguards and within certain limits, there is a danger that it will refer back
to the idea that there does exist a nature or human result of a certain number of historical, social, or
economic processes, found itself concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by some repressive mechanism.
In that hypothesis it would suffice to unloosen these repressive locks so that man can be reconciled with
himself.” There is a warning here that the totalizing vision which accepts such a “human foundation” is
always in danger of leading back to totalizing practice – and even the critical dichotomy of leading back to a
totalizing practice.
A reduction in direct state presence just results in a transformation of its power

Once interpreted in this way and especially against the understanding of liberalism which views individual
liberty as and end in itself, the ‘withdrawal of the state’ as strongly advocated by neo-liberal logic could be
seen in a somewhat (if not even very) different light. It is not about the state losing its powers in terms of
domination and control, rather, it is about the state transforming its powers in terms of remolding its
governmental techniques in the form of acquiring new entrepreneurial tasks and consequently ‘delegating’
some of its responsibility onto ‘empowered’ individuals. The blurring between the public and the private or
encroachment on the private, to be more precise, could also be deciphered accordingly. If the classical-
liberal understanding rendered the individual freedom as a precondition for rational government, for the neo-
liberalism the point of reference is no longer natural freedom that we are to respect, but rather “an artificially
created form of behavior,” where the individual “becomes a behaviouristically manipulable being and the
correlative of a governmentality which systematically changes the variables of the ‘environment’ and can
count on the ‘rational choice’ of the individuals.” To sum up, notwithstanding the ethical implications
thereof, the message is simple: neo-liberal power as embodied/articulated in the government technologies
could be perspectivized as functioning in the form of a chain reaction, where individuals become the
vehicles, although more often than not remaining unaware and thus trapped in their own lack of knowledge,
which consequently makes it even more difficult to rehearse the possibility of resistance.
130
Reduction in state activities does not reduce governance
Rasa Ostrauskaite, 2002 (RUBIKON E-JOURNAL, May, http://venus.ci.uw.edu.pl/~rubikon/forum/ostrao.
According to the governmental perspective, “states are not subjects with essences,” that is, they are not
comprised of essential subjective properties. We can thus conceive of them, pace Dillon, as an ensemble of
governmental practices that are to a certain degree constrained by juridical and territorial boundaries. Hence,
having stripped a unified (welfare) state of its alleged ‘unity’ and ‘replaced’ it with multiple fragmented
agencies, we can then conceive, by analogy, of global liberal governance as of a diffuse network with
sovereign states acting as nodal or key points. From this perspective and especially since states are sources
of juridical power, not only are they necessary but they are indispensable for an efficient functioning of the
whole mechanism, (although this is not to suggest that there are no tensions between macroscopic discourses
of sovereignty (Latin super, above) and microscopic processes of governmentality.) States, as a result, are
not only producers of political subjectivity, they are the products of this subjectivity (Latin sub, beneath)
themselves. This, in turn, may lead to what may appear as a self-contradictory statement: the retraction of
state does not lead to less government (at least not in Foucault’s understanding of it.)
“Empowerment” fits within neo-liberal forms of rationality

Following Foucault’s suggestion to consider government as a ‘contact point’ which bridges the techniques
of domination and techniques of the self, one may question whether the new forms of ‘responsibilization’
and even ‘empowerment’ of individuals pursued by governments are not precisely the outcomes of neo-
liberal rationalities, which seem to be on the verge of becoming the (only) rationality. And by rationality I
here mean ‘collective mentality’ or a ‘typical way of perceiving and interpreting the world,’ as defined by
Robert Cox, or ‘unauthentic legitimization,’ to use the Weberian term, or dominant discourse, as Foucault
would argue. To understand modern forms of rule, therefore, one needs, as argued by Miller and Rose, to
investigate not only ‘grand political schema,’ but also general slogans such as ‘state control’ and free market
and, most important, “apparently humble and mundane mechanisms which appear to make it possible to
govern.” The meaningfulness of ‘scientific’ knowledge, ‘cultivation’ of a personality and even social
practices thus should be assessed also in terms of their capacity to become ‘instruments of power’ or, in
other words, in terms of how they help to bring activities of individuals and groups ‘into alignment with
governmental aspirations.”
131
Traditional representative democracy cannot challenge biopower
The dissociation of the interests of political and economic society is one of the problems facing governance.
But it is not the only one. There is also the fact that the conditions in which political authority and legitimacy
are shaped and asserted are changing too. In increasingly individualistic, culturally and socially
heterogeneous societies, the Fordist trade-off between authority and security seems redundant. Governance
expresses a new power paradigm, which depends less on a fixed and static hierarchy than on flexible,
modulable and fluctuating networks. This paradigm shift is not unlike the transition from disciplinary
societies to societies of control described by Foucault. The Fordist society fits the profile of a disciplinary
society quite closely, while the network society is closer to the paradigm of the society of control. This new
paradigm was described by Foucault as "biopower". By biopower he meant the fact that life was now an
object of power. How right he was. If power in the 20th century turned on the issue of the ownership of the
means of production, it is not unreasonable to argue that the issues of the 21st century are rooted in the
ownership of the "life", such as biotechnological patents, for example. Given the ethically and technically
tangled nature of these issues, making choices calls both for the pursuit of a consensus and the development
of a culture of evaluation. None of these changes can be spontaneously handled by traditional representative
democracy.
132
State centered policies fail because power is fluid
Michel Foucault, Director Institute Francais at Hamburg, 1977 (POWER/KNOWLEDGE: SELECTED
INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1972-1977, p.
http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm)
Your study is concentrated on all those micro-powers that are exercised at the level of daily life. Aren't you
neglecting the State apparatus here? It's true that since the late nineteenth century Marxist and 'Marxised'
revolutionary movements have been given special importance to the State apparatus as the stake of their
struggle. What were the ultimate consequences of this? In order to be able to fight a State which is more than
just a government, the revolutionary movement must posses equivalent politico-military forces and hence
must constitute itself as a party, organized internally in the same way as a State apparatus with the same
mechanisms of hierarchies and organization of powers. This consequence is heavy with significance.
Secondly, there is the question, much discussed within Marxism itself, of the capture of the State apparatus:
should this be considered as a straight forward take-over, accompanied by appropriate modifications, or
should it be the opportunity for the destruction of that apparatus? You know how the issue was finally
settled. The State apparatus must be undermined, but not completely undermined, since the class struggle
will not be brought to an immediate end without the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Hence the State apparatus must be kept sufficiently intact for it to be employed against the class enemy. So
we reach a second consequence: during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State apparatus
must to some extent at least be maintained. Finally then, as a third consequence, in order to operate these
State apparatuses which have been taken over but both destroyed, it will be necessary to have recourse to
technicians and specialists. And in order to do this one has to call upon the old class which is acquainted
with the apparatus, namely the bourgeoisie. This clearly is what happened in the USSR. I don't claim at all
that the State apparatus is unimportant, but it seems to me that among all the conditions for avoiding a
repetition of the Soviet experience and preventing the revolutionary process from running into the ground,
one of the first things that has to be understood is that power isn't localized in the State apparatus and that
nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside
the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level, are not also changed.
Disciplinary practices manage resistance

Kathryn R. Fox, Sociologist, University of Vermont, SOCIAL PROBLEMS, February 1999, p. 95.
Discipline implies agency and suggests struggle. The use of professional, disciplining discourses to manage
individuals arouses resistance, and is thus dynamic. However, part of disciplinary practice is the
management of resistance. In CSC, resistance is regarded as evidence of the "truth" of the discourse, an
indication of extraordinary criminal thinking. Painless conversions are regarded with suspicion. For
example, early on in a Stage I group, an inmate demonstrated uncanny mastery of the program's
terminology. A facilitator told me privately: "I am not sure how real it is. He's got the words down, but it
came a little too easily." Resistance is expected before any "real" transformation can occur, thereby exposing
the tension between overt control and cognitive control.
133
Reform is co-opted
Michael McCubbin, Ph.D., SWEET WORDS THAT HURT, Spring/Summer, 2000, p.
http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/mccub1.html.
The trend among mental health planners over the last decade has been to adopt the discourse of democracy
and inclusiveness. But usually this discourse has remained symbolic, or worse: coopting users' voices -
drawing them into "cooperation" with the system and muting their opposition to its disempowering features.
Too often we have seen health authorities say that they have "community participation" on their governing
bodies - leading many to assume that this includes user participation - when the "community" persons are
actually government paid health and social service professionals. Or, if there is user representation it is token
and the user representative is snowed under by professional power, arrogance, agendas and technocratic
language.
Reforms just legitimize the system

Douglas Smith, MD, WHY OUTPATIENT COMMITMENT LAWS CHANGE (ALMOST) NOTHING,
December, 19, 1999, p. http://www.antipsychiatry.org/kendra-c.htm.
So let's see Kendra's Law in New York and similar laws in other states for what they are: symbolic victories
of those who favor using psychiatry to violate human rights. There are at least two dangers of these new
laws: First, their enactment shows that our lawmakers still believe myths such as (1) mental illness is a real
illness, and it deprives people of free will and of the ability to make rational decisions, (2) mental illnesses
are caused by biochemical imbalances that are corrected by psychiatric drugs, and (3) psychiatrists are
always honest and are experts in their field, so their "diagnoses" determining who is "mentally ill" and who
will become violent are reliable, making safeguards against unnecessary or unjust or oppressive use of
involuntary commitment unnecessary. We need to be more effective in our efforts to make lawmakers,
judges, mental health professionals, and ourselves realize that physicians are not perfect examples of
honesty and integrity, that "mental illness" is not a valid concept, that psychiatry is a pseudo-science, that
unjust psychiatric commitment is commonplace, that psychiatrists routinely violate human rights, and that
psychiatric "treatment" usually harms rather than helps people. Second, these outpatient commitment laws
may get psychiatrists and other mental health "professionals" in the habit of incarcerating people only
because they refuse to take psychiatric drugs when in the past they might have left us alone. All psychiatric
drugs are harmful. Nobody should be taking these drugs. If we can't stop the lawful use of coercive
psychiatry, we may need to start an "underground railroad" similar to that used to help blacks escape slavery
during the period shortly before the civil war when slavery was legal. Does anybody know where victims of
psychiatric oppression can go to hide from those who would harm them with involuntary commitment or
forced use of psychiatric drugs? Does anybody want to volunteer to provide transportation to such a safe
haven?
134
Discourse Key
Discourses form social reality
Colin Gordon, afterward to Michel Foucault, POWER/ KNOWLEDGE, 1980, p.245.
This phenomenon consists in the singular emergence in Western thought during the past four centuries of
discourses which construct programmes for the formation of a social reality. The existence of these
discourses, whose object-domains are defined simultaneously as a target area for intervention and a
functioning totality to be brought into existence, has a significance for historical analysis which prior to
Foucault seems never to have been fully exploited. Our world does not follow a programme, but we live in a
world of programmes, that is to say in a world traversed by the effects of discourses whose object (in both
senses of the word) is the rendering rational isable, transparent and programmable of the real.
Discourse is a form of social power

Colin Gordon, afterward to Michel Foucault, POWER/ KNOWLEDGE, 1980, p.244-5.
First, in his 1970 lecture The Order of Discourse, Foucault shows how the rules of formation of discourses
are linked to the operation of a particular kind of social power. Discourses not only exhibit immanent
principles of regularity, they are also bound by regulations enforced through social practices of
appropriation, control and 'policing'. Discourse is a political commodity.
Power arises at multiple levels including the linguistic and epistemological

Todd May, Professor of Philosophy, Clemson, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF POSTSTRUCTURALIST
ANARCHISM, 1994, p.94-5.
The kind of politics that genealogy yields is a politics that is more local and diffuse than the large-scale
politics that is better suited to grand narratives. Genealogy promotes resistance at the diffuse points at which
practices occur, intersect, and give rise to oppressive relations. It struggles not only on the economic or state
levels, but on the epistemological, psychological, linguistic, sexual, religious, psychoanalytic, ethical,
informational (etc.) levels as well. It struggles on these levels not because multiple struggles will create a
society without the centralization of power, but because power is not centralized, because across the surface
of those levels are the sites at which power arises.
135
Impacts: Disciplinary Power is Very Bad
The expansion of biopower via disciplinary power is what triggers genocide
Michael Goodhart, U Pittsburgh, 2001 (POLITY, Winter 2001 v34 i2 p241(17))
Foucault's own discourse maintains an ambivalent relationship to this "war of the races." On the one hand, it
serves as an example of a subjugated knowledge to be resurrected. This is a discourse of opposition and
represents an alternative to the still dominant discourse of sovereignty visible, according to Foucault, in
Hobbes and Machiavelli, and persisting in many Marxist notions of power circulating during Foucault's
time. On the other hand, the war of the races" takes on new forms centering upon the purification of the
species with the institution of the regime of biopower in the next two centuries to reach its horrifying apex
with the Holocaust. (He suggests also that class struggle" is certainly not free of such fascist dangers.) Hence
Foucault simultaneously promotes and evidently practices an animation of war and antagonism in discourse
and in practice to counter the pacifying and subjugating effects of disciplinary normalization and the rhetoric
of sovereignty where power purports to function monolithically and seamlessly outside of rather than within
subjects; and warns that one must not accept these racialized divisions, instituted through the so-called
"sciences of man," which aim to classify the abnormal, mad, homosexual, neurotic, or other problematic
elements of the social body.
Disciplinary biopower is the foundation of the holocaust,

D. Milchman, Philosophy Professor, Queens, PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM, v. 22, 1, p. 106
Where does Nazism fit in the development trajectory of technologies of domination, and bio-power, that
have shaped our late modernity? For Foucault, Nazism is the culmination point (paroxysne) of the
development of the new mechanisms of power set in place since the 18th century…disciplinary power, bio-
power, all that traverses and sustains every aspect of Nazi society. But let us not forget about Foucault’s
allusion to thanatpolitics. War, and mass murder, to becomes an imperative for a regime based on biopower:
War? How can one not only make the war on one’s adversaries, but expose one’s own citizen’s to war,
making them kill by the millions…if not, precisely, by activating the themes of racism? Here, the role of the
Nazi regime is clear in Foucault’s discourse: “You must understand, then, in these conditions, how and why
the most murderous states are, at the same time, necessarily, the most racist. Surely, here we must refer to
the example of Nazism. Here, the role of the Nazi regime is clear in Foucault’s discourse: “You must
understand, then, in these conditions, how and why the most murderous states are, at the same time,
necessarily the most racist. Surely, we must refer to the example of Nazism. For Foucault, the lethality of
Nazism was heightened by its infusion of a hyper-modern analytics of sexuality (concomitant with
biopower, and “racism in its modern, biologizing, statist form”) and a more ancient “symbolics of blood,” an
overlapping that characterizes the instantiation of regimes of power: “Nazism was doubtless the most
cunning and the most naïve (and former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms
of a disciplinary power. A eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the way of extension and intensification
of micro-powers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control (etatisation) was accomplished by the generic explanation
of a superior blood; the latter implied both the systematic genocide of theirs and the risk of exposing oneself to total
sacrifice.” The fantasies of blood incarnated in Nazism, however, could only assume so massively lethal a form
because of the technologies of domination, and the bio-power, within which they were firmly ensconced.
136
Impacts: Biopower Causes Extinction
Power and bio-power make genocide and extinction possible
Paul Rabinow, 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 so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of
wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the
one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic
situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the
underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics
of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle that defines
the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at
stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, this is
not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
The expression of humanist biopower will destroy the planet

James Bernauer, philosophy professor, Boston College, 1990 (MICHAEL FOUCAULT'S FORCE OF
FLIGHT: TOWARD AN ETHICS OF THOUGHT, pp. 141-2)
This capacity of power to conceal itself cannot cloak the tragedy of the implications contained in Foucault's
examination of its functioning. While liberals have fought to extend rights and Marxists have denounced the
injustices of capitalism, a political technology, acting in the interests of a better administration of life, has
produced a politics that places man's "existence as a living being in question." The very period that
proclaimed pride in having overthrown the tyranny of monarchy, that engaged in an endless clamor for
reform, that is confident in the virtues of its humanistic faith -- this period's politics created a landscape
dominated by history's bloodiest wars. What comparison is possible between a sovereign's authority to take a
life and a power that, in the interest of protecting a society's quality of life, can plan, as well as develop the
means for its implementation, a policy of mutually assured destruction? Such a policy is neither an
aberration of the fundamental principles of modern politics nor an abandonment of our age's humanism in
favor of a more primitive right to kill; it is but the other side of a power that is "situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population. The bio-political project of
administering and optimizing life closes its circle with the production of the Bomb. "The atomic situation is
now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of a
power to guarantee and individuals continued existence. " The solace that might have been expected from
being able to gaze at scaffolds empty of the victims of a tyrant's vengeance has been stolen form us by the
noose that has tightened around each of our own necks.
137
Impacts: Biopower Causes Totalitarianism
Biopower is totalitarian because there is no escape
I would like to argue that a consideration of Foucault's predilection for military terminology and the
deployment of war as a "grid of intelligibility" for understanding social relations must be thought of as a
civil war, because we are no longer on the terrain of sovereignty where the relationship between core and
periphery is given and stable. Biopolitics functions differently from sovereignty in that there is no outside to
biopower (Hardt 140). Sovereign territory always exists in relation to its frontiers, their maintenance and
expansion. Whereas punishment under sovereignty can be torture, execution, or exile, the punitive measures
of biopolitics consist in discipline which transforms, normalizes, and subsumes difference--there is nowhere
else to go, exile is impossible since divisions are necessarily internal to the social body.
138
Impacts: Holocaust
Biopower eliminates any value to human life. The human lives the plan saves are meaningless.
Vote on presumption
Boleau, 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 body’s dispersion into a complex
myriad of political strategies and techniques. In contrast to Aristotelian man, who was (for some) self-
grounded, Foucault sees modern man as “animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in
question. In other words, Foucault sees individuals as social creations: no individual is his or her own
ground.
Biopolitical relations culminate in genocidal practices

D. Milchman, Philosophy Professor, Queens, PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM, v. 22, 1, 1998, p.
111
We believe that the regimes of practices that shape what Foucault sees as the carceral side of modernity,
constitute the historical matrix from within which Nazism and the Holocaust emerged. The prevailing view
within contemporary social theory is that Nazism, and the Holocaust, was an historical aberration, an
atavistic revolt against modernity. What is so original in the Foucauldian vision is an historical
contextualization which firmly situates Nazism and the “Final Solution,” within the carceral archipalge, that
has been generated by modernity itself. This carceral archipelage is the outcome of a major shift in the way
in which power, and domination, is exercised: from a negative power to episodically punished, and to take
life, exercised by the sovereign, to a positive power to administer,, manage, and regulate the intimate details
of life – and death – of whole populations, in the form of technologies of domination, exercised by a
multitude of governmental institutions. The result is what Foucault terms biopower.
139
Impacts: Holocaust (Cont)
State power to “care” for populations is the same power that enables the to commit genocide
D. Milchman, Philosophy Professor, Queens, PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM, v. 22, 1, p. 104
In several lectures, and in his HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, Foucault began to develop the idea that the state
which had progressively taken as its task the ‘care” of the population in all its dimensions may also be
massacre it. “Since the population is nothing mare than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of
course, the state is entitle to slaughter it if necessary. So the revere of biopolitics is thanatopoltiics. A
formidable power of death in w2hich political regimes inflict “holocaust on their own populations” is, for
Foucault, 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. Such is the
outcome when the stathification of power, and the governmentalization of the state, make it possible to
“produce docile bodies.”
The nazi eugenics movement was a triumph of power over life

Richard Bernauer, Philosophy Professor, Boston College, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON MICHAEL
FOUCAULT, 1999, p. 21
The ethic of Nazi Socialism is regarded as a form of applied biology. The asceticism of Himmler’s ethic was
not just the rigorous discipline of the SS man’s formation, with its stress on duty and obedience, but the
practice of killing as a moral imperative to enhance biological life. A eugenics for one racial body which
entailed a “euthanasia’ for others. And the goal of all of this – to which Nazi anti-Semitism was itself
subordinated – was a definitive biological purification for history, a revitalization of life itself, its triumph
over death.
140
Impacts: Biopower Causes War
Biopower produces war in the name of the people
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)
The 'principle underlying the tactics of battle' defining 'the strategy of states' as bio-politics, is not military
and does not derive from military theory. As a plan for 'life and survival,' it belongs more properly to
evolution and to what Darwin called 'the struggle for existence,' which he use . . . in a large and metaphorical
sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the
life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny (Darwin, 1958: 74-75).
Wars in the name of the population produce devastating consequences

The modern administration of death is situated and exercised at the very level of life itself, that is, 'it is
manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life'
(Foucault, 1978: 136). It might indeed seem paradoxical that power should exercise the prerogative of taking
life in the name of preserving it - a contradiction abated by its restricted use of the death penalty (Foucault,
1978: 138). And yet it is just as logical for power to exercise that prerogative, or rather deploy that strategy,
at least evolutionarily speaking, in cases where its own survival, its own potential and growth, is in question.
Such are instances of war, which, unlike la peine de mort, have become more numerous in recent history, or
at least more destructive in their wagering the life of a population at large: wars were never as bloody as
they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such
holocausts on their own populations... It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies, that so many regimes
have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed... 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 principle underlying the tactics of battle - that one has to
be capable of killing in order to go on living - has become the principle that defines the strategy of states; at
stake is the biological existence of a population.
141
Impacts: Biopower Supports Capitalism
Biopower supports capitalism through rendering bodies docile
John Pratt, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, Massey University, 1998 (FEATURES: POWER
AND RESISTANCE, http://www.massey.ac.nz/~nzsrda//nzssreps/journals/sites/pratt14.htm)
Against this, the new order of capitalist society demanded a political economy of the body organized around
principles of heredity and life. In this new society, power was not to be used to take life or to destroy bodies
but instead to manage them - to render them "docile", to make them productive, to make them useful. And
this was why sexuality became so important from this time: it provided a means of regulating the conduct of
individual bodies and of ensuring the health and efficiency of the population as a whole (hence the
significance and influence of eugenics in the development of sexual discourses from the early years of the
19th century, (Foucault 1979, Pratt 1981)). But not only would power be used to ensure that bodies would be
made useful: it would also be used to ensure that there would be no wastage. From now on, no-one would be
allowed to stand outside of society as outcasts, rebels, outlaws and so on. This was one of the reasons for the
shift away from penalties of exclusion, banishment and destruction for law breaking that had been prevalent
in pre-capitalist society to penalties of inclusion and incorporation that began to develop and permeate the
penal system of modern societies (initially in the form of the prison, but eventually in a range of community-
based alternatives to it - see later). It represented a politics of heredity and life in that the new ruling class -
the bourgeoisie - came to stake their claim to power by reference not to ancient lineage but to how much
wealth they possessed, how much they had been left and how much they could pass on to their successive
generations: equally, life had to be managed in such a way that it could be used to reproduce this wealth.
142
Impacts: Biopower Supports the State
Biopower supports a strong state
James D. Marshall, The University of Auckland, 1995 (FOUCAULT AND NEO-LIBERALISM:

BIOPOWER AND BUSNOPOWER, http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-Yearbook/95_docs/marshall.html)
Foucault also develops the notion of governmentality as the art of government or, as it is sometimes referred
to, the "reason of state." This notion "refers to the state, to its nature and to its own rationality." He sees the
technologies of domination and the self as being the techniques used "to make of the individual a significant
element for the state." By "government" Foucault should be understood as meaning something close to "the
conduct of conduct." This is a form of activity which attempts or aims at the conduct of persons; it is the
attempt to shape, to guide, or to affect not only the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute
people in such ways that they can be governed. In Foucault's work this activity of governance could cover
the relations of self to self, self to others, relations between institutions and social communities, and the
exercise of political sovereignty. Governmentality is obtained not by a totalizing deterministic or oppressive
form of power, but by bio-power directed in a totalizing manner at whole populations and, at one and the
same time, at individuals so that they are both individualized and normalized. Here one locates the human
sciences and their "truths," and the institutions or disciplinary blocks (including education) in which these
truths have been developed, played, and continue to play, a crucially important role.
Biopower is the power of the state over life

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, entitled La Volonté 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 uncynically as
instrumental in attaining justice for the good of the citizen and state, 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.
143
*** Alternatives ***
144
Alternative: Chaos
The alternative is a natural state of chaos
Bruce Arrigo, Professor of Criminology, Christopher Williams, PHD Candidate in Psychiatry, 1999
(SOCIAL JUSTICE, Spring, p. 182)
Chaos theory informs us that no one state can be regarded as a normal, natural, inevitable pattern of social
life toward which all individuals or systems converge. Contrarily, society and its constituent segments must
be examined in light of the disorderly, divergent, and nonlinear dynamics that define it. Chaos theory claims
that these dynamics are propelled by changes in key parameters that can incite a stable, linearly progressing
system into a state of chaos (i.e., orderly disorder). These diverse social parameters consume the society
around us. Consuming variables such as economic inequalities, political privileges, power relations, and
other social forces are all critical factors that, under severe conditions, become catalysts for the chaotic
dynamics inherent in all systems. Controlling these parameters has traditionally been regarded as integral to
the containment of unpredictability - a condition viewed mostly in modern science as unacceptable.
Repressing the presence of disorder (e.g., through the disciplinary power of medicine and law) neutralizes
the prospects for society to assume its potentially chaotic nature. As Foucault (1965, 1977, 1990) reminds
us, this clinicolegal endeavor has historical significance. Indeed, our critical examination of contemporary
civil confinement practices reveals just how profound the repression of chaos can be.
Chaos is necessary to prevent the death of society

Bruce Arrigo, Professor of Criminology, Christopher Williams, PHD Candidate in Psychiatry, 1999
(SOCIAL JUSTICE, Spring, p. 183)
As Young asserts, negative feedback loops "defeat flexibility and change; thus end[ing] in death for society,
which uses them as logic for social control." The "death" of society that Young refers to results from a lack
of growth or the reproduction of only equilibrium conditions. Chaologists believe that "healthy" systems
need chaos. Adaptation to changing social conditions requires a flexibility that, in turn, depends on choices.
Homeostatic or equilibrium conditions achieved by way of social control negate choices and, thus, the
possibility of growth through adaptation.
145
Alternative: Criticism
Criticism enables resistance to biopower
Sara Hayden, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Montana, WOMEN'S
STUDIES IN COMMUNITY, Spring1999, p. 30.
In his early writings, Foucault focused on the ways in which bio-power subjugated the individual, hence
leading some scholars to criticize his work for implying that "the hold of disciplinary power is total."
Toward the end of his career, however, Foucault began to emphasize the potential for resistance. Foucault
maintained that power relations 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 always possible 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 any practice or discourse can take place exterior to relations of
power. Rather, resistance lies in bringing to light the ways in which power operates "in an effort to create a
critical distance on it." Once we have achieved an understanding of how power functions, we can "modify
its hold."
Plebian resistance is necessary to challenge power

Boileau, 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 of the power regime. But Foucault believes that we can recognize increases in
liberation (which is synonymous with freedom), if we dispense with the search for truth and focus on a new
kind of resistance. For Foucault, resistance can be accomplished locally, by the insurrection of subjugated
knowledges and by plebian resistance. As explained in Chapter Three, plebeian resistance acts as the limit
and as an inherent counter-effect to the effects of power. But plebian resistance does not expose any kind of
independent or ultimate truth. It only exposes and rearranges power relations. With regard to exposing any
kind of ultimate truth, local resistance suffers from the dame deficiency as global transformation – they both
cannot overcome the fact that truth is regime-relative. This plebeian resistance combats the modern power-
knowledge-subjectivity formation by creating the are of existence where we act ethically according to an
aesthetic ideal.
146
Resistance disrupts power
Peter Atterton, philosophy professor, University of California San Diego, HISTORY OF THE HUMAN
SCIENCES 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 or less unfettered sway without anything being able to interrupt or escape it?
The question is not Foucaldian, not least because it presents power as a sovereign unitary force given at the
outset. As we have seen, if bio-power can be understood vectorially as having force and direction,
dominance and strategy, it is only through the resolution of a complex strategical situation within a societal
body as a multiplicity of power relations each with their own local aims and objectives. This does not rule
out the possibility of different tactics whose 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 that they serve as a local center around which multifarious disciplinary technologies may coalesce so
as eventually to integrate them into an overall strategy of administrative control. All the same, this does not
mean that, prior to their being integrated or resolved in this manner - 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
understood merely as another element in the functioning of power, i.e. 'only a reaction, a rebound, forming
with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
They are disruptive and serve as the source of power's ultimate instability.
Local resistance is needed to solve

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 apparatuses and institutions, without being
exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and
individual 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."
147
Resistance can de-center power's stranglehold
HUMAN SCIENCES JOURNAL, 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 or less unfettered sway without anything being able to interrupt or escape it?
The question is not Foucaldian, not least because it presents power as a sovereign unitary force given at the
outset. As we have seen, if bio-power can be understood vectorially as having force and direction,
dominance and strategy, it is only through the resolution of a complex strategical situation within a societal
body as a multiplicity of power relations each with their own local aims and objectives. This does not rule
out the possibility of different tactics whose 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 that they serve as a local center around which multifarious disciplinary technologies may coalesce so
as eventually to integrate them into an overall strategy of administrative control. All the same, this does not
mean that, prior to their being integrated or resolved in this manner - 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
understood merely as another element in the functioning of power, i.e. 'only a reaction, a rebound, forming
with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
They are disruptive and serve as the source of power's ultimate instability.
It is possible to resist power

Sara Hayden, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Montana, 1999
(WOMEN'S STUDIES IN COMMUNITY, Spring, p. 30)
In his early writings, Foucault focused on the ways in which bio-power subjugated the individual, hence
leading some scholars to criticize his work for implying that "the hold of disciplinary power is total"
(Sawicki, 1991, p. 71). Toward the end of his career, however, Foucault began to emphasize the potential for
resistance. Foucault maintained that power relations are everywhere-they are exercised in myriad ways
throughout the social field (Haber, 1996, p. 140). 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 always possible to modify its
hold, in determined conditions and following a precise strategy" (as cited in Sawicki, 1991, pp. 24-25). From
a Foucauldian perspective, then, resistance does not imply the transcendence of power. Indeed, it is a fallacy
to assume that any practice or discourse can take place exterior to relations of power. Rather, resistance lies
in bringing to light the ways in which power operates "in an effort to create a critical distance on it"
(Sawicki, 1991, p. 99). Once we have achieved an understanding of how power functions, we can "modify
its hold."
148
Alternative: Counter-Movements
Counter-movements are possible
Thus Foucault rightly urges us to give up seeing one discourse on the side of power and another discourse,
resistance, opposite it and always in a position of subordination. Discourses may be honed and adapted
according to the field of relations in which they find themselves. And if, certainly within the institutions,
they are nearly always deployed for disciplinary ends and selected on the basis of bio-power itself, this does
not rule out the possibility of a discursive strategy enjoying a protective similarity in appearance to another,
analogous to what biologists call 'Batesian mimicry.' Modern power relations are thus characterized not by
total domination, but mutual provocation and struggle in an institutional environment that is unfavorable to
forms of life whose recalcitrance and intransigence towards disciplinary control gives rise to counter-
movements, counter-strategies, realignments and regroupings of the social field as so many different locales
of resistance. 'Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or
pure law of the revolutionary'. There is a plurality of resistances serving to maintain society in a perpetual
state of tension and struggle. Wherever actual cases of the latter are resolved, usually all too predictably in
line with established power as holder of the keys to the carceral lodgings (psychiatric ward, hospital, prison,
etc.), then new relations of what Foucault calls 'agonism' - 'a relationship which is at the same time
reciprocal incitation and struggle' - are constantly flaring up to take their place.
149
Alternative: Interruptive Politics
Interruptive politics solve
Michel Foucault, Director, Institute Francais at Hamburg, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE,
1969, p. http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm.
Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogeneous manifestations of a single mind or
of a collective mentality, beneath the stubborn development of a science striving to exist and to reach
completion at the very outset, beneath the persistence of a particular genre, form, discipline, or theoretical
activity, one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions. Interruptions whose status and nature vary
considerably. There are the epistemological acts and thresholds described by Bachelard: they suspend the
continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time, cut
it off from its empirical origin and its original motivations, cleanse it of its imaginary complicities; they
direct historical analysis away from the search for silent beginnings, and the never-ending tracing-back to
the original precursors, towards the search for a new type of rationality and its various effects. There are the
displacements and transformations of concepts: the analyses of G. Canguilhem may serve as models; they
show that the history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of its progressive refinement, its
continuously increasing rationality, its abstraction gradient, but that of its various fields of constitution and
validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and
matured. There is the distinction, which we also owe to Canguilhem, between the microscopic and
macroscopic scales of the history of the sciences, in which events and their consequences are not arranged in
the same way: thus a discovery, the development of a method, the achievements, and the failures, of a
particular scientist, do not have the same incidence, and cannot be described in the same way at both levels;
on each of the two levels, a different history is being written.
150
*** Answers to Affirmative Arguments ***
151
152
Answers to: “Habermas’ Attack on Foucault”
Habermas has not been able to avoid grounding his theories in universal rationality either
Flyvberg, Development and Planning Professor, BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, 49(2), pp. 220-1
Such critique for relativism is correct, if by relativistic we mean unfounded in norms that can be rationally
and universally grounded: and this is what Habermas (1987: 294) means when he criticizes Foucault for not
giving an “account of the normative foundations” for his thinking. By this standard, however, Haberemas’
own work is also relativistic. As we have seen, Habermas has not, so far, been able to demonstrate that
rational and universal grounding of his discourse ethics is possible, he has only postulated such grounding.
And Habermas is not alone with this problem. Despite more than two thousand years of attempts by
rationalistic philosophers, no one has been able to live up to Plato’s injunction that to avoid relativism our
thinking must be rationally and universally grounded. That reason may be that Plato was wrong.
Foucault rejects relativism – he believes strong in situational ethics

Flyvberg, Development and Planning Professor, BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, 49(2), pp. 220-1)
Employing this line of reasoning, Foucault rejects both relativism and founationalism and replaces them by
situational ethics, i.e., by context. “With explicit reference to Kant and Habermas, Foucualt (1984b) says
that unlike these two thinkers he is “not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a
science.”
153
Answers to: “Habermas’ Attack on Foucault” (Cont)
Genealogy does not need a universal standard
Moss, Philosophy Professor, University of Melbourne, THE LATER FOUCAULT, p. 78
Thus, unlike Habermas, both the critical theorists and Foucault refuse to succumb to the “blackmail” of the
Enlightenment by either being simply “for” or “against” reason. Instead, Foucault insists on the historical
nature of reason and the contradictions and counter-traditions that are to be found within the history of
reason. This brings out the central question of the debate between Habermas and Foucault, according to
Hoy: whether there is a need for Foucault’s genealogical studies to be backed by an abstract theory of
reason. Hoy is critical of Habermas’ objection that the genealogists needs some sort of external standard to
conduct criticism. For instance, Habermas claims that the preference for pluralism and others expressed by
Foucault is just that – a preference, which itself cannot escape the idea that there is still a choice involve in
the liking for pluralism. Thus, he argues, if this pluralism is not to involve a vicious relativism that allows all
forms of social practices no matter how destructive, there will have to be some standards which transcend
the plurality of different communities. What this approach to genealogy fails to appreciate is the sense of
genealogy as a version of “internal critique,” not unlike modern forms of cultural anthropology. Hoy argues
that on this interpretation, a genealogical analysis might serve to highlight the hidden assumptions operating
in a social practice. For this reason, the genealogist does not have to deny that some sort of consensuality in
the face of Habermasian objections (that would be blackmail). Quoting Foucault, Hoy argues that it is not a
matter of being…”for consensuality, but one most be against nonconsensuality.” The genealogist is thus not
committed to the values of consensuality and community on the basis of there being universal values which
underlie the communicative competence of community members. The values of community and solidarity
have a moral grip on us for contingent and not universal reasons.
154
Answers to: “Habermas’ Attack on Foucault” (Cont)
Habermas ignores the productive nature of power and advocates an impossible utopia that
denies voice to feminists
Jessica Kulynych, Winthrop U, POLITY, Winter, 1997, p. 323-4
However, Habermas’ discursive formulation is inadequate primarily because it does not explicitly and
rigorously attend to the disciplinary effects of contemporary societies explained so creatively by Foucault.
Habermas has been routinely criticized for ignoring the productive nature of contemporary power. His
juxtaposition of system and life-world in THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATION ACTION relies on a
separation of good power from bad (communicative power v. steering media), and posits an ideal speech
situation freed from the distortions of power. More importantly, Habermas’s theorization of discursive
participation is exceedingly abstract and does not adequately attend to the ways in which power informs
discourse. A number of theorists have effectively argued that women and men do not stand equal in relation
to language. For example, Linda Zerilli argues that discursive space is a “fraternal community of unique and
symbolic dimensions.” Women utilize language in this discursive world “whose ‘common’ and symbolic
language….enables one user to understand what another is saying; just as it compels each speaker to
constrain himself within the limits of an existing political vocabulary.” In this case the content of speech is
systematically limited in direct violation of the required conditions for the ideal speech situation. The
foundations of communication are not the ideal equal relationships that Habermas imagines, but are instead
an exclusive, learned, and gendered, symbolic heritage. As Carole Pateman points out, women enter into
public discussion on a very tenuous plane. The symbolic heritage that defines the meaning of key
communicative concepts such a consent systematically excludes women from the category of individuals
capable of consenting. The mere existence of a debate over whether “no means no” with regard to
consensual sexual relations and rape is a manifestation of this heritage. Women can hardly be seen as equal
participants when the do not have the same opportunity to express intent.
Habermas provides no route to achieve communicative rationality

Flyvberg, Development and Planning Professor, BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, 49(2), 2002, pp.
215
This is the fundamental political dilemma in Habermas’ thinking: he describes to us the utopia of
communicative rationality but not how to get there. Habermase (1990: 209) himself mentions the lack of
“crucial institutions,” lack of crucial socialization” and “poverty, abuse, and degradation” as barriers to
discursive decision making. But he has little to say about the relations of power that create these barriers and
how power may be changed in order to begin the kinds of institutional and educational change,
improvements in welfare, and the enforcement of basic human rights that could help lower the barriers. In
short, Habermas lacks the kind of concrete understanding of relations of power that is needed for political
change.
155
Answers to: “Foucault Threatens Feminism”
Foucault’s ethics are relevant for feminists
Helen Stratford is a researcher in architecture and critical theory at the University of Nottingham, School of
the Built Environment, 2002 (RESOURCES FOR FEMINIST RESEARCH, Fall, p. 2003)
Ultimately, if Foucault himself glosses over gender configurations of power, his ethics, grounded in a
resistance to whatever configuration totalitarian power might take, can prove relevant for feminists in
contemporary society where, as Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby have argued, the two regimes of dominating
and generative power coexist and often intertwine. Indeed, as Couzens-Hoy concludes, although Foucault
says there is no social existence without power relations, this "does not entail that particular, oppressive
power relations are necessary." Furthermore, his rejection of the notion of universal progress, does not
necessarily "abandon the hope for emancipation, if by that one means the resistance at particular points to
local exercises of power." Here then, resistance is not restrained to immutable boundaries, it aims to search
for pertinent and progressive ways of considering the fluidity of boundaries among people which make it
possible for difference to be embraced.
Foucauldian criticism is critical to any feminist kritik

Phelan, Philosophy Professor, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, 1998, (34(2), pp. 421-2
Michael Foucault was one of the most controversial and provocative thinkers of this century. Though he
died much too early, he left us an approach to social thought that pulled together many of the threads left
dangling between Marx and Nietsche. His work on sexuality, especially that in the first volume of the
HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, has been of interest to feminist theorists, for he reconceived the terrain of the
battle over sexuality that is so central to modern Western society. Nonetheless, many feminists have rejected
Foucault’s work. Some have done so because he himself failed to understand or support some feminist
perspectives and struggles. Others have suggested that the very foundation of his work is defective for
feminists, as it is for all political struggle. This view does not separate feminist objectives from other ones; it
asserts that Foucault’s ideas are equally inadequate for any real struggle. This study will argue that
Foucault’s work is indeed vital for the development of feminist theory, if not for every feminist issue. This
does not mean that we must accept his authority on everything, nor dismiss him completely when he fails us;
the impulse behind such reactions is one that he himself enables us to see and critique. We must see him as
an ally because be ultimately provides the seeds of a democratic theory and a reconceptualization of the
values of freedom and individuality that have such a fundamental role in feminist theory and activity.
156
Turn – the counter critique is gendered. This allows gender oppression to continue
Zipin, Education Professor, UW Madison, FOUCAULT’S CHALLENGE, 1998, pp. 323-4
Butler rejects binarized “gender” propensities that some feminists essentialize as foundational grounds for
women’s agency to transform male institutions (e.g., women’s capacity for “caring”). Says Butler (1990),
“There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics, for gender ontologies always
operation…as a normative injunctions..setting the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered
bodies come into cultural intelligibility. Ontology is thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that
operates insidisously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground. She continues….
“Foundations simultaneously conceal normative biases within assertions of universal truth about nature or
history. Butler thus calls for feminist research and politics that are cannot found themselves on ontologies,
but vigorously deconstruct the normative latent in such metafictions.
Turn – focusing on notions of gender just reifies power relations

Zipin, Education Professor, UW Madison, FOUCAULT’S CHALLENGE, 1998, pp. 279-80)
So it is in making the suggestion that there is no outside of power that Foucault poses his most poignant
warning to critical analysis. If criticism, that of feminism included, sets out to right the scales of power
merely by taking sides in a world of those who “have” power and those who do not, of dominators and
dominated, it may preserve old dichotomies of power in spite of itself. Even a metaphysics of gender runs
that risk, not because it has always focused on gender but because it is a metaphysics of that Western variety
that mirrors its own origins of domination. For feminism, then, as Judith Butler’s work suggests, Foucault
sharpens the warning that the analysis which privileges “gender,” or woman as “other,” may still speak form
within the paradigm that made the both what they are; it may confirm that “dyadic gender system” by
making a metaphysical standard out of it.
157
Turn: a feminist analysis can be added to foucault critique, it doesn’t hurt it
Buker, Philosophy Professor, WESTERN POLITICAL QUARTERLY, 1990, pp. 830-1
The missing persons are women who can only appear politically in Foucault’s story through their
relationships with men. A feminist analysis can both extend his argument and politically enrich it by
presenting accounts which offer models of masculine and feminine sexuality which are not built upon
domination and asymmetrical power relations, but which are built upon an “impatience for liberty”
(Foucault, 1987, p. 174). This impatience needs to reflect a desire for women’s liberty as well as for men’s.
Foucault’s critique solves the problems associated with his andocentric language
Aladjem, Philosophy, Harvard University, POLITICAL THEORY, May, 2000, p. 280
After all, by the extraordinary omission of a “female perspective,” Foucault has very nearly assumed the
“androcentric” attitude with which Eloise Buker associates him. But some he remains a critic – subversive
and proud of anything in that attitude. From the perspective that moves within the games of male power
displaying its different guises, he has decentered and disrupted the very same “androcentrism.” He has
stepped within the context of power without adopting the point of view of the prevailing power, and with the
relativistic eye of the visitor, he surveys everything evenly so that it is all oddly diminished.
158
Answers to: “Porter”
Foucault is not after what porter criticizes him for
Gutting, Philosophy Professor, Notre Dame, CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO FOUCAULT, 1994, p. 21
But perhaps Foucault’s concern with fundamental experiential categories rather than with specific
perceptions, beliefs, and actions is itself they key to a response to Porter. For, after all, Porter’s critique is
based on just the sort of specific beliefs and actions that are not Foucault’s primary concern. Foucault is not
making empirical generalizations about what people in various countries thought or did; he is trying to
construct the categorical system that lay behind what was no doubt a very diverse ranger of beliefs and
practices. Confinement, then, is a fact, perhaps most stroking in France, but, as Porter admits, also present in
England and the rest of Europe. Foucault is concerned with the categorical conditions of possibility for this
fact. He wants to know what in the way of the Classical Age experienced madness the sort of confinement it
practiced possible. Of course there were, as Foucault admits and even emphasizes, other dimensions of
Classical practice, most notably medical therapy, that involved integration rather than isolation of the mad
from the community. In some cases this may have meant that, as Proter finds for England, the progress of
confinement was slow and piecemeal. But such empirical divergences do not refute Foucault’s categorical
analysis of the Classical experience of madness.
159
Answers to: “Eurocentrism”
Foucault allows for counter-hegemonic discourses that kritik eurocentric discourses
Schaub, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON MICHAEL FOUCAULT, 1999, p. 22
Said’s argument is persuasive for many of the discourses he examines. But whereas Foucault allows for the
emergence of counter discourses beneath the official discourse of power, Said ignores Western discourses
about the Orient that opposes Western expansionism and subvert, rather than support, Western domination.
Foucault opposes the exclusivity of western european discourses

Schaub, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON MICHAEL FOUCAULT, 1999, p. 29
In all these characterizations of Foucault, the man and the teacher, the Oriental context remains the general
frame of reference. It is invoked by admirers and detractors alike, and his own comparison of Eastern and
Western educational modes supports these characterizations. In his DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE,
Foucault makes quite clear that he considers the alleged universal communication of knowledge one of the
great myths of European culture. Indeed, he asserts, there are rituals of exclusion and selectivity in Western
education that operation not entirely unlike the Oriental transmission of a monopolized and secret
knowledge. As a teacher, Foucault adopted a discursive style free of any pretense to unlimited
communication, thus fostering a measure of exclusivity.
160
Answers to: “Nihilism”
Foucault’s work is not nihilistic
(GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, January, p. 91)
Kathi Weeks invokes Discipline and Punish to claim that Foucault's work is nihilist; it only destroys, it is
worse than Nietzsche in that it contains no creative moment, no production of new values. And, similarly, if
less interestingly, Fraser complains that unlike Habermas's mode of critique, Foucault's has no "positive
normative pole.” Foucault is said to assert only what is bad or wrong with social relations, not what might be
good and what we might endeavor to preserve, cultivate, or strive toward. Yet such criticisms almost seem
more avowable in relation to Foucault's theoretical adversaries in the first volume of The History of
Sexuality. Foucault explicitly resists an understanding of power as solely negative or repressive, as
constraint and blockage. Power is quite creative and productive: it incites, intensifies, enables in some
instances, constrains in others. Some of these criticisms stem from the refusal to understand Foucault's
reformulation of power itself. For example, Fraser writes, "Their obvious heterogeneity notwithstanding, all
of these are instances of the ways in which social constraint, or in Foucault's terms 'power,' circulates in and
through the production of discourse in societies" The notion of power as "social constraint," however, is
precisely the understanding Foucault is contesting. Yet many astute readers stubbornly maintain the
sovereign paradigm in thinking power, and thus the assertion that "power is everywhere" (HS1 93) signals
that domination, repression, and subjugation are everywhere. It remains inconceivable that power might be
proper to subjects and part of a vibrant will to live, thrive, and persevere. While Foucault endeavors to locate
power in terms of its exercise--undoubtedly exercised by agents--power remains an abstract term for too
many readers.
161
Answers to: “Foucault Useless”
Foucault's ideas have had a wide impact
FOUCAULT: THE LEGACY, 2002 (http://www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/report.html)
In the health field, a number of nursing educators and sociologist discussed a variety of topics relating to old
age and nursing homes, the status of nurses as professionals, the conflict between medicine and midwifery,
intellectual disability and sexuality, AIDS, the history of hygiene education as well as issues of public health
and lifestyle. A number of Foucualt's ideas were called upon to shed new light on these matters. Stephen
Katz, a sociologist from Trent University in Canada in a paper titled 'Foucault and Gerontology: Aging
Bodies and elderly populations' discussed the medicalization of the aged body which he argued 'can be seen
as a key genealogical episode in the construction of the modern ages subject'. He also referred to the
'governmentality of the aged population', namely how that population is administered and governed in
contemporary society. Sue Crane, a nursing academic from Deakin University described a research project
she is conducting in conjunction with nurses, managers and domestic staff at a nursing home in Melbourne.
Her approach combined a feminist perspective with a foucauldian examination of some of 'the technologies
of power' at work within the home. She posed in particular the question "women as a self-surveillance
mechanism?' Sarah Winch noted also in relation to aged care that "a number of salient disciplinary
techniques and technologies emerge which surveillant, control and constitute the aged body as a docile
entity capable of only spasmodic resistance'. Another speaker, Kim Walker, also used Foucault's later work
on subjectivity to discuss "Nursing and the problem of the modern subject' a paper which described "the
ways in which nurses have become the subject of, and subjected to those "regimes of truth' which insert
themselves in the discourses and institutions of nursing'. Also of interest were two papers on accounting
given by four lecturers in Accounting. In a paper titled "A foucauldian genealogy of income' the two
authors, Alagiah and Gaffikin questioned "the forms within which individuals are able and are obliged to
recognize themselves as subjects of income' and other speakers noted that "accounting is a "mechanism'
through which "power' is exercised'.
162
Answers To: “Foucault Useless”
The job of the intellectual is simply to identify the mechanisms of power in a society
Larry Shiner, History Professor, 1982 (HISTORY AND THEORY, v. 21, issue 3, pp. 382-98)
Foucault's idea of the "specific" intellectual would add little to the traditional view if it assumed the
intellectual is a famous or highly placed individual developing a theory which the ordinary citizen may
apply, On the contrary, the intellectuals Foucault has in mind are found in a variety of occupations -nurses or
engineers, psychiatrists or sociologists, laboratory researchers or social workers. Moreover, the knowledge
and theory they develop- are not something they "apply" to the problems and political conflicts which touch
the areas of their expertise. By virtue of their location and status in society, their statements and
interpretations become interventions. Their discourse is a form of action; their theory is practice. But what of
the "professional" intellectual, those of us who spend our time in research, reflection, and writing? There are
two tasks the intellectual in the narrower sense can perform. First of all she or he can develop certain tools
for use in common with others involved in the political struggles of a particular sector. The intellectual's role
is not to provide vision and leadership, nor is it to offer a global social and economic theory.
Foucault's ideas are mainstream

But the immense popularity of Foucault's work is not without its problems. As J. Proust remarked
perceptively in 1968 in La Pensée 'the danger will come from Foucauldiens if there ever are any' (1968:24)
and a little later in 1974, the American historian George Huppert noted the risk of some of Foucault's theses
'more or less vaguely understood... becoming articles of faith among intellectuals'. Now that Foucault's work
has become firmly established in the curricula of a number of universities in the Anglo-Saxon world - in
spite of continuing fierce resistance from many quarters- his work runs the risk of becoming just another
tedious orthodoxy. Indeed, in many ways, this is already the case and particular versions of his thought are
exerting all the terrorist effects that such orthodoxies usually generate. Paradoxically Foucault's very efforts
to subtract his work from this fate have become some of the most entrenched items of dogma. His famous
description of theory as a 'tool-box' originally developed in conjunction with Deleuze in their 1972
discussion. 'Intellectuals and power' has been much invoked to support a certain view of intellectual work
and the world in general. In addition to this, Foucault's work read outside its original French context often
becomes a mysterious object indeed, full of strange, exciting but only half understood allusions. This lends
to his work a delphic aura and often phrases and ideas from his work are used to give a cachet of theoretical
respectability or an imaginative glitter to an otherwise mundane analysis.
163
Answers To: "Foucault Doesn't Agree With Your K"
Foucault does not insist on single uses of his work
But as Foucault himself often insisted, an author cannot dictate how his work is going to be used and
interpreted. Certainly, Foucault did not always take his own advice and on a number of occasions sought to
correct wild (and not so wild!) interpretations of his work, but in the final analysis, these 'corrections' did no
more than provoke fresh departures and critical 'errors'. In the preface to the second edition of Madness and
Civilization, Foucault declares: 'I would like this object-event [the book], which is almost imperceptible
amongst so many others, to be recopied, fragmented, repeated, simulated, to fall apart and then finally to
disappear without the one who happened to produce it ever being able to claim the right of being its master
of imposing what he meant, nor prescribing what it should be'.
Criticisms of foucault's historical accounts do not weaken his arguments

Joni Low, 3rd year honors history student, University of British Columbia, 2002 (IS FOUCAULT A
HISTORIAN?, http://foucault.info/articles/history.Is_Foucault_Historian.2002.en.shtml)
Furthermore, the data he represents is often scattered throughout the past; this spatialization of time, which
varies according to what concept - reason, sexuality, or institutions - he is studying. This approach has
frustrated historians and created waves among the discourse to the extent that historians were wary of
claiming Foucault as one of their own. The accusations range from Foucault not being conclusive enough in
his histories, to criticizing him for not properly backing up his arguments or getting his facts wrong entirely.
Yet they have often noted, albeit somewhat uneasily, that although Foucault's techniques and methods are all
'wrong' in a historical sense, these perceived inaccuracies do not weaken his arguments.
164
Answers To: “Postmodernism is Bad”
General indicts of postmodernism do not apply to our foucault argument
THEORY, August, p. 559)
I show that Foucault does not confirm the expectations of theorists who subscribe to the postmodern
consensus. This strategy entails some pretty obvious perils. First, Foucault's relation to "postmodernism" is
not a simple one. He surely does not articulate all postmodern themes. Nor do other postmodern theorists
share all of his preoccupations.
165
Permutation Answers
Disciplinary practices manage resistance
Kathryn R. Fox, Sociologist, University of Vermont, 1999 (SOCIAL PROBLEMS, February, 1999, p. 95)
Discipline implies agency and suggests struggle. The use of professional, disciplining discourses to manage
individuals arouses resistance, and is thus dynamic. However, part of disciplinary practice is the
management of resistance. In CSC, resistance is regarded as evidence of the "truth" of the discourse, an
indication of extraordinary criminal thinking. Painless conversions are regarded with suspicion. For
example, early on in a Stage I group, an inmate demonstrated uncanny mastery of the program's
terminology. A facilitator told me privately: "I am not sure how real it is. He's got the words down, but it
came a little too easily." Resistance is expected before any "real" transformation can occur, thereby exposing
the tension between overt control and cognitive control.
Power is only possible when it is masked

The increasing number of strategies for the administration of bodies since the seventeenth century is
concomitant with their becoming more elaborate and specialized according to how the population is
sectioned as a general field of inquiry, the local tactics of power immanent to each sector, the reciprocal
influence between different sectors, and their attempts to compete with, and distinguish themselves from,
each other. Indeed, the tendency towards specialization may itself be seen in the service of a wider strategy,
not only to preserve the constitutive knowledges from external criticism, thereby protecting the professional
status of the elites who practice them, 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.’
166
Permutation Answers
Entrenched powers prevent reform
Michael McCubbin, Ph.D., and David Weisstub, J.D., 1998 (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 of the policy game - a sort of macro-system engineering. The obvious problem with this is that the
people who can change 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 the hope, 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.
Power assumes the provision of a level of freedom

The side of itself that power exhibits and which enables its other, more insidious side, to operate unnoticed
and thereby unchallenged, is its juridico-legal aspect. Represented in terms of the law of interdiction, power
is held to leave a measure of freedom, if only slight, if only the freedom not to break the law, intact and
inviolable. As Foucault says: 'Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general
form of its acceptability.’
The imposition of power by the affirmative makes resistance impossible

Bruce Arrigo, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Professor of Public Policy and Psychology, and
Christopher Williams, Minot State University Professor of Criminal Justice, 2000 (SEATTLE
UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW, Fall, p. 248)
What all this suggests is that we, as constituent practitioners and/or scholars in the world of humanism and
of human rights, have acquiesced to an unreflective existence within the preconfigured borders of (ethical)
codes laid before us by our ancestors. This legacy does not imply that we, as individuals, necessarily have
made a choice to escape from the freedom of responsibility. What it does, in fact, suggest is that we no
longer enjoy the power to make such a choice. At some historical point, the representative powers that be
concluded that it was in our best interest to be subjected to constraints on moral discretion. One can only
assume that our predecessors were unable to find the possibility of such unbridled freedom liberating.
Perhaps a select few made choices that were not in the best interests of their clients and/or communities;
consequently, such decision-making power was withdrawn from their/our possession. The result, of course,
continues to be a circumscribed education in morality and justice.
167
Permutation Answers
Liberalism does not challenge the regulation of the individual
Barry Hindess, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 2001
(ALTERNATIVES: GLOBAL, LOCAL, AND POLITICAL, June, p. 93)
Liberalism in no way disputes this police view of the importance of discipline in the production and
maintenance of good order. It does, however, insist that the workings of society could not be known in the
manner supposed by the theory of police, and therefore that it could not be governed entirely in accordance
with police prescriptions. One of the most influential formulations of this view appears in Adam Smith's The
Wealth of Nations, which analyzes the economic activities of individuals within commercial societies as
contributing to a larger system of interaction. The conduct of each participant in this system is said to be
regulated, not only by the values, habits of thought and the like which they bring to their interactions but
also by the signals of other actors--that is, by the prices for goods and labor resulting from numerous
individual decisions to buy or to sell, or to seek a better deal elsewhere. This account of the complex
relationship between prices on the one hand and numerous individual decisions on the other enables him to
make two fundamental points about market interaction, at least within commercial societies: first, that it
fosters the development of punctuality, discretion, industry and other prudential virtues in the individual, and
secondly, that it should be seen as a self-regulating domain of interaction. On this view, state interference
with any of these prices will provide individuals with misleading signals, thereby subverting their prudential
virtues, distorting the regulatory mechanisms of the larger economic system and undermining its efficiency
overall.
168
*** General Extensions ***
169
The K Challenges Affirmative Assumptions
The kritik challenges the epistemological & ethical foundation of the aff
Nikolas Rose, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, RE-ASSESSING FOUCAULT, Ed. Colin Jones
& Roy Porter, 1994, p. 68
The Birth of the Clinic has at its heart a consideration of the reorganization of our relationship to
individuality, to suffering and to death that has made this new regime of the self possible. The mutation in
medical thought and practice that is traced in the book marks, claims Foucault, an ineradicable chronological
threshold. The underside of disease - illness - comes to light, offers itself to the gaze, to language and to the
practice of the cure in the same moment as it distributes itself in the enclosed but accessible volume of the
body. This mutation has epistemological and ethical dimensions which are not confined to the territory of
illness. Clinical experience and the anatomo-clinical method have a decisive epistemo-ethical significance,
in constituting 'man' as an object of knowledge, in making possible a science of the human individual as a
complex of specifiable processes and attributes that can be diagnosed, calibrated, compared and generalized.
Foucault suggests that in the same way that a positive knowledge of individual human mental life became
possible only on the basis of the experience of unreason - of madness - so a positive knowledge of human
corporeal life becomes possible only on the basis of integration of death into medical thought.
170
Each Individual Key
Each individual act is critical
Michel Foucault, Director, Institute Francais at Hamburg, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE,
1969, p. http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm.
We must ask ourselves what purpose is ultimately served by this suspension of all the accepted unities, if, in
the end, we return to the unities that we pretended to question at the outset. In fact, the systematic erasure of
all given unities enables us first of all to restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence, and to
show that discontinuity is one of those great accidents that create cracks not only in the geology of history,
but also in the simple fact of the statement; it emerges in its historical irruption; what we try to examine is
the incision that it makes, that irreducible - and very often tiny - emergence. However banal it may be,
however unimportant its consequences may appear to be, however quickly it may be forgotten after its
appearance, however little heard or however badly deciphered we may suppose it to be, a statement is
always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust. It is certainly a strange
event: first, because on the one hand it is linked to the gesture of writing or to the articulation of speech, and
also on the other hand it opens up to itself a residual existence in the field of a memory, or in the materiality
of manuscripts, books, or any other form of recording; secondly, because, like every event, it is unique, yet
subject to repetition, transformation, and reactivation; thirdly, because it is linked not only to the situations
that provoke it, and to the consequences that it gives rise to, but at the same time, and in accordance with a
quite different modality, to the statements that precede and follow it.
171
Genealogy Good
Genealogies make criticism possible
Hugh Baxter, Professor of Law, Boston University, 1996 (STANFORD LAW REVIEW, January, pp. 460-1)
Foucault's genealogies have a critical function. They serve not to "discover the roots of our identity" or our
institutions, but to render both identity and institutions vulnerable to criticism. Consider, for example, the
genealogy of punishment Foucault develops in Discipline and Punish. The book, significantly subtitled "The
Birth of the Prison," seeks to undermine our belief that prisons are the inevitable form of punishment.
Foucault argues that the systematic use of imprisonment as punishment is a relatively modern development,
going back no further than the nineteenth century. He reviews two technologies of punishment prevalent in
the century before the "birth of the prison" - first, public torture and execution, then the reformers'
"picturesque" "theaters of punishment" emphasizing the different functions punishment was thought to serve
in those eras. Foucault presents the arguments against imprisonment that seemed decisive even a few years
before the triumph of the prison, arguments that still resonate today. Immediately after the triumph of the
prison system, and ever since, Foucault argues, it "was denounced ... as the great failure of penal justice,"
because it fails to reduce the crime rate, causes recidivism, and creates career criminals. Thus, for Foucault,
the prison's rise and continued existence are problems in need of justification, not evident social necessities.
Power speaks truth: only a genealogical inquiry can uncover truth

HUMAN SCIENCES JOURNAL, V. 7, http://www.acusd.edu/~atterton/Publications/foucault.htm)
The uniqueness of Canguilhem's adoption or adaptation of evolutionary theory for the study of the history of
medicine and biology, opposed to the simple patterning of the history of the life sciences after the history of
life by way of a crude reductionism, lay in the especial emphasis placed on so-called 'error,' a term borrowed
from genetics and used by evolutionists to account for variation underlying speciation. Rather than plotting
the 'progress' of science as an ordered series of modifications generated through rational calculation, creative
imagination, discoveries and opinions by a community of benign and 'disinterested' researchers, Canguilhem
proposed to describe how, for instance, discursive medical practice, despite all its superficies to the contrary,
is an irregular series of epistemological figures, interrupted by chance discovery, minute deviation, faulty
calculation and fallacious inference. These are selected on the basis of certain norms (with their
corresponding compensations for the professional body of scientists who follow them), which are not ideally
or originally given, but defined in conditions that are historical and thereby open to transformation. The
decisive importance of this line of approach for Foucault's own histories has been recognized by Paul Bové,
who claims in his essay 'The Rationality of Disciplines': 'Canguilhem's positioning of biological error as an
unavoidable feature of genetic information systems grounds. . . Foucault's own insistent claims for historical
discontinuity and the role of power in the relationship between thought and history'.
172
Genealogy Good
Genealogies de-scientize
Hugh Baxter, Associate Professor of Law, Boston University, 1996 (STANFORD LAW REVIEW, January,
p. 462)
The critical edge of Foucault's genealogies appears, further, in their tendency to trace institutions or
practices back to ignoble ancestry, much as Nietzsche traced morality back to "shameful origins." In
discussing the development of a "science of sex," for example, Foucault notes the centrality of confessional
practices and remarks that "since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied [the confession] like a shadow,
and supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins." Foucault thus suggests that the confession is
genealogically linked to the project of controlling the body. Similarly, Foucault speculates that the human
sciences' "birth" lies in the " "ignoble' archives" of disciplinary power. A genealogical approach to history,
Foucault writes, "teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin .... Historical beginnings are lowly ...
derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation." Genealogy deflates claims to disinterestedness
and scientificity.
173
Discourse Key
Discourse is critical to power
THEORY, August, p. 559)
This claim may sound entirely implausible. Foucault, after all, insists that he is concerned in his genealogies
with "relations of power, not relations of meaning." Thus, while he is centrally concerned with the
functioning of discourses, he does not analyze them in terms of communication. Discourses instead are the
medium within which "power and knowledge are joined together," and they thereby are implicated
essentially in the ways that power relations are established and consolidated.
Discursive choices sustain power structures

Derek Hook, lecturer in Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, 2001 (THEORIA, June, p. 29)
In a succinct introduction to Foucault's `The Order of Discourse' paper Young (1981) notes that the central
focus of the paper is on the rules, systems and procedures which constitute, and are constituted by, our `will
to knowledge'. These rules, systems and procedures comprise a discrete realm of discursive practices -- the
order of discourse -- a conceptual terrain in which knowledge is formed and produced. As Young specifies,
what is analyzed here is not simply that which was thought or said per se, `but all the discursive rules and
categories that were a priori, assumed as a constituent part of discourse and therefore of knowledge' (Young
1981: 48). In this way, the effects of discursive practices is to make it virtually impossible to think outside of
them; to be outside of them is, by definition, to be mad, to be beyond comprehension and therefore reason.
Discursive rules are hence strongly linked to the exercise of power: discourse itself is both constituted by,
and ensures the reproduction of, the social system, through forms of selection, exclusion and domination.
Government discourses are controlling

Derek Hook, lecturer in Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, 2001 (THEORIA, June, p. 29)
As Foucault asserts near the beginning of the paper, `in every society the production of discourse is at once
controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a ... number of procedures.” From the outset then
Foucault is involved in a concerted attempt to restore materiality and power to what, in the Anglo-American
tradition, has remained the largely linguistic concept of discourse.
174

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Planet Debate 2009 – Biopower/Foucault Kritik

Foucault, Biopower, and Social Services............................................................................................................................6

Links: Public Health Programs Entrench Disciplinary Power...........................................................................................61

Links: Categorizing People..............................................................................................................................................107

Links: End of History Discourses....................................................................................................................................108

Answers to: “Foucault Useless”.......................................................................................................................................162

Foucault, Biopower, and Social Services

The Construction of the Subject

Debating Foucault on the Affirmative

Debating Foucault on the Negative

Beer, Dan. (2002). MICHAEL FOUCAULT, FORM AND POWER.

Han, Beatrice. (2002). FOUCAULT’S CRITICAL PROJECT: BETWEEN THE TRANSCENDENTAL

Rajan, Tilottama. (2002). DECONSTRUCTION AND THE REMAINDERS OF PHENOMENOLOGY:

Discourse and Foucault

Burr, V. (1995). AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM.

Fairclough, N. (1995) CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: THE CRITICAL STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

Parker, I. (1999). DECONSTRUCTING PSYCHOTHERAPY.

Burchell, Graham. (1991). THE FOUCAULT EFFECT: STUDIES IN GOVERNMENTALITY.

International Organization Links

Global Governance Links

Dillon, Michael. (1995). ALTERNATIVES, pp. 330-ff.

Finklestein, L. (1995). What is Global Goverannce. GLOBAL GOVERNANCE. V. 1, pp. 365-72.

Durham, Thomas. (1996). MICHAEL FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM.

Habermas, Jurgen. (1987). THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY. In this book

Foucault and Feminism

Diamond, I. (1988). FEMINISM & FOUCAULT: REFLECTIONS ON RESISTANCE.

McLaren, Margaret. (2002). FEMINISM, FOUCAULT, AND THE EMBODIED SUBJECT.

McNay, L. (1992). FOUCAULT AND FEMINISM.

Sawicki, J. (1991). DISCIPLINING FOUCAULT: FEMINISM, POWER, AND BODY.

Feminists Who Support Foucault

Harstock, Nancy. (1990). Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women. FEMINISM/POSTMODERNISM.

Heckman, Susan. (1990). GENDER AND KNOWLEDGE: ELEMENTS OF POSTMODERN

Feminists Who Criticize Foucault

Balbus, Isaac. (1988). Disciplining Women. In AFTER FOUCAULT: HUMANISTIC KNOWLEDGE,

Bartky, Sandra. (1990). FEMININITY AND DOMINATION: STUDIES IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY

Braidotti, Rosi. (1994). NOMADIC SUBJECTS: EMBODIMENT AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN

Brodribb, Somer. (1992). NOTHING MATTERS: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERNISM.

Harstock, Nancy. (2000). Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women? In

Foucault and the Subject

Stratford, Helen. (2002). Micro-Strategies of Resistance. RESOURCES FOR FEMINIST RESEARCH.

General Books About Foucault

Barry, Andrew. (1996). FOUCAULT AND POLITICAL REASON: LIBERALISM, NEO-LIBERALISM

Dreyfus, Richard. (1992) BEING AND POWER: HEIDEGGER AND FOUCAULT.

Flillingham, Lydia Alix. (1993). FOUCAULT FOR BEGINNERS.

Lotringer, Sylvère. (1996). FOUCAULT LIVE (INTERVIEWS, 1961-1984) / MICHEL FOUCAULT.

Popekwitz, Thomas. (1998). FOUCAULT'S CHALLENGE: DISCOURSE, KNOWLEDGE, AND POWER

Rabinow, Paul. (1997). ETHICS: SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH / MICHEL FOUCAULT.

Books and Articles by Foucault

(2000). POWER: ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT, 1954-1984, Volume III.

(1981). POWER/KNOWLEDGE: SELECTED INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1972-1977.

(1984). THE FOUCAULT READER.

(1990). THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY: AN INTRODUCTION.

(1994). THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEDICAL PERCEPTION. This is a

(1990). POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE: INTERVIEWS AND OTHER WRITINGS, 1977-1984.

(1994). THE ORDER OF THINGS; AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES.

(1997). THE POLITICS OF TRUTH.

Journal Articles About Foucault

Racevskis, Karlis. (1993). Interpreting Foucault. PAPERS ON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.

Foucault 1NC Shell

B. Disciplinary liberalism’s biopower necessitates extermination and annihilation

Foucault 1NC Shell

Programs that are designed to socialize instill norms

All service will be juridically defined