The affirmative creates the idea that ill people pose a risk to their entire society---these

people are excluded and turned into threats to the population

Peter Marton 2007 [Paper presented at The 6th Convention of the Central and East European International
Studies Association (CEEISA), at the conference ‘Global and Regional Governance –European Perspectives and
Beyond’. University of Wroclaw, Wroclaw, Poland, 24-26 May 2007.] “Liberal vs. libertarian Leviathan, of
Predator vs. Alien in a critical theory of state failure: Analytical implications for global governance”
http://www.ceeisaconf.uni.wroc.pl/wordy/papers
%205%20session/MartonCEEISApaperStateFailureGlobalGovernance1.pdf
That’s how interdependent security works. We can point to several analogies to better highlight the essence
of this sort of security interdependence. The study by Kunreuther, Heal and Orszag (2002) on security
challenges faced by companies in the airline industry is one very good example of such an analogy. They
point to the example of Pan Am flight 103 that was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland. The luggage
containing the bomb didn’t go through Pan Am’s quite reliable screening system – it came transferred from
another flight. So Pan Am lost an airliner effectively due to another airline’s lax approach to security (p.2.).
Several other analogies that one could mention include interconnected computer networks such as the
Internet itself, where one insufficiently defended computer might be a threat to the entire network, for the
chances are that it might more easily be bot-infected and controlled by malevolent third parties looking to
send out spam or destructive worms from it. And so do people, who are not vaccinated against infectious
diseases, increase the risk to their entire society – the risk of those very diseases spreading around and
eventually evolving, through mutation, into a threat even to the vaccinated part of the population (to
which the old vaccination no longer provides protection).

The attempt to create a “free” individual who can make independent choices about their
body fails to recognize the role that power plays in the construction of autonomy and
prevents action.
Mark Bevir Prof. of Poli Sci at UC Berkeley. 1999 “Foucault and Critique: Deploying
Agency Against Autonomy”
Foucault's analysis of the social construction of the subject might seem merely to recapitulate a concept already
familiar to us as socialisation. Actually, however, his critique of the subject cuts deeper than this. Foucault argues
that power is ubiquitous so a subject can come into being only as a construct of a regime of power/knowledge.
No society, culture, or practice possibly could be free of power. No individual possibly could constitute
himself as an autonomous agent free from all regimes of power. This is why, to return to our starting point,
Foucault rejected the concept of the "sovereign, founding subject" for one of "the subject" as "constituted
through Even when individuals appear to live in accord with commitments they have accepted for themselves,
they really are only examining and regulating their lives in accord with a regime of power . Foucault's view of
the subject, therefore, precludes an idea often seen as the core of liberalism, the Enlightenment Project, or
modernity; it precludes the idea of the individual coming before, or standing outside of, society. Indeed, Foucault
argues that our view of the subject as an autonomous agent derives from our having so internalised the
technique of confession that we see it falsely as a way of unlocking our inner selves rather than rightly as a
way of defining ourselves in accord with a social formation. He says: "the obligation to confess is now relayed
through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power
that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, demands only to
surface."' According to Foucault, the individual subject is not an autonomous agent, but rather a social
construct. To consider the validity of his view of the subject, I want to distinguish autonomy from agency.1°
Autonomous subjects would be able, at least in principle, to have experiences, to reason, to adopt beliefs, and to act,
outside all social contexts. They could avoid the influence of any norms and techniques prescribed by a regime of
power/knowledge. This concept of the autonomous subject resembles the idea of a "sovereign, founding subject"
that Foucault vehemently rejects: autonomous subjects, at least in principle, could found and rule themselves
uninfluenced by others. Agents, in contrast, exist only in specific social contexts, but these contexts never
determine how they try to construct themselves. Although agents necessarily exist within regimes of
power/knowledge, these regimes do not determine the experiences they can have, the ways they can exercise their
reason, the beliefs they can adopt, or the actions they can attempt to perform. Agents are creative beings; it is just
that their creativity occurs in a given social context that influences it.

Medicalization allows deviancy to be blamed on the victim while ignoring that the current
structure of social situations could be the real cause.

Peter Conrad. Department of Sociology, Brandeis University; Department of Sociology, Drake University.
Social Problems, Vol. 23, No. 1, Oct., 1975: The Discovery of Hyperkinesis: Notes on the Medicalization of
Deviant Behavior, Page 19-20.

The medicalization of deviant behavior is part of a larger phenomenon that is prevalent in our society, the
individualization of social problems. We tend to look for causes and solutions to complex social
problems in the individual rather than in the social system. This view resembles Ryan's (1971) notion of
"blaming the victim;" seeing the causes of the problem in individuals rather than in the society where
they live. We then seek to change the "victim" rather than the society. The medical perspective of
diagnosing an illness in an individual lends itself to the individualization of social problems. Rather than seeing
certain deviant behaviors as symptomatic of problems in the social system, the medical
perspective focuses on the individual diagnosing and treating the illness, generally ignoring the
social situation. Hyperkinesis serves as a good example. Both the school and the parents are concerned with the
child's behavior; the child is very difficult at home and disruptive in school. No punishments or rewards seem
consistently to work in modifying the behavior; and both parents and school are at their wits' end. A medical
evaluation is suggested. The diagnoses of hyperkinetic behavior leads to prescribing stimulant medica tions. The
child's behavior seems to become more socially acceptable, reducing problems in school and at home. But there is
an alternate perspective. By focusing on the symptoms and defining them as hyperkinesis we ignore
the possibility that behavior is not an illness but an adaptation to a social situation. It diverts our
attention from the family or school and from seriously entertaining the idea that the "problem" could
be in the structure of the social system. And by giving medications we are essentially supporting
the existing systems and do not allow this behavior to be a factor of change in the system.
Depoliticization of deviant behavior is a result of both the process of medicalization and individualization of social
problems. To our western world, probably one of the clearest examples of such a depoliticization of deviant
behavior occurred when political dissenters in the Soviet Union were declared mentally ill and confined in mental
hospitals (cf. Conrad, 1972). This strategy served to neutralize the meaning of political protest and dissent, rendering
it the ravings of mad persons. The medicalization of deviant behavior depoliticizes deviance in the same
manner. By defining the overactive, restless and disruptive child as hyperkinetic we ignore the
meaning of behavior in the context of the social system. If we focused our analysis on the school
system we might see the child's behavior as symptomatic of some "dis order" in the school or
classroom situation, rather than symptomatic of an individual neurological disorder.

Medicalization invades every aspect of our lives as a prevention method for disease so that
we do not become a burden to the system.

Robert A. Nye. Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at Oregon State University . Journal of
History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 115-129 Spring 20 03: The Evolution of the Concept of
Medicalization In The Late Twentieth Century, Page 119-120.

The combination of piecemeal, market-driven solutions and uncertainty about the natural laws of health has shifted
our contemporary attention from the nineteenth-century preoccupation with pathogens and bodies that could be
confined, segregated, or cured to the individual cultivation of a healthy body that is exalted as an ideal (Armstrong,
1995; Gastaldo. 1997. pp. 113-118). We still gather statistics, engage in medical surveillance, and
promote health education, but we have given up the hygienist's dream of isolating and
eradicating disease for a model of individual responsibility. The irony of this development is that
the goal of a perfectly healthy population—bodies that are "natural" and unmedicalized—can
only be achieved by the individual internalization of a totally medicalized view of life. As Jennifer
Harding has written; owing to the medicalization of life generally and the promulgation of medical statements about
symptoms and diseases and then treatments, in the clinic and in the media, as news and entertainment, it is hard to
isolate examples of medicalization from its absences . . (Harding. 1997. p. 145). Although the burden of
responsibility for health in this new schema rests with individuals, who are encouraged endlessly to
assess the risks of particular behaviors and to make then bodies into self-directed enterprises for
maintaining health and fitness, aggressive government intervention is not ruled out when
particular crises in public health arise. If anything, as Robert Castel has argued, the new health doctrine
of risk prevention potentially expands the occasions for intervention: "Not just those dangers that
lie hidden away inside the subject, consequences of his or her weakness of will, irrational desires or
unpredictable liberty, but also the exogenous dangers, the exterior hazards and temptations from
which the subject has not learnt to defend himself or herself, alcohol, to bacco, bad eating habits,
road accidents, various kinds of negligence, pollutions, etc." (Castel. 1991, p. 289). Today, by virtue of
medical knowledge and human longevity, we view old age itself as a site of preventable health risk. Bombarded
with statistics about the high costs of broken bones caused by osteoporosis, public health experts recommend
aggressive hormone replacement therapy; aging individuals are encouraged to watch their diets,
exercise, and stay socially engaged so they can avoid becoming a burden to the health care
system. We are now being told that there is a correlation of juvenile obesity and diabetes that will result in a huge
increase in health costs to future generations. As Alan Petersen has written , Foucault's concept of
governmentality, "allows one to recognize the agency of subjects, without recourse to the notion
of a fully autonomous self or to voluntaristic explanations of behavior " (Petersen. 1997, pp. 202-203)
As this brief survey of theories of medicalization suggests. Foucault's late work, supplemented and expanded since
his death by historians and social scientists, provides a more flexible set of analytical tools than students of
medicalization possessed in the 1960s and 1970s.1

Medicalization has become the preferred method of control over deviants leading to an
increase in “sickness” and a decrease in personal responsibility.

 Peter Conrad. Department of Sociology, Brandeis University; Department of Sociology, Drake University.
1992. Deviance and Medicalization, page 34-35.

When treatment rather than punishment becomes the preferred sanction for deviance, an
increasing amount of behavior is conceptual ized in a medical framework as illness. As noted earlier, this
is not unexpected, since medicine has always functioned as an agent of social control, especially in
attempting to "normalize" illness and return people to their functioning capacity in society.
Public health and psychiatry have long been concerned with so cial behavior and have functioned
traditionally as agents of social control (Foucault, 1965; Rosen, 1972). What is significant, however, is the expansion of this
sphere where medicine functions in a social control capacity. In the wake of a general humanitarian trend, the success and prestige of modern
biomedicine, the technological growth of the 20th century, and the diminution of religion as a viable agent of control, more and more deviant
dominant designation of deviance has changed;
behavior has come into the province of medicine. In short, the particular,
much of what was badness (i.e., sinful or criminal) is now sickness. Although some forms of deviant behavior arc
more completely medicalized than others (e.g., mental illness), recent research has pointed to a considerable variety of deviance that has been
treated within medical jurisdiction: alcoholism, drug addiction, hyperactive children, suicide, obesity, mental retardation, crime, violence, child
there has been a
abuse, and learning problems, as well as several other categories of social deviance. Concomitant with medicalization
change in imputed responsibility for deviance: with badness the deviants were considered re -
sponsible for their behavior; with sickness they are not, or at least responsibility is diminished (see Stoll, 1968). The
social response to deviance is "therapeutic" rather than punitive. Many have viewed this as "humanitarian and scientific" progress; indeed, it often
leads to “humanitarian and scientific” treatment rather than punishment as a response to deviant behavior. As Barbara Wootton (1959) notes:
Without question ... in the contemporary attitude towards anti-social behavior, psychiatry [i.e.. medicine] and humanitarianism have marched
hand in hand. Just because it is so much in keeping with the mental atmosphere of a scientifically-minded age, the medical treatment of social
deviants has been a powerful reinforcement of humanitarian impulses; for today the prestige of humane proposals is im mensely enhanced if these
are expressed in the idiom to medical science, (p. 206) There are, however, other, more disturbing consequences of medicalizing deviance that
will be discussed in later chapters. A number of broad social factors underlie the medicalization of deviance. As psychiatric crit ic Thomas Szasz
(1974) observes, there has been a major historical shift in the manner in which we view human conduct: With the transformation of the religious
perspective of man into the scientific, and in particular the psychiatric, which became fully articulated during the nineteenth century ,
there
occurred a radical shift in emphasis assay from viewing man as a responsible acting in and on the
world and toward viewing him as a responsive organism being acted upon by biological and
social "forces." (p. 149)' This is exemplified by the diffusion of Freudian thought, which since the 1920s has had a significant impact on
the treatment of deviance, the distribution of stigma, and the incidence of penal sanctions. Nicholas Kittrie (1971) focusing on decrimi nalization,
the foundation of the therapeutic state can be found in determinist criminology , that it
contends that
stems from the parens patriae power of the state (the state's right to help those who are unable to help
themselves), and that it dates its origin with the development of juvenile justice at the turn of the century. He further
suggests that criminal law has failed to deal effectively (e.g., in deterrence) with criminals and
deviants, encouraging a use of alternative methods of control. Others have pointed out that the strength
of formal sanctions is declining because of the increase in geographical mobility and the decrease in strength of
traditional status groups (e.g.. the family) and that medicalization offers a substitute method for
controlling deviance (Pitts. 1968). The success of medicine in areas like infectious disease has led to rising expectations of what
medicine can accomplish. In modem technological societies, medicine has followed a technological imperative— that the physician is responsible
for doing everything possible for the patient—while neglecting such significant issues as the patient's rights and wishes and the impact of
biomedical advances on society (Mechanic. 1973). Increasingly sophisticated medical technology has extended the
potential of medicine as social control, especially in terms of psycho technology (Chorovcr. 1973). Psycho technology
includes a variety of medical and quasimedical treatments or procedures: psychosurgery, psychoac- live medications, genetic engineering,
the
disulfiram (Antabuse), and methadone. Medicine is frequently a pragmatic way of dealing with a problem (Gusfield. 1975). Undoubtedly
increasing acceptance and dominance of a scientific world view and the increase in status and
power of the medical profession have contrib uted significantly to the adoption and public
acceptance of medical approaches to handling deviant behavior.

Biopolitics will lead to widespread death and suffering—power in a biopolitical system

allows a sovereign the power to sustain life through its total power to administer life itself,
and contingently then to not allow life.

Thomas Dunn 2002 [Michel Foucault and the politics of freedom 116-7 Collége de France]

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality (The Will to Truth), Foucault connects the rise of
normalization (with which he concludes Discipline and Punish) with a biopolitics that puts entire
populations at risk. In the final essay in that volume, "Right of Death and Power Over Life," he examines
"sexuality" as a field of power. Sexuality is a primary site where both the formation of a confessing subject and the
establishment of the strategies that would enable the control of populations are conjoined as "two poles of
development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations."6 He argues that the sovereign right
to decide life and death has undergone a profound transformation, one consistent with the
transformation in the overall logic of power. Power was once the "right of seizure: of things,
time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order
to suppress it."' But this power of seizure is but one element in the modern repertoire of power.
The form of power in the modern era is , as Foucault explained in Discipline and Punish, " 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 ."' The paradox is that this exercise of a
lifesustaining power occurs during the era that has been witness to the unleash ing of the most
formidable powers of death in human history. 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 regulation. 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.9
For Foucault, the principles of battle are now attached to the survival strategies of states. These survival
strategies of bio-power, which operate at both the macro level of populations and the micro level of sexualities ,
have raised the stakes of politics to a new high. The continued existence of a sovereignty no
longer is the final arbitrator of how far power will be exercised; instead, the stakes of power are
raised to risk the biological existence of an entire population in the name of its continued
survival. Foucault writes, "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern 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, the large -scale phenomena of population."° In short, Foucault
argues, the right of the sovereign to take life or let live has been replaced by " a power to foster life or disallow
it to the point of death."

Biopolitics allows the government to determine who is worthy of life and who can be killed.
Dean 2001 (Mitchell, Dean is is a Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Division of Society, Culture, Media
and Philosophy at Macquarie University, Australia, “Demonic Societies” in “States of Imagination” p. 57-58)

National Socialism is one contingent, historical trajectory of the development of the biopolitical
dimension of the social, medical, psychological, and human sciences that occurs tinder a
particular set of historical circumstances. One should not underestimate the factors operative in
German society, the historical legacy of war and revolutionary movements, the nature of German
polity, or the economic crises of the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, Peukert and Foucault
would both agree that the kind of state racism practiced by the Nazis that would lead to the Final
Solution was quite different from traditional anti-Semitism insofar as it took the form of a
"biological politics." as the German historians call it, that drew on the full resources of the
human, social, and behavioral sciences. In this regard, Peukert's retrieval of the process by which the human
sci- ences move from a concern with "mass well-being" to acting as the instrument of "mass annihilation" remains
extremely interesting. In the ease of "social-welfare education," he identifies a number of phases (1993: 243- 45 ).
First there was a formulation of the problem of the control of the youth in the late nineteenth
century within a progressivist discourse in which every child had a right to physical, mental, and
social fitness. This was followed by a phase of a phase of routinization and a crisis of confidence
exemplified by the failure of legal schemes of detention or protection of those who were "unfit"
or "ineducable." The third phase, coinciding with the final years of the Weimar Republic, has
disturbing overtones for our own period. Here there were a series of scandals in young people's
homes and a debate about the limits of educability coupled with welfare stare retrenchment. This
debate introduced a new cost-benefits trade-oft with services allocated on the basis of immediate
return, and the criterion of "value" was brought into the calculative frame- work. Value at this stage
may or may not be determined on the basis of race or genetics, but the ineducable were excluded in 1932 from
reform school education. After ig those who opposed the racial version of determining value were forced into
silence, compulsory sterilization of the genetically Un- healthy was practiced, and concentration camps for the
racially inferior established. However, even this program faced a crisis of confidence and the utopian
goals came up against their limits and the catalogue of deviance became greater and more
detailed. The positive racism of youth welfare provision 110W met the negative radicalization of
a policy of eradication of those who, in the language of the order that represents the crucial step
in the Final Solution, are deemed "unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben). The biopolitical
government of life had arrived at the point at which it decided who was worth living. With the
technology of murder up and running, the social and human sciences "are engaged in a parallel process of theoretical
and institutional generalization that is aimed at an all-embracing racist restructuring of social policy, of educational
policy, and health and welfare policy'' (Peukert 1993: 245). The term Gemeinschaftsfremde (community alien) came
to embrace failures, ne'er-do-wells, parasites, good-for-nothings, troublemakers, and those with criminal tendencies
and threatened all these with detention, imprisonment, or death.

Biopolitics allow for a never ending cycle of racism and the control of every aspect of the
citizens’ lives.
Dean 2001 (Mitchell, Dean is is a Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Division of Society, Culture, Media
and Philosophy at Macquarie University, Australia, “Demonic Societies” in “States of Imagination” p. 58-61)

The phrase "those unworthy of life" is striking because it so clearly resonates with the
biopolitical attempt to govern life. It suggests a distinction between those who are merely living
and those who are worthy of existence as a part of a social or political community. We should he
clear that there was nothing necessary in the path of National Socialism and that there were crucial steps of the
conversion of knowledge and services concerned with the care of the needy into a technology of mass annihilation.
However, given that many, if not all, the forms of knowledge and technologies of government (including the
concentration camp) were the product of polities characterized at least broadly by liberal forms of rule, this does
suggest there is no room for complacency and that the liberal critique of biopolitics cannot offer the kind of
guarantees it claims to. Foucault is right to provoke us with the idea that the assurance of life is connected with the
death command and to claim that "the coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and
institutions oriented toward the care of individual life is something puzzling and needs some investigation" (1988b:
147). Mass slaughters may not necessarily or logically follow from the forms of political
rationality and types of knowledge we employ, but they do not arise from a sphere that is
opposed to that rationality and knowledge. It is crucial to realize, as Peukert argues in his book
Inside Nazi Gernany, that racism was a social policy, that is, a policy that was concerned with
the elimination of all those who deviated from an ever more detailed set of norms and the
reshaping of society into a people of German blood and Nordic race; four-square in body and
soul" (1989: 208). What Peukert cannot address is the rationality of what he conceives as the irrational component
of Nazism. Although he understands the role of the haman sciences in the formation of Nazi
biological politics, he tends to consign the themes of blood, race, and Volk to an irrational
sublimation contained within them rather than viewing them, as Foucault does, as rearticulated
elements of sovereign power. This brings us to the central distinctiveness of Foucault's comments. National
Socialism is not regarded as the pinnacle of the total administration of life undertaken with the help of the human
sciences and biopolitical technologies, as it might be by the Frankfurt School and their descendants. The key point
for Foucault is that National Socialism is regarded as a particular articulation of specific elements of biopolitics
and its knowledge of populations and individuals and sovereignty. It is not simply the logic of
the bureaucratic application of the human sciences that is at issue but the reinscription of racial
discourse within a biopolitics of the population and its linkage with themes of sovereign identity,
autonomy, and political community. This form of sovereignty has been drained of all its potential to claim
and protect rights by the removal, following Bauman (1989: 111), of all counterbalancing resourceful and influential
social forces. A political dis-course that divides populations on the basis of race has certain fairly obvious political
dangers. However, one that makes the welfare and life of a racialized population the basis for national sovereignty
and political community could be viewed as more clearly “demonic.” Unfortunately, this story of
biopolitical racism does not end with Nazism. Foucault also insists that the possibilities of state
racism are found in many versions of the articulation of biopolitics and sovereignty, including
many varieties of socialism (1997b: 233-34; Stoler 1995: 96-97). For Foucault, the problem with socialism is
that it has a kind of state racism inscribed in its premises and that, even if it has sometimes criticized biopower, it
has not reexamined the foundations and modes of functioning of racism. When so- cialism analyzes its own
emergence as a result of economic transformation, it does not have need for an immediate recourse to these racist
motifs. When it insists on the necessity of struggle to socialist transformation, a struggle that is
against the enemies within the capitalist state, Foucault argues, it necessarily revives the theme
of racism. Moreover, when socialism takes upon itself the task of managing, multiplying, and
fostering life, of limiting chances and risks, and governing biological processes, it ends up
practicing a form of racism that is not properly ethnic but evolutionary and biological. The enemies
within on which this racism will be practiced are the mentally ill, the criminal, political adversaries, and-with, say,
China's one-child pol- icy-imprudent parents and their potential offspring (Sigley 1996). In the last case, we find a
form of government that combines market-based norms and biopolitical Interventions into the intimate life of the
population in a non- liberal manner in order to
Impact—Racism
realize the objective of the quantity and quality of the population necessary for the socialist plan. This kind of
evolutionary and eugenic racism is one that can be practiced against one's own population in the name of optimizing
its quantity and qual- ity. Thus, the Chinese government "claims that, not only is it possible to know in detail the
object to be governed, but, further, it is possible to predict the precise outcome of any possible intervention" (Sigley
1996: 473). This kind of rule is nonliberal in that, first, it does not use any version of the liberal
subject to limit or try to offer guarantees for or make safe population pro- grams, and, second, it
seeks to unite market-style economic norms with bio- political ones. Thus, national authorities
assign numerical targets, provincial authorities translate these into birth quotas that are
distributed among pre- fectures and counties, which in turn divide the quota among communes,
townships, and so on. The policy is implemented at the microlevel of brigades, or street or lan committees, and
their subgroups (474-75). The latter are responsible for “one hundred or so households..to keep records of their
family plans, contraceptive use and monthly cylcles” (475). This detailed chain of command uses such
instruments as local meetings of married couples, certificates of permission to become pregnant,
allowances for couples of single children, and harsh fines for those conceiving without a
certificate and those with more than one child. The Chinese policy thus inscribes sovereign elements (of
devree, interdiction, punishment and reward) within a detailed biopolitical intervention into the intimate lives of its
population. It does this not in the name of the fatherland, blood, and racial purity, but in terms of the targets
envisaged by the plan. On one point, it is clear that Chinese policy is nonliberal in that it does not rely on the
choices, aspirations, or capacities of the individual subject. This does not stop it having some similarity
with early liberal policies, particularly Malthusian-informed poor policies. In both cases, the
process of economic liberalization and the recommendation of prudential procreation are linked.
One tries to privatize the costs of imprudent propagation onto individuals, families, and their
offspring; the other tries to prevent burdens on the developmental dreams of the socialist state.

Racism is inherent in a biopower political rationality – societal normalization inevitably

leads to the slaughter of populations, war, and genocide
Eduardo Mendieta – SUNY at Stony Brook – April 25, 2002 (“‘To Make Live and Let Die’: Foucault on
Racism”; http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/emendieta/articles/foucault.pdf)
This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the emergence
of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription within the very logic
of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am quoting: “the conditions for the
acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization,
where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism
is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The
homicidal [meurtrière] function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality
of bio-power, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982
lecture “The Political Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of
the state after the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a
power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the population is
nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake , of course, the state is entitled to
slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.” (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the
thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same
political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of
a people. And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has
been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials
colonizers, which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of
a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois
political power, biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and
medicalizes war. Racism makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time
masking its weapons of death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by
making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes
the killing of the other, of others, an everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of
society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand
society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature.

The outright rejection, criticism and resistance to traditional modes of biopolitics solves
through exposing the injustices committed in the status quo. This enables a large scale
resistance in which the “new intellectual” emerges from the political struggle empowered
amidst the knowledgeable masses.

Pickett Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College 20 05 [On the Use and Abuse of
Foucault For Politics pp. 40-41]

A prominent aspect of humanism, one which Foucault is particularly concerned with attacking, involves references
to a 'normal' individual based upon the scientific discourses of psychiatry or criminology . By legitimating what
is done in prisons and asylums, the categories of humanism "dispel the shock of daily
occurrences."26 Humanism is also the legitimating force behind liberal democracy. It tells people
that although they do not have power, they are still the rulers: "In short, humanism is everything
in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and
excludes the possibility of power being seized."27
Because of its effects, Foucault argues that it is necessary to undermine the categories and central
concepts of humanism. One of the most effective ways of doing this, Foucault claims, is to learn
from those who have been the direct targets of power and repression, learn how they were
"divided, distributed, selected, and excluded in the name of psychiatry and of the normal
individual, that is, in the name of humanism."28 Their memories, histories, and knowledges are
concerned with power and struggles, not with the categories of humanism. This insurrection of
subjugated knowledges unmasks previously hidden techniques of power. Since Foucault believes
that power is only acceptable to the degree that it is hidden, this insurrection of knowledge will lead to
direct action against the central institutions of contemporary culture.
At the heart of humanism, according to Foucault, is the theory of the subject. Foucault means two things
by 'the subject.' The first is the subject of a hierarchical political order. This is the humanist notion of
the 'sovereign' individual who is subjected to the laws of society, nature, truth, and God. The
subject, even though he exercises no power, is the sovereign. The humanistic theory of the
individual rests, Foucault contends, upon a subjected will to power. That is, the very desire for
power is to be eradicated from the individual in the name of truth, nature, and society. In order to
achieve the "'desubjectification' of the will to power," that is in order to liberate the desire to take power, it is
necessary to engage in political struggle.29 During the early 1970s Foucault repeatedly emphasized that one
does not struggle against power because it is morally just; instead it is simply a struggle to take
power.30 The notion of the individual as subject, as fixed within a series of hierarchies that limit
and constrain, is overthrown through this war for power.
The second aspect of the theory of the subject is the reference to a 'normal' subject . Modern definitions of
normalcy are invariably constructed by the human sciences. This fiction of what a normal person
is like has important effects, according to Foucault, in courtrooms, prisons, and various other
institutions such as universities. The attack on the normal subject is achieved through breaking
the various taboos placed upon the individual. Drug experimentation, communes, and disregard
for gender lines are all possible examples of this.31
Another source of struggle against humanism, and the mechanisms of power that it supports, is what Foucault
envisions as a 'new intellectual.' In contrast to the traditional theorist, who formulated a totalizing
theory apart from the masses and led them with it, the new intellectual does not aspire to guide the
masses. He does not impart knowledge to them. Indeed, the masses know better than he, which is
why the intellectual must learn from those most exposed to power. The theories constructed from the
memories and struggles of factory hands and inmates are local, not global. The new intellectual is not the
bearer of truth; instead his theory is merely one more tool in the struggle against power .32
Furthermore, Foucault argued that it is dangerous to formulate a universalistic theory. Struggle must
not be made in the name of a new Utopia . "I think that to imagine another system is to extend our
participation in the present system."33 There is a strong temptation to describe a certain human nature, argue
that this nature is repressed or distorted by society, and thereby give the outlines of a new, just order. Foucault is
adamant that this temptation be resisted. The danger is that the description of human nature will itself
be unwittingly drawn from the contemporary power system. 34 One becomes entrapped in the very
system one is trying to oppose:
These notions of human nature, of justice, of the realization of the essence of human beings, are
all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilization, within our type of
knowledge, and our form of philosophy . . . and one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward
these notions to describe or justify a fight which should—and shall in principle—overthrow the
very fundaments of our society.35
Instead of opposing the ideal to the real, Foucault suggests that the new intellectual oppose the real to the
real. Exposing the specific, concrete workings and events of the prison, asylum, and other
institutions is enough to justify action. Once certain "intolerables" are revealed, such as the
prevalence of suicide in French prisons, a struggle has been created.

Voting negative turns this debate into a cite of resistance—use your ballot as both a
concrete agitation and ideological critique, destabilizing the utopian metanarratives which
form the unquestioned foundation of the affirmative—only our localized criticism can
present a viable strategy for challenging dominant power relations.
Pickett Associate professor of Political Science at Chaldron State College 20 05 [On the Use and Abuse of
Foucault For Politics pp. 42-43]

The ultimate goal of these various tactics and techniques, such as genealogy or learning from those most affected
by power, is the incitement of local struggles against the modern power system . These actions
must be led by those most subject to their constraints. Students must fight a "revolutionary
 battle" against schools; prison inmates should revolt and thereby be integrated into the larger
political struggles.41 Only those directly involved in the battle can determine the methods used.
Three institutions are most important to Foucault in this period. The revolt against these institutions must
simultaneously involve concrete agitation and ideological critique. First, schools are important
primarily because they transmit a conservative ideology masked as knowledge. Second, psychiatry
is important precisely because it extends beyond the asylum into schools, prisons, and medicine:
in short, "all the psychiatric components of everyday life which form something like a third order
of repression and policing."42 Finally, and probably most importantly to Foucault, there is the judicial
system since it relies upon the fundamental moral distinction of guilt/innocence. This allows "the
most frenzied manifestation of power imaginable" to masquerade as "the serene domination of
Good over Evil, of order over disorder."43 The judiciary actually blocks direct action through the
construction of an allegedly neutral structure that stops real struggle in the here and now and
instead arbitrates in the realm of the ideal. Moreover, the judicial system performs a number of
functions which prevent revolution, such as controlling the most volatile people who might
spearhead a revolt and introducing internal divisions within the masses so that one group will see
the other as "dangerous" or "trash." For these reasons it is vital that the judiciary be attacked. Foucault gives
examples of the "thousands of possibilities" for "anti-judicial guerilla operations," including escaping from the
police and heckling in the courts.44 Ultimately, Foucault calls for "the radical elimination of the judicial
apparatus."45
Yet agitation cannot be limited to prisons, schools, and asylums; it must extend into factories and
streets. This raises an essential point. Totalizing theory is rejected, but Foucault does support total revolution. If
theory is to be local and discontinuous, how is revolutionary action to gain its larger coherence? " The generality
of the struggle specifically derives from the system of power itself, from all the forms in which
power is exercised and applied ."46 The diffuse yet unitary nature of power allows for these
various agitations across society to finally achieve coherence, thereby eliminating the need for
imagining a new system.
Although Foucault criticizes those who still feel this need for a global theory and its Utopia , he himself
occasionally gives suggestions about what a better system would look like. Most prominent here is a desire for a
lack of hierarchy, including class divisions. For instance, when speaking about the events of May 1968, Foucault
said, "It is of the utmost importance that thousands of people exercised a power which did not assume the form of a
hierarchical organization."47
A second feature of a better society appears to be a radical pluralism bordering on anarchy. Foucault strongly
disagrees with those who invoke "the whole of society" when formulating plans for revolutionary action.48 Such an
ideal, he contends, itself arises from a Utopian dream. It also has the detrimental effect of limiting possible
avenues of struggle. If prisoners feel that they must take over their prison, they are not to be
dissuaded from this because of what is thought to be best for the whole of society. Only those
directly involved at each local site of action can determine the methods used and the goals
sought. "The whole of society is precisely that which should not be considered except as
something to be destroyed. And then, we can only hope that it will never exist again."49

The affirmatives call for morals is a call for a universal morality where everyone is forced to
submit. Not only is this biopolitical but according to Foucault would be catastrophic
Marli Huijer 1999
The aesthetics of existence in the work of Michel Foucault. Centre for Gender and Diversity, University of Maastricht Faculty of Philosophy, University of
Groningen

It would have been only logical to round off this ’political technology of the body’ with the ’death
of man’ or the ’death of the body’. Because no matter how much insight Foucault’s analysis might provide into the disciplining forces that are operative
in Western societies, the individual with his docile body, as it came to the fore in Surveiller et punir, has just as negligible a right to exist as the ’man’ from
Les mots et les choses. But perhaps, as Franqois Ewald proposed, we should conceive of Foucault’s genealogical analysis as a genealogical critique, as a
weapon against that power that divests it of all its masks and takes it to pieces (Ewald, 1975: 1235). Although Foucault presented the genealogy in Surveiller
et punir as a factual study on changes in the penal system on the basis of a political technology of the body, he also referred to the critical effect of genealogy
(Foucault, 1980b: 78-108). If genealogy is a critical analysis of power relations, then yet another mode of thinking about the ‘I’ is possible in the void of
disappeared man in addition to a mode of thinking about ’the subject’ in terms of subject positions in language and as an object of power and knowledge.
This other thinking came to the fore in L’usage des plaisirs when Foucault gave a third answer to the question of what the ‘I’ is without a presupposed ‘I’.
He suggested the possibility that the experience of oneself is a relation to oneself that comes into being in links to truths and power relations. And he
dedicated himself to an analysis of games of truth, ’true-and-false-games through which the being historically constitutes itself as experience, in other words
as something that can and must be thought’ (Foucault, 1984a: 12-13). For Foucault, this experience is not a case of being-subjected-to something or
someone, nor is it a case of being-linked-to one’s own identity, it is an experience that comes into being in an interplay of truths and power relations. In these
games of truth and power relations, the human being constitutes a relationship to himself (experiences himself) through a certain link to ’truth’. This last
thought movement makes the declaration of the death of ’man’ superfluous: ’man’ can be perceived as one of the figures in a multifarious series of
subjectivities. A bit more than a decade later, Foucault
referred to his philosophical statement in Les mots et les choses that
’man’ had all but perished as a mistake. Instead of stating that ’man’ or ’the subject’ was dead,
what he wanted to say was ’that in the course of history, human beings have never ceased to
construct themselves, in other words to perpetually alter the level of their subjectivity and
constitute themselves in a manifold and infinite series of differing subjectivities that will never
reach a final point and will never position us eye to eye with man’ (Foucault, 1980a, DE IV: 75). The aesthetics of
existence is a stylization of the relation to oneself, existing side by side with other formations. It is not a prescription or an ideal to be strived for by
everyone. According
to Foucault, ’ The search for a form of morality acceptable for everyone - in the
sense that everyone would have to submit to it - seems catastrophic to me’ (Foucault, 1984j, DE IV: 706)

Looking after the ‘health and safety’ of the population gives the government more control over the
population and justifies surveillance.
Bell 2006
(Colleen, Centre for International and Security Studies, York University,”Surveillance Strategies and Populations at Risk:
Biopolitical Governance in Canada’s National Security Policy”, Sage Journals)

There are two notable characteristics of the policy that illuminate important aspects of modern
power relations. The first is the articulation of the freedom, health and safety of the Canadian
population as a primary security objective. While continuing to share an understanding of the state (and
therefore also political authority) as the solution to the problem of (in)security, the treatment of
the population as a core national security concern represents a departure from traditional
interpretations of security, which have tended to posit states as the primary, and often only,
objects. The second characteristic concerns the emphasis on surveillance. While the policy explicitly
devotes only one strategic area to intelligence, further investigation shows that securing each strategic area relies in
large part on the development of routine surveillance practices. These characteristics inform a security
approach that rationalizes Canada both as a sovereign state oriented to ends–means strategies and as a collective population
that requires subjection to regulatory mechanisms to secure it from a range of broadly conceived ‘risks’ that fit under the
equally ambiguous rubric of liberty, health and safety. This article examines Canada’s first-ever national security policy by
taking up Foucault’s postulation that modern society is marked by biopower, a mechanism of power that is principally
concerned with the management of biological life. As a power focused on life, biopolitics has meant that the
problem of how best to govern has not only been posed in terms of effecting ultimate dominion
over a sovereign territory, but increasingly as an issue of yielding productive services from the
citizenry. According to Foucault, ‘reason of state’ is no longer confined to the will of the prince,
but is ‘government in accordance with the state’s strength’, which includes the ‘ends–means’
instrumental rationality associated with state survival in a competitive international system
conjoined with the observance of what is governed and how government might improve or
enhance the qualities of a population (Gordon, 1991: 9–10). This study examines how Canada’s national security
policy is mobilized through discourses and administrative practices that take elusive risks to the freedom, health and safety of
the population as an opportunity for action, and is made possible through a generalized expansion of surveillance. The
biopolitical character of security has greatly reduced the traditionally accepted distinctions between the state as a military and
legitimated actor and the state as a service-providing, regulatory agency for the management of the population. This not only
reinforces the state as a pre-eminent, direct authority, but ushers in a set of decentralized and indirect mechanisms of rule that
are principally activated through population monitoring. The national security policy demonstrates a form of biopolitical
governance that treats the problems for political freedom, equality and democratic accountability posed by encroaching
national security measures as largely negligible in the face of supposedly indeterminable danger. While illustrating a
clear objective to secure the health and safety of the national population from threats, it does not take
seriously the freedoms that may be at stake in such action. The most sustained consideration of freedom, rather, is
the claim that freedom is best protected by the security measures proposed, because dangers to freedom are presented as a
consequence of the threats to which Canada is supposedly subjected, rather than as connected to the governance and security
practices of the Canadian state. Security thus becomes the solution not only to the problem of
indeterminate danger, but also to the problem of freedom. Despite the human-based security concerns upon
which the policy is premised, state-centric security objectives that call upon coercive and militarized tactics are not only left
intact, but have found new sources of legitimacy. Securing the health and safety of the population serves as
the principle criterion for discretionary state power and for risk-profiling motivated by suspicion.