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Biopower Answers

Biopower Answers...................................................................................................................................................1Biopower Frontline (1/3).........................................................................................................................................3Biopower Frontline (2/3).........................................................................................................................................4Biopower Frontline (3/3).........................................................................................................................................5Biopower Alt Specific Frontline (1/5).....................................................................................................................6Biopower Alt Specific Frontline (2/5).....................................................................................................................7Biopower Alt Specific Frontline (3/5).....................................................................................................................8Biopower Alt Specific Frontline (4/5).....................................................................................................................9Biopower Alt Specific Frontline (5/5)...................................................................................................................10Biopower Deterrence Turn (1/2)...........................................................................................................................11Biopower Deterrence Turn (2/2)...........................................................................................................................12Biopower Capitalism Turn (1/2)............................................................................................................................13Biopower Capitalism Turn (2/2)............................................................................................................................14Biopower Sicence Turn.........................................................................................................................................15Biopower Hegemony Turn....................................................................................................................................16Zizek Freedom Turn..............................................................................................................................................17Pragmatism – Alt Fails..........................................................................................................................................18Turn – Progressive Politics....................................................................................................................................19Foucault = Flawed.................................................................................................................................................20A2: Authors Biased................................................................................................................................................21A2: Authors Biased................................................................................................................................................22A2: Discourse First................................................................................................................................................23A2: Discourse First................................................................................................................................................24Turn – Pragmatism Key.........................................................................................................................................25Permutation............................................................................................................................................................26Perm Solvency.......................................................................................................................................................27Fuco Bad/Perm Solvency......................................................................................................................................28Perm Solvency.......................................................................................................................................................29Agency Turn [1/3].................................................................................................................................................30Agency Turn [2/3].................................................................................................................................................31Agency Turn [3/3].................................................................................................................................................32A2: ToTo...............................................................................................................................................................33Alt Fails – Marxist Turn........................................................................................................................................34Identity Politics Turn.............................................................................................................................................35No Link - Habitus..................................................................................................................................................36Foucault = Flawed (Ambiguity)............................................................................................................................37Baudrillard Turn – Death Simulation....................................................................................................................38Zizek – Critical Fantasy Turn................................................................................................................................39Foucault = Flawed (Reality)..................................................................................................................................40Foucault = Flawed (Truth).....................................................................................................................................41Alt Fails (Poverty).................................................................................................................................................42

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Biopower Frontline (1/3)

1.) Double-bind, eithera.) the alternative advocates the holistic rejection of biopolitical control making it utopian fiat

since no aff can outweigh a world in which the neg can fiat absoluteness, destroying fairness and making it a voting issue

-or-b.) their discourse is meaningless and has no effect outside this round making case a disad; Prefer

the coherent internal logic of our warranted scenarios to their generic impacts

3.) Permute – do the plan then the alternativea.) Opp Cost – if it’s so good, the alt should solve for residual linksb.) Timeframe – our impacts are too important to be left out, we can still reject the state later

6.) Biopower is inevitable and inescapable – the alt can never solvePeter Dula [Historic Peace Churches Consultation, Bienenberg, Switzerland, 25 June 2001] http://www.peacetheology.org/papers/dula.html

Global capital operates on all registers of the social order. It is the pinnacle of biopower, where social life is not just regulated but also produced. Understood in these terms, the web of power seems inescapable. There is no outside to this power, as Hardt and Negri repeatedly insist. There is no non-co-optable space from which to mount a critique, no proletariat (or church) to

function as a locus of purity. And since this power takes the form of a constantly shifting web or network it is difficult, if not impossible, to pin-point an ‘enemy’ (56-58). Negri goes so far as to say that ‘the proletariat is everywhere, just as the boss

is.’ In other words, everyone is now both oppressor and oppressed. In light of all this it becomes easy to read Hardt and Negri as utterly hopeless and also as absurdly abstract. One wants to respond with Emerson’s retort to Tocqueville: ‘I hate the builders of dungeons in the air.’ Or with Stuart Hall’s

insistence that the argument that global capitalism is the final triumph of the West, ‘the final moment of a global post-modern where it now gets hold of everybody, of everything, where there is no difference which it cannot contain, no otherness it cannot speak, no marginality which it cannot take pleasure out of…. [is] the form of post-modernism I don’t buy. It is what happens to ex-Marxist French intellectuals when they head for the desert.’ On the ground, say in Prague or Capetown not so many years ago, the line between oppressor and oppressed comes into focus in a

way it can’t from the heights of Deleuzian metaphysics. Civil society becomes more elusive than Hardt and Negri’s condemnation (or Falk’s approval) suggests.

7.) Their alternative will be co-opted, resistance can’t break down biopowerH. F. Haber, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Colorado-Denver, BEYOND POSTMODERN POLITICS, 1994, p. 99

Foucault states in the passage quoted above, that the existence of power "depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance," that resistance "can only exist in the strategic field of power relations." But this means that resistance is co-opted for the purposes of disciplinary and normalizing regimes of power, and is evidence of the fact that resistance need not result in transformation. And in fact, Foucault is not wrong. We see this co-opting of resistance all the time. Enough white middle-class women objected to being confined to the role of housewife for it to have become the norm for those women to find jobs outside of the home. But, far from changing the basic power structure, the phenomenon of women in the workplace has served to strengthen it. The male-dominated society hasn't given much up-women are still responsible for the household; government has not taken on the responsibility of making day care available to all, it has not sufficiently altered the workplace to accommodate demands for maternity (much less demands for paternity) leave, women are still not given equal pay for equal work, etc., it would not then be surprising if these women "chose" to go back to being housewives. The dominant power regime assures a no-win situation. If women work, more can be produced, and two-income families are able to spend more in an inflationary age than a single-income family would. On the other hand, if women are forced to go back to being housewives, the patriarchal power regime wins by having its values reinforced. Either way the dominant power regime is able both to benefit from, and deflect, resistance . Or one could take the example of how resistances are used as a target to strengthen the hold of the dominant powers by unifying the people against a common enemy.

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8.) We’re Different – their generic evidence assumes the Nazi and Hitler-style biopolitical control which resulted in genocides; prefer specific warranted internals – heg is good.

9.) Permute – do the plan and all parts of the alternative that don’t consist of “vote negative”.

a.) Working within the system is critical to progressive changes – history proves that non-statist movements, such as their alternative, are total failures.Grossberg, Professor of Communications at the University of Illinois, 1992 [Lawrence, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, p. 390-391]

But this would mean that the Left could not remain outside of the systems of governance. It has sometimes to work with, against and with in

bureaucratic systems of governance. Consider the case of Amnesty International, an immesely effective organization when its major strategy was (similar to that of the Right) exerting pressure directly on the bureaucracies of specific governments. In recent years (marked by the recent rock tour), it has apparently redirected its energy and resources, seeking new members (who may not be committed to actually doing anything;

memebership becomes little more than a statement of ideological support for a position that few are likely to oppose) and public visibility. In stark contrast, the most effective struggle on the Left in recent times has been the dramatic (and, one hopes continuing)

dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. It was accomplished by mobilizing popular pressure on the institutions and bureaucracies of economic and governmental institutions and it depended on a highly sophisticated organizational structure. The Left too often thinks that it can end racism and sexism and classism by changing people's attitudes and everyday practices (e.g. the 1990 Black boycott of Korean stores in New York). Unfortunately, while such struggles may be extremely visible, they are often less effective than attempts to move the institutions (e.g.,banks, taxing structures,

distributors) which have put the economic realtions of black and immigrant populations in place and which condition people's everyday practices. The Left needs institutions which can operate within the system of governance, understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that power can be challenged . The Left assumed for some time now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in

fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of decision making power. Otherwise the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they must act with organizations, and within the systems of organizations which in fact have the capacity (as well as

responsibility) to fight them.

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b.) the alternative only breeds nihilism and worse oppressionCollins ‘97 (Patricia Hill, Department of Sociology, PhD, Brandeis University, President-Elect of the American Sociological Association, Fighting Words, p 135-136)

In this sense, postmodern views of power that overemphasize hegemony and local politics provide a seductive mix of appearing to challenge oppression while secretly believing that such efforts are doomed. Hegemonic power appears as ever expanding and invading. It may even attempt to “annex” the counterdiscourses that have developed, oppositional discourses such as Afrocentrism,

postmodernism, feminism, and Black feminist thought. This is a very important insight. However, there is a difference between being aware of the power of one’s enemy and arguing that such power is so pervasive that resistance will, at best, provide a brief

respite and, at worst, prove ultimately futile. This emphasis on power as being hegemonic and seemingly absolute coupled with

a belief in local resistance as the best people can do, flies in the face of actual, historical successes. African-Americans, women, poor people, and others have achieved results through social movements, revolts, revolutions, and other collective social action against government, corporate, and academic structures. As James Scott queries, “What remains to be explained…is why theories of hegemony….have…retained an enormous intellectual appeal to social scientists

and historians” (1990, 86). Perhaps for colonizers who refuse, individualized, local resistance is the best they can envision. Overemphasizing hegemony and stressing nihilism not only does not resist injustice but participates in its manufacture. Views of power grounded exclusively in notions of hegemony and nihilism are not only pessimistic, they can be dangerous for members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, the emphasis on local versus structural institutions makes it difficult to examine major structures such as racism, sexism, and other structural forms of oppression. Social theories that reduce hierarchal power relations to the level of representation, performance, or constructed phenomena not only emphasize the likelihood that resistance will fail in the face of a pervasive hegemonic presence, they also reinforce perceptions that local, individualized micropolitics constitutes the most effective terrain of struggle. The emphasis

on the local dovetails nicely with increasing emphasis on the “personal” as a source of power and with parallel attention to subjectivity. If politics becomes reduced to the “personal,” decentering relations of ruling in academia and other bureaucratic structures seems increasingly unlikely. As Rey Chow opines,

“What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and this depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand.

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Biopower Alt Specific Frontline (1/5)

The state will crush any attempt to perform the altNathan Snaza, Bad Subjects, April 03

What is required of us then is a thinking of what it means to inhabit human being without identity, or in Agamben's terms, as whatever being. Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear. (Means Without End) The whatever, which is neither generic nor specific, neither universal nor particular, is for Agamben the "loveable." What Agamben recognizes in Tiananmen as the insistence of the whatever in the face of State violence, we may recognize in the New York peace protest in February of 2003. David Roediger, in a recent talk, suggested that something happened at this protest in New York that was qualitatively different from what he'd seen at other protests. The marchers all carried hand-made signs proclaiming this or that reason for opposition to the Administration's "preemptive strikes." The un-organized presence, the common presence with no common denominator, was thus asserted. It was met with police violence and tear gas.

Relativisim –

A. Rejecting the notion of objective truth embraces rape, racism, and Holocaust denial

Catharine A. MacKinnon 2000 (Chicago Kent Law Review, 75 Chi. Kent L. Rev. 687)It is my view that it is the relation of theory to reality that feminism changed, and it is in part a reversion to a prefeminist relation of theory to reality that postmodernism is reimposing. This is not about truth. Truth is a generality, an abstraction of a certain shape and quality. Social realities are something else again. Postmodernism has decided that because truth died with God, there are no social facts. The fact that reality is a social construction does not mean that it is not there; it means that it is there, in society, where we live. According to postmodernism, there are no facts; everything is a reading, so there can be no lies. Apparently it cannot be known whether the Holocaust is a hoax, whether women love to be raped, whether Black people are genetically intellectually inferior to white people, whether homosexuals are child molesters. To postmodernists, these factish things are indeterminate, contingent, in play, all a matter of interpretation. Similarly, whether or not acts of incest happened or are traumatic to children become fogged over in "epistemological quandaries" as beyond thinking, beyond narrative, beyond intelligibility, as "this event that is no event"--as if survivors have not often reported, in intelligible narratives, that such events did happen and did harm them. 41 That violation often damages speech and memory does not mean that, if one has speech and memory, one was not violated. Recall when Bill Clinton, asked about his sexual relationship with a young woman intern, said that it all depended on what "is" means. The country jeered his epistemic dodge as a transparent and slimy subterfuge to evade accountability: get real. The postmodernists were strangely silent. But you can't commit perjury if there are no facts. Where are these people when you need them?

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B. Rejecting the foundations of knowledge robs their criticism of all coherence and meaning; their argument makes no sense if there is no objective truth

Jarvis 00 (Darryl, lecturer in IR at the University of Sydney, International relations and the challenge of postmodernism, 2000, p. 189-

First, the project of subversive-deconstructive postmodernism can be seen as contrary to the discipline of International Relations as a social sci-ence designed not so much to generate knowledge as to disparage knowl-edge spawned through Enlightenment thinking and the precepts of rationality and science. At its most elemental, it is a project of disruption and an attack upon the "complacency" of knowledge generated in modernist quarters. Not that this is all bad. There is much good to come from a shakeup of the academy, from a reexamination of our ontological, episte-mological, and axiological foundations and from the types of practices that ensue from certain modes of conceptualization and analysis . Pointing out silences and omissions from the dominant discourse is always fruitful and necessary, but, arguably, also accomplished under theories and paradigms and from critical quarters that are not necessarily postrnodern and which do not seek to "undo" all knowledge simply on the basis of imperfection . Mod- ernist discourse is not unreflective, can make autonomous corrections, engage in revisionist history, identify injustices, crimes of exclusion, and extend representation to groups that were otherwise not previously repre-sented (think of liberalism or socialism for example!). This, after all, is why we understand modernity to be progressive and history a forward-moving narrative that is self-effusive. More importantly,

given the self-defeating con-tradictions endemic to subversive-deconstructive postmodernism, especially its specious relativism, it requires no great mind to postulate that the use of modernist/rationalist/Enlightenment discourse will better make the case for a progressive politics of ever

greater inclusion, representation, and jus-tice for all than will sloganistic calls for us to "think otherwise." The sim-ple and myopic assumption that social change can be engineered through linguistic policing of politically incorrect

words, concepts and opinions, is surely one of the more politically lame (idealist) suggestions to come from armchair theorists in the last fifty years. By the same token, the suggestion that we engage in revisionism of the sort that would "undo" modernist knowledge so that we might start again free of silences, oppressions, and inequalities also smacks of an intelligentsia so idealist as to be unconnected to the world in which they live. The critical skills of subversive postmod-ernists, constrained perhaps by the success of the West, of Western capi-talism, if not liberal

democracy, as the legitimate form of representation, and having tried unsuccessfully through revolution and political uprising to dethrone it previously, have turned to the citadel of our communal

identities and attacked not parliaments, nor forms of social-political-economic organization, but language, communication, and the basis of Enlightenment knowledge that otherwise enables us to live, work, and communicate as social beings. Clever though this is,

it is not in the end compatible with the project of theory knowledge and takes us further away from an understanding of our world. Its greatest contribution is to cele-brate the loss of certainty, where, argues John O'Neill, "men (sic) are no longer sure of their ruling knowledge and are unable to mobilize sufficient legitimation for the master-

narratives of truth and justice." To suppose, however, that we should rejoice collectively at the prospects of a specious relativism and a multifarious perspectivism, and that absent any further constructive endeavor, the great questions and problems of our time will be answered or solved by this speaks of an intellectual poverty now famed perversely as the search for "thinking space."26

Permute – reject biopower in all instances not necessary to do the plan – it’s justified by lack of a stable alternative and is key to test the specificity of the link

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The biopolitical use of sovereignty allows for freedom from oppression Humphrey 2004 (Caroline; Professor of Asian Anthropology – University of Cambridge) “Sovereignty” in Companion to the Anthropology of Politics ed. by Nugent p. 435

Yet we are dealing here with a new era. The images that enhance the authority of the roof are not just after-images of Soviet athletes. They also embody the figure of the ruthless capitalist, with all that

implies for people who have been taught from childhood about such people but never experienced them . The subjects in this arena of sovereignty bring to it new, yet historically specific, political ideas – such as that they constitute “a movement,” that they are all “privatized,” and that a certain freedom is possible within an oppressive system. Agamben may be right in general terms that across the world we are coming to see the increased presence of paralegal measures beyond the state that embrace “biopolitics” and create enclaves alien to democracy (see also Žižek 2002). But it would be a mistake to think that new sovereignties emerging within and beyond nation-states are all alike, simply because they do indeed have the characteristics of sovereignty. Sovereignties are saturated with “ways of life.”

Vagueness – Their authors provide no description of what the world post alternative would look like

A. Takes out the alternative solvency – Absent a concrete system to replace the SQ of democracy, there is ZERO risk that their call to action will culminate in any sort of change.

Rorty 98 (Richard, Stanford Philosophy Professor, Achieving Our Country, pp. 103-5)

The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about "the system" rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insou- ciant use of terms like "late capitalism" suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy—the liberation of the people from the power of the technocrats—until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. Even someone like myself, whose admira-tion for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory democracy against Walter Lippmann's insistence on the need for expertise.15 The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were di- abolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation.

Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

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B. It’s a voting issue for equity – Vague alternatives allow the negative to shift out of all our offense by claiming that the alt wouldn’t cause/destroy X system. It irreparably damages 2AC strategy.

Genocidal Violence still exists in world without sovereignty Bauman 2000 (Zygmunt “Ziggy”; Professor Emeritus of Sociology – Universities of Leeds and Warsaw) Liquid Modernity p. 193-4

If the principle of nation-states’ sovereignty is finally discredited and removed from the stature-books of international law, if the states’ power of resistance is effectively broken so that it needs no longer to be seriously reckoned with

in the global powers’ calculations, the replacement of the ‘world of nations’ by the supranational order (a global political system of

checks-and-balances) is but one – and from today’s perspective not the most certain – of the possible scenarios. The world-wide spread of what Pierre Bourdieu has dubbed ‘the policy of precarization’ is equally, if not more, likely to ensue. If the blow delivered to state sovereignty proves fatal and terminal, if the state loses its monopoly of coercion (which

Max Weber and Norbert Elias alike considered to its most distinctive feature and, simultaneously, the sine qua non attribute of modern rationality and civilized order), it does not necessarily follow that the sum total of violence, including violence with potentially genocidal consequences, will diminish; violence may be only ‘deregulated’, descending from the state to the ‘community’ (neo-tribal) level. In the absence of the institutional frame of ‘arboretic’ structures (to use Deleuze/Guattari’s metaphor), society may well return to its ‘explosive’ manifestations , spreading rhizomically and sprouting formations of varying degree of durability, but invariably unstable, hotly contested and devoid of foundation to rely on – except the passionate, frenetic actions of their adherents. The endemic instability of the foundations would need to be compensated for. An active (whether willing or enforced) complicity in the crimes which only the continuous existence of an

‘explosive community’ may exonerate and effectively exempt from punishment is the most suitable candidate to fill the vacancy. Explosive communities need violence to be born and violence to go on living. They need enemies who threaten their extinction and enemies to be collectively persecuted, tortured and mutilated , in order to make every member of the community into an accessory to what, in case the battle were lost, would most certainly be declared a crime against humanity, prosecuted and punished.

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Permute - do both – use biopower is critical to expose negative uses – complete denunciation fails Rabinow and Rose 2003 (Paul, Professor of Anthropology – Berkeley; and Nikolas, Professor of Sociology – London School of Economics and Political Science) “Thoughts on the Concept of Biopower Today” www.lse.ac.uk/collections/sociology/pdf/RabinowandRose-BiopowerToday03.pdf

One might well imagine what it might have been like in 1800 for an analyst attempting to grasp the transformative implications of the forerunners of the “birth of the clinic.” Today we are equally in a situation of major historical change whose directions are partially obscure and not yet solidified. Thus it is no surprise that it is hard to tell whether we are at the early stages of a momentous historical shift, in the middle of a process that is well underway towards stabilizing new forms, or in a conjuncture that will prove to be a dead end or at least marginal to other changes that we cannot envisage today. With that proviso, we feel that the concept of biopower is pertinent to grasping many diverse contemporary developments. But the concept remains insufficiently developed, and has not yet demonstrated its analytic mettle in sufficient cases. We would recommend that analysts attended to that task, rather than succumbing to the allure of philosophies that turn a concept into a theory or a world view. The three elements that are brought together in the concept of biopower - knowledge of vital life processes, power relations that take humans as living beings as their object, and the modes of subjectification through which subjects work on themselves qua living beings - as well as their multiple combinations remain to be charted. We argue that analyses of aimed at clarifying the bio-political rationality of the near future must pass through detailed empirically grounded inquiry into changes that are occurring at each of these three axes, and the relations and combinations amongst them. The significance - and indeed the possibility - of the entry of genomic knowledge into the bio-political field must be situated within the shifting territorialization both beyond and across nation states – transnational flows of knowledge are coupled with local intensifications of research sites, and with supra-national institutions from the European Union to the World Health Organization. Variable mobilizations of persons, tissues, organs and pathogens interact with the slower mobilizations of therapeutics such as generic drugs for the treatment of AIDS. Parallel motions can be identified on the level of subjectifications: cystic fibrosis groups cut across national and class barriers as do their care givers; models of patient activism spread, and are taken up and reinterpreted form Japan to Bangladesh, and from Turn to Toronto. It is important to underline that these processes are both individualizing and collectivizing. Who, in 1955, could have imagined depressed people as a global category, not only as targets but also as active subjects in a new biopolitics of mental health? To carry out these mappings of the possibilities opened up in this seemingly novel formation of biopower is not to ignore the negatives - the machinations of international capital, the hyped up marketing strategies of “big pharma,” the new entanglements between truth, health and profit that characterize the relations between researchers and industry as well as the implications of intellectual property for older forms of knowledge production, the possibilities of pathogenic release with wide scale effect, the massive inequalities in access to even basic healthcare, the more traditional forms of geopolitics which will make use of these new bio-possibilities in all sorts of inventive and often reprehensible ways. That said, if in fact we are in an emergent moment of vital politics, celebration or denunciation are insufficient as analytical approaches. One of the most pressing demands for critical thought today is the invention, enlargement and testing of an analytical toolkit adequate to the present reality. Biopower, used in a precise fashion, and subject to inventive development, would surely take its place as a key part of such a toolkit.

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Biopower Deterrence Turn (1/2)

A. Biopower key to nuclear deterrence

William Bogard, professor at Whitman College, 1991 [Social Science Journal, Vol. 28 Issue 3 p. 325]

Although there are many places in the History of Sexuality that might indicate what Foucault had in mind was indeed what we commonly mean by “deterrence,” the general context remains one of discipline, expanded to encompass the issues of bio-power and the control over life. But there are a number of reasons to believe that such developments raise problems for the economy of power relations that, while related to those of discipline, are nonetheless conceptually distinct. The following appear to me to be the most relevant of those distinctions. With discipline, the problem of power is that of producing and finalizing functions within a human multiplicity, to maximize utility through the strategic ordering of spatial and temporal relations, ultimately to foster or disallow life itself.

With deterrence, on the other hand, we might say that the problem is one of reintroducing an asymmetry between opposing forces which have evolved too close to a point of equivalence or parity, or to a saturation

point where it is no longer possible to increase their respective utilities. <continued…> Where discipline sets forces in motion, deterrence indefinitely postpones the equivalence of forces. Here again, the case of nuclear deterrence serves as a paradigm, but this is only because it is the most concentrated and extreme form of a whole multiplicity of tactical maneuvers—of postponement, disinclination, destabilization, etc.—that, like the disciplines in the 1 8th century, have evolved into a general mechanism of domination, and which today pervades the most diverse institutional settings.

B. Deterrence solves CBW warfareDavid C. Gompert is vice president of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he runs the National Security Research Division, January/February 2000 [Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2000/jf00/jf00gompert.html]

While chemical weapons are more likely to be used to disrupt U.S. military operations, biological weapons pose terrible and lingering dangers to the general population, much like strategic nuclear weapons. The most immediate concern is that rogue states, lacking other options, might threaten to use biological weapons against U.S. troops in a local war. The United States can partly neutralize this threat by exploiting information technology--dispersing its forces and striking accurately from afar. But

determined enemies will then resort to longer-range means to threaten U.S. forces, allies, and territory. Try as it might to stop the spread of these weapons, the United States must prepare to prevent or defend against their use. But defense alone, with anti-missile and

counterforce weapons, cannot make American forces and citizens entirely safe from lethal biological agents. Deterrence is crucial. A common argument is that U.S. conventional military superiority--the ability to render an adversary defenseless--should suffice to deter the use of weapons of mass

destruction. However, an enemy may already be receiving the full brunt of U.S. conventional strikes when it opts to threaten biological attack. Indeed, the most plausible reason why a rogue state would threaten to use weapons of mass destruction

is that the United States has already unleashed its conventional might to defeat local aggression. Given that, the threat of U.S. conventional reprisal presumably would be ineffective. And because the United States has forsworn biological and chemical weapons, deterrence could depend critically on the threat to retaliate with nuclear weapons . That, of course, would be contradicted by a nuclear no-first-use policy.

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Biopower Deterrence Turn (2/2)

C. Bioweapons cause extinction

John Steinbruner, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, chair of the committee on international security and arms control of the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Policy, December 22, 1997

That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.

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Biopower Capitalism Turn (1/2)

A. Biopower is key to Capitalism

Read 2003 (Jason; Assistant Professor of Philosophy – University of Southern Maine) The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present p. 140-1

In many ways the articulation of the concept of biopower falls outside of Marx’s problematic. Foucault argues that biopower predates the emergence of industrial capitalism: “This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomenon of population to economic processes.” Biopower predates capitalism insofar as the recognition of the relationship between the population as a vital entity and the state dates back to at least early mercantilism, or mercantile capitalism. Population does not simply designate the number of individuals bounded by a territory but the dynamic relations of birth and death, sickness and health, which are vital to a nation politically and economically. It is only later, after the rise of the urban centers of production and the threat of revolution, after the health of the rich and the poor become intertwined, that the state concerns itself not only with the population as a statistical entity but specifically with the health and environment of the working body. What is essential for Foucault is the manner in which the investment of the state into the life and death of the population, the environmental conditions of the cities, and the health and longevity of the working class in each case is a properly political relation forming a biopolitics. In each instance the goals of the intervention are political: Biopolitics functions to increase productivity while at the same time reducing the conditions and causes for revolt. Thus, it is more accurate to say that biopolitics works for both economic and political goals, or better, it is constituted at the point at which political power becomes inseparable form economic power. Biopolitics, like Marx’s critique of political economy, short-circuits the division between the economic and the political. Moreover, at the same time as biopolitics functions in the service of political and economic goals, is also works to restructure and transform political and social space, for example, by imposing grids and models drawn from the control of contagions onto the city, models that are always both hygienic and political. It brings with it new models of the partitioning of social space, new forms of knowledge regarding social space, new ways of living and understanding life.

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Biopower Capitalism Turn (2/2)B. Capitalism’s socializing functions are key to survival

Heilbroner 1985 (Robert L.; Norman Thomas Professor of Economics – New School for Social Research) The Nature and Logic of Capitalism p. 23-4

Of at least equal importance with the institutions that shape the economic activities of the system are those that mold behavior and belief at the diffuse, unspecialized level we call social life. Here, typical behavioral ways are influenced by the pressures of indoctrination and education – experiences that make it

possible for individuals to enter their social formations with a sense of familiarity and acceptance. These pressures begin with the family that introduces the infant to the norms of private and public existence; continue with the reinforcement of, and sometimes with the challenge to, those norms

by the child’s peers and teachers; and are capped by the enticements, rewards and punishments administered by larger social organizations, from churches to corporations to the state itself. The latter includes, of course, the socio-legal framework that casts its powerful compulsions over so much of social activity, establishing with the force of law what we must do and what we may not

do. This socializing and normalizing process is by no means a completely integrated or frictionless one . As they move through history, all societies must make their peace with nature and with themselves, the latter constituting the theme of domination and

oppression that will play a very large role in our analysis. Here we need only note that the institutions in which are molded typical patterns of rule, obedience, and beliefs are themselves molded by an inner dynamic that may take the form of class against class, against tribe, even civilization against civilization, or at times contests that focus on color, religion, sex. For these reasons, at close range the socialization process is often a tense and sometimes turbulent one. But at a sufficient historic distance, the spectrum of socializing institutions clearly succeeds in creating typical behavioral patterns. Primitive societies produce hunters and gatherers with their requisite attitudes as well as skills; imperial and feudal societies produce peasants and lords with their respective mentalities and accepted roles; and

capitalist societies create workers and capitalists who also bring to their activities deeply ingrained conceptions of their social functions. Were there not a high degree of dependability to this indoctrination process, the extraordinary stability of social formations would not be the rule, and humanity would long ago have perished or found its way to a heaven on earth. The viscosity that is so prominent a feature of social history must therefore be traced to the stabilizing influence of the behavior-shaping cores of its social formations.

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Biopower Sicence Turn

A. Biopolitics is key to Modern Science and Medicine

Rose 2001 (Nikolas; Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College – University of London) “The Politics of Life Itself” Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 18(6): 1–30

THE BIOLOGICAL existence of human beings has become political in novel ways. The object, target and stake of this new ‘vital’ politics are human life itself. How might we analyse it?1 I would like to start from a well known remark by Michel Foucault, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality: ‘For millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living being with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question’ (Foucault, 1979: 188). Foucault’s thesis, as is well known, was that, in Western societies at least, we lived in a ‘biopolitical’ age. Since the 18th century, political power has no longer been exercised through the stark choice of allowing life or giving death. Political authorities, in alliance with many others, have taken on the task of the management of life in the name of the well-being of the population as a vital order and of each of its living subjects. Politics now addresses the vital processes of human existence: the size and quality of the population; reproduction and human sexuality; conjugal, parental and familial relations; health and disease; birth and death. Biopolitics was inextricably bound up with the rise of the life sciences, the human sciences, clinical medicine. It has given birth to techniques, technologies, experts and apparatuses for the care and administration of the life of each and all, from town planning to health services. And it has given a kind of ‘vitalist’ character to the existence of individuals as political subjects.

B. Western Science is key to survival

Locke 1997 (Edwin A.; Professor of Management – University of Maryland-College Park and Senior Writer – Ayn Rand Institute) “The Greatness of Western Civilization” www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr001=7xcem0b1i1.app7a&page=NewsArticle&id=6164&news_iv_ctrl=1077

The triumph of reason and rights made possible the full development and application of science and technology and ultimately modern industrial society. Reason and rights freed man's mind from the tyranny of religious dogma and freed man's productive

capacity from the tyranny of state control. Scientific and technological progress followed in several interdependent steps. Men began to understand the laws of nature. They invented an endless succession of new products. And they engaged in large-scale production, that is, the creation of wealth, which in turn financed and motivated further invention and production. As a result, horse-and-buggies were replaced by automobiles, wagon tracks by steel rails, candles by electricity. At last, after millennia of struggle, man became

the master of his environment. The result of the core achievements of Western civilization has been an increase in freedom, wealth, health, comfort, and life expectancy unprecedented in the history of the world. The achievements were greatest in the country where the principles of reason and rights were implemented most consistently--the United States of America. In contrast, it was precisely in those Eastern and African countries which did not embrace reason, rights, and technology where people suffered (and still suffer) most from both natural and man-made disasters (famine, poverty, illness, dictatorship) and where life-expectancy was (and is) lowest. It is said that primitives live "in harmony with nature," but in reality they are simply victims of the vicissitudes of nature--if some dictator does not kill them first. The greatness of the West is not an "ethnocentric" prejudice; it is an objective fact. This assessment is based on the only proper standard for judging a government or a society: the degree to which its core

values are pro- or anti-life. Pro-life cultures acknowledge and respect man's nature as a rational being who must discover and create the conditions which his survival and happiness require--which means that they advocate reason, rights, freedom, and technological progress. Despite its undeniable triumphs, Western civilization is by no means secure. Its core principles are under attack from every direction--by religious fanatics, by dictators and, most disgracefully, by Western intellectuals, who are denouncing reason in the name of skepticism, rights in the name of special entitlements, and progress in the name of environmentalism. We are heading rapidly

toward the dead end of nihilism. The core values and achievements of the West and America must be asserted proudly and defended to the death. Our lives depend on them.

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Biopower Hegemony Turn

A. Biopolitics is key to maintaining US hegemony globally

Reid 2005 (Julian; Professor of International Relations – University of Sussex) “The Biopolitics of the War on Terror” Third World Quarterly v. 26 n. 2 June

The defining feature of the modern international system has been the ongoing conflict between the sovereign powers of nation-states that constituted it at its outset and the development of bipolitical organs generated in pursuit of an ethical commitment to the enfranchisement of a universalised humanity. Yet the account of humanity rendered in the institutionalisation of biopolitical practices and through the creation of agencies for the defence of the rights of humanity in universal terms is itself, a statically imperial one. Defining humanity in accordance with internationalised laws, reducing it to another imperial injunction, biopolitical modernity plays into the hands of modern sovereignty. Coordinating its global deterritorializations of humanity via a concomitant universalisation realises the conditions for the imposition of a new form of transcendent sovereign power, also, on a

global scale. Global deterritorializations beget global reterritorializations. The idea and pursuit of a universally coded and legally enfranchised humanity invokes necessarily the idea and pursuit of a universal state. It is for these reasons that we cannot account for the globality with which the sovereign power of the United States is asserted today other than in the context of a global biopolitics.

B. U.S. Hegemony is Critical to Preventing Global Nuclear War

Khalilzad 1995 (Zalmay; RAND Institute, “Losing the Moment? The United States and the World After the Cold War” Washington Quarterly Spring l/n) . Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding

principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free

markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as

nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system

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Zizek Freedom Turn

Turn: attempts to emancipate biopolitical subjects only reinforces biopolitical regulation – illusions of liberation and free thought deter action.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2002.[Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Ph. D in kicking your ass. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. p. 2]

Is this not the matrix of an efficient critique of ideology – not only in totalitarian conditions of censorship but, perhaps even more, in the more refined conditions of liberal censorship? One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedom one wants – then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the ‘red ink’: we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict – ‘war on terrorism’, ‘democracy and freedom’, ‘human rights’, and so on – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the freedom instead of allowing us to think it. In this precise sense, our ‘freedoms’ themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom. A hundred years ago, in his emphasis on the acceptance of some fixed dogma as the condition of (demanding) actual freedom, Gilbert Keith Chesterton perspicuously detected the antidemocratic potential of the very principle of freedom of thought: “We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safeguards against freedom. Managed in modern style, the emancipation of the slaves mind is the best way to prevent the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself”Is this not emphatically true of our ‘postmodern’ time, with its freedom to deconstruct, doubt, distantiate oneself? We should not forget that Chesterton makes exactly same claim as Kant in his ‘What is Enlightenment’: ‘Think as much as you like, and as freely as you like, just obey!’

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Pragmatism – Alt Fails

Pragmatism is key – liberation efforts must be submerged into the biopolitical economy: the call to action creates an ethical space for action through which autonomy may be achieved.

Zizek, Slavoj. May 30, 2007[Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Ph. D in kicking your ass. http://www.lacan.com/zizhollywood.htm]

But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom and Reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding the weak children? This "absurdity" is simply the price of freedom - freedom is not free, as they put it in the film. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. The Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the external opposite of the Athenian "liberal democracy," it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through a ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one's choice puts at stake one's very existence - one does it because one simply "cannot do it otherwise." When one's country is under a foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not "you are free to choose," but: "Can't you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?" No wonder that all early modern egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to Jacobins, admired Sparta and imagined the republican France as a new Sparta: there is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, etc .Even more important is, perhaps, the film's formal aspect: the entire film was shot in a warehouse in Montreal, with the entire background and many persons and objects digitally constructed. The artificial character of the background seems to infect "real" actors themselves, who often appear as characters from comics rendered alive (the film is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel 300). Furthermore, the artificial (digital) nature of the background creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, as if the story does not take place in "real" reality with its endless open horizons, but in a "closed world," a kind of relief-world of closed space. Aesthetically, we are here steps ahead of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series: although, in these series also, many background objects and persons are digitally created, the impression is nonetheless the one of (real and) digital actors and objects (elephants, Yoda, Urkhs, palaces, etc.) placed into a "real" open world; in 300, on the contrary, all main characters are "real" actors put into an artificial background, the combination which produces a much more uncanny "closed" world of a "cyborg" mixture of real people integrated into an artificial world. It is only with 300 that the combination of "real" actors and objects and digital environment came close to create a truly new autonomous aesthetic space.

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Turn – Progressive Politics

Turn - Foucaultian power relations denies agency, precluding progressive social change.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

I develop my critique in part by comparing Foucaultian conceptions of power with some Chinese notions of power, arguing that both are categories that represent the relations between producers and their productions in alienated form; in other words, both are ideological representations that deny to real social actors the productive power that constitutes social life. In the Chinese case, this productive, socially ordering power is attributed to supernatural entities or, more abstractly, to metaphysical categories such as ch'i or tao. In Foucault's case, this productive power is similarly attributed to a metaphysically conceived power itself (or, in some of his writings, to discourses). In both cases, social collectivities or real individuals are represented as objects of power; they are denied effective or authentic intention-in a word, agency. In short, I argue that Foucault's invocation of power as an explanatory principle in social analysis, despite its currency in academic discourse, is logically profoundly flawed. His own explicit denials and those of his disciples notwithstanding, Foucaultian power assumes demiurgic, demonic properties (some-times named "the state") that diminish the coherence of otherwise valuable academic explorations of the operations of power in social processes .4 I am convinced that the issues surrounding power have implications beyond academic refinements of an analytical construct; I shall argue that embedded in Foucault's writings is an aggressive polemic against critical use of ideology in social analysis and that academic usage of Foucaultian power registers an ideological and alienating representation of the nature of social life.

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Foucault = Flawed

Foucauldian criticism is flawed - it obscures genuine analysis and denies all progressive social action.

Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

It is Foucault's explicit disarticulation of power from subjectivity or agency that arguably most defines the novelty of his usage, and it is this element of his thinking that is most widely emulated by other scholars. Against Foucault's reifying, transcendental notion of power - a notion in which intentional action is incidental to power - I argue that power can be employed coherently as an analytical category only when it is linkable to some socially constituted agent - that is, to a person or to a socially constituted collectivity. This is not to say that actors or agents are possessed of complete knowledge of how their own desires and motives are also products of complex social circumstances or of how their actions have effects that exceed intentions.8 As Foucault frequently emphasizes, people, selves, the subjects are in part products of historically and locationally specific circumstances, cultures, discourses. However, denying agency - that is, power to actors, viewing people even at the level of their desires primarily as products and only trivially, if at all, as producers, is not only fatalistic, it significantly misrecognizes the realities of social life.9 In comparing "Chinese" notions of power (or, more precisely, some notions of power produced by Chinese culture) with Foucault's, my intention is to draw attention to similarities in their alienating properties. I suggest that in the Foucaultian categories of power and its ineluctable other, resistance, one can perceive remarkable affinities to Chinese contrastive oppositions such as yang (a metaphysically conceived representation of ordering) and yin (yang's disordering, resistant alter). Far from providing the kind of critical insights that Foucault would claim, Foucaultian power and resistance obstruct genuine critical analysis and constitute elements of a romantic ideology whose "effects of truth" are most socially manifest in providing an avant-gardist intelligentsia an ideology that dissociates its "theory" from its own individual and class interests - and, paradoxically, all this in the name of reflexivity and high-minded political virtue . This representative dissociation of power from intention in Foucault is also apparent in Chinese ideologies of power. Such dissociations-forms of alienation-are defining characteristics of ideology's operations in social processes.

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A2: Authors Biased

Turn - “unbiased” critical accounts of society lead to oppressive alienation – your authors are couched even further in avant-garde intelligentsia.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

It is Foucault's explicit disarticulation of power from subjectivity or agency that arguably most defines the novelty of his usage, and it is this element of his thinking that is most widely emulated by other scholars. Against Foucault's reifying, transcendental notion of power - a notion in which intentional action is incidental to power - I argue that power can be employed coherently as an analytical category only when it is linkable to some socially constituted agent - that is, to a person or to a socially constituted collectivity. This is not to say that actors or agents are possessed of complete knowledge of how their own desires and motives are also products of complex social circumstances or of how their actions have effects that exceed intentions.8 As Foucault frequently emphasizes, people, selves, the subjects are in part products of historically and locationally specific circumstances, cultures, discourses. However, denying agency - that is, power to actors, viewing people even at the level of their desires primarily as products and only trivially, if at all, as producers, is not only fatalistic, it significantly misrecognizes the realities of social life.9 In comparing "Chinese" notions of power (or, more precisely, some notions of power produced by Chinese culture) with Foucault's, my intention is to draw attention to similarities in their alienating properties. I suggest that in the Foucaultian categories of power and its ineluctable other, resistance, one can perceive remarkable affinities to Chinese contrastive oppositions such as yang (a metaphysically conceived representation of ordering) and yin (yang's disordering, resistant alter). Far from providing the kind of critical insights that Foucault would claim, Foucaultian power and resistance obstruct genuine critical analysis and constitute elements of a romantic ideology whose "effects of truth" are most socially manifest in providing an avant-gardist intelligentsia an ideology that dissociates its "theory" from its own individual and class interests - and, paradoxically, all this in the name of reflexivity and high-minded political virtue . This representative dissociation of power from intention in Foucault is also apparent in Chinese ideologies of power. Such dissociations-forms of alienation-are defining characteristics of ideology's operations in social processes.

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A2: Authors Biased

Turn – constructions of “unbiased social commentators” creates an us vs. them dichotomy – one group with the greater moral authority with which to rule over an oppressed group.


Foucault himself makes such empirical claims and is thus himself a participant in this Enlightenment project.14 In previous writings about ling, I have attempted to show how such representations of power are historical productions with legitimating ideological effects-with, that is, what Foucault might term "effects of truth" (Sangren 1987, 1988, 1991, 1993). As I indicate above, a similar argument can be made with regard not only to Foucault' s notion of power but also to a much more encompassing, romantic, postmodern ideology institutionally produced in (among other locales) avant-garde academic settings. Academic polemics against the "totalizing" ambitions of "modernity," "rationality," and similarly rhetorically constructed adversarial demons themselves constitute an ideology among whose effects are the self-legitimation of a privileged bourgeois intelligentsia.'5 What I am suggesting is that in the form of such variously construed objects of polemical interrogation, we can observe the classic construction of an "other" against which to imagine an individually or collectively constituted "self' possessed of greater moral authority.'6

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A2: Discourse First

Foucauldian discursive analysis fails.


I believe that Foucault mislocates the distinction intended by analytical uses of ideology. Separating that in discourses which is true from that which is false need not imply that representations and ideology do not participate in the production of social truths, as Foucault's caricature assumes. On the contrary, analytical invocation of ideology insists on maintaining the distinction between how discourses represent social realities and how analysts do. Foucault's analyses themselves cannot avoid assuming such a distinction and making their own truth claims. In other words, a concept of ideology that insists on the productivity of ideological misrecognition within an encompassing social reality (always only provisionally representable in any particular analysis) does not entail a denial that ideologies (or discourses) have real social effects or that ideology's productive effects are secondary or epiphenomenal to other, more material, forces (e.g., economy, biology, etc.). Foucault's caricature of ideology diverts attention from the crucial contradiction Habermas notes in Foucault's ambition to produce an antiscience and his claims to produce new understanding. In sum, Foucault seems to desire to have things both ways; on the one hand he preserves for himself the modernist pleasure of unmasking ideology by implicitly claiming to produce "an understanding of social practices as having an intelligibility radically different from that available to actors" (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: xxvii; quoted in Sullivan 1990:246), while on the other hand he denigrates, even demonizes, social sciences for thus objectifying human experience. I have argued that this contradictory rhetorical appropriation of unjustified and unacknowledged magisterial authority, in a discourse that overtly aims to subvert such authority/authorial claims, constitutes the ideological appeal of Foucaultian and, more generally, postmodernist discourse (Sangren 1988, 1989).

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A2: Discourse First

Emphasis on discourse precludes societal change – only re-entrenches avant-garde intellectualism.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

I also agree with Culler that the frequent invocation of Foucault as "an apostle of the political" is puzzling; indeed, I would go further and suggest that invocation of Foucaultian "knowledge/power," because it seems to make of discourses something more "institutional," "social," or "political," misleads many intellectuals into believing that their critical practices escape idealism, and thus has had the unfortunate effect of distracting criticism from employing authentically dialectical methods. Of course, Foucault cannot be blamed for this, but these characteristics of his thought (idealism in the guise of its transcendence) clearly exercise a seductive appeal upon intellectuals. Against a Marxian conception of ideology, the Foucaultian conflation of power and discourses effects a rhetorical elevation of the status of the scholar and critic. If power and politics are conceived of mainly as exclusively discursive phenomena, avant-garde intellectuals are free to occupy themselves wholeheartedly in competitive academic life and critical speculation, all the while imagining themselves as occupying the vanguard of progressive politics .33 More to the present point, a crucial but unacknowledged effect of Foucault's disavowal of the analytical legitimacy of ideology is that an extra-discursive domain of social production is disqualified as a locus of power because such a domain cannot be conceived of or justified consistently in the absence of a theorization of the difference between discourse (as representation) and practices (as social production). In polemicizing against analytical use of ideology, Foucault is refusing precisely to theorize this difference. Moreover, this refusal is crucial to the claims his work makes to theoretical originality (especially as a critique of modernity and as a "history of the present").

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Turn – Pragmatism Key

Turn – the alternative’s fantasy of “new discursive spaces” denies all action – even Foucault acknowledges it is a utopian impossibility.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

Foucault's insistence that power is located in locally specific, "concrete" power relationships, discourses, and institutions does not, in my judgment, dispel the foregoing philosophical and analytical difficulties.35 In the response to his critics cited above, for example, Foucault denies that he employs power as a transcendental cause: "there is no Power, but power relationships which are being born incessantly, as both effect and condition of other processes" (1989:187). Here and elsewhere, Foucault insists that power be understood as an aspect of specific relationships between people. Yet Foucault's multifarious characterizations of power and his assertions that there are multiple local contexts, centers of discourse, and technologies of power do not resolve the pro-lems of agency or suffice to dispel the objections of his critics. Similar difficulties attend to Foucault's invocations of "resistance." Characterizing Foucault's use of resistance, Gordon writes: The facts of resistancea re ... assigneda n irreducibler ole within the analysis. The field of strategies is a field of conflicts: the human material operated on by programmes and technologiesi s inherentlya resistantm aterial.I f this weren ot the case, historyi tself wouldb ecomeu nthinkable.[i n Foucault1 980:255] "Resistance" thus becomes the privileged domain of agency and change in history. In the midst of a theory that claims to bypass subjectivity and theoretical totalization, resistance becomes the cipher for their covert reappearance (see also Anderson 1983). There is something romantic, even mystical, about the current academic infatuation with "resistance"; I suspect that this appeal is precisely the "space" that the concept "opens up" for an unanalyzable (my parodying of jargon is intentional), irreducible subjectivity against the imagined ordering, disciplining, normalizing, and totalizing force of "modern," "state," or "rational" discourses. (In the jargon of Chinese metaphysics, resistance is yin to power's yang.) Even if subjects lack "presence" and stability, even if they can be relegated to the status of elusive and illusive "effects" of language, "truth," or "power," in the concept of "resistance" there thus remains a comforting trace of ineffable creativity (and, thus, power) against language, representation, discourse, and "mere reproduction." Foucault seems to recognize the difficulties his position raises for justifying political action or ethics better than do some of his admirers, but he takes ref-uge in the anarchical position that although any resistance implies power, one should resist power as a categorical imperative (see also Merquior 1985). In addition to the philosophical difficulties of justifying this political/moral position, the social science or analytical problem of accounting for the encompassing level of the distribution of and interrelations among various local discourses is begged altogether.

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Permutation

Perm: do plan and criticize the discourse employed.Internal resistance solves – democratically contextualized biopolitics is a positive means of producing progressive social change and is vital to efforts to solve biopower – their perm answers ignore the fluid nature of biopower.Dickinson, History Prof. @ U-Cincy with a PHD from Berkely, 2004 p. online Edward Ross, Central European History vol. 37 no. 1 )Second, I would argue that there is also a causal fit between cultures of expertise, or “scientism,” and democracy. Of course, “scientism” subverted the real, historical ideological underpinnings of authoritarian polities in Europe in the nineteenth century. It also in a sense replaced them. Democratic citizens have the freedom to ask “why”; and in a democratic system there is therefore a bias toward pragmatic, “objective” or naturalized answers— since values are often regarded as matters of opinion, with which any citizen has a right to differ. Scientific “fact” is democracy’s substitute for revealed truth, expertise its substitute for authority. The age of democracy is the age of professionalization, of technocracy; there is a deeper connection between the two, this is not merely a matter of historical coincidence. Third, the vulnerability of explicitly moral values in democratic societies creates a problem of legitimation. Of course there are moral values that all democratic societies must in some degree uphold (individual autonomy and freedom, human dignity, fairness, the rule of law), and those values are part of their strength. But as people’s states, democratic social and political orders are also implicitly and often explicitly expected to do something positive and tangible to enhance the well-being of their citizens . One of those things, of course, is simply to provide a rising standard of living ; and the visible and astonishing success of that project has been crucial to all Western democracies since 1945. Another is the provision of a rising standard of health; and here again, the democratic welfare state has “delivered the goods” in concrete, measurable, and extraordinary ways. In this sense, it may not be so simpleminded, after all, to insist on considering the fact that modern biopolitics has “worked” phenomenally well. Fourth, it was precisely the democratizing dynamic of modern societies that made the question of the “quality” of the mass of the population seem— and not only in the eyes of the dominant classes increasingly important. Again, in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the expected level of the average citizen’s active participation in European political, social, cultural, and economic life rose steadily, as did the expected level of her effective influence in all these spheres . This made it a matter of increasing importance whether the average person was more or less educated and informed, more or less moral and self-disciplined,more or less healthy and physically capable,more or less socially competent. And modern social reform “biopolitics” defined very broadly—seemed to offer the possibility of creating the human foundation for a society ordered by autonomous participation, rather than by obedience. This too was part of the Machbarkeitswahn of modernity; but this was potentially a democratic “Wahn,” not only an authoritarian one. Fifth, historically there has been a clear connection between the concept of political citizenship and the idea of moral autonomy. The political “subject” (or citizen — as opposed to the political subject,who is an object of state action) is also a moral subject. The citizen’s capacity for moral reasoning is the legitimating postulate of all democratic politics. The regulation of sexual and reproductive life has long been understood in European societies to be among the most fundamental issues of morality. There is, therefore, a connection between political citizenship on the one hand, and the sexual and reproductive autonomy implied in the individual control that is a central element of the modern biopolitical complex, on the other. The association in the minds of conservatives in the late imperial period between democracy and declining fertility was not a panicky delusion; panicky it certainly was, but it was also a genuine insight into a deeper ideological connection.113 Perhaps it should not be surprising, therefore, that the first great homeland of eugenic legislation was the United States — the first great homeland of modern democracy. In fact the United States served both as a kind of promised land for racial and eugenic “progressives” in Germany, and as a worst-case scenario of “regression into barbarism” for those opposed to coercive eugenic measures. 114 Nor should it be surprising that, apart from Nazi Germany, the other great land of eugenic sterilization in Europe in the 1930s was Scandinavia, where democratic governments heavily influenced by social democratic parties were busily constructing the most ambitious and extensive welfare states in the world.115 The lesson is not that modern democracy is “dangerous” or destructive, much less that it is crypto-fascist — that, as Jacques Donzelot put it, the 1930s was the age of “social fascism” and our own age that of “social sector fascism.” 116 The relevant message is, rather, that it is time to place the less familiar history of modern democratic biopolitics alongside the more familiar history of modern totalitarian biopolitics. The dream of perfectibility — Machbarkeitswahn —

is central to modernity. But social engineering, the management of society, can be organized in different ways. Historically, totalitarian biopolitics was a self-destructive failure. Democratic biopolitics has, in contrast, been— not in any moral sense, but politically —a howling success. For the historian interested in modernity, that story is no less interesting or important than the story of the implosion of the Nazi racial state."

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Perm Solvency

Divorcing discursive power from real social space makes it impossible for the alt to solve – tying discursive criticism to political action is critical to effective power resistance.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

If discourse is imagined in purely linguistic or representational terms, its division into semiautonomous localities can be defended. However, Foucault clearly intends power to exceed its discursive or representational manifestations; that is, to include social effects unrepresented in discourses themselves . Such effects would include the contestations among real socially defined localities of the sorts studied by world-system theorists, regional-systems theorists, and mode-of-production theorists interested in the emergence of systemic properties of articulation (and domination) of many localities into nondiscursive systems of a logical complexity not intelligible as a mere plurality (or cacophony) of contending voices or juxtaposition of multiple sites. What I am driving at here is that in addition to the mainly logical or philo-sophical objections to Foucaultian power adduced above, one might add that power and discourses are generally treated aspatially. "Space" in Foucaultian discourse is mainly semantic and metaphorical.36The academic penchant to imagine discourses as hierarchized into "dominant," "orthodox," "hegemonic," or "state" discourses and (conversely) "subaltern," "local," "counter-hegemonic," "resistant," or "heterodox" ones aligns very inadequately with the complexity of multiple levels of community and identity in real social space .37 Moreover, such usages also serve very poorly the challenge posed by regional analyses of economic and political integration to develop an equally compelling understanding of the nature and degree of cultural integration in spatially complex societies.38 Foucaultian power admits of no such spatially patterned complexity; the "spaces" and "localities" in Foucaultian power are discursive ones. Power's only conceivable "other" is resistance.39 My point is that scholars interested in invoking power as a slogan for transcending subject/object, material/symbolic oppositions should avoid a penchant to treat power as a mainly discursive or lin-guistic category, divorced from the spatial and temporal social realities that pro-duce it and from the individual and collective agents that employ it. There is much encompassed by social life in addition to its discursive self-repre-sentations. Social life is systemic in ways unimagined in such discourses, and this systematicity must be taken into account if we are to understand the "mean-ings " (including ideological dimensions) embodied in discourses.40 If power is to avoid devolution into yet another form of aspatial or transcendental idealism, it must be dialectically located in the spatial and temporal realities of social ac-tivities. In sum, Foucault' s invocation of the local specificity of power is an evasion of the contradiction in his own thought between a concept of power treated as a metaphysical and transcendent cause of ubiquitous and totalizing efficacy and the tone of moral approbation manifested in a less systematically argued invo-cation of resistance. This evasion, in turn, is accompanied by a veiled reassertion of the "exorbitation of language"41that he intends his invocation of power to avoid. Silverman and Torode arrive at a similar assessment, noting, "Despite its anti-idealist pretensions, the model lapses into an idealist position whereby 'discourse' or 'culture' become grammatical unities rather than the locus of con-tradictory practices" (1980:337).

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Fuco Bad/Perm Solvency

Foucauldian critique cannot offer a possible alternative – it must be concretized within a critical relaist framework; emancipation by the alternative is impossible.Jonathan, 04

[Capital & Class, Spring 2004 by Joseph, Jonathan Foucault and Reality, www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200404/ai_n9367541/pg_1]

These ideas are explained by linking beliefs to their causes. Therefore, critical realism questions not only social ideas, but also the social processes that generate such ideas. Bhaskar links this critique to the question of human emancipation in that a critique of ideas leads to a critique of that which produces them which in turn poses the question of transforming that cause. It has been argued above that because Foucault links his critique of ideas to a study of social institutions, practices and hegemonic power relations, his theory also comes close to explanatory critique and emancipatory axiology.The problem, however, is that the power-knowledge insight is not related to ontological realism and remains at a deconstructive level. For all its critical insights, we are left wondering as to the emancipatory potential of Foucault's work. As an example, one well known collection on Foucault begins with the argument:The kinds of political analysis presented in this volume are not liable or designed to inspire or guide new political movements, transform the current agenda of political debate or generate new plans for the organisation of societies. Their claim would be, at most, to help political thought to grasp certain present realities, then perhaps providing a more informed basis for practical choice and imagination (Gordon 1991: 46).First, it might be argued that offering a practical grasp of present realities is hardly a radical strategy. To use Bhaskar's words, 'emancipation depends on the transformation of structures, not the amelioration of states of affairs' (Bhaskar 1989: 6). Second, it must be wondered if Foucault's arguments are capable of offering a radical agenda or plans for a new ordering of society. Critical realism conceives of the ordering of society in terms of relatively enduring and cohesive social relations and structures. Foucault, with his emphasis on contingency, difference and discontinuity is able to provide a critique of these relations, but cannot develop this in an ontological direction. His work cannot have transformative potential if it does not have a developed conception of the underlying structures that agents must transform . Consequently his later writings are strategic without a strategy, and his critique is that of the marginal outsider, suspicious of all strategies and discourses including those aiming for some sort of emancipation.Critical realism, with its immanent critique of ideas, leads to critique of the institutions and social structures that sustain them. There is a danger that Foucault collapses this distinction and thus offers little by way of transformatory vision. In short, Foucault's work can offer a lot. But its emancipatory potential will only be realised within a critical realist ontology.

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http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200404/ai_n9367541/pg_1

http://findarticles.com/p/search/?qa=Joseph,%20Jonathan

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200404/

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/


Perm Solvency

Discursive analysis must be simultaneously combined with action in order to remain relevant – the alternative solves nothing without the aff.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

It is in the production of ideologized consciousnesses-that is, in the production of cultural selves-that discourses and practices most effectively exercise power (or, in Gramscian terms, hegemony). But conversely and dialectically, discourses and practices are activities by means of which such selves act with the aggregate, if often unintended, effect of producing and reproducing so-cial life.48 In this latter sense, individuals, too, exercise productive power in the domain of intersubjective or collective representations and institutions. In other words, power is neither the exclusive property of individual subjects nor of in-tersubjective discourses or practices; rather, it manifests itself in the activities in which both subjects and collective institutions (including the state, communi-ties, language, and society) are produced. Yet this understanding should not encourage us to follow Foucault by dissociating power from any subject (collec-tive or individual) whatsoever, or by disallowing ideology a role in the various manifestations of power embedded in social production. In sum, the conception of ideology that I deem necessary if social analysis is to minimize the shortcomings I attribute to Foucaultian power is based on what might be termed realist assumptions. It assumes that there are social realities that exceed our representations of them, and that social science can legitimately aspire to characterize such realities and the ways that ideologies participate in and misrecognize them. Such assumptions entail transcendental elements, to be sure-the existence of a domain of existence that exceeds our cognitive grasp of it. Moreover, in employing terms such as social realities or society, my argument might be criticized for producing a mechanically reified totalization that belies the complexities and imponderabilities of real experience.

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Agency Turn [1/3]

Foucauldian studies of power deny agency.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

To be sure, power is immanent in the processes of production, but it can be exercised as control over production only when appropriate subjects (the state, other collectivities, politically empowered individuals) are disaggregated to exercise it. This disaggregation is precisely what the Foucaultian conception disallows. As noted above, the paradoxical result of desubjectifying power is that power itself comes to occupy the position of transcendence in Foucaultian cosmology. Thus, in contrast to the Foucaultian formulations, I would argue that study of the operations of power requires identifying the subjects (collective or individual) that exercise it, with the proviso that the contextualizations of our analyses avoid the sorts of nondialectical reifications that elevate such disaggre-gated subjects to the status of transcendent or irreducible originators of social action, obscuring their dialectically simultaneous natures as immanent products or effects of social activities. In sum, Foucault's formulation of power, by equating power's effects of truth to social reality and disallowing theorization of the productive effects of misrecognition (which would require a notion of truth beyond the effects of power), elevates power itself to a transcendence similar to that occupied by heaven in Chinese cosmology. In other words, Foucault's discourses on power cannot account for what produces power itself. Power in Foucault's representations of it is thus alienated from human agency and from its locus in social production in two senses. First, despite frequent assertions of the immanence of power in material-cum-representational practices and the like, Foucault's refusal to distinguish truth effects of power from social reality (in other words, his refusal to theorize ideology's role in social production) locates power in discourses of power, not in social production (which encompasses, but is not ex-hausted by, such discourses). Second, power is defined as that which produces selves; individuals are denied productive efficacy. They are vehicles of power, not its producers.

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Agency Turn [2/3]

Loss of agency is bad.

Tad Beckman, Prof at Harvey Mudd College, Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics, 2000The threat of nuclear annihilation is, currently, the most dramatic and ironic sign of technology's "success" and of its overwhelming power; mass itself has been grasped as a standing-reserve of enormous energy. On the one hand we consider ourselves, rightfully, the most advanced humans that have peopled the earth but, on the other hand, we can see, when we care to, that our way of life has also become the most profound threat to life that the earth has yet witnessed. (14) Medical science and technology have even begun to suggest that we may learn enough about disease and the processes of aging in the human body that we might extend individual human lives indefinitely. In this respect, we have not only usurped the gods' rights of creation and destruction of species, but we may even usurp the most sacred and terrifying of the gods' rights, the determination of mortality or immortality. The gods, it is true, have been set aside in our time; they are merely antiquated conceptions. [Continues…] Let us return to the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" because it was there that Heidegger set us underway against "the greatest danger" and in possession of the idea that it may be through art that we can come to a saving power. If he was correct in his understanding of technology as enframing, it

poses a great danger to human life; this danger is that the epoch of enframing locks human activity into its own form of the destining-of-revealing and, hence, tends to limit human freedom by concealing the possibility of other forms of revealing and, within that, the possibility of human involvement in other forms of revealing."The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth." {[7], p. 28} As human beings become progressively more involved as the orderers of a reality conceived as standing-reserve, they too become standing-reserve at a higher level of organization. In other words, as human beings come to see other beings in the world only for their potential applications to human dispositions, humans themselves come to mirror this shallowness of "being" and to see themselves merely in terms of potential resources to the dispositions of others. Enframing challenges us forth in the decisive role as organizer and challenger of all that is in such a way that human life withdraws from its essential nature. Within this role the essence of our humanity falls into concealment; we can no longer grasp the real nature of life . We withdraw into a conception of reality that is subjective and isolated; but Heidegger asserts that the human essence is not a being in isolation. When we explore

beings, things that exist, we discover that most beings are simply in existence with no relationship to one another, no consciousness. Human beings are unique, so far as we can tell, because human beings do observe. Humans are aware of other beings; they witness them. This is why Heidegger referred to the human being with the German word 'Dasein' or "being-there." The human is the only being we know for which the "there" and the "when" make sense because the human's awareness defines a "there" and a "when" among all other beings . For non-aware beings, beings that are merely "ready-to-hand," there is no sense of taking a place within a historical time. It is in this respect, then, that our central concern regarding the human essence must be to consider who we are as beings among beings and, in particular, as beings who witness other beings. All profound thinking about human life must be founded on the question of who we are as aware beings among other beings. The essence of human life is, indeed, founded in the facticity, or objectivity, of dasein; not only do we humans come into relationship with other beings through our characteristic consciousness but they come into their own beings as objects through us. They are witnessed by us. This is why Heidegger insisted that,

from the position of our own essence, "we can never encounter only [ourselves]." {[1}, p. 27} Any conception of our environment that perceives only ourselves and our dispositions is necessarily flawed from the point of view of essential human nature. The human presence is crucial to other beings coming-to-presence, to truth happening. This concept should sound familiar now now; what it claims is that the human essence is fundamentally involved in all revealing, in all objects coming into unconcealment. Technology, as a mode of revealing, is one path within many possible paths that open up within the essential nature of that human role; each of these paths develops a specific aspect of our relations to beings. That relationship is always reciprocated in the sense that, in so far as being-there is our essential nature, the way that we are there, the way that we relate, is the way that we ourselves come into being during that period. This is the key to Heidegger's insight that the way we treat

other things is the determinant of the way we ourselves will be treated. The danger of technology is that it treats other beings in an aggressive, utilitarian way so that, ultimately, we ourselves are carried away within the overarching themes of aggression and utility. In the epoch of technology, we come to see ourselves exclusively within the limited sense of agency within this unfolding structure of being.

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Agency Turn [3/3]

Perm solves this.Sangren, P. March 18th, 1999.[Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. “Power” Against Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage. Jstor]

In both instances, in the interest of denying the existence of a "transcendent" subject, the productive power both of social collectivities and of individuals is represented in alienated form as power itself -a move that amounts to a relocation of transcendent subjectivity.54 Let me conclude with a reflexive consideration of the implications of the kind of analysis I have proposed directed toward the power of power itself; that is, on how we can employ the concept in effective production of empowering knowledge about social realities. In this regard, I might rephrase my critique of Foucault's usage of power by noting that my argument is less that what he writes about power is not true but rather that, as he might put it, the truth of such a conception of power is analytically less powerful than it seems. (Although insofar as the concept comes to occupy a position of transcendent agency, it obviously exercises a seductive ideological power, but this is another story.) Power conceived of as exercised in the absence of a subject (or subjects) cannot avoid becoming a kind of ubiquitous, transcendent, omnipotent force-akin to Chinese tao or ling-that becomes coterminous with all of social reality; and, by the way, there is no reason not to extend this notion (as the Chinese do the notion of tao) to include all of nature and the cosmos. But following the reasoning of my analyses of how power is produced in ritual, it seems to me that analysis of social life ought rather, in a logical sense, to "alienate" social reality itself, at least insofar as this entails viewing social life as an external object. In other words, I am proposing that by placing social reality in the position of object of analysis and invoking it as the source of authority for the representations we produce of it, social reality can be said in some sense to occupy a position of logical transcendence. Moreover, it is this epistemological structure that allows the analyst to occupy the empowered position, that is, the position to produce the analysis. In implicitly assuming this empowered position, the analyst's will to truth does not disguise a will to power, as some critics have argued; the will to power is clear and conscious. The analyst cannot avoid producing himself or herself as an empowered subject in the process of producing the analysis. The analysis is undeniably a representation of social reality, but once produced, of course, it also becomes a part of that reality. If we aspire (as I presume those who hope to make of anthropology an ef-fective form of cultural critique do) to alter that reality-that is, to hope that our productions contribute to anthropological understanding, and, more ambi-tiously, to influence wider forms of social consciousness and institutions, and distributions of power itself-we can no more absent ourselves as subjects in this process of social and self-production than we can claim that in our repre-sentative and (in this sense) productive practices we do not aspire to exercise power. But it seems to me that these ambitions, this will to power, also requires for its legitimation the authority of a conceptualization of social reality- "truth," if you will-that is not coterminous with our understanding of power, which, as Habermas insists, is grounded in a philosophy of the subject. In other words, a reflexive consideration of our own productive practices, viewed as em-powering activities, cannot be justified except in terms of realist epistemology-an epistemology that cannot avoid distinguishing "the truth effects of power" (ideology) from social realities.5

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A2: ToTo

Democracy checks negative forms of biopolitics and allows for constructive implementation of biopolitical strategies that are neither dangerous nor violent; the permutation solves the impacts both ways.Dickinson, History Prof. @ U-Cincy with a PHD from Berkely, 2004 p. online Edward Ross, Central European History vol. 37 no. 1 )

"In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucault’s ideas have “fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its ‘microphysics.’”48 The “broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus” on “technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of science” was the focus of his interest.49 But the “power-producing effects in Foucault’s ‘microphysical’ sense” (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of “an entire institutional apparatus and system of practice” ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them . In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the völkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state."

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Alt Fails – Marxist Turn

Their engagement of micro-political struggle fails to identify the ideological structures from which power originates.Zizek, Slavoj. March 18th, 1999[Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana. Mapping Ideology. Left. p. 12 - 14]

What follows is the step from 'in-itself to 'for-itself, to ideology in its otherness-externalization: the moment epitomized by the Althusserian notion of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) that designate the material existence of ideology in ideological practices, rituals and institutions." Religious belief, for example, is not merely or even primarily an inner conviction, but the Church as an institution and its rituals (prayer, baptism, confirmation, confession . . . ) which, far from being a mere secondary externalization of the inner belief, stand for the very mechanisms that generate it. When Althusser repeats, after Pascal: `Act as if you believe, pray, kneel down, and you shall believe, faith will arrive by itself , he delineates an intricate reflective mechanism of retroactive 'autopoetic' foundation that far exceeds the reductionist assertion of the dependence of inner belief on external behaviour. That is to say, the implicit logic of his argument is: kneel down and you shall believe that you knelt down because of your belief — that is, your following the ritual is an expression/effect of your inner belief; in short, the 'external' ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation.' What we encounter here again is the 'regression' into ideology at the very point where we apparently step out of it. In this respect, the relationship between Althusser and Foucault is of special interest. The Foucauldian counterparts to Ideological State Apparatuses are the disciplinary procedures that operate at the level of 'micro-power' and designate the point at which power inscribes itself into the body directly, bypassing ideology — for that precise reason, Foucault never uses the term 'ideology' apropos of these mechanisms of micro-power. This abandoning of the problematic of ideology entails a fatal weakness of Foucault's theory. Foucault never tires of repeating how power constitutes itself 'from below', how it does not emanate from some unique summit: this very semblance of a Summit (the Monarch or some other embodiment of Sovereignty) emerges as the secondary effect of the plurality of micro-practices, of the complex network of their interrelations. However, when he is compelled to display the concrete mechanism of this emergence, Foucault resorts to the extremely suspect rhetoric of complexity, evoking the intricate network of lateral links, left and right, up and down . . . a clear case of patching up, since one can never arrive at Power this way — the abyss that separates micro-procedures from the spectre of Power remains unbridgeable. Althusser's advantage over Foucault seems evident: Althusser proceeds in exactly the opposite direction — from the very outset, he conceives these micro-procedures as parts of the ISA; that is to say, as mechanisms which, in order to be operative, to 'seize' the individual, always-already presuppose the massive presence of the state, the transferential relationship of the individual towards state power, or —in Althusser's terms — towards the ideological big Other in whom the interpellation originates. This Althusserian shift of emphasis from ideology 'in-itself to its material existence in the ISA proved its fecundity in a new approach to Fascism; Wolfgang Fritz Haug's criticism of Adorno is exemplary here. Adorno refuses to treat Fascism as an ideology in the proper sense of the term, that is, as 'rational legitimization of the existing order'. So-called 'Fascist ideology' no longer possesses the coherence of a rational construct that calls for conceptual analysis and ideologicocritical refutation; that is to say, it no longer functions as a lie necessarily experienced as truth' (the sign of recognition of a true ideology). 'Fascist ideology' is not taken seriously even by its promoters; its status is purely instrumental, and ultimately relies on external coercion.' In his response to Adorno, however, Haug 17 triumphantly demonstrates how this capitulation to the primacy of the doctrine, far from implying

the 'end of ideology', asserts the founding gesture of the ideological as such: the call to unconditional subordination and to `irrational' sacrifice . What liberal criticism (mis)perceives as Fascism's weakness is the very resort of its strength: within the Fascist horizon, the very demand for rational argumentation that should provide grounds for our acceptance of authority is denounced in advance as an index of the liberal degeneration of the true spirit of ethical sacrifice – as Haug puts it, in browsing through Mussolini's texts, one cannot avoid the uncanny feeling that Mussolini had read Althusser! The direct denunciation of the Fascist notion of the 'community-of-the-people [Volksgemeinschaft]' as a deceptive lure that conceals the reality of domination and exploitation fails to take note of the crucial fact that this V olksgemeinschaft was materialized in a series of rituals and practices (not only mass gatherings and parades but also large- scale campaigns to help the hungry, organized sports and cultural activities for the workers, etc.) which performatively produced the effect of Volksgemeinschaft.'

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Identity Politics Turn

The negative’s attempt to free the subject from institutions of power undermines individuality and entrenches the normalizing discourse they attempt to criticize.Fraser, Nancy. June, 2000.[New School of Research of NYC. Rethinking Recognition. www.newleftreview.org/?view=2248]

Displacement, however, is not the only problem: the identity politics model of recognition tends also to reify identity. Stressing the need to elaborate and display an authentic, self-affirming and self-generated collective identity, it puts moral pressure on individual members to conform to a given group culture. Cultural dissidence and experimentation are accordingly discouraged, when they are not simply equated with disloyalty. So, too, is cultural criticism, including efforts to explore intragroup divisions, such as those of gender, sexuality and class. Thus, far from welcoming scrutiny of, for example, the patriarchal strands within a subordinated culture, the tendency of the identity model is to brand such critique as ‘inauthentic’. The overall effect is to impose a single, drastically simplified group-identity which denies the complexity of people’s lives, the multiplicity of their identifications and the cross-pulls of their various affiliations. Ironically, then, the identity model serves as a vehicle for misrecognition: in reifying group identity, it ends by obscuring the politics of cultural identification, the struggles within the group for the authority—and the power—to represent it. By shielding such struggles from view, this approach masks the power of dominant fractions and reinforces intragroup domination. The identity model thus lends itself all too easily to repressive forms of communitarianism, promoting conformism, intolerance and patriarchalism.

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No Link - Habitus

The kritik assumes that all societal normalization and cultural divides are discursively formed, and in doing so ignore the core of human subjectivity that allows us to resist power.

Boucher, Geoff. June, 2000.[Hegelian Social Critic. From the Desire for Recognition to a Politics of Resistance. www.ethicalpolitics.org/geoff-boucher/2005/resistance.htm]

For Bourdieu, the habitus is a mediating concept – it mediates between individual character, described as a “bodily hexis,” or style of the subject inscribed in corporeal deportment, and the complex structural terrain of an institutional apparatus, described by Bourdieu as the “field.” From the perspective of this materialist theory of social action, the individual is positioned structurally through socialisation in the group habitus – a differentially defined lifeworld, or structure of dispositions based on a practical taxonomy – which defines a whole, socially antagonistic “way of life.” Habitus describes a collective relation to hegemonic norms that explains how, despite enormous individual variation, social groups – as statistical aggregates – tend to exhibit the ideological characteristics that fit them to certain functional roles in the social division of labour. The generative schemes of the habitus are schemes for the interpretation and transformation of social practice. The nature of the habitus as the ideological unconscious of practice creates a “common-sense” world, endowed with an objectivity that is secured by a consensus on the meaning of practices in the world. Habitus is a system of “durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the product of obedience to rules” (Bourdieu, 1977: 72).

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Foucault = Flawed (Ambiguity)

Foucauldian theory is characteristically ambiguous, a technique that is used to divert argumentation. The alternative fails to ground itself in reality, ensuring politics remains unchanged.

Sion, Avi. 1990.[Linguistic Expert. Logical Aspects of Foucault's "Archeology”. www.thelogician.net/5b_ruminate/5b_foucault.htm]

The reader is fatigued, bedazzled, bewildered, and intimidated, into submission. You can never pin the author down, because almost as soon as he says something, he also denies it; he is there, and then he is not there, so that you cannot argue with him, because he has not asserted anything , yet. It is like in the manuals on the martial arts, always to elude the opponent, strike and quickly depart, become invisible and untouchable. The only answer to that technique, is to find the slippery character, in the midst of all those feints and velleities. Where he shows himself, you are there. Foucault's text is filled with ambiguities and equivocations; concepts and words are left undefined or denied their customary meanings, and freely used in a variety of ways. Distinctions are imposed on similar things, or denied to dissimilar things, merely by saying so and repeating it over and over, making it seem like accepted fact. Certain distinctions are transformed into deep, unbridgeable divisions between things, which only the most naive would dare to question. He exaggerates, understates.

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Baudrillard Turn – Death Simulation

Radical opposition to institutions of power only affirms its existence and structural assumptions on which it operates. This allows the system to simulate its own death, magnifying its power.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1990.[French Philosopher and Cultural Theorist. Simulacra and Simulations. www.thelogician.net/5b_ruminate/5b_foucault.htm]

The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the "vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution. All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios. It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc. Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an artificial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone. To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort

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Zizek – Critical Fantasy Turn

The negative places demands on the system from coordinates of socio-political privilege. This is rooted in the desire to appear critical, but never to bring about the actualization of their demands.

Zizek, Slavoj. 2002.[Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Ph. D in kicking your ass. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. p. 62]

Here the old ’68 motto ‘Sayons realists demandons l’impossible’ acquires a new cynical and sinister meaning which, perhaps, reveals its truth: ‘Let’s be realists: we, the academic Left, want to appear critical, while fully enjoying the privileges the system offers us. So let’s bombard the system with impossible demands: we all know that these demands won’t be met, so we can be sure that nothing will actually change, and we’ll maintain our privileged status!’ If someone accuses a big cooperation of particular financial crimes, he or she is exposed to risks which can go right up to murder attempts; if he or she asks the same corporation to finance a research project into the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, he or she stands a good chance of getting hundreds of thousands of dollars. Conservatives are therefore fully justified in legitimizing their opposition to radical knowledge in terms of happiness: knowledge ultimately makes us unhappy.

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Foucault = Flawed (Reality)

Foucault’s conception of power in relation to knowledge ignores the possibility of elements of the social space that transcend language, making his criticism fail.

Joseph. Spring 2002.[Marxist cultural critic. Class and Capital. www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200404/ai_n9367541/pg_1]

Foucault's work does contain an irrealist impulse, which is to stake his all on the transitive domain of knowledge, and to define reality according to the power of discourses or the Nietzschean struggles of power-knowledge. There is a tendency in Foucault to reduce truth-claims to rhetoricalnarrative strategies (Norris 1992: 85). Yet the power-knowledge relation is tempting for a realist too. Against the naivety of positivist inspired social science, it is important to show that the transitive domain of human knowledge is full of power relations and that knowledge develops, not simply on the basis of trying to understand the world beyond it, but according to the dynamics of its practical, institutional and discursive context. Epistemic caution is necessary for the transitive realm is full of different theories, knowledge claims and views of the world. But this reaffirms the need to uphold a knowledge independent intransitive realm, over which such battles are fought, and which must be appealed to when different theories make different claims. Firstly, for there to be a dispute between competing descriptive discourses, these discourses must have a common referent outside of themselves, or else the contestation is meaningless. Secondly, critical realism argues that the ordering of transitive knowledge into different theories, practices and disciplines indicates a wider ordering of the intransitive world that this knowledge is about. Critical realism argues that the possibility of knowledge and the forms that it takes (as practices and disciplines) reflects the fact that the world has an ordered, intelligible and relatively enduring structure that is open to scientific investigation. That knowledge is possible, albeit disputable, presupposes that the world is a certain way and that claims may be made about its nature. Critical realism makes a transcendental argument along the lines that given that knowledge is possible and is meaningful, this pre-supposes that the world itself is a certain way. In place of Kantian transcendental idealism that moves from the status of knowledge to the necessary structure of the mind, critical realism looks at what knowledge and human practice presupposes about the world itself. Given that certain things, or even certain debates, are intelligible to us, this presupposes that the world is ordered or structured in a particular way that is open to investigation. Therefore, while Foucault is useful in highlighting the dynamics of the transitive realm, his views may become dangerous if the complexities of the transitive realm mean that we can never get beyond it, if the search for knowledge of the intransitive world becomes a lost cause . If this becomes the case, then knowledge becomes knowledge of knowledge, not of the real world. The danger in Foucault is if access to the real world is cut off, if knowledge-conditions are internalised in discourse, or reduced to the will to truth, if epistemic relativism becomes judgmental relativism so that the diversity of truth claims means there are no grounds for judging these discursive paradigms. Then we end up with Lyotard's postmodernist language-game position whereby: 'All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species ' (Lyotard: 1984: 26).

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Foucault = Flawed (Truth)

Accepting Foucault’s theory regarding the relativism of truth means that we must ignore his work, as it is part of the ‘regimes of truth’ he is criticizing.


The problem with Foucault is that in arguing that the production of knowledge is bound up with historical regimes of power he displays a tendency to reduce truth claims to power effects. Cognitive validity is relative to a particular system of practices, discourses and power relations or what he calls a 'regime of truth'. If knowledge is relativised to such a degree, then there can be no basis for objective knowledge . All statements and accounts of the world disguise hegemonic power relations and dominant discourses. This simply invites a critical realist like Andrew Sayer to ask, if this is the case, why it is then that we should we take Foucault's own accounts seriously? He argues that in fact Foåucault's relativisation of truth 'involves a performative contradiction which invites ridicule-"there is no truth beyond whatever anyone defines as the truth-and that's the truth!"' (Sayer 2000: 49).

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Alt Fails (Poverty)

Foucauldian theories of power deny the importance of economic power relations, such as the hegemony of the rich over the power, paralyzing resistance – the alt can’t solve the case.


Because Foucault is a poststructuralist, he tends to avoid the question of underlying social structures, concentrating instead on the network of power-knowledge relations operating at the level of their exercise. Because he is keen to overcome the structuralist tendencies of his earlier work, Foucault attempts to rid his work of all forms of determinism, including what he sees as support for underlying structures and essential social relations. This explains his criticism of Marxism and its reliance on underlying categories of power like class and mode of production. Foucault argues that the political conditions themselves are the very ground on which the subject, domains of knowledge and truth relations are formed (Foucault 1979: 27). The Marxist notion of ideology must also be abandoned, for it is no longer the case that ideas are distorted by power relations, economic relations or class relations but rather, power and knowledge always act together so that the 'effects of truth are produced within discourses that, in themselves, are neither true nor false' (Foucault 2ooib: 119). The trouble with Foucault's alternative is that it relies on the elision of power, structure and knowledge whereas critical realism insists on their distinction. By making such a distinction, it is possible to say something about the purpose of such social relations. By denying the importance of classes or the state or underlying economic relations, it is never clear exactly what power is exercised for and, consequently, it cannot be clearly said what it is that any possible resistance may be exercised against.

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