The 1AC’s theorization of governmentality over genetic data through emerging life science industries adopts a post-racial framework that seeks to uproot the historical and ontological basis of race and settler colonialism despite their structuring of biocapitalist procedures

FSS’s undertheorization of racism and colonialism also produces inaccurate genealogies of (life) sciences and technologies, most strikingly regarding the so-called digital and molecular revolutions. FSS scholars of these revolutions purport to update Foucault for “the age of life as information” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 106) and to describe epochal breaks in scientific understandings of life, corresponding with an equally epochal shift from a biopolitics of scientific racism to a new post-racial form of biopolitics. However, they do so without any serious attention to Foucault’s post-colonial critics, or any serious inquiry into lines of continuity between White supremacist scientific racism and these digital and molecular ‘revolutions’. Thus for instance Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008, 273) argue that “biopolitics is critically dependent, epistemically and ontologically, on what the sciences of life say that species life is”. As such, “[i]n the molecular age life is no longer simply the life of population as Foucault documented... because molecular science has transformed what we understand a living thing to be” (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008, 286). Dillon and Reid similarly claim to trace shifting notions of life. They assert that over the past five decades “the very ontology of biological life has shifted to the ground of ‘information’” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 22) and that distinctions between animate and inanimate, biological and non-biological “have been newly construed and problematized” (Dillon and Reid, 2009, 22). Though much of this is derivative of Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose’s work, attention to the digital and molecular has particular impacts in the international and security fields. According to Dillon and Reid (2009, 22), digital and molecular ‘reproblematizations’ of life have impacted the biopolitical strategies of liberal internationalism: “[t]he very space of enmity is itself re-problematized. Who is dangerous, what is dangerous, how things become dangerous are all transformed” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 107). This has apparently resulted in a shift from scientific racism to ‘new racism’ with an emphasis on cultural difference rather than biological hierarchies. FSS’s ability to examine how science has shaped the biopolitical strategies of security and liberal internationalism is limited by its persistent Eurocentrism and undertheorization of race. Societal notions of ‘life’ are treated as interchangeable with the life sciences’ supposedly post-racial understanding of life as generic data. This fails to engage with either the ingrained (settler) coloniality of technoscience or the stubborn (and institutionalized) 2 As well as those deemed Jewish under the racist Nuremberg ‘race’ laws. 13 persistence of broader structures of White supremacy and antiblackness. This has serious empirical implications. For instance, Dillon’s discussion of ‘new’ risk analysis and biometrics does not consider how these security technologies have been designed to police enslaved populations and surveille Black people (cf. Browne 2015), as part of a long-standing legacy of colonial techniques of ‘identity dominance’ (Bell 2013). Similarly, FSS discussions of the molecular fail to engage with the contemporary racial politics of genetic science (Duster 2003; Nelson 2016; TallBear 2013), how molecular life sciences were and are fueled by experimentation on the bodies of racialized and indigenous people (Dudley 2012; Mosby 2013; Washington 2006), including the movement of pharmaceutical clinical trials from US prisons to the Global South (Petryna 2009), or the neo-eugenic functions of genetic reproductive technologies (Roberts 2013) and related racialized economies of labour in the global surrogacy industry (Twine 2011), to name just a few examples. Instead, highly abstract formulations stand in for historically specific forms of power. Dillon and Reid write that “[p]ower is palimpsestuous. New forms and relations of power become superimposed on older ones. Previous relations and accounts of power are rubbed out but may not be entirely effaced” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 124). This statement comes with no serious empirical engagement with the persistence – and modulation – of scientific racism into the 21st century. Instead we are to believe that racism is now cultural, not scientific – and for that matter, that science isn’t cultural itself. The result is an e(race)sure (Moore 2012) of the ways that racialized subjects continue to always already signify violence that once again shores up the foundational White FSS mythology that everyone is (potentially) dangerous and therefore vulnerable to the punitive and/or lethal dimensions of liberal power. Ironically, FSS discussions of post-WWII biopolitical liberal internationalism thus reproduce, rather than challenge, the promise that liberal war will transcend the global colour line (Richter-Montpetit, 2014)/