Biopolitics K - Northwestern 2024

Biopolitics K Aff and Neg – NDI 2024
Aff---Biopolitics Kritikal Affirmative
1AC
Adv 1 – Otherization and Control
We are all under the biopolitical regime. Modern biopolitics creates a state of branding: excluding people in an exercise of power that enforces further surveillance on them and the broader community
Btihaj Ajana 2005, Btihaj holds a BA (Hons) with First Class in Media Studies and Computing Science from London South Bank University, an MA with Distinction in Digital Media from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), “Surveillance and Biopolitics”, Electronic Journal of Sociology, pg. 4-6, https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/ejofsociology/2006/01/content/2005/tier1/ajana_biopolitics.pdf
In a chapter called Panopticism, Foucault (1975) begins by outlining two major forms through which discipline and surveillance were exerted. The first being the spatialisation of the plague-stricken town by means of segmenting and immobilising space as well as placing individuals within enclosures and under severe and permanent supervision. Such surveillance involves ‘tactics of individualizing disciplines’ (Foucault, 1975: 199) which proceed from a system of ‘permanent registration’ (registering the details of each inhabitant of the town) as well as mechanisms of distribution (in which each inhabitant is related to his place, his body and his condition) so that the disease is met by order, eradicating any confusion that may emerge out of the ‘mixing’ of bodies, be these living or dead. The second organisational form is that of the treatment of the leper which, unlike ‘the plague and its segmentations’, functions by means of separation and exclusion of the leper from the healthy community through mechanisms of ‘branding’, ‘dichotomisation’ and ‘exile-enclosure’. From these two different images (plague and leprosy) which underlies the two different projects (segmentation and separation), Foucault goes on to explain the two ways of exerting (political) power: discipline on the hand (as is the case with the plague), and exclusion on the other (as is the case with leprosy). However, and despite the difference of the two modes, they are ‘not incompatible ones’ (Foucault, 1995: 199) for power functions by way of excluding the ‘infected’ (here, the image of the leper stands as an emblematic figure of ‘beggars’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘madmen’, etc, just as the image of the plague symbolises ‘all forms of confusion and disorder’) and individualising the excluded so much so that lepers (all those who are symbolised by this image) are treated as plague victims (all those who are caught up within disorderly spaces). Hence, power is but a concurrent amalgamation of the two forms, and according to Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon is par excellence ‘the architectural figure of this composition’ (1975: 200).
Bentham’s utilitarian plan for a prison which is based on an observing supervisor placed in a central tower and who can see without being seen, serves as a compelling paradigm for the kind of surveillance that is intrinsic to the compound power of exclusion and individualization. As Elden (2002: 244) explains, the model of the Panopticon is where the space of exclusion (of the figurative leper) ‘is rigidly regimented and controlled’ (as is the case with the figurative plague victim). The idea that ‘visibility is a trap’ (Foucault, 1975: 200) (i.e. the presence of the tall tower at the centre does not necessarily mean the supervisor is watching), that ‘collective’ individualities are overridden by separated ‘individualities’ (the treatment of lepers as a plague victims – the trinity of segmentation, individualisation and separation) and that power is ‘unverifiable’ (uncertainty about whether/when one is being watched), is what makes the model of Panopticon such a subtle and effective architectural apparatus. Power does not need to be enforced but merely ‘internalised’ through mechanisms of self-regulation. Such mechanisms render the observed as simultaneously the bearer (subject) of and the one subjected to power.
Not that the Panopticon is merely a method of observation devoid of other disciplinary modes of power but it is also a machine that could be used to ‘carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals’ (Foucault, 1975: 203) within a variety of institutional spaces, ranging from prisons to schools, hospitals, factories, etc. It is, hence, the way in which the metaphor of the Panopticon encapsulates different technologies and spaces of surveillance and discipline that Foucault places the notion of disciplinary society under the umbrella of panopticism in order to capture the diagrammatic strategies underlying power relations and in which ‘positions’ and ‘identities’ are fundamental features vis-à-vis the functioning of ‘panoptical’ surveillance.
The biopolitical state leads to the categorization, restricting, and purging of ‘foreign bodies’ leading into eugenics--a scientific racism that takes autonomy hostage.
Nikolas Rose 2001, Professor of Sociology at Kings College London, Head of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Head of the Department of Sociology, and he founded the History of the Present Research Network, an international network of researchers influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault, 2001, “The Politics of Life Itself”, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 18 issue 6, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02632760122052020
In the light of the history of biological racism and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is not surprising that many sociologists have expressed concerns about the contemporary resurgence of biological and genetic accounts of human capacities and incapacities.3 They have argued that, like previous appeals to biological nature, such developments will tend to generate a politics that individualizes human worth, essentializes variations in human capacities, reduces social phenomena to the aggregate of individual actions, and discriminates against, constrains or excludes those found biologically abnormal or defective. Thus they have warned of the dangers of a new determinism – ‘geneticism’ – based on a false but seductive mystique of the power of the genes, and entailing all sorts of discrimination on genetic grounds (Dreyfuss and Nelkin, 1992; Lippman, 1992; Nelkin, 1992; Nelkin and Lindee, 1995; Nelkin and Tancredi, 1994). Some have suggested that we face the real prospect of the rebirth of scientific racism grounded in the apparent objectivity of DNA sequences, and of a new eugenics fuelled not merely by the commercial interests of the biotech companies, but also by parental desires for a perfect child in an age of manipulated consumerism and reproductive choice (Duster, 1990; Hubbard and Wald, 1999; Rifkin, 1998). From such a perspective, the rhetoric that celebrates the potential of biomedicine and biotechnology to improve the health, welfare and quality of life of individuals obscures the threat that new biological practices of control will coerce, restrict and even eliminate those whose biological propensities are believed – by doctors, parents or perhaps even by political authorities – to be defective.
Some locate the wish to control the biological make-up of the population at the very heart of modernity. Thus for both Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman the thanatopolitics of population purification is immanent within the very project of biopolitics: to manage the health of the ‘body politic’ inescapably requires the control and elimination of ‘foreign bodies’ (Agamben, 1998; Bauman, 1989). The National Socialism of the German Third Reich certainly exemplifies this link between the administration of life and the administration of death. For example, in a book of 1936 entitled Rassenhygiene als Wissenschaft und Staatsaufgabe, Ottmar von Verschuer asserts that politics should mean ‘giving form to the life of the people’ (von Verschuer, 1936: 8, quoted from Agamben, 1998: 148). Life itself, the vital reality of a people, must become the overriding responsibility and criterion that should guide the exercise of political authority. This requires a nationally organized and politically directed programme to improve the quality of the national stock and eliminate taints or weaknesses that might threaten it. Its tactics range from propaganda and education stressing the burden on the race imposed by those with defective constitutions, to eugenic legislation on marriage, the assessment of reproductive worth by experts working on behalf of the state, the prevention of those who are members of defective or inferior sub-populations from reproducing through sterilization or extermination. Once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation. All the eugenic projects of selective reproduction, sterilization and incarceration follow. Indeed, Agamben asserts that ‘the camp’ is the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’: when the collective body of the people becomes the principal resource for politics, the purging of defective individuals becomes an essential part of the care of life (Agamben, 1998).
COVID proves the state will use any excuse to create “others” and target them with violence--the status quo is uniquely a state of proliferated biopolitics.
Sunday Onwuegbuchulam 2024, a research fellow at the Center for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa, 6/30/24, “A Matter of Life and Death: State Power and Control of the Body in a Pandemic Era in the Light of Foucault’s Concept of Biopolitics”, Adam Academy Journal of Social Scienes, vol. 14 no. 1, pg. 111-126, https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/adamakademi/issue/86077/1317666
There is no gainsaying the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on the lives of people all over the world. It has not only led to the loss of lives but has also led to the loss of livelihoods. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been diverse in different countries but all pointing to the reality that the human body became the centre of political action towards containing the spread of the virus. Notably, in different locations certain bodies were considered biological threats; for example, the West/the USA saw China as a threat, souring relations between the countries (Christensen 2020); and at some point, in China Africans were seen as biological threats (Castilloa and Amoah 2020; Ngcobo 2021); in South Africa black people/ townships were mostly targeted as biological threats hence the deployment of soldiers to mostly Black populated areas (Bond 2022). These incidents including the numerous restrictive regulations put in place by governments globally to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitate an interrogation of how social beings were governed through discursive practices and disciplinary techniques and use of power. Notably, during COVID-19 two styles/types of power were exercised; repressive and productive power (Barceló et al. 2020; Patterson and Clark 2020). Both kinds of power produced different outcomes and deployed different strategies. The issue then would be to try and investigate how these deployments of different forms of power structured human ways of being during COVID-19.
According to Brown and Gershon (2017: 2) ‘the theme of body politics directs our attention to how bodies are included or excluded in the polity. How do governments respond to the political demands of bodies that transgress normative boundaries? How does the regulation of bodies, or the lack of regulation, impact society?’ The issue has also brought to the fore a revived interest in the interrogation of the nexus between state power and control of the freedom of citizens. Notably, by extension, the control of citizen’s freedom meant the control of the human body through several restrictive acts as already mentioned. The issue has also brought into focus Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and rule in modern and postmodern societies centring on the concept of biopower/biopolitics. Biopolitics concerns the administration of life – it is concerned with issues of life and death, birth and breeding, health and disease (physical and mental), and the procedures geared towards retarding or sustaining life optimisation in societies (Dean 2001; Armstrong 1983: 2-3).
Biopolitical “othering” romanticizes an ideal type while dehumanizing or tolerating a differing identity as a sacrifice to benefit and empower a specific group.
Andreucci & Zografos, 22 [Diego, political ecologist, resource activist, member of the Undisciplined environments collective, department of geography, University of Barcelona; Christos, Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of Pompeu Fabra University, PhD in Environmental Science and Technology, 11/22, Corrigendum to “Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change” Political Geography 92 (2022) 102512], 11/22, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629821001724]
In speaking of othering as a technology of government underpinning and reconciling two types of power—one promoting life or improvement, the other violence or sacrifice—we do not argue that these are the only ways that, historically, the West has represented “the rest”. In a broad sense, ways of knowing the other have much deeper and more complex histories: the practice of ethnographic writing, and attention to the knowledges and practices of other cultures, stretch back to ancient Greece (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Sullivan, 2017, p. 222); moreover, Western representations of non-European cultures and geographies, even when associated with colonialism, include positive depictions and even romanticising idealisations (e.g. Altmann, 2020). Here, however, we want to maintain our focus on these two ways of constructing the other—as an internal enemy or an object of improvement—because we find them especially salient to dominant ways of framing and governing the climate crisis.
In doing this, we also caution against exaggerating the difference or distance between these two logics of othering. These are in fact “idealtypes” that, in practical contexts, often overlap and conflate. First, before being (and in order to be) identified as an internal enemy, a certain group needs to be included within the governmental responsibility of the state (or development institution). Second, othering may serve not simply to exclude or include, but also to include differently. For instance, as Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015, p. 59) argue, drawing on Mbembe (2003), the necropolitical logic of colonialism and the plantation in Africa did not preclude “making live” native populations in the colony, yet it did so in ways that primarily advanced the interests and “improvement” of the ostensibly racially superior people in the metropole. Othering, therefore, underpins a wide array of interventions that go from the pure act of killing or sacrificing an internal or internalised enemy, to the ostensibly disinterested act of including, as a way of improving a group’s conditions, wealth and wellbeing.
The biopolitical state destroys freedom and forms a future that cannot be separated from death--our impact is living extinction.
Houtz, 21. [Cassie, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Genetics & Genomics. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Science, 3-3-2021, When Life Cannot Be Lived: Biopolitics, Living Death, and Difficult Ethics. https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37371918]
The production of living death is particularly common in warfare. In Weil’s discussion of war there emerges another aspect of what it might mean to exist in a living death. On the one hand, war turns all its participants into “things.” Both conqueror and conquered are caught up in a momentum that robs them of their freedom, making them subject to pure necessity and thus depriving them of some aspect of being alive. In Weil’s imagining, those subject to force become inert, frozen in place like Hector before Achilles, while those who ply it are driven by an equally mechanical momentum of violence and destruction. She concludes that battles are fought not by human beings but by things, by “men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum.”239 War, that is, makes “things” of all those it touches.
In addition to becoming a “thing” caught up in the momentum of war, soldiers undergo a psychic shift that alters their relationship to “life.” At first, conquering soldiers shield themselves from the horrors of war through emotional and conceptual distancing. They view warfare as a kind of game, and the lives they destroy “are like toys broken by a child, and quite as incapable of feeling.”240 Eventually, though, their own vulnerability to pain or loss becomes unavoidable, perhaps due to a serious injury or the death of a beloved comrade. In such a moment, the reality of war makes itself painfully present. Awareness of this reality transforms the soldier’s relationship to living and dying. As Weil describes it, “for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and the future is different than for other men. For other men death appears as a limit set in advance on the future; for the solider death is the future, the future his profession assigns him.”241 Life enfolds death. Death becomes the only imaginable future – the death of one’s enemy, of one’s comrades, of oneself. This relationship to futurity, in which death appears as the sole future, alters not only the relation to the future but also to the present. It is “much too hard to be borne,” “abhorrent,” “unendurable.”242 Weil continues, “Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years.”243 War reveals a reality that is intolerable to the mind, yet the mind cannot turn away. The possibility of death becomes ever-present, inescapable. It is as though the solider must each day experience the acute agony of facing a sword that could strike at any moment. The solider is like Hector, but for far more than a single moment. Every day, “the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way.”244 When the future appears (only) as death, aspiration becomes impossible. Contemplating the future entails contemplating death; death becomes life’s only possibility, its sole horizon. Thus, Weil claims, “the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence.”245 War imprisons the mind, making it impossible (or at least incredibly painful and therefore exceedingly rare) to imagine anything beyond the present, which is suffused with death. The future holds only death; the present is lived in thrall to this deathly future. To pass through one’s days in such a way cannot really be called “living.” One who exists in this way “belongs to a different race from the race of the living,” Weil insists.246 Like Hector, all soldiers who have perceived the reality of war become no longer quite alive.
Creates a state of being that is dead-while-alive. It outweighs.
Houtz,

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.