ADI1
Critical LabBiopolitics K
Biopolitics K Index
ADI1
Critical LabBiopolitics K
Biopolitics K Index
1NC Shell
1NC Shell
1NC Shell
Link: Visas
Link: Work Visas
Link: Amnesty
Link: Trafficking Visas
Link: Agriculture
Link: US/Mexico Border
Link: Globalization/Heg/Neo-Lib
Link: Poverty
Link: Identity Politics
Links: Law
Link: Citizenship
Link: Free Will
Link: Immigration
Link: Equal Protection
Internal Link
Impacts: Feminism/Sexuality Turns
Impacts: Racism
Impacts: Capitalism
Impacts: Nuclear War
Impacts: War
Impact: Totalitarianism
Alternative Extensions
Framework
Discourse 1st
Answer To: K Ignores Suffering
Answer Too: Resistance Impossible
Answer To: Alt=Inaction
Answer To: Perm
***Affirmative Answers***
2AC Frontline
Biopower Capitalism Turn
Incrementalism
Sovereignty Not Root of Power
Link Turns
No Alt Solvency
Perm
ADI1
Critical LabBiopolitics K
1NC Shell
A. The biopolitical categories in the visa regime open the applicants to the biopolitics of the state
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies, biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
Foucault's writings on the topic of biopolitics ground this analysis. Foucault examined the concomitant evolution of industrial and institutional techniques of modern governance through an investigation of how mobile, productive, healthy, moral bodies were constructed, schooled, policed, and harnessed for labor. (58) His investigation of the how the penal system in particular led into the evolution of a disciplinary society stopped at the borders of the state, but in principle can be expanded to encompass a biopolitics of international relations: the management of international bodies. Fundamental to the evolution of the modern state was the control over mobility of citizens, which Foucault illustrates architecturally in the panopticon and plague town, Timothy Mitchell within Egyptian schools and urban architecture, and John Torpey through state passports. (59) What these authors neglect is the international aspect of this control of mobility. Following work by Barry Hindess, Nevzat Soguk, and William Walters, who describe a structure of international management of population through the regulation of citizenship, refugees, and stateless persons, the international control of persons is just as vital to the stability of the modern state system as the domestic control of mobility. We can see the ways in which the visa system contributes to the definition and control of international populations: through the ascription of biopolitical characteristics in terms of labor skill or capitalization, epidemic or health liability, and risk or normalcy. But, how do mobile individuals come to recognize themselves as part of this population and engage in self-disciplinary behavior? For an explanation, I turn to the moment of discretion and the construction of the confessionary complex.
1NC Shell
B. The biopolitical framework established by Foucault produces prejudiced boundaries of race that have become embedded within the current immigration system.
Stoler, Professor of Anthropology at the NewSchool, 1995(Ana L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, p. 6-8, CPG)
While we might comfortably concur with Foucault that a discourse of sexuality was incited and activated as an instrument of power in the nineteenth century, we might still raise a basic question: a discourse about whom? His answer is clear: it was a discourse that produced four "objects of knowledge that were also targets and anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge" (HS:105), with specific technologies around them: the masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the "hysterical woman," the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. But students of empire would surely add at least one more. Did any of these figures exist as objects of knowledge and discourse in the nineteenth century without a racially erotic counterpoint, without reference to the libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized -- reference points of difference, critique, and desire? At one level, these are clearly contrapuntal as well as indexical referents, serving to bolster Europe's bourgeois society and to underscore what might befall it in moral decline. But they were not that alone. The sexual discourse of empire and of the biopolitic state in Europe were mutually constitutive: their "targets" were broadly imperial, their regimes of power synthetically bound.
My rereading of The History of Sexuality thus rests on two basic contentions, central to much recent work in colonial studies. First, that Europe's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political, or economic assertions, cannot be charted in Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrasts for what a "healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body" was all about. Europe's eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality can -- indeed must -- be traced along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to nineteenth-century technologies of sex. They were refracted through the discourses of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those confidences were built, could not be disentangled. I thus approach The History of Sexuality through several venues by comparing its chronologies and strategic ruptures to those in the colonies and by looking at these inflections on a racially charged ground. But, as importantly, I argue that a "comparison" between these two seemingly dispersed technologies of sex in colony and in metropole may miss the extent to which these technologies were bound.
My second contention is that the racial obsessions and refractions of imperial discourses on sexuality have not been restricted to bourgeois culture in the colonies alone. By bringing the discursive anxieties and practical struggles over citizenship and national identities in the nineteenth century back more squarely within Foucault's frame, bourgeois identities in both metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race. Discourses of sexuality do more than define the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic, they have mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedimented discourses on sexual morality could redraw the "interior frontiers" of national communities, frontiers that were secured through – and sometimes in collision with -- the boundaries of race. These nationalist discourses were predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were worthy of recognition and whose were not.
Nationalist discourse drew on and gave force to a wider politics of exclusion. This version was not concerned solely with the visual markers of difference, but with the relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence. Assessment of these untraceable identity markers could seal economic, political, and social fates. Imperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized, metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain cultural competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn defined the hidden fault lines -- both fixed and fluid -- along which gendered assessments of class and racial membership were drawn. Within the lexicon of bourgeois civility, self-control, self-discipline, and self-determination were defining features of bourgeois selves in the colonies. These features, affirmed in the ideal family milieu, were often transgressed by sexual, moral, and racial contaminations in those same European colonial homes. Repression was clearly part of this story, but as Foucault argues, it was subsumed by something more. These discourses on self-mastery were productive of racial distinctions, of clarified notions of "whiteness" and what it meant to be truly European. These discourses provided the working categories in which an imperial division of labor was clarified, legitimated, and -- when under threat -- restored.
1NC Shell
C. BIOPOWER RISKS EXTINCTION
Foucault 84
(Michel, Director of Institute Francais at Hamburg, THE FOUCAULT READER p. 259-260. KNP)
Since the classical age, the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocaust on their own populations. But this formidable power of death-and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits-now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise Controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence.
D. The Alt: the AFF is an extension of biopower, we must reject the plan now, or risk becoming an institution for juridical state power.
Foucault, Professor of philosophy at the college de France 84 (Michel, A Foucault Reader p 63 KNP)
I wonder if this isn’t bound up with the institution of monarchy. This developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep. Sovereign, law and prohibition formed a system of representation of power which was extended during the subsequent era by the theories of right: political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. Such theories still continue today to busy themselves with the problem of sovereignty. What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that has still to be done. 63
Link: Visas
Visa requirements control those entering the US
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies, biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
Preliminary empirical work suggests that there are a number of common requirements for visas: a fee for processing (a remote tax); return tickets (good faith illustration that the applicant's stay is temporary); statement of qualifications (to distinguish the degree of skilled labor); funds for stay; a health certificate (declarations that one is not an epidemiological risk: AIDS/HIV; yellow fever; tuberculosis; etc.); and affirmation of acceptable behavior (declarations that one is not a criminal/felon). Thus, the mobile subject is configured by the receiving state in terms of health, wealth, labor/leisure, and risk. The guarantee of the passport is its isomorphic representation of a particular body to a set of governmental records. The visa application, which always tests and depends on the validity of the passport, attempts to render the position of the applicant in terms of state, educational, health, and police institutions. As Don Flynn has suggested, the product of the visa bureaucracy is rejection, and efficiency is determined by rates of rejection against some imagined norm of regularly occurring fraud. (48)
The visa program exerts biopolitical control over the holding opening them up to state control over entry
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies, biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community. In this structure, the fundamental right of the sovereign is to be able to exclude and define the limits of its population with little reference to other states or sovereigns. Mobility is structured in terms of entry, which is made obligatory by citizenship or refugee status, or entirely the discretionary, by noncitizenship. I want to unpack this discretionary moment that is vital to the delimitation of the population of the state.From the French vise, meaning having been seen, the visa refers to "(1) the authorisation given by a consul to enter or to pass through a country, and (2) the stamp placed on the passport when the holder entered or left a foreign country." (37) In modern usage, it refers to the prescreening of travelers and represents a prima facie case for admission. (38) The visa in no way guarantees actual admission, which remains the prerogative of the sovereign and its agents at the border. The visa regime allows for a delocalization of the border function so that states may engage in sorting behavior away from the physical limit of the state. (39) In some instances, visas may be applied for and received at the actual border of a state, but in such cases it is viewed mostly as a revenue generator rather than a security function.
The Biopolitical categories allow for biosocial control about what countries citizen’s do and look like
Shamir 5 Ronen Sociological Theory Vol 23 June 2005 “Without Borders? Notes on Golobalization as a Mobility Regime”
The current global mobility regime, writes Bauman, is based on a distinctive principle of osmosis: "traveling for profit is encouraged; traveling for survival is condemned" (2002:84). To maintain this osmotic system, new technologies of social intervention are developed and perfected in tandem with the physical development of fences, prisons, and gated enclaves. One instance of this osmotic fine-tuning concerns infinite administrative classificatory expansion. A basic illustration of this is the classificatory scheme of American nonimmigrant visas. As of 2004, there have been 48 different categories of nonimmigrant visas to the United States. Thus, for example, the H-2A type of nonimmigrant visa is applicable to "temporary agricultural workers coming to the United States to fill positions for which a temporary shortage of American workers has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture," while the L-1 type of nonimmigrant visa is applicable to "intracompany transferees who work in positions as managers, executives or persons with specialized knowl- edge." Thus, classes of people who are typically barred entry, namely, unskilled laborers, may be granted mobility rights for designated tasks, while people who become valuable citizens of multinational corporations, namely, corporate executives, are granted special mobility privileges. In both cases, the visa system allows for the fine-tuning of movement, carefully sorting out individual identities. In particular, the osmotic system is now geared toward sorting out those who are deemed necessary to enhance the quality of the labor market from those who are considered redundant or, worse, a burden. Thus, the continued mobility of high-skilled workers is considered a vital issue for many rich countries. Accordingly, around 1.1 million people considered high skilled came to work in the United States in 2000 on temporary stay visas, more than the roughly 850,000 immigrants admitted for legal permanent residence (Jachimowicz and Meyers 2002). Similarly, Germany introduced a "green card" system to help satisfy the demand for highly-qualified information technology experts. Through this new immigration program, about 9,200 highly-skilled workers have entered Germany through August 2001, with 1,935 Indians accounting for the largest group ( At the same time, millions are barred entry, whether as immigrants or visitors, on various grounds of perceived threats. In sum, the osmotic system developed under the guidelines of the global mobility regime must rely not simply on fences but on finely-tuned screening mechanisms that provide it with its necessary social elasticity. Screening, in turn, relies on that technology of intervention that I as biosocial
Temporary visas are forms of biopolitical control that allows people into society but limits their acceptance into the community
Salter 6 Mark B, “The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies, biopolitics”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, April-June, 2006,
This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community, and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessionary regime. The global visa regime and international borders are crucial in constructing both international mobile populations and international mobile individuals.