Topologies of Power
Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government
beyond ‘Governmentality’
Stephen J. Collier
Abstract
The publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the
late 1970s has provided new insight into crucial developments in his late
work, including the return to an analysis of the state and the introduction
of biopolitics as a central theme. According to one dominant interpretation,
these shifts did not entail a fundamental methodological break; the
approach Foucault developed in his work on knowledge/power was simply
applied to new objects. The present article argues that this reading – which
is colored by the overwhelming privilege afforded to Discipline and Punish
in secondary literature – obscures an important modification in Foucault’s
method and diagnostic style that occurred between the introduction of
biopolitics in 1976 (in Society Must Be Defended) and the lectures of 1978
(Security, Territory, Population) and 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics). Foucault’s
initial analysis of biopolitics was couched in surprisingly epochal and total-
izing claims about the characteristic forms of power in modernity. The later
lectures, by contrast, suggest what I propose to call a ‘topological’ analysis
that examines the ‘patterns of correlation’ in which heterogeneous elements
– techniques, material forms, institutional structures and technologies of
power – are configured, as well as the redeployments through which these
patterns are transformed. I also indicate how attention to the topological
dimension of Foucault’s analysis might change our understanding of key
themes in his late work: biopolitics, the analysis of thinking, and the concept
of governmentality.
Theory, Culture & Society 2009
Vol. 26(6): 78–108
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