Stephen J. Collier

Topologies of Power Foucault's Analysis of Political Government beyond 'Governmentality'

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 totalizing 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.

Distributed Preparedness: The Spatial Logic of Domestic Security in the United States:

This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call ‘distributed preparedness’. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US.

Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency

This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, when planners and policy-makers recognized the increasing dependence of collective life on interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. Over the following decades, new security mechanisms were invented to mitigate the vulnerability of these vital systems. While these techniques were initially developed as part of Cold War preparedness for nuclear war, they eventually migrated to domains beyond national security to address a range of anticipated emergencies, such as large-scale natural disasters, pandemic disease outbreaks, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. In these various contexts, vital systems security operates as a form of reflexive biopolitics, managing risks that have arisen as the result of modernization processes. This analysis sheds new light on current discussions of the government of emergency and ‘states of exception’. Vital systems security does not require recourse to extraordinary executive powers. Rather, as an anticipatory technology for mitigating vulnerabilities and closing gaps in preparedness, it provides a ready-to-hand toolkit for administering emergencies as a normal part of constitutional government.

Ethics and the anthropology of modern reason

In recent years, anthropologists have shown increasing interest in scientific, technical and administrative systems and their political regulation. In what follows, we suggest that a major concern in much of this work is a common interest in how, in relationship to these technical and political developments, ‘living’ has been rendered problematic. In the first part of this article, we suggest that these strands of anthropological investigation can be fruitfully analyzed by engaging the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, whose distinctive neo-Aristotelian approach has had an important influence on recent discussions of ethics in philosophy. In the second part of the article, we propose that the significance of this anthropological work lies not only in its descriptions of the specificities of local ethical formations, but also in its contribution to a broader understanding of what we propose to call ‘regimes of living’.

Neoliberalism and Rule by Experts

This chapter explores neoliberalism not as a specific kind of expertise but as a form of critical technopolitical reflection on the way that the authority of truth and the legitimate exercise of political power both ground and limit each other. Focusing on the work of the political scientist Vincent Ostrom, it examines how American neoliberalism emerged as a critique of expert rule established during the Progressive Era and the New Deal and as an argument in favor of an alternative model of administration that is embedded in a “polycentric” democratic polity. It proposes that Ostrom’s work suggests a reappraisal of the critique of technical expertise and democracy that has been advanced in recent social theory.

Assemblages and the Conduct of Inquiry

In this conversation with the editors, Stephen Collier reflects on his engagement with assemblage thinking in his collaboration with Aihwa Ong on ‘global assemblages’ and in his work on vital systems security. Looking forward to the various contributions from the central part of the book, Collier discusses the use and misuse of assemblage thinking and comments on its potential IR applications. Providing a bridge between the theoretical reflexivity of the two previous conversations and the thematic chapters ahead, Collier raises questions of adjacency and entanglement with the ‘field’ by assemblage theorists.