After Biopolitics.

Michel Foucault has become increasingly influential in the literature dealing with global politics. From the now foundational epistemological critique of the validity of IR as a theory, inspired by Michel Foucault?s early works, to the emerging field of surveillance/intelligence studies, focusing more on the tool of the ?dispositive?, now a large part of these works are based on Michel Foucault?s analysis and tools.In this paper, I will try to show how Michel Foucault?s work on the Art of governmentality is particularly relevant to contemporary times of digitalization. I will draw my argument both from the critique of IR, mainly based on the episteme as discussed in Michel Foucault?s early works, and from surveillance studies in resorting to the ?dispositive?. I will try to show how Michel Foucault?s analysis and tools are not only interesting to describe historical trends, but also to be actualized. In that sense, this paper both aims at: 1.arguing for the tool of the ?dispositive?, preferred to the ?field? of a Bourdieu Sociology in the analysis of transformations of global politics; 2.Highlighting the actualization of this dispositive - taken here as the regulative political structure of the disciplinary moment ? in times of digitalization. By digitalization I mean the specific process, enabled by the computing tools, through which a given complexity is segmented in a set of figures gathered in packets of data and binaurally ordered. This process is both sign/symptom and active agent of the spatio-temporal transformations of our ability to apprehend the real.For this, we will propose an analysis of the state surveillance and control dispositive, in both its discursive and non-discursive dimension. This helps, we believe, to understand how necessity and emergency claims/discourses enter in a synaptic resonance with the very bureaucratic structure. Our main hypothesis, mainly based on the analysis of the US anti-terrorism case, is that state Administrations are progressively networked and epicentered on the security of an extended territory, with a special focus on mobility and its own mode of government : traceability.In main respects, all this is to be inscribed in the scope of what Michel Foucault stated in his late 70?s work and teachings in the Collège de France regarding the move from a negative to a positive technology of power, and on the inflexion of the historical trend in governmentality. This is to say that there is finally nothing new in this fact to put people under surveillance and control, to accumulate a strong and full knowledge about and on them. The main transformation when considering the effect of digitalization on this constitution of knowledge on people, is that it tends to automate and systematize (See Lyon; Wood) control on the one hand and the power exercise and authority on the other. From this, I?ll try to discuss this progressive focus on mobility (and traceability) in trying to see how it re-defines, if it does, the tryptic Michel Foucault highlighted: Territory (Sovereignty) / Bodies (Discipline) / Population / (Biopolitics). ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]