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From Strategic Relations to States of Domination: A Formal Gloss on Foucault's Topology of Power

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Michel Foucault’s late work on power articulates a tripartite distinction among strategic relations, techniques of government, and states of domination. This paper argues that the distinction constitutes a topology — a structural characterization of power’s possible configurations — lacking a dynamics: it cannot say how or when a strategic field collapses into a state of domination. We propose that the C-A-D decomposition drawn from the Recursion-Collapse-Recombination (RCR) framework provides this missing structural vocabulary, and that the Relational Saturation Limit (RSL) begins to provide the missing mechanism. RSL distinguishes a proved D-ceiling result, a proved corollary establishing that full saturation requires the joint structural suppression of two AM axioms (A3 and A5), and a still-open conjecture about the transience of high-D states. We argue further that the empirical structure of the C-A-D decomposition — high mutual information between C and A, near-independence of D from both — is the formal signature of Foucault’s three-stratum commitments: an active strategic-governmental field coupled at the dual projections of the same underlying state, with an orthogonal saturation dimension. The C-A-D measures Centralization (C), Asymmetry (A), and Dominance (D) track, respectively, the stratum of techniques of government, the stratum of strategic relations, and the threshold of domination in Foucault’s schema. RSL’s proved ceiling theorem and joint-suppression corollary together provide a formal correlate of Foucault’s deepest structural intuition: that the relational field cannot achieve full saturation, that freedom is the architectural precondition of power as such.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20260733
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161536905
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