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Micropolitics is an umbrella term covering a host of old and new political forms—“informal politics,” “capillary politics,” “the ungovernables,” “radical incrementalism,” “infrapolitics”—each of which proposes a politics measured in microdimensions.¹ Historically, the pivotal points of reference are found in the work of Foucault and Guattari, and to a far lesser extent, in that of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt. The latter two, though not considered here, coauthored History and Obstinacy (1981), which, like its predecessor volume Public Sphere and Experience (1972), took “the microphysics of resistance” (“die Mikrophysik des Widerstands”) as a crux of political and methodological orientation.² Microhistory (microstoria), became of course a signature term for a historical school associated with the work of Carlo Ginzberg, who, in a chapter of Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, presents a microhistory of the term “microhistory” before and after his own usage that contrasts it with constructs such as “local history,” Richard Cobb’s petite histoire, Fernand Braudel’s histoire événementielle, Edoardo Grendi’s microanalysis and Hayden White’s “fragmentary” historiography.³

Foucault coined the expression “micro-physiques du pouvoir” (micro-physics of power) to designate modes of subjectivation and auto-regulation in the management of space and time. In Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir) the micro-physics of “cellular power,” understood here quite literally with reference to the monk’s cell, foregrounds the regulation of time within the monastic community. Religious orders were “the great technicians of rhythm and regular activities.”⁴ These ordering practices migrated to the army’s “chronometric measurement of shooting” (based on precise correlations of body and gesture), and to protocols of time management, as the wage-earning class introduced a more “detailed partitioning of time” that normatively rewarded non-idleness or “exhaustive time,” and equated wasted time with “moral offence and economic dishonesty.”⁵

The concept of a “micropolitics of power” gives rise to the very notion of the disciplinary in its broadest Foucauldian ascription, as Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the years 1972–73 (published under the title The Punitive Society) attest. Here, Foucault rehearses material that finds its way into Discipline and Punish, including the investigation of time management in the mid-nineteenth-century silk mill of Jujurieux, and the routines developed in early nineteenth-century correctional facilities. The “surveil-punish” couplet emerges here, and though it will be supplanted by terms with greater currency—sovereignty, biopower, and security apparatuses—it is an important carrier of the micropolitical into the larger structure of the disciplinary. Bernard Harcourt notes a passage from the lecture of March, 1973 where Foucault defines the surveil-punish couplet as an imposed “power relationship indispensable for fixing individuals to the production apparatus, for the formation of productive forces, and characterizes the society that can be called disciplinary.”⁶ What is key, for my purposes, is the notion of “fixing”; the fixative or adhesive that binds individuals to production apparatuses. It may only be an abstract idea rather than a material substance, but it reads out, Foucault suggests, when “microsociological research” is applied to structures of spatiotemporal organization. If we can determine the “fixing,” we can accomplish something theoretically significant, from mapping genealogies of power to defining the disciplinary episteme as such.⁷

Microsociological research forms the basis for a “micro-physics of power” in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault writes of

a new way of administering time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization. A macro- and micro-physics of power made possible not the invention of history (it had long had no need of that), but the integration of a temporal, unitary, continuous, cumulative dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice of domination.”⁸

Micro-physics is no mere metaphor, then; it denotes a real physics of gesture and posture. In the measured hand movements of the military maneuver; in the hygienic brushing and rubbing rituals of self-care; in the spinal curvature of bodies hunched over the school desk; and in all manner of orthopedic conformity to the architecture of schools, hospitals and prisons.

Correctional architecture is treated as a medium of punitive micro-physics. Writing about Attica Prison in 1972 just one year after the riot, Foucault assigned significance to every element of the architectural infrastructure. Proceeding microphenomenologically, he zeroed in on aspects of spatial organization—like the action of a riot or prison escape—that remain unaccounted for by any totalizing frame:

What struck me perhaps first of all was the entrance, that kind of phony fortress à la Disneyland, those observation posts disguised as medieval towers with their mâchecoulis. And behind this rather ridiculous scenery, which dwarfs everything else, you discover it’s an immense machine. And it’s this notion of machinery that struck me most strongly—those very long, clean, heated corridors that prescribe, for those who pass through them, specific trajectories that are evidently calculated to be the most efficient possible and at the same time the easiest to oversee, and the most direct. Yes, and all of this ends in those huge workshops, like the metallurgical one, which are clean and appear to be close to perfection.⁹

Foucault will admit that, before he visited Attica, his investigations of social exclusion were seated in abstractions. Now, his confrontation with the actual space of human warehousing, contoured by “bars everywhere,” imparted vivid awareness of the disciplinary logic of the penal system that regards human subjects as if they were caged animals The microstructures of carceral surveillance encountered at Attica portend the for-profit prison industry in the United States that would reach full term through the impetus of privatization.

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel Prisoners of Jebs, a bureaucratic dystopia, allows us to trace a line from Foucault to Achille Mbembe, which is to say, from the micropolitics of the prison-industrial complex to necropolitics, a term coined by Mbembe to designate regimes of death management. Jebs is a jail at Guantánamo Bay designed for pan-Africanist reformists:

In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-five, the Organization of African Unity decided in its accustomed wisdom to set up an elite prison on the Dark Continent. The reasoning was as follows: Africa needed political unity, and general unanimity. It had not been able to achieve these or anything like them after over twenty years of effort by Presidents and free men. It was felt that prisoners drawn from member-nations, locked up in a pollution-free environment and forced to think day and night about the problem of the continent and of each member-nation, would certainly usher in progress. The decision, not surprisingly, received unanimous approval. Each member-nation had a surplus of prisoners who ate too much food and embarrassed the big bosses. To offload them was sheer relief. The decision pleased the people of Africa because they reasoned that it was better to have living prisoners than dead ones, it being the fashion in those days to shoot prisoners and display their corpses in public.¹⁰

This send-up of African unity politics doubles as an exposé of the murderous logic of use-value that treats prisoner “surplus” as disposable material, and the caloric intake of the prisoner as a metric for profit-margin calculation. Saro-Wiwa’s setting approximates the kind of “death-world” that Mbembe identifies with the necropolitical, and which is most commonly found in camps, migrant detention centers, labor colonies, prisons, quarantined townships and occupied territories.¹¹ In Mbembe’s unnerving formulation, “politics is therefore death that lives a human life.”¹² Necropolitics achieves its endgame in “zombification”: “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to becoming living-dead.” These forms of existence create topographies of cruelty that blur the lines “between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.”¹³ Though it depends on a macro-scaled perspective of biopolitical organization, necropolitics is indistinguishable from micropolitics to the extent that both default to the calculus of managed life. In both micropolitics and necropolitics the subject is indissociable from temporal and spatial infrastructures of domination and subjective demolition.

In place of Foucault’s biopolitics—a model built for structural diagnoses of discipline and, more specifically, for decortications of punitive society institutions—Félix Guattari introduces infrastructures of the unconscious in a field of libidinal potentialities. As Shigeru Taga has observed, the Foucault-Guattari relation remains relatively under-examined, and I would argue that elaborating that relation has bearing on how micropolitics, as a form of unexceptional politics, differs as a theoretical project from the unexceptional politics of “small p” politics.¹⁴ Meeting and forming a friendship in the 1970s, Foucault and Guattari collaborated on projects sponsored by CERFI (Le Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionelle) at the La Borde clinic with shared interests in medico-legal practices, regimes of care, and micropolitics.¹⁵ In this context, we can see how Foucault’s “micro-physics of power” would serve as the fulcrum of Guattari’s “micro-politique du désir,” conceived in the struggle against oedipal hierarchization, and emergent as a medium of schizo-analysis, group subjectivity and discursive reprogramming.

Guattari’s essay “Microphysique des pouvoirs et micropolitique des désirs” (Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire), first published in 1986, was initially delivered as a conference paper in Milan at a colloquium devoted to the work of Foucault. A close reading of Foucault’s 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France—L’ordre du discours (Orders of Discourse)¹⁶—Guattari introduced a “problematics of analytic singularity” based on unworking homogeneity within a logos-driven discursive field.¹⁷ Foucault had opened this text with the fantasy of discourse shorn of institutional checks—free of decisionism, susceptible to chance, indefinitely open, calmly transparent—only to have the voice of the institution countermand the fantasy in the voice of an oppressively benevolent, superegoic guardian.¹⁸ In standing up to the discursive guardian, Foucault, Guattari suggests, takes aim at universal mediation on the grounds that it elides “the reality of discourse.” He concurs with Foucault in maintaining that discourse has been historically privileged in a vision of the logos bent on “everywhere elevating singularities into concepts, finally enabling immediate consciousness to deploy all the rationality in the world.”¹⁹ Foucault insists that the logos is “really only another discourse already in operation,” a way in which “things and events insensibly become discourse.”²⁰ This logocentric discursivity contains all manner of exclusions and internal procedures—classification, ordering, semiotic distribution, logics of coherence—that patrol and authorize what is expressible. Unbinding the singularities of things and events from a logos powered by the drive to universal knowledge and universal truth entails dissolving grammatology’s structural foundationalism. Foucault, Guattari notes, produces a

very distinct conception of the statement as no longer representing a unity of the same sort as the sentence, the proposition, or the speech-act. Consequently, the statement, for Foucault, no longer functions on the authority of a segment of a universal logos leveling out existential contingencies. Its proper domain is therefore no longer simply that of a relation of signification, articulating the relationship between signifier and signified, nor of the relation of the denotation of a referent. For it is also a capacity of existential production (which, to use my terminology, I call a diagrammatic function). In its mode of being singular, the Foucauldian statement is neither quite linguistic nor exclusively material.²¹

Guattari endorses Foucault’s treatment of the statement not as a structure but as “a function of existence.” Foucault’s emphasis on the contingent mise-en-existence of signification, and its reliance on the interaction of semiotic, denotative and pragmatic functions within discourse, alerts him to “the rifts of discourse, that is, the ruptures of meaning in the ordinary language of scientific discursivity.”²² What counts for Guattari is how Foucault reterritorializes the linguistic unit of the statement, and by extension, the subject. No longer conceivable as “an irreducible point of escape from the systems of relations and representation,” the subject of language is replaced by a “process of singularization” that “comes to exist as a collective assemblage of enunciation.”²³ The impact of Foucault’s ungrounding of discursive foundationalism is not restricted to intervening in the processes by which a social body is subjectivated; it extends to opening the enunciative field to an expansive “micropolitics of existence and desire.”²⁴

Guattari’s analytic of singularity abandons the practice of honing words to an irreducible essence, as well as that of suturing knowledge to iconic concepts. What is at stake is a procedure that dismantles hierarchies of value within grammar. Predicates and propositions are unseated; loci of power within syntax and diction are denaturalized within discursive reason; acts of language that secure what Foucault characterized as the “government of individualization” are desubjectivized. Paraphrasing Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge Guattari projects the discursive field as an “intentionality without subject” proceeding from “collective surfaces and inscriptions.” Micropolitics is here identified with an inter-lingual relationality associated with the active deindividuation of grammar. Guattari’s deprivileging of the pronominal “I” harks back to Gilbert Simondon’s notions of pre-personal quanta and transindividuation.

What kind of depersonalized grammar would this be? It is found in schizo-language. In his translator’s introduction to Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Andrew Goffey warns Anglophone readers that the text’s language will strike them as baroque jargon sourced from psychoanalysis, philosophy, ecology and informatics.²⁵ Goffey will insist, however, on working through this difficulty, treating it as central to Guattari’s project of stretching discourse beyond the limits of intelligibility, to the breakout points where words open onto deterritorialized planes of expression.

Guattarian micropolitics imagines orders of relationality that enable language to be seen as a new materialism. This takes us back to Foucault’s evocation of discourse “in its material reality as pronounced or written thing,” which is to say, a thing fraught with danger insofar as it harbors simmering “struggles, wounds, dominations, and subordinations.”²⁶ For Guattari, this discursive materialism can result in such a state of war, but it can also be a revolutionary medium that redistributes enunciation, matter, and existence on a flat plane. In this context, discursive singularity anticipates Bruno Latour’s investigation into modes of existence as well as multiple tendencies within object-oriented ontology in which objects, including linguistic objects, literary objects, or texts that become the object of translation, are fully vested as existents.

Guattarian micropolitics adopts Foucault’s focus on discursive subjectivation, but transposes its micro to the molecular. In La Révolution moleculaire (1977), abridged in the English translation (The Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics), molecular networks of lateral links connect everything: fascism, desire, and even cookery. Molecular micropolitics is invoked to document how fascism permeates every kind of activity and social organization: from the passivity and complacence produced in response to machinic violence; to everyday forms of fascism in the family, on the shop-floor, in the trade-union hall or in any place where “local tyrants and bureaucrats of all sorts perform hysterical antics and paranoid double-dealing.”²⁷ Molecular Revolution gives rise to political praxis insofar as it denounces libidinal economies that fuse oedipal organization to state structure, and promotes initiatives “to remove select areas of science, art, revolution and sexuality from dominant representations.”²⁸ The micropolitical subject of this resectorization takes on a more robust existence as the “infra-individual” in Lignes de fuite (Lines of Flight). More vector or “trans” function than subject of ontology, the infra-individual crosses unconscious desires with bodily attributes, material orders of expression with semiotic ones.²⁹ Infra-individuals are the micropolitical subjects of social movements; at once popular and transversal (bi-polarized in schizo-analytic terms), they transgress the boundaries of privatized individualism securitized by law under oedipal capitalism.

A molecular micropolitics of desire is integral to the Guattarian vocabulary of anti-psychiatry, geophilosophy, chaosmosis, information theory and schizoanalytic cartography. Arguably it is really the only politics at issue in Deleuzean/Guattarian notions of deterritorialization, rhizomatic arboreality, minor literatures, and the hyphenated group-subject. Its imprint was palpable in post-’68 collectives and groupuscules pursuing creative practices at the juncture of poetry, punk, theater, plastic arts, theory, anarchism, ecology and anti-psychiatry. A constant among these experimental group-subjects was the desire to channel the therapeutic demiurge into modes of theatrical and political existence, be it a politics of care, a principle of disponibilité (availability) and acceuil (unconditional welcome), a resolve to live in immediacy rather than in bankable intervals of postponed gratification, or a recognition of small acts, unrecompensed gestures, and unidentified modalities of experience.³⁰ Many small-group adherents apprenticed in the institutional psychotherapy of Guattari and Jean Oury, who welcomed at La Borde a host of intermittent residents who sojourned in the clinic as patients, staff, students or a combination of all three. An underlying ethic was the constant renewal of the clinic itself, echoed in Oury’s injunction to “remake the therapeutic group, at all times” (“refaire le club thérapeutique, tout le temps”). Remaking included the physical labor of rebuilding environments of habitation. Oury sought to transform architecture into something other than a “renfermerie” (space of enclosure)—a current that was, in his view, exacerbated in the 1960s by the Brutalist style of concrete and glass walls that afforded no respite from surveillance. In an essay on “architecture and psychiatry” published in 1967, he called for the reconstruction of community according to simple steps: find a space with enough rooms to shelter people in precarity; explore materials; build through bricolage.³¹

Oury’s spatiotemporal therapies are reprised today by the Invisible Committee (Comité Invisible) in their call for a blockade on infrastructure, considered to be the “mise en forme de la vie qui est le ravage de toute forme de vie” (modes of life-formation that wreak havoc on every form of life).³² Small groups implanted in unprepossessing, semi-abandoned places—town edges, rural redoubts, graveyards for retired machines—attest to ongoing experiments in micropolitical living that take inspiration from past countercultural settlement movements—what Felicity Scott, in Outlaw Territories, groups under the heading “Woodstockhome.” Scott’s examples include the Open Land movement communes of Morning Star and Wheeler Ranch in Northern California during the late sixties, and the Hog Farm Tent City in Stockholm of the early seventies, both dedicated to experiments in environmentalist living. Throughout the book, an implicit question hovers: what is the relevance of these communes to the politics of now? An answer can be gleaned from Scott’s opening quote from the Invisible Committee’s 2009 manifesto The Coming Insurrection, which indicts the conglomerate of global organizations responsible for the current state of the environment as “the vanguard of disaster.”³³ Scott, it would seem, is advocating for an insurgent architectural practice that has little to do with building types and more to do with a futural militant ecology. Her study complements McKenzie Wark’s eco-militant treatise Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, which, as its title suggestions, harks back to the Guattarian revolution, and to molecular micropolitics in its appeal to a “Carbon Liberation Front.”

Wark’s invocation of a Carbon Liberation Front echoes the Invisible Committee’s neo-communist ecopolitical exploits. In 2005 the Invisible Committee, shepherded by the philosopher/Situationist/activist Julien Coupat, established itself in a farmhouse in the Corrèze region of southwestern France. Though the collective would be accused as the “Tarnac Nine” of terrorist activity by the Sarkozy government in 2009, and prosecuted by the French anti-terrorist division as an anarcho-autonomist cell suspected of plots to sabotage train lines and global summits, it was officially acquitted for lack of evidence. Signing itself Tiqqun, a Hebrew term for repair, resurrection and healing, the group published Theory of Bloom, a poetical pamphlet that nominated James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom (alongside Melville’s Bartleby and Robert Musil’s “man without qualities”) as the figurehead of outliers and social outcasts. Bloom, as both character and principle, was hailed for his stigma-inducing sexuality as a “prisoner of the non-sensual sexualization [Ulysses] is riddled with.”³⁴ In his suffering and embodiment of “radical insufficiency” (Agamben), Bloom allows for the burgeoning of a theory that recruits eco-activists for an environmentalist Commune.

The Invisible Committee belongs to a loosely associated network of communities that survive in the interstices of the society of calculation and are occasionally characterized as manifestations of the contemporary groundswell for new utopias. Visiting the railway town of Vénéray-les-Laumes in summer 2015, I stumbled on one such collective at La Quincaillerie du Moulin, a building that had been boarded up for years and was gradually being reclaimed from the spiders, room by room, by Alexis Forestier and a group of friends and visitors. A bridge that cuts off this village siphons traffic from the giant regional supermarket (“Super U”), to feeder roads for the motorway. La Quincaillerie lowers under the bridge, a redoubt championing a site marked by dwindling residents and closed businesses. Forestier reclaimed this rambling factory compound, turning its outbuildings into spaces for performance and film projections, art ateliers and workstations, and hideaways for reading and sleeping. The place corresponds, as one visitor put it, to the dream of “the perfect palace of a peasant intellectual” (“le palais idéal d’un intellectual paysan”).³⁵ Oneiric and eccentric, La Quincaillerie offers a refuge of hospitality: the furniture is scavenged; the front door remains open; tea and coffee are on the table; books on psychotherapy, philosophy, literature, and anarchism are ready for consultation by whomever. A woman with CDs to donate appears, followed by an expatriate British farmer. An actor tends the garden. It is this rhythm of coming and going, casual interruption and encounter, that makes of the site what the group called, in the first issue of their journal, a “place for making living possible,” a kind of habitat factory (“un lieu de fabrique et d’un habiter possible”).³⁶ Formerly, Forestier had collaborated with Jean Oury at the La Borde clinic while running through a range of hybrid métiers that included architecture, farming, ethnomusicology, psychotherapy, writing, and theater. He had helped found a community of “degree zero social alienation” called “Les Endimanchés”—a name meaning “Sunday best,” in homage to nineteenth-century workers’ movements who were inspired by Paul LaFarge’s right to laziness.³⁷ Like the multiple phalansteries with which it is informally connected, La Quincaillerie dedicates itself to making creative time continuous with work time. There is the work of industrial archeology, the recycling of machine parts and old photographs of early technology, and the coordination of avant-garde performances. On the program were Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire, plays by Brecht, Beckett, and Müller, and a philosophical promenade by bicycle (titled “Changer la vie”) featuring octogenarian sculptor André Robillard, who lives in and out of psychiatric facilities. Each activity was infused with a distinct spirit of place emanating from the local stream, the factory remnants, and the depopulated streets. Like a scene excerpted from Romantic landscape poetry, the site, as its journal attests, aspires to being a “sojourner’s way station” (“construction précaire d’une aire de séjour”).

These forays into provisional homesteading and environmentalist autonomism, spearheaded by molecular groupuscules who take their cue from the Imaginary Party, come off, to be sure, as utopian adventures that, in their indifference to political institutions, are far removed from the arenas of ordinary politics. Though at risk of being dismissed or disparaged as alternative lifestyle politics, it is a molecular commune, a community of micro-affects and solidarities that corresponds politically to what Slavoj Žižek, reviewing Wark’s Molecular Red, characterized as “weird domains which are NOT part of our experiential reality, from quantum oscillations to genomes.” For Žižek, we are dealing with a

molecular level so low that it is imperceptible not only to “molar” big politics or social struggles but also the most elementary forms of experience. It can only be accessed through “high” theory—in a kind of self-inverted twist, it is only through the highest that we get to the lowest.³⁸

Molecular micropolitics, whether we agree or not with Žižek’s contention that it can only be accessed through high theory, infiltrates mainstream politics through its global dispatch of geophilosophic subjects; subjects who have their ear low to the ground, their attention trained on life beside the bridge.