Micropolitics

Micropolitics refers to small-scale interventions that are used for governing the behavior of large populations of people. Recent definitions of micropolitics, given by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, argue that micropolitics is a type of political regulation involved in shaping the preferences, attitudes, and perceptions of individual subjects. Micropolitics contributes to the formation of desire, belief, inclination, and judgment in political subjects. Its regulations take place at local and individual levels in locations such as prisons, hospitals, and schools, but also in movie theaters, churches, and family gatherings. When employed as a form of governance, micropolitical techniques include the discipline, surveillance, and examination of political subjects and are supported by specialized knowledge in the social sciences such as criminology, psychiatry, and sociology.

The study of micropolitical techniques began when early modern political thinkers turned their focus from legal sovereignty to the administration of complex economic and social systems. Early in the nineteenth century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon observed that being governed was to be observed and controlled in all aspects of life. This observation points directly to the micropolitical techniques of governance in which behavior is coordinated through small, daily forms of regulation, measurement, and control rather than through legal statute.

Micropolitical power can be usefully distinguished from legal power. Law depends on the prohibition, interdiction, and restriction of behavior. In contrast, micropolitical techniques depend on instilling the attitudes, dispositions, skills, and capacities to shape behavior. Because they do not depend on legal power, micropolitical techniques allow the state to devolve functions of governance to other networks of administration.

The study of micropolitics requires social scientists to shift the focus of their inquiries away from the arena of high-level decisionmakers. Throughout much of the twentieth century, it had been assumed that political power lay primarily in the hands of the leaders of national institutions and that the appropriate method of study proceeded from the top down. The study of micropolitics, however, suggests that power is exercised at the minute level of individual subjects. Working from the bottom up, the study of micropolitics is concerned with everyday techniques that form the perceptions, desires, and judgments of individuals as they are embedded in their worlds.