Micropolitics

Micropolitics and the Political Subject

Whereas many forms of political theory take political subjects and their interests as pregiven and then seek to describe their interactions, micropolitical analysis looks at the various social, political, cultural and economic forces that function to produce particular types of political subjectivities. An example of this is Foucault's work on disciplinary spaces, in which he investigates how the specific ordering of bodies in prisons or schools serves to produce certain forms of subjectivity and agency. A micropolitical approach will reorient a research agenda away from the large-scale mechanisms of control and organization and toward those forces operating at the personal and prepersonal level to produce certain patterns of habits, behaviors, perceptions, interests, beliefs, and desires. For example, in Deleuze and Guattari's account of fascism, they argue that the fascist state cannot be explained solely by its macropolitical order of authoritarian control (as there are many authoritarian states that are not fascist). To truly explain fascism one has to look to the micropolitical level, to see the way in which a fascist subject is produced which accepts, and even desires, repression.

However, it is important that we not develop too functionalist an understanding of micropolitics. Micropolitics is not simply the act of producing and organizing subjects in ways that maintain entrenched power structures. If we understand micropolitical power solely as organized by, or even originating from, macropolitical centers (such as the state or the capitalist economy), then we have missed the point entirely. Though macropolitical imperatives such as state or economic necessity are not absent, local formations (the organization of the neighborhood, the household, the office) are just as likely to play a key role in the constitution of political subjects. Micropolitics involves a vast and complex web of forces, too diffuse to be rooted in any centralized organizations and deeply responsive to the particularities of local situations. Sometimes this web of micropolitical flows conjugates in ways that shore up large-scale structures of administration and organization. Other times they connect in such as way as to produce what Deleuze and Guattari call “lines of flight,” which leak out around the large-scale aggregations and power centers of macropolitical formations. In this regard, micropolitics is as much a theory of how macropolitical formations hang together as how they fall apart.

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