emergency, exceptional power, or the stakes of an empty structure that Agamben, in reference to the state of exception from law, qualified as “a force of law without law.”49
Though it might seem like an odd swerve to follow on a condensed lexicon of “politics” and “The Political” (passing through Arendt, Ricoeur, Balibar, Mouffe, Badiou, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Rancière, Derrida and Bennington), by cycling back to Bruno Latour, his commentary on Schmitt in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence warrants reference at this juncture because of the way it unexceptionalizes transcendent modes of the Political. Latour introduces the geometric figure of the curve or circle along which “little transcendences” are distributed, thereby circumventing the need for a Schmittian “exceptional man” charged with instituting sovereign decision above the law.50 Latour’s circle is “exceptional at all points,” and represents the collective as it coalesces around specific issues in real time.51 Plotted on the curve is a “small p” politics that speaks in its own language, that defines distinct modes of acting or articulating politically that evolve and mutate. One could even say that Latour gives us something on the order of a plastic politics: an ontogenetics of political DNA comparable to what Arne de Boever, building on Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity as an explosive/reparative capacity, calls “plastic sovereignty”; forms that retain “sovereignty’s positive accomplishments.” These include the skills of the professional organizer; non-vertical axes of agency; autopoeic transformation over and against “neoliberal flexibility”; and a “new experience of language.”52 A “plastic” approach to politics, from this perspective, might entail taking up anew elements of its DNA: terms that codify a concept of politics as professional métier (as in Cicero’s On Government), or vocabulary that has fallen into desuetude (civility, civic virtue, the citizen subject).53 It initiates and promotes thinking pragmatically and philosophically about the links between effective sophistical praxis and micropolitics.
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
