Unexceptional Politics. Emily Apter
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