LivingstonCPSA2008.doc (may 12/2008) On the Micropolitical Alex Livingston Department of Political Science University of Toronto
[email protected] DRAFT. Do not cite or circulate without the author’s permission. I. Introduction A turn to micropolitics appears to be going on in contemporary American political theory. Defined in its broadest terms, micropolitics is a politics of the ordinary that politicises habits, dispositions, feelings, the body, emotions, and thinking as potential sites of domination and resistance below the hallowed heights of liberal principles of justice. The claim of micropolitics is that justice talk, whether liberal, communitarian or otherwise, is insufficient if it remains narrowly confined to the ordering of basic institutions or of the idea of a political community as such. More everyday and ubiquitous practices and attitudes work to realize or hinder the potential of principles and institutions. And at this lower register, new conceptions of action, judgment, and responsibility are needed. In a recent edited volume Jane Bennett and Michael J. Shapiro define the substance of this turn as follows, “In sum, to engage in micropolitics is to pay attention to the connections between affective registers of experience and collective identities and practices. The aim is to encourage a more intentional project of reforming, refining, intensifying, or disciplining the emotions, aesthetic impulses, urges, and moods that enter into one’s political programs, party affiliations, ideological commitments, and policy preferences.”1 Defined as such, this could include a Foucaultian micropolitics of capillary power and arts of resistance, a Benjaminian micropolitics of capitalist phantasmagoria and redemptive critique, or even an Aristotelian micropolitics of the prior associations of the polis and virtuous self-cultivation.