Micropolitics: from Subjects to Folds

by Christian Gilliam

Whether individual or collective, the subject has been a central component of the ‘dogmatic image of thought’ of political theory and practice, specifically insofar as it is treated as the indispensable precondition of thought, meaning, action and ethics. Even where the subject is radically displaced, as is increasingly the default position of contemporary radical thought and those writing within a broadly postmodern milieu, it is still retained in some form. Displacement, after all, is not the same as eradication. Such positions have, in effect, become the last and perhaps final bastion of the subject – an attempt to concede as much ground as possible to the postmodern delight of killing off modern metanarratives without for all that giving up the form of what has been perhaps the grand narrative of modernism. Political theories of ‘lack’ are the most prominent in this respect, holding that despite the fallibility of the subject, inasmuch as it ultimately fails to secure itself, there is still a need for some form of a temporarily centred subject with a sense of its identity and capacity to act. Here, I am referring to thinkers such as Slajov Žižek and Ernesto Laclau.

There are countless other examples of theories that retain some version of this kind of subject, but only one real exception: political philosophies of immanence, whose two main figureheads can be said to be Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. What is immanence? At its most basic, immanence refers to a state of being internal or remaining within, in which the condition is in the conditioned, the cause in the effect. Rooted in the thought of Spinoza and the ancient Stoics on the nature of divinity, when applied to the formal structure of subjectivity, immanence completely eschews the subject as a constitutive foundation. The subject – its ego and the identities by which it coordinates itself – is a semblance of a prior pre-individual and pre-personal (unconscious) transcendental process.
    The transcendental must not be confused with transcendence. Whereas transcendence refers to that which conditions from without, or to that which is external to the conditioned, transcendentalism refers to the conditions of subjective experience, i.e. that which allows us to build coherent and cogent representations and meanings of the world and our self. The transcendental has long been attached to transcendence, in the sense that it has often been posited that the conditions of experience are external to experience itself. We find such a conceptualisation in the transcendental idealism of Kant, for instance. But with immanence, we have what Deleuze termed ‘transcendental empiricism’. For though immanence eschews the transcendental idealism of both Kant on the basis of presenting positions of transcendence, it is nevertheless still transcendental insofar as it concerns itself with the conditions of experience, and yet still empirical insofar it concerns itself with the real to which it is immanent. The unconscious transcendental conditions of experience/ thought/ political transformation are derived from and actualised through experience itself. The cause remains within the effect, denoting a relation of ‘double-conditioning’, as Michel Foucault put it.

The question of political subjectivity, then, is one that must be posited at the level transcendental level itself, and not as a Kantian redoubling of the empirical that still precludes the transcendental from being posited as an object of experience. This duality does not amount to an ontological dualism. Rather, it establishes a philosophy of Univocity, an ontology of the One.

To remain within? The One? Taken together, this might suggest some kind of harmonious unity or interiority. Indeed, this is the way immanence is sometimes conceived by some of the very figures that the I argue belongs together in a lineage of immanence – Sartre, for example, holds such a view when criticising the immanence conceived in phenomenology. But what is significant about a different notion of immanence that develops from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and reaches its culmination in Deleuze and Foucault is that, despite superficial appearances, it cannot be restricted to or defined in such terms. Instead, it entails a concept of the Outside or Other, and a corresponding violence or disturbance, reconfigured in terms of non-Euclidean ‘folding’. The ‘fold’ refers to a disjunctive synthesis as a virtual/interpenetrative spatio-temporal relation of multiple existential sense or series that are derived from actual experience. The multiple senses fundamentally differ to each other, and yet continue to relate between and within the Inside/Outside of the self, forming a continuum of multiplicities. Thus the synthesis is neither of pure interiority or pure exteriority. It is a synthesis that evokes the folding of a piece of paper.

Spatial metaphors have long formed the basis of metaphysical discourse. And certainly the folded paper is a rather fruitful discursive example, if we are to understand the paper as interchangeable for Univocal immanent Being, i.e. the One of difference. Two marks on diagonally opposing corners of a piece of A4 paper may be distinguished by their negative difference, in that this primarily demarcates respective locations or identities. Unassuming as the point may seem, it is notable that the opposing marks are still of the same paper, for it is by virtue of this that if I were to fold one side of the paper over to the other, the two opposing marks would still retain their negative difference in one dimension, while gaining a closer connection in another. If this idea of folding is applied to multiple spatial dimensions, as we find in non-Euclidean n-dimensional space (and even multiple temporal dimensions), then we can image a highly complex relation of folds as a generative and constitutive process, which is always immanent unto itself. The non-Euclideanism of this process – an idea taken from the mathematician Bernhard Riemann and developed into metaphysics via Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – partly signifies a subversion of the spatialised metaphors of metaphysics, e.g. in Plato, the Good is that which is ‘higher’. With a non-Euclidean fold, it follows that I can fold in multiple ways via multiple dimensions to generate new divergent relations between and within the marks on it and even the form of the paper itself. Yet the paper shall remain, with no need of extrinsic dimensions.

Although opposition and/or correspondence between two things (such as the folded marks) may still exist, neither their opposition and/or correspondence are constitutive or conceptually holistic, since such opposition and/or correspondence will never delineate the multiple/other meanings, senses or differences, that exist between and within the two things. Thus, the synthesis is one that bypasses the old dichotomy between the order of dialectical unity and chaos of complete non-relation – Apollo vs. Dionysus – delineating, instead, a ‘structural dissymmetry’ in which the constitutive differences of a being are related through their difference, establishing intersections where differences resonate and communicate with each other and out of which temporary unities of identity may arise.
    As opposed to a politics of the subject, then, immanence posits an ‘immanent life’ of prepersonal and preindividual virtual events and singularities, which are in turn actualised and politically organised in the form of subjects and objects to which it attributes itself. Indeed, as Deleuze argues, all expression requires organisation/stratified relations through formed matters in disjunction with social production or political forms (interchangeably understood as the ‘macropolitical’). ‘A life’ is therefore not marked by separate individualities and subjective qualities as much as it is defined by distinct singularities and virtuals engaged in a process of actualisation following the politicised plane that gives it its particular reality. This is precisely what the micropolitical is; that which is constitutive of our being, operating below the level of segmented forms, actualised expressions and conscious thought. We are micropolitical before we are political.

It is precisely this micropolitical domain, and its relevance to post-industrial capitalism and resistance to it, that I explore in Immanence and Micropolitics: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucualt and Deleuze.

Christian Gilliam is a political philosopher, former UK Labour Party politician and author of Immanence and Micropolitics: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). His philosophical work focuses on French existentialism, political subjectivity and micropolitics. Having previously worked as Associate Lecturer in political theory at the University of Kent and Visiting Lecturer in modern philosophy at Royal Holloway, where he received his PhD., he currently works for the Doctoral College at the University of Surrey and is the lead, along with Dr Allan Johnson, of the Arts and Humanities Research Group (AHRG). Gilliam has published articles in prominent journals, including Contemporary Political Theory and Existential Analysis.