nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

(how and what we analyse, organise, strategise, and how we think of power,struggle, antagonism...), and on our becoming as bodies....(im)mediate strugglesMichel Foucault once suggested that ‘we need [...] a political philosophy thatisn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty [...]. We need to cut off theking’s head: in political theory that has still to be done’. 5 He aimed to showthat the theories of sovereignty as domination and power over life and deathhad already been deconstructed from the late 18th Century. Exemplified bythe emergence of the regime of discipline and biopower; exemplified by theshift in forms of punishment from torture and execution to the prison-workhouse,living bodies and subjectivities became the objects of a power, thistime exercised primarily over life and its productivity. 6 The point for Foucaultis to go beyond the representations of power, its imaginary unifications, itsheads, bodies and symbols, and dive into the techniques of power, the waysin which power is exercised over real bodies, the ways in which real bodiesare governed and individualised. With that comes also another conception ofstruggle, not as the struggle against ‘the state’ or ‘capital’, but against the manymechanisms of power by which capitalist exploitation and state institutionsgovern us, but not by any means limited thereto. In the early eighties Foucaultreflected on the commonalities of the past decade of ‘anti-authoritarian struggles’,which he described as transversal, immanent (criticizing not the aims ofpower such as profit, but its effects), and “immediate” 7 :In such struggles people criticize instances of power which are closest tothem, those which exercise their action on individuals. They do not lookfor the ‘chief enemy,’ but for the immediate enemy. Nor do they expectto find a solution to their problem at a future date (that is, liberations,revolutions, end of class struggle). 8Foucault’s call for a decapitation of the king is a way to simultaneously rejectorganicist thought. If there is no head of the body politic, there is no bodypolitic, and no task of analysing, attacking or defending it. Foucault’s polemicpoints beyond the preoccupation with the symbolic heads of capital and state,to the study and politics of the techniques which prop it up: a study whichoutlines the ‘antagonism of strategies’, rather than the study of grand structuresand systems of domination and dependence. Instead of a metaphoristicsof power rooted in biology we get one founded on physics: power is a relationbetween forces, which even in their relation remain external to one another.201