Oliver Marchart's Minimal politics: Beyond micro-politics and grand-politics A Critique of Post-Structuralism in Foucault and Deleuze

Introduction: The conditions of political action are one of the most discussed problems in political and social sciences today. Generally, there are two well-known approaches to this problem: grand theories of politics and micropolitics. Structuralism is a grand theory of politics that presumes some given structures that dominate all aspects of everyday life, thus degrades the agency of social actors. Likewise, Orthodox Marxism, from a grand perspective, reduces the different actions to an economic base, and by lessening the political agency to a unique class, it disregards the concrete antagonisms of everyday life. On the other hand, though the post-structural approach criticized these wholistic grand approaches, reduces all politics to micro-domain of differences and consequently ignores the possibilities of collective political action. Thus, to overcome this dilemma, we should look for a new way to consider this problem.
Method: This study inquires about the conditions of political action in current precarious societies through a critical approach. To this purpose, we have studied Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, who have attempted to specify these conditions through a poststructural direction. The data from their works were analyzed using the immanent critique method. This method exposes the inner incosistencies of poststructural approaches and shows how some of their fundamental assumptions would contradict their own goals.
Findings: The immanent critique of Foucault’s genealogy of power shows that his nominal approach results in a polemical image of society in which all political actors are involved in a never-ending war. Also, the anti-foundational image of society presented by Deleuze shows these actors as fundamentally different forces that are constantly decoding sedimented discourses. Together, these approaches form a schema of antagonisms that is, at best, indifferent to the collective actions of political actors. In this schema, we are dealing with divergent and different forces that fight and flee from each other. Hence the process of these forces joining in a strategy of becoming-major is ignored, and collective political action against the hegemonic state becomes impossible.
Conclusion: Marchart’s post-foundational thinking on antagonism offer a new understanding of social conflict. He rejects the polemical view of antagonism and asserts that there is no war at the base of society. He believes that antagonism is not mere decodification of the hegemonic discourse, but also includes the process of codification that constitutes the anti-hegemonic discourses. In ordr to overcome the micro/macro dichotomy, Marchart proposes “minimal politics” as a new way of thinking about the conditions of political action. This new way supprots the concrete differences and conflicts of everyday life. At the same time, it will not fall back into micro-politics and preserves the possibility of becoming-major and collectivity in the chains of equivalence.