neurophysiology and everyday life’ mean that we do recognize the realm between
thinking and affects and are beginning to outline a ‘neuropolitics’ (Connolly 2002)
that might work with them. It is a politics that recognizes that political concepts
and beliefs can never be reduced to ‘disembodied tokens of argumentation.
Culture has multiple layers, with each layer marked by distinctive speeds, capacities
and levels of linguistic complexity’ (Connolly 2002: 4 5). Take difference and
identity as one example of this geology of thinking. The political literature in
this area has tended to foreground signification at the expense of affect and has
therefore enacted culture as a flat world of concepts and beliefs which can be
changed simply by engraining other new concepts and beliefs. It might be possible
to point to (and domesticate) the vagaries of thinking in everyday life via a concept
like habitus but that is about it. But difference and identity isn’t like that. It
operates on several registers, each with their own organizations and complexities:
on one register it is a defined minority that deviates from the majority practice.
On a second, it is a minority that varies from other constituencies in a setting
where there is no definitive majority. On a third, it is that in an identity (sub-
jective or intersubjective) that is obscured, suppressed, or remaindered by
its own dominant tendencies – as in the way devout Christians may be
inhabited by fugitive forgetfulness and doubts not brought up for review
in daily conversations or in church, or in the way that militant atheists may
tacitly project life forward after death when not concentrating on the belief
that consciousness stops with the death of the body. The third register of
difference fades into a fourth, in which surpluses, traces, noises, and charges
in and around the beliefs of embodied agents express proto-thoughts and
judgements too crude to be conceptualised in a refined way but still intensive
and effective enough to make a difference to the selective way judgements
are formed, porous arguments are received, and alternatives are weighted.
And in a layered, textured culture, cultural argument is always porous. Some
of the elements in such a fugitive fund might be indicated, but not of course
represented, by those noises, stutters, gestures, looks, accents, exclamations,
gurgles, bursts of laughter, gestures and rhythmic or irrhythmic movements
that inhabit, punctuate, inflect and help to move the world of concepts and
beliefs.
(Connolly 2002: 4 3– 44 )So we require a microbiopolitics of the subliminal, much of which operates
in the half-second delay between action and cognition, a microbiopolitics which
understands the kind of biological-cum-cultural gymnastics that takes place in this
realm which is increasingly susceptible to new and sometimes threatening know-
ledges and technologies that operate upon it in ways that produce effective
outcomes, even when the exact reasons may be opaque, a micropolitics which
understands the insufficiency of argument to political life without, however,
denying its pertinence. That micropolitics might be thought to be composed of
three main and closely related components. One is quasi-Foucauldian and consists
192 Part III