Micropolitics key to re-engage agency

Human freedom became the problem. If human beings are free, does this mean that there is some ultimate ‘man’ who can be liberated from the forces of production; or does radical freedom mean that there is no longer any human essence to which politics can appeal? All this came to a head in the student sit-ins and disruptions of 1968. There were protests throughout Europe in the late 1960s which were random, unthought out, and motivated not by the economically defined class of workers so much as by students and intellectuals. In the aftermath of these disruptions it was realised that politics was no longer the affair of economic classes and large or ‘molar’ groupings. Local disruptions at the level of knowledge, ideas and identity could transform the political terrain. Deleuze and others opened the politics of the virtual: it was no longer accepted that actual material reality, such as the economy, produced ideas. Many insisted that the virtual (images, desires, concepts) was directly productive of social reality. This overturned the simple idea of ideology, the idea that images and beliefs were produced by the governing classes to deceive us about our real social conditions. We have to do away with the idea that there is some ultimate political reality or actuality which lies behind all our images. Images are not just surface effects of some underlying economic cause; images and the virtual have their own autonomous power. This is where structuralism and post-1968 politics intersected. We need to see our languages and systems of representation not just as masks or signs of the actual, but as fully real powers in their own right. The way we think, speak, desire and see the world is itself political; it produces relations, effects, and organises our bodies.