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Are Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitics, as Alan Badiou suggests, a theory ‘yearned for by the doxa of bodies, desire, affect, network, multitudes, nomadism and joy, where all contemporary ‘politics’ is spoilt, as in a Spinozism of the poor’? And is Foucault’s microphysics of power ‘always a mixture of genealogies of symbolic forms and a virtual (or desiring) theory of bodies […] that could go under the name of linguistic anthropology’?[1] Contrary to what these questions might suggest, whilst their critics are arrogant and dishonest, micropolitics and microphysics can be said to be the first great theories to really problematise the neutralisation of ‘revolutionary politics’ and the ‘revolutionary subject’ carried out by capitalism since the Soviet Revolution. According to Foucault, as they developed in Christian Europe power and politics have been radically disrupted by the birth of the economy.[2] At the end of the 19th century, the workers movement, especially its Marxist variant, and the revolutions that broke out at the end of World War One successfully exploited the problematic relationship between the economy and the political, and turned it against capitalism. Carl Schmitt, whose concept of power was certainly neither juridical nor economic, believed that it was impossible in capitalism to speak of the ‘political’ and the ‘political subject’ without going through the economy.[3] By the time Foucault analysed the liberal theory arising after the Soviet Revolution and read its transformation of power and politics, the problem had completely shifted. The working class that in the inter-war US New Deal and the Fordist pact after World War Two had been integrated into industrial society, was defeated and ‘de-proletarianised’ (as the Ordo-liberals would say) after the 1970s, whilst industrial society was being dismantled, no longer the centre of the world economy. The introduction of a ‘new domain and field’ that Foucault calls the ‘social’ now ‘neutralised’ (or depoliticised) the problematic relationship between politics and the economy, which the ‘revolution’ had exploited and overturned. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this growing panoply of dispositifs and techniques (semiotic, scientific, cultural, communicative and of insurance) significantly blurred the boundaries between the economy and politics and deeply transformed the role of the State,[4] thus rendering the tactics and strategies devised by revolutionary politics inoperable.
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