To read some analyses, you would think that 1968 took place in the heads of a few Parisian intellectuals. We must therefore remember that it is the product of a long chain of world events, and of a series of currents of international thought, that already linked the emergence of new forms of struggle to the production of a new subjectivity, if only in its critique of centralism and its qualitative claims concerning the ‘quality of life’. On the level of world events we can briefly quote the experiement with self-management in Yugoslavia, the Czech Spring and its subsequent repression, the Vietnam War, the Algerian War and the question of networks, but we can also point to the signs of a ‘new class’ (the new working class), the emergence of farmer’ or students’ unions, the so-called institutional psychiatric and educational centres, and so on. On the level of currents of thought we must no doubt go back to Lukacs, whose History and Class Consciousness was already raising questions to do with a new subjectivity; then the Frankfurt school, Italian Marxism and the first signs of ‘autonomy’ (Tronti); the reflection that revolved around Sartre on the question of the new working class (Gorz); the groups such as ‘Socialism or Barbarism’, ‘Situationism’, ‘the Communist Way’ (especially Felix Guattari and the ‘micropolitics of desire’). Certain currents and events have continued to make their influence felt. After 1968, Foucault personally rediscovers the question of new forms of struggle, with GIP (Group for Information about Prisions) and the struggle for prison rights, and elaborates the ‘microphysics of power’ in [Discipline and Punish]. He is then led to think through and live out the role of the intellectual in a very new way. Then he turns to the question of a new subjectivity, whose givens are transformed between [The History of Sexuality] and [The Use of Pleasure], which this time is perhaps linked to American movements…
-Gilles Deleuze, Foucault p.150-1 n45.
