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text in progress by the nanopolitics group¹

The impossibility of not being affected. We can train ourselves to be affectable … – we can continuously extend the spectrum of our senses and sensibility … learning to be affected necessarily passes through the body – it means working with the body – nanopolitics is about that – working with the body in this city, in our situations, together…¹

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1 . Nano-politics?

Nanopolitics is the name of a practice that a group of us have been engaged in in London. A practice of sensibilities, an experiment of how to think politics from, with and through the body – and vice versa. As a group, since 2010, we have spent a few days a month together in different spaces, bringing our bodies and sensitivities to what we experience as urgent political matters. To us, politics does not just reside in voting, making statements or protesting, but it cuts across our everyday/everynight movements, where our bodies are at. The ways in which we inhabit the city, the street, our workplaces, neighbourhoods and homes are no more ‘natural’ than the Olympic Park that’s risen from the ground in London recently. How can we find other ways of moving and relating in and across those spaces? Indeed we also frequently contest the regimentation of such spaces in our everyday,: putting our bodies on the picket line, dancing on the roof of a bus stop, wrangling with a police cordon, finding that our voice trembles as we speak at an assembly… how do we compose with political and conflictual situations in embodied ways? With a certain attraction to choreo-graphy – to writing in chorus, with our bodies – we understand our bodies as key compositional and sensitive devices. In the present text, some of us attempt a shared writing that trickles down into words on screens and paper: and we try a little dance with Felix Guattari.

As Guattari exits the podium of a ‘Schizo-Culture’ conference in 1975 in New York, he makes a quick remark:

I do not believe that anything can be changed by a transmission of information between speaker and listener. This is not […] even a problem of ideological striving or of striving for truth, as one could have understood it here. It is simply this: either there will be other types of arrangement of enunciation in which the person will be a small element juxtaposed to something else […], or there will be nothing. And worse than nothing […]²

We follow the gist of this statement. Working with bodies, their surroundings and prostheses, we sympathise and empathise with a Guattarian sensitivity to producing assemblages that make new things possible, rather than insisting on appeals to pre-given rationality that comes down to little more than attempts at manipulating thought. If thought is that which operates at the limit of what we can imagine or grasp, that which emerges through stuttering, pains, itches, twitches, déconneries, jumps, dances, then we can say that nanopolitics is about thinking even when it is not about speaking. Thinking is not a disembodied process, nor does it necessarily have its telos in language: it’s a process of inventing new ways to move. And the same goes for politics.

In our terms, the ‘nano’ of politics concerns the dimension of our sensitivities and movements. What happens between speakers, or writers, or computers, or neuro-receptors, even skins or bank accounts, is irreducible to transfers of already-givens, to a supposedly all-positive ‘communication’. We are interested in sensing, feeling and grasping the subterranean processes that go on as we move through conversations, places, relations: to play with the stuff that circulates between us, both visibly and invisibly. This implies working on our sensitivities, as that which holds our movements and exchanges together: the very affective stickiness that allows us to make sense of our worlds. So we make sense with our senses, not by disembodied deduction, not in finding objective truth or universal formulas, but in experimenting what works through choreo-graphic, playful, dis-assembling collective processes. This preference for a ludic or aesthetic paradigm over a scientific one comes from our wanting to set bodies in motion.

When we say nanopolitics concerns movement, we mean movement quite concretely, as the movement of individual and collective bodies, of our tissues and fluids, our skins, bones and so forth. Somewhat beyond positivism, we think that this is also the stuff that our so-called ‘social’ movements are made of. To understand resistance from the point of view of embodied, everyday life and the relations that we practice in this context, we need to cultivate an analysis of the kinds of compositions that underpin our sensitive and habitual worlds. What are we attentive to when we facilitate a political meeting, talk over tea, or work on the computer at night? What do we feel, perceive and sense when we exit our workplace, or go on a demonstration? How do we relate to each other in a space such as the university, or via mailing lists, for instance? How, on the basis of learning other attentional and sensing modalities, can we invent new ways of taking care?

We developed or practice of nanopolitics in a city that sets up a number of powerful ways of inhabiting, perceiving and sensing. London as a space determines our lives, work and politics in multiple ways, shaping our spatial, emotional and material possibilities of relating. We come together to disassemble the bodies we become in the context of a neoliberal city, and to reassemble, through movement, play and theatre. We struggle with the neoliberal university, with precarity, and a political culture that tends to stress the ‘correct line’, a centralism which is democratic in the stalest of ways, and a political productivism which mirrors and tries to outperform capitalism itself. We struggle with high rents and long distances in the city, with expensive transport and a high degree of urban dispersion, not to mention with maintaining our ties to other places. We also struggle with the condition of being migrants in a city of quick transfers and individualized multi-cultural political correctness.

Some of these matters of relation and habitation have brought us together in a desire to recompose our bodies and collective processes, not just to better survive and resist but also to take more pleasure and breathing spaces, in our everyday lives as much as in political mobilization. Consequently, ‘nanopolitics’ has become a singular collective space built around our neighbourhoods, universities, workplaces and homes, wherein we practice different ways of relating to each other, to space, to work, to our bodies. To resist the individualization that life in London implies – particularly for people without local families and stable work – we needed to produce a common, a shared space for experimenting, expressing and being in solidarity. There was no such given common yet: not much of a transversal connection between our lives and more intimate politics, between our desires for macropolitical change and our ways of caring and desiring. Our nanopolitics produces concrete alliances and compositions, some of which point us to such possibles – we will tell of those further down.

1.1 Science, animisms, politics

The distinction between molecular and molar, between micro and macro to some extent underpins our thinking about nano. In accordance with the micropolitical sensitivities we may find on the level of some groups and inter-relational practices, as well as with the intelligences we may find in some macropolitics of institutions, social movements and strategies of autonomous governance, we focus on the emergence of a third dimension of sensitivity and intelligence: that of embodied practice, affective and pathic relationality. This is a vital contribution to the political, work, and life spaces we share: we see it as a laboratory for developing other ways of being attentive and responding to each other.

Thinking of ‘nano’, nanoscience comes to the mind: high-tech laboratories and impatient investors. Although we like the frame of the experiment as a sensitive and experiential one, and the laboratory as a space for trying out things together, we’re not particularly fond of science, except for a somewhat joking reference to it. The politics of those sciences whose funding, and research objectives, aims and culture are produced by the perverse milieus of state and capital are a very interesting an pertinent thing to address, no doubt, and we appreciate the labours of people like Isabelle Stengers in undoing some of their presuppositions. If nanoscience is a science of the isolation and objectification of the very small and bearly perceptible things in our world, exposing them to external measure and manipulation, then what we have in common with it is an interest but not a method. Nanoscience is a gaze that presents what we are made up by, what passes through us, what forms our environment as field of technical intervention. We’re not against technics at all, but ours are quite pagean, trashy and intuitive, such as in technoshamanism. The way that we deploy ‘nano’ in our designation of ‘nanopolitics’ pertains to an experiential and experimental affirmation that ‘nano’ is sensed and perceived in complex ways, not just seen. It is not simply an external measure, but a field we inhabit and sometimes also feel displaced in, passing through our senses of smell, movement, touch, acceleration, gravity, tone, pitch, magnetism, humidity, tension, density, taste, resonance, spin, rhythm, pain, and so on and so forth. It is where our bodies can take measure of themselves and each other, immanently and singularly mapping out and transforming what they can do.

Nanoscience contemporarily is a frontier of the capitalist economy, a new area of financial investment and of commodification. Against the colonially conquering major Science, nanopolitics is minor science, a playful fröhlich, gay science, a form of witchcraft and an animistic becoming and being with. Our learning is not one of transcendent knowledge but of understanding some dynamics and compositions in their singularity and situatedness, across time. We’re not quite gathering ‘skills’ in this strange training and testing, but we gather experience, in ways hardly possible outside the gentle frames of common laboratories. Nanopolitics is not a name that confers an identity but that speaks of some moments and sensitivities we come to share. As Stengers writes about animism:

Nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist “in general,” only in terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected—and also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms that which they all require in order not to enslave us: that we are not alone in the world.³

So we are not concerned with the ‘nano’ of nanoscience but with the infinitely small operations that bring us together as bodies in movement, struggle, love, work and so forth. Nanopolitics encompasses developing and extending our common language and movements, ways of engaging with the dimensions of body, sensation and affect, of inhabitation and relation. In what follows, we give account of our practice and context.⁴

Precarity, professionalization, migrancy, competition, individualization: we have perhaps already endlessly analysed these problematics in cognitive and communicational terms, but how can we grasp them in other ways, through other experiences? And how can we organise around them otherwise, in taking them seriously as embodied conditions? Can we embrace the positive side of precarity – our vulnerabilities, our openness to change – in building strength and sensitivities that at the same time allow us to fight back more fiercely, with more pleasure even? We are fragile not just in our work, housing or migration statuses, but also within the processes most dear to us, such as politics, love and friendship. How to build strength, solidarity and empathy across those? What ‘ways out’ can we find to exit certain stuck experiences, blocked dynamics in our bodies, collective processes and social spaces?

We do not seek recipes or definitive solutions, but – like Guattari – we like that ‘which works’, and go with it. Each time we meet, we try another relational dispositif. Our approach to method is messy: sometimes we play with anarchist, anti-copyright techniques as well as trying copyright and professionalized methods, we test and discuss what we come across. There is not a fixed methodology at the basis of nanopolitics, rather, emergent knowledges about body-playful-collective practices. Workshops, dinners, drifts, demonstrations, flashmobs, discussions; walking with eyes closed, sitting on each others heads, singing; and so forth. A schizoanalytical approach? Perhaps. If schizoanalysis in Guattari’s sense is not meant to be a discipline but an ongoing and open field of experimentations wherein the development of certain sensitivities is encouraged, without telos but with tools (held in whatever way works).

1.2 Norms, becomings, modes of care

We feel like we’re dealing with some sort of nanopolitical manifesto when we read, in the edition of Recherches that Guattari edited in 1973 with the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire: ‘The ‘revolutionary consciousness’ is a mystification if it is not situated within a ‘revolutionary body’, that is to say, within a body that produces its own liberation.’⁵

While many of us draw strength and inspiration from the French and Italian ’68 and ’77, it’s also clear that what was ‘liberating’ then is not necessarily liberating now, the commercialisation of gay subcultures being but one example. The question of liberation being a more complex one, we might say with Foucault: ‘It’s not enough to liberate sexuality. […]We have to liberate ourselves even from this notion of sexuality.⁶‘ Neo-liberal capitalism wants us to liberate ourselves to liberate ourselves subculturally, to create niche markets and stable harmless ‘scenes’ or at least policeable ghettos. The way Novella Bassano Bonelli speaks of the pressures of liberation in the 1970s resonates with the way we feel about self-improvement today:

first of all you need to be virgin, to do the mother and all these things… and it’s not true that in 1976 they don’t tell you these sorts of things anymore; then you join the groups of the revolutionary left and they tell you that this is the revolution: you are a woman, you open your cunt and you fuck, otherwise you are repressed, inhibited, you are not revolutionary, you don’t believe in class struggle, and on top of that you are also frigid.’⁷

A discomfort lingers when speaking of liberation, and we may prefer the term revolutionary becoming, because it gets away from telos while focusing attention on process, method and praxis. Whether then or now, it is clear to us that in as much as bodies can be liberated, they have to be vulnerable and desiring bodies, not perfectly functional machines or healthy organic wholes. In as far as “liberation” is liberation from “repression”, it needs to be understood as a process of freeing ourselves from dominant ways of normalising our bodies, or better as the experimentation and construction of bodies that exit their normalisation. “Liberation” is disentangling our bodies from their normalisation, and not from what the norm itself establishes as negative, sick, problematic, as against a supposed health.

In this sense, our experimentations are not about being healthy or unhealthy, normal or abnormal, but about a collective practice that can establish open-ended forms of normativity: points of orientation and reference that we can share and transform. The ‘normal’ as much as the pathological are fields of negotiation and play, and we neither want to engage with them through paranoia nor through complacency.

‘There is no fact which is normal or pathological in itself. An anomaly or a mutation is not in itself pathological. These two express other possible norms of life. If these norms are inferior to specific earlier norms in terms of stability, fecundity, variability of life, they will be called pathological. If these norms in the same environment should turn out to be equivalent, or in another environment, superior, they will be called normal. Their normality will come to them from their normativity. The pathological is not the absence of a biological norm: it is another norm but one which is, comparatively speaking, pushed aside by life.’⁸

“Liberation” becomes also experimentation with modes of dealing with our suffering, tensions, problems and conflicts, which can give strength and a common ground for our collective struggles to transform or abolish that which makes us suffer. We want to create spaces where we can sound out our mutations together, to not just be left alone with them in the face of medicine and therapy. To have some shared powers over life, to cultivate sensitivities to care and listen, to trust some of the intelligences of our mutations and play with them where possible. In a world becoming ever more precarious and competitive, it’s hard to find ways of caring and listening that don’t merely conform us to existing norms: this is the challenge we face also with respect to working through different methods, each with their own normativites. How to draw on methods as singular dispositifs, as situated experimental frameworks with a history and a dialect, without assuming their normativities?

Of course, with all that in mind, we think especially of the resistances of women and the subaltern to norm-giving, of the many bearly visible practices of sustaining life and cultural forms in the face of patriarchal and colonial impositions. Our resistances to hegemony pass through our minor gestures and words as much as through our militancy and loud opposition. We like witchcraft and to try make things emerge, to make new and old ways of thinking, speaking and relating possible. As such it is important not just to enchant and impassion, through body and affect, but to deal with depression and tension and to experiment with breaking spells. In our case, particularly the spell of professionalized individuality: nanopolitics has been – this is the first and perhaps most important thing we can say about it – a process of experimenting with ways of relating to one another beyond our specialized or personalized roles and habits, and through the body. We touch on the limits of what we know, come close to magic sometimes, play with power. We understand ‘the body’ not as a given or primordial foundation – as that which delimits some sacred individuality, as a container of truth, as uninvested by power. We rather think it as something we are and take part of, in sharing movements and sensations, through which we meet in ways often forgotten, and can meet in ways unimagined, ways beyond what we already think we are and know. Nanopolitics isn’t ‘personal’ or ‘subjective’ in the sense of limited to the individual, nor ‘objective’ in the sense of social processes that simply happen to us. How to develop practices of self-care (not just individual but collective) that evade the neoliberal capture of self-help and self-management as well as new ageist solipsism?

If it’s a question of self-care, of resistant autopoeisis, it’s also a question of reproduction that’s at stake here: to find collective ways to pay attention to how bodies are constantly produced and reproduced, according to lines of power, force, affect and desire. What might we need to take into account in struggling for autonomous reproduction? We move between different registers of sensing, perception and articulation, we meet limits as well as openings we weren’t aware of, we get to meet bodies we do not know, perhaps even bodies we did not know could be possible. We experiment different ways of embodying change to our micro-realities, our worlds, friendships, work, political organising and our being in space and time.

1.3 Questions for any-becoming-body

When we began our collective experiments, we found ourselves bringing a whole host of questions to the process: a list that has only grown and expanded with time. Curious, doubtful and ambivalent questions – our challenge was to address them in embodied encounters, shared experiments in movement, touch, vibration and speech. These questions, these problems and concerns, are what moves us. They are the dynamic and unstable ‘core’ of nanopolitics. As we have moved through our encounters, we have asked:

How can we think a politics that starts from the movements of bodies? Or rather: how do we live politics all the time, how do our bodies resist and propose different paths often without our conscious knowing? This includes a politico-corporeal investigation into the social and the economic from the point of view of what our bodies refuse or demand to do, from our fatigue, stress, depressions to our addictions, compulsions and guilty resistances, procrastination and snoozing to the affirmations of our pleasures, desires and energies. Too often we have found that our political activism mirrors the hyper-productive mode of our work, with its over-work, stress and guilt. How to politically investigate and reshape work and politics from the point of view of what our bodies can and cannot do?

How are our bodies interpellated, identified, subjected – made productive? In a society dominated by the demands of capital accumulation, the body is posited primarily as labour power: the body and soul put to work as human resource. The demands put on the body in this context place it in a double bind, a contradictory injunction . On the one hand, the body is rendered passive-political in the imperative to become subjugated, its ‘normal’ structures formed as normalised effects of lost battles, subdued or temporarily inactive struggles. The body carries with it memories of what it wanted but failed to do, desires and possibilities that are of the body, but point beyond past and present. On the other hand, the body as affirmative of affects and traversed by enthusiasm. The body is active-political, it moves, pulls other bodies along, it is capable of affecting and being affected. Yet, this is equally a terrain of struggle as the body is rendered hyper-active. Neoliberal capitalism desperately needs ‘liberated’ bodies that are ‘creative’, flexible and productive – these are bodies that are ready to cope with the unforeseeable, with risk, stress, danger. How then, to reactivate, politicise and de-traumatise these struggles, and how to de-individualise the defeats and conformism our bodies have suffered? How to free the body from the repression of waged labour? How to open up our vulnerabilities to each other, in ways that can counter both the threats to the stability of our selves and the pressure of having to be and perform as (working) supermen and wonder-women?

How are our bodies engaged and produced in current struggles? How, in our struggles, do we find ourselves being affected, changed, expanded and reprimanded? How can we talk about our political practices with our bodies in mind? How to grasp the ways in which race, class and gender play out through bodily experiences without reducing the body to a socially constructed object? Our politics against deeply embodied racisms, sexisms and elitisms will only ever be superficial and unconvincing if it does not alter the ways our bodies relate and move together.

Can an undoing and reshaping of our bodies have an impact on an undoing and reshaping of our subjectivities and of our institutions? A practice of undoing our bodies does involve some sort of violence: the undoing of a body is the undoing of its traumas as well as the undoing of what our body has become comfortable with. Defensive reactions learned and absorbed to cope with those traumas, behaviours perceived as normal and natural that make life ‘easier’ for our bodies… This undoing may be therapeutic: not in the sense that necessarily makes us feel better, or cures us once and for all, but in the sense that it allows us to get over traumas and repressions. To undo the traumatic contractions, defensive patterns, imposed schemes of normality, some pharmacological knowledge is needed, and everything can be a drug: touch, words, silences, etc. Can we undo our subjectivities and institutions with this playful ethics of drugging?

How can we learn to support, sustain and take care of each other? How can we bring the lightness and intensity generated through the exercises and games of nanopolitics sessions into our everyday life, into a taking care of each other that becomes light, into a becoming common of our lives, starting from their more basic aspects like eating, sleeping, drinking and breathing? Can we learn from nanopolitics how to practice a life together, a different life from the one we know, which is often so centred on our individual selves? How can we move from exercising a proximity of our bodies to exercising a proximity of ourselves, a getting close and implicated with each other which would differ from both the black holes of personal and exclusive commitments and the shallow utilitarianism of a networking modality? How to take seriously the ecologies of the social, environmental and psychic by investigating a fourth dimension, that of sensation, movement and experience?

 

2 . Spaces of our lives, dimensions of nanopolitics

The practice of nanopolitics is always situated. To speak of how we concretely move our bodies in nanopolitics, to speak of our tools, techniques and experiences, we need to speak of where and when, in what spaces, social and physical, and at what times.

2.1 London, London

Many of us have come to live and work in London, from more or less far or near. London is a city with its particular intricacies and monstrosities, producing particular bodies. Like the city itself, the London body is often fragmented, reactive, irritated, torn and restless. London spreads widely over physical space, with an unaffordable centre emptied out by corporations’ headquarters and commercialized for tourism, a cold, blank and opaque ‘City’ dedicated to finance and untouchable to the ‘public’, and impoverished ‘zones’ that sprawl both within and far out of the centre. We share ongoing experiences of crass gentrification across our homes and workplaces, moving along the margins of zone two, ever more pushed towards the suburbs because of rising rents and the everyday more unreachable possibility of ever owning a shelter to call home.

There are about 7.5 million people on 1583 square kilometres here. What does this number mean to our bodies, our relationships, our politics? London is not just marginal to our shared concerns and experience, but constitutes a key part of them: the long distances we travel just to have a short meeting or coffee make us protective of our time, exhausted from constant movement, and the price of transport weighs us down, or keeps us home. On bicycles, we escape the time and money drain of London a bit, but our bodies feel the stress of traffic and the exhaustion of distances all the more: rain and wind often add to that. London is a bodily condition in so many ways: it’s a noisy and speedy city before our eyes, ears and muscles – we go to sleep with tense jaws, tired legs and eyes.

Real estate speculation and neoliberal urban policies make the city a permanent construction site. Cranes devour familiar landscapes at vertiginous speed, familiar shops shut down and are replaced all the time, skyscrapers growing to the skies, shopping centres and Olympic sites rise from the ground , demolishing and displacing the ‘old’ city on their ascent to empty global urban iconicity. The city reloads itself constantly. We tire of aggressive change, not least because it drives us out of our neighbourhoods, poor and trashy but beloved. We try to engage locally with our politics, and hold our meetings at easily reachable and friendly sites, since it easily takes an hour to get anywhere London, but this is difficult since we’re all spread across vast distances north and south of the river. What does resistance mean in the face of these conditions of urban life?

In our journeys often have to traverse the City of London: a block of glossy, impenetrable concrete and glass buildings with luxury shops in between, full of people with black suits, skirts and blackberries. This is one of the monstrous hearts of global finance, these are the people earning the public money that was used to save the banks: the Occupy movement bravely put itself right there, in the belly of this most hostile and disturbing part of London. We try to invade and inhabit this territory many times, in demonstrations and protests, but apart from fleeting moments, and the warmth of the company and free tea at the occupy camps, a feeling of chill and disempowerment remains every time. This feeling also persists in central London, and increasingly in our own areas, where public space and services shrink or disappear under increasing privatisation and ‘austerity’ measures, where benches and quiet areas are erased by gated shopping facilities and big chain stores replace older shops. No space can be taken for granted in this city, and the desire for everyday commons is a constant struggle.

The ways in which we register London with our bodies are multiple. Exhaustion, burnout, depression, fatigue, hyperstimulation, nervousness, racing hearts, insomnia, tinnitus, allergies… These are not just individual problems, things we should sort out so we can get on with being productive, whether this means being revolutionary or an entrepreneur – these are the traces of our daily encounter with neoliberal urban dynamics. Nanopolitics is the name we give to a practice of transforming these dynamics, by transforming our relations across them and reclaiming other ways of inhabiting.

Session #1, Street Training

A drizzly spring day in 2010, we set out with Lottie who invented street training together with some teenagers in our neighbourhoods. It’s a simple proposition: as a group, you go out and inhabit the city playfully and experimentally, drifting and relating to space in new ways with your bodies. A corporeal drift: climbing, jumping, running, lounging, rolling, hanging, gliding, adapting architectures and objects to ones desires, touching untouched surfaces, trespassing and discovering new parts of streets and backyards. And above all, relating to people differently, seeing them upside down, conversing while lying on the asphalt, prompting passersby to a singing match, playing hide and seek with strangers. Some eight of us drifted through central Hackney, and what we found was surprisingly powerful, even though it seemed so simple: adapting ones limbs to bits of street in unusual ways, moving through habitual spaces without the usual goal-orientation, beyond normalized patterns of walking, looking, speaking, other worlds open up. Other worlds entail other perspectives, subjectivities, sensations.

Sitting in the street, we feel suspicious looks and the general attitude of fear at our doing anything unusual. Aside from being plastered with signs interdicting anything from playing ball games to smoking or trespassing, London has been drenched in a politics of fear of terrorism: we feel this very concretely on our bodies now. Sociability and collectivity appear ok in the street as long as they are linked with consumption or some marker of identity like religion or sport. Falling out of the normal, we become suspect and marginal immediately. Being somewhat young and wearing some hoodies, we specifically feel the stigma of the gang bear upon us as we hang around spaces without a clear aim: it’s only ok to take up space when passing through or consuming, hence the gradual removal of public benches in London (those that have not been removed have been made impossible to sleep on).

Poor people and teenagers are feared for their ‘antisocial’ potential: The 2011 London riots bring home new and old policing instruments such as ‘stop and search’, and ‘anti-social behaviour orders’ including collective ‘dispersal orders’ to regulate and purify urban space. As large portions of student protesters and rioters are processed through police stations, courts and prisons, many have taken to putting their bodies near them, to support, smile, observe and document. A lot of strength is to be gained by the subtle transformation of a space by a body, be it as minor as someone unexpected sitting in court, making an unexpected move, cracking open routine through a small expression. We remember that story⁹ of a trial concerning free radios in Paris, where a lawyer demands for a symbolic fine to be imposed on pirate broadcasters, whereupon someone rolls down a 1 Franc coin from the gallery, apparently all the way down to the stand, with the coin coming to a halt just at the lawyers feet. UK carpets are designed to absorb any ‘public disorder’ of this kind, but people find other ways here. What a body can do… what a space can be. These two appear ever more intricately linked.

An excerpt from our Street Training notes:

Noticing how full of borders the city is. Fences everywhere. Desire to go into forbidden zones. More comfortable in less busy streets, alleys for instance. Brick Lane was a pain because of the hyper-visibility of our doing this, and at the same time the sense of it blending in with the cool. Being identified as artists or people doing cool weird shit […]. More quiet spaces much preferable. Also interactions with children seem quite a bit more rich. Health and safety mania. Condemning looks from people who deem us irresponsible for doing things that are ‘unsafe’. Smiles from children and some adults.

Session #2, City machine

One of Augusto Boal’s analytical-transformative tools is the ‘machine of rhythms’, a theatrical dispositif that builds on associative body-images and assembles them into a machine¹⁰. On the occasion of one of our Theatre-of-the-Oppressed workshops with Nelly – working specifically on conflicts and urban space – we built a ‘London Machine’. To address how we inhabit the city and relate to each other in the specific space-time of London, beyond what we already know. A machine that works to analyse the rhythms, speeds, assemblages, flows, chaosmoses and compositions we inhabit when we say ‘London’.

Boal’s format works as follows: one after another and building on each other, participants bring their postural image of ‘London’ to the floor. A sequencing occurs, whereby different poses are plugged into each other, linked and combined. Then, one by one, each person repetitively mobilizes their posture; the machine begins to move. Lastly, each adds a repetitive sound to their movement-image; the machine is noisy, cacophonous and multi-layered, and can be made to slow down or speed up, to the point of breaking down. We use this tool to analyse our modes of relating across our respective image-postures and actions: one by one, we step out and watch the machine at work. Later, we pass to a stage where people can propose to modify aspects of the machine, to fine tune or hack into it and see if a new effect emerges.

What does the London machine produce? Is it productive at all? It produces individualization, mostly. Conflicts that remains unresolved, unaddressed. The cyclist races past the person reaching out, the cleaner silently sweeps their way through messy landscapes of competition and business, some repeatedly check their watches as others shout to draw attention to them. The megaphone meets the therapist, we’re in a mess, it’s painful to our ears and disturbing as we try to relate differently in an environment that seems deaf to our efforts. There’s a lot of aggression and anger in this machine; we try to mobilize it out of stuckness with our ludic techniques. A playful approach is common to both Theatre of the Oppressed and to SOMA, the anarchist method that Goia facilitated our previous session with. We follow up on this session, with view to developing tools for urban intervention and other ways of inhabiting the city. The beginning of our notes from our SOMA session read:

aggression/anger – the ability to say no and set boundaries, as a political moment anger and despair as sources of political change; what are the distinctions between them? anger-management, despair-management: managerial techniques that lead us to ignore the underlying, political issues that make us angry; anger is productive for political change ; illness also is a response to political problems, not just a matter of your own body ; individualizing techniques vs. contextualizing, politicizing techniques ; feelings of embarrassment – how this affects our bodies in the world…¹¹

2.2 Political cultures, political context

Nanopolitics intersects with experiences and practices of organising and doing politics of many other groups, projects and collectives, and the wider movement.¹² But nanopolitics as a collective practice is not set up to coordinate and cohere existing ways of doing politics, or to make us all do more. With stress, fatigue and burnouts such common experiences, and guilt such a common motivation, it is neither a question of doing more or of doing less, but of trying to do politics differently, to find ways of doing politics that are not at odds with life, with desire and the capacities of our bodies.

Clearly this is not easy, and it might be even harder than it sounds. The ‘bad ways’ of regular politics on the British left, the often poor micropolitics and marginal nanopolitical sensitivities, which become increasingly obvious as we develop our practice, are not just ‘bad’ – something that we can voluntaristically overcome by doing better. Rather the bad ways, they are effects of the conditions of the city, its modes of existence and death, its temporalities and spaces, and the traditions, institutions and defensive politics that have been passed over from the series of defeats that constitute the genealogy of the current socio-political predicament.

The intensity of London worklife, the ever changing neighbourhoods, the dispersal of individuals… The non-coinciding temporalities, the distances, the lack of spaces (high rents, the brief lifespan of squats that only very rarely become social centres)… people coming, leaving, moving around… All this makes organising in London a constant struggle. When and where can we all meet? In two weeks? Three? And who will have energy at the meeting? And in the coming months? Who will be fully committed? We all have high workloads and too many political engagements – spread betting, trying to be everywhere, in order to be where something might develop (maybe that something which might just help us with our other work, with our career)… If self-organising is difficult, it is multiply difficult to do so with coherence and continuity. Old organisations, formalised, institutionalised, professionalised seem to be the only ones with duration. It is no coincidence nor a result of bad will that the political parties and groups in London often mimic the worst aspects of organisations under neoliberal capitalism: entrepreneurialism (self-exploitation, opportunistic networking, careerism), HR management (self-managing teams under strong hierarchical supervision, prescribing the ethics of the ‘firm’ and of co-operation top down), volunteerism (unpaid labour and general self-sacrifice for a higher ideal), labourist trade unionism (professionalization of activists, slick and safe populist media-centred communication) and venture capitalism (purely self-interested cooperation, hostile takeovers). Hard-working, self-denying philanthropic class struggle to outdo NGOs in pure hearted charity, the military in cold hearted discipline, and capitalism itself in adrenalinic productivism.

Generally those who work more than part time, those who have kids, those who live far away where rents are affordable, disengage more and more as they grow older, while a precarious core of hyper-active activists in their 20s do a couple of years and leave, burned out, fed up. All this reinforces the idea that one cannot possibly do politics after 30, except as a union/party/NGO job (or a saintly sacrifice for the class struggle). Of the young activists few care about reproduction, while for the older professionals, finding a stable wage and secure housing increasingly become questions of committing to worklife rather than effecting socio-political change. In this way reproduction and care are almost systematically excluded from London politics in their structural mirroring of the London job market. In the prevalent political discourses of London, questions of life tend to become reduced to questions of living conditions, expressed in the most pecuniary terms – or as subcultures of alternative living for those who can afford it or who cannot afford to do otherwise.

Nanopolitics tries to exist in and work against this predicament, to create spaces and times to affirm the many ways we do and could rely and support on each other in reproducing our worlds. In these times and spaces (workshops, dinners, actions) we develop minor practices and sensibilities of care, love, living, initially and quite basically we find ourselves creating needs and desires in common, extending and deepening our capacities to struggle together. And this struggle has only become greater since the nanopolitics group formed, and while the material necessities are more and greater, so are our desires to extend and create spaces and times of care, of sharing and of doing together.

2.3 Work, professionalization and the production of knowledge

More, perhaps, than most neoliberal cities, London is characterized by an incitement to productivity. If you stop you are lost, if you slow down you are likely to feel guilty, and if not, someone will unknowingly remind you that you ought to be… You are not supposed to waste your time: you have to insert everything you do, no matter how pleasurable, into a working or investment framework. While for most the incitement is that of the boss and his productivity measures, and of colleagues identifying with boss and measures, for more and more these pressures are deeply internalised, the measures constructed by ourselves. Everything has to be useful in some way, even the conversation with your friends in a pub: you can get to know about new conferences you could apply for, you might do some extra networking, you can practice your social skills, or you just take a break to be more productive once back at your computer. In the London of mass youth unemployment, precarity and intense competition, our careerist behaviour rarely results in a career, but is rather the minimum expected by employers.

We are mostly under and struggling against this aspect of the regime of productivity, according to which we are something like an agent of capitalization, an investor in our own human capital, a channel that sucks all the inputs available around us in order to nourish our career, our job, the new project we are working on, the PhD we are writing. We learn how to turn everything, even what at first sight seems banal and irrelevant, into something useful – at least we are supposed to try. This logic spills over from work to life to politics, and easily adopts the language and adapts to the ethics of these respective spheres. You don’t necessarily have to think everything in terms of career-building and competition: it might be a collaborative cultural project, it might be even activism, a cause that you fight for together with your comrades. We are always subjected to the pressure of turning everything we do into a working object or a working process, into something that complies with a working practice that we internalize, that is produced with and through a neoliberal subjectivity.

And so, activism becomes a second or third job, beside those we do already in order to survive: you end up trying to fight one kind of hyper-productivity with another kind of hyper-productivity, having to play both of them at the same time. You might end up burning yourself out. You write about Guattari in your PhD and this becomes yet another commodity, you “sell it” as a product for conferences and publications, whilst the impact of the encounter with Guattari in your life is decreasing, if it ever was more, to zero. It could be Guattari or anything else: a necessary ingredient to brand yourself as a knowledge producer. You organize a cultural project with your colleagues, with the aspiration of changing something for the better in your neighbourhood, and despite the relative independence that you gain from the council or whatever institution providing the (little) funding, you end up packaging a cultural product, and reproducing roles and social categories: the cultural organizers, the special guests, the participants, the public… You teach at the university as a “postgraduate researcher with teaching duties”, with little money and an annual contract that you never know until the summer if they are going to renew, and you have to struggle with an institutional pressure of delivering knowledge to the students, knowledge as nicely wrapped up and ready to swallow, in an academia that resembles more and more a shop, where customers’ satisfaction is what really counts.

Academic discussions have to comply with a reasonable protocol, everything has to be under control, the machine for the production of knowledge has to replicate itself. This is a machine that gets fed by the desires, aspirations and creativity of whoever takes part in it – as long as desire, aspirations and creativity can become useful, as long as they can be absorbed and neutralized. There’s no limit to the voraciousness of the neoliberal institution, if the nourishment can be digested, accounted for, justified, turned into profit.

Work as competition shapes our individualized lives, often even when we collaborate together; culture as a specialized field producing commodities and perpetuating hierarchies shapes subjectivity; professionalization characterises our relations and stiffens our bodies. Life in its entirety becomes professionalized: you have to demonstrate that you are worth it, that you can make it, that you are bright, that you have good contacts and a good CV coming up when someone googles your name. In order to demonstrate who you are, you are required to constantly measure yourself and your performance against that of everybody else. You have to develop a hierarchical structure of judgement where you can negotiate your position in relation with the position of everyone else. Our bodies get contracted, shrink and stiffen according to this charts used to define individuals’ relations. This is how competition works: even if you don’t really feel it, your body does.

In this context, it’s seductive to apply the same regulatory and specializing logics to our lives and politics. On the spur of the micro-fascisms that come as the backlash of a ceaselessly de – and re – territorialized neoliberal subjectivity, we easily become rigid about formal guidelines. New modes of measure come to apply to us all the time, and often leave us at a loss for ways of valuing and evaluating our experiences and projects: our stressed response may consist of reproducing the numb politics of measure. We insist on guidelines and protocols: whether it is certain consensus decision making tools, special organic foods or the technicalities of polyamory. Those are precious, but they depend on openness to make sense, and a phronetic sensitivity with regards to our desires and limits. Nanopolitics is also about relating to protocol in ways that allow us to come back to movement and imagine new ways of finding trust and stability. We struggle to match our desire for new tools and protocols with processes of opening, of questioning given truths and of softening professionalized narratives and bodies.

Session #5, Contact improvisation

Many of us who take part in nanopolitics share, to different extents, a working life as well: some of us are PhD students, teach at universities, are part of activist collectives, organize cultural projects together. How is nanopolitics reshaping these working practices, how is it transforming our relations and collaborations, what is its impact onto our working bodies?

Contact improvisation is a technique in which points of physical contact between bodies provide the opportunity to explore different movements and a different relation between bodies. Giving weight, sharing weight, initiating movement together, finding boundaries and exploring ways around them. Through a bodily practice like contact improvisation, we learn a different way of relating to each other, a different way of relating together to our surrounding space. We learn to become vulnerable and to expose our vulnerability in a space that is safe enough to begin doing that. Through contact we learn to trust each other by trusting each other bodies: we develop a sensitivity that would otherwise remain repressed, a sensitivity that is usually considered “useless”, unless you are a professional of contact improvisation, unless dancing becomes your profession.

3 . Beyond therapy, stickyness

In some ways, nanopolitics is precisely about this becoming-useless in the face of an entrepreneurial subjectivity, creating effects that are immeasurable, operating transformations that we often find we can hardly capitalize on. Indeed, part of making our practice accessible in writing can be seen as allowing us to produce cultural capital despite the seemingly unproductive nature of what we do. But there’s no point in a paranoia which claims that everything, from our love lives to our favourite foods, is captured by capital. We find this kind of position cynical, since indeed there is much more to our worlds than capitalist relations. There’s no rules that can tell us how to navigate our ambivalent worlds in ways that avoid capture: we need our sensitivities to help us with that. Our discomfort is often intelligent: we can use each other to find out.

We learn to take pleasure from each other’s proximity, we learn not be scared of it, and we learn that it is not necessary to capitalize on it as an object of pleasure. We find a different way of talking to each other, one that is not dominated by the tyranny of reason with its corollary of employability. We get surprised and excited by talking with our colleagues in a different way: an affective commotion destabilizes our selves, we learn to sense each other differently, to feel a pleasure that is not turning into any recognizable pattern of relationship.

All this does not necessarily imply “feeling well” or feeling better: you might get uncomfortable, you might get even scared by what is happening to you and your body. You don’t quite know what it is, you are not entirely in control. Nanopolitics does not imply becoming smooth: all kinds of shit sticks to us, we remain clumsy, dirty, silent, overexcited, anxious. The schizoanalytic tenet of giving up the cure applies to our work: while collective transference may keep us hoping we’ll get better sometimes, what we are doing is establishing a culture where stickiness is quite welcome, met with enjoyment and curiosity.

The ever recurring question of how to practice analysis without a cure, without the telos of a ‘fin de la cure’, then, also presents itself in doing nanopolitics. To reject the idea that our worlds ‘can be changed by a transmission of information between speaker and listener’ implies replacing the paradigm of truth with a more aesthetic paradigm. Throughout our sessions, we repeatedly face the question of the potential therapeutic dimension of our work, an ambivalent matter with no definitive answer but only a tendency: nanopolitical devices of collective and embodied analysis, yes, but healing and treatment, maybe no thanks. Anne Sauvagnargues describes Guattari’s chaosmosis and its aesthetic paradigm as ‘producing new infinites in departing from the finitude of the sensible’¹³ – we like to experiment this through a process of collective becoming. A group should sense when to die, too: and so we know that in its finitude, nanopolitics will end when our capacities to move, to produce agencements, new assemblages and articulations, cease.

We produce a different knowledge, one that gets registered through our bodies. Contact improvisation, or any of the methods we experiment with, doesn’t become part of our profession, nor is it just a practice that makes us feel better, less enclosed into a body that is restricted to the visible outline of our flesh. How does this differ from turning our bodies into something malleable, adaptable, productive and ready for (collaborative and perhaps even pleasurable) self-exploitation?

What produces differing and deviant bodies rather than better working bodies is the encounter between all the layers composing our lives and movements. A set of transversal conjunctions functioning as what Guattari would call an assemblage of collective enunciation: collective not in the sense that is produced by us, an “us” always unstable and uncertain, but because it has an impact on a plurality of things, – bodily, cultural, social, political…. As interferences and resonances between our bodies and the city we live in, the jobs we do, the institutions we deal with, the friendships and relationships we build, the way we organize our political struggles, our reproduction, our resistance to individualization.

0 This text has been drafted by Paolo Plotegher, Bue Ruebner Hansen and Manuela Zechner, and further edited by Emma Dowling, Gabriella Alberti, Mara Ferreri, Amitabh Rai and Nelly Alfandari. A previous version of it has been translated into spanish by Nizaiá Cassián for the book ‘Guattari: los ecos del pensar’, ed. Gabriela Berti, Hakabooks: http://www.hakabooks.com/es/194-felix-guattari-los-ecos-del-pensar-entre-filosofia-arte-y-clinica.html The text that evolves here will be published in our nanopolitics handbook.