nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

kids that go back to their families? How can we keep learning overChristmas, reflecting, how will we return? [...] How do you respond topeople who say ‘but this isn’t about you!’? […] Belonging – this wordseems very pertinent in these days, our sense of belonging is shifting/growing. How can that be strengthened... [...] The kettle gives you asense of belonging, as a space it crafts that, but it doesn’t give you a senseof your power and right to protest. That sense of your right to protest,to space, to the city etc. comes when you swarm through the streets.Shouting ‘whose streets? Our streets!’ was very powerful. […] We lovethe pedagogy of the movement: the workshops, protest labs, discussions,[…] Recovering from the kettle and violence – how? What forums andplatforms for this recovery, especially for people who have no affinitygroup? […] What does it take for all this to make sense....? • Kids stilldo what they always did, get drunk, roam the streets and dance onbus shelters every once in a while, but now it’s ‘political’, now it makessense, it has an orientation... • But what does it take for something tomake sense – does it maybe require more than an ideological-politicalorientation, does it need to entail a sense of meaningfulness andcontinuity beyond the moment, a sense of embeddedness, support, safety– so that you need all that on top of the ideology for an event to reallymake sense to you, in the body as well as the mind.[…] People are learning to pick their fights these days, it’s good. Theviolence has of course always been there, it’s been structural […]Imagining another state is a matter of imagining other organisationalforms, unless we want to just focus on imagining top-downdistribution/power, so those experiments in organisation and relationare key. How do we negotiate social roles with relationality across thisprotest: the police in its human face (smiling, being nice) and in itsautomated, dehumanized face (beating us up, turning ice cold uponthe command of a walkie talkie) - this has been more widely criticizedin terms of police tactics, that recent techniques only leave police anoption of on/off, and the same goes for protesters in fact – the kettlepromotes property destruction and violence […] maybe violence canbe understood in that light of rigid social roles: the structural violenceof the state is based on cutting peoples welfare, making education moreexpensive, etc. – and the physical violence of the state is based on therole of the police. The big difference between us and the police/state isthat their violence is supposedly legitimate, our uprising is never seen tobe. violence often lies in abstraction, in disregarding a relation in favourof an abstract idea. difficulty of the idea of dialogue in this: police150