nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

elated fears. ‘This works well if the fear is related to your job.’ She asks mequestions about myself and what I do, my fears and imaginaries. I try to answer,but I cannot really talk, my face is almost paralyzed, as if anaesthetized.‘Don’t worry, it’s because of some techniques I used with your head.’ I workas a teacher – she asks me to imagine myself in class, she asks me what I feel,what I think about myself, what do I think the students think of myself. ‘Theythink I shouldn’t be there, they think I’m not appropriate for that job, theythink I’m not really a teacher. They think there is something wrong with me...’(at this point my friend Molli, as she will later tell me, starts crying). I feelcalm, I can answer the questions, but my body is reacting in a different way. Itwas as if the body was detached from myself, or the mind was detached frommy body. I started stomping my foot on the floor. Molli told me afterwardsthat she never saw me like that, so angry, that she thought I was going topunch someone in the face.‘And let goooo... breathe...’ Through breathing my chest seems to expand inspace. ‘And now look people in their eyes.’ Some of them are turning their faceaway. Some of them are visibly upset. For me as well is hard to look at them intheir faces. ‘Now you are a teacher!’ says Merav. I try to smile, but it’s hard...Later on, we talk about power and domination, and their difference. Toempower myself (through these exercises, if they have the desired effect)could be a way to empower us, as a group. To ‘liberate’, let go, open somethingup in collective spaces, through our bodies. As always with catharticapproaches, one big question remains about their effects: producing great distressto then produce great release, does that necessarily shift the way we feel,think and relate? Does this kind of frontal ‘hacking’ of reflexes generate new,more sensitive pathways? Is it too loud and harsh to give rise to new sensitivities?Is there something to be cleared out of the way forcefully?Assuming that release, liberation and opening take place, there is as alwaysthe issue that these techniques can and are also to empower some todominate others. Grinberg is a therapy for wellbeing, and it can well be atherapy for the wellbeing of workers, for the companies they work in, for thewellbeing of capitalism... Such exercises can be used to shatter the subject insuch a way that capitalism can take better advantage from it: I become a fearlessworker, I don’t know what is going to happen to me but that’s ok, I don’thave an image of myself anymore and I can fearlessly face every kind of (workrelated) risk, any kind of (working) situation.Through Grinberg and other such methods capitalism can make use ofthe forces of the unknown, of bodily energies, of our openness towards encounters.Our ability to cope with the new and the unknown gets developed,to unleash creativity through our bodies, to free ourselves from a fixed iden-158