nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

in a way it is not really me feeling, it is the body itself. Now our bodies toucheach other, grazing, it is as if part of my leg, my foot, becomes somethinglike a hand, a sensitive piece of flesh which is not quite mine anymore. Thisreconfiguration of limits allows for other kinds of encounter, far beyond theverbal or even vocal.Thus we explore ‘tuning into’: bodies that tune in with one other. In themselves,the movements and gestures we make are simple – I gently lean myhands onto someone else’s body. But it is something else than just leaningwhat we do. Carla talks about the bodily tissues behind the skin, about muscularfascia, about what is unseen of our bodies. She seems to use anatomicalknowledge, an anatomy far more complex than the one we’ve learned inschool. Carla asks us to touch and sense and affect the connective tissues ofsomeone else’s body, imagining is a mapping which allows us to start engagingwith the tissues of our bodies. Carla tells us how, because of the way thebody is constituted at a ‘nano’ level, a pressure on its surface becomes a pressureon its interior (but Carla never talks in terms of interior and exterior ofa body). ‘Anatomy is a kind of fiction’ says Carla, and it is also the ‘real’, solidbase for these exercises. I really ‘yield’ into someone else’s body with my own.I perceive the other body alive, moving, palpitating. Then I don’t perceive itanymore, I forget that my hand is pressing someone else’s shoulder, I forgetsomeone’s hand touching my leg. My body becomes limitless in all directions:its shape changes not only outwards but also inwards, it is made of movingfractals.Whilst Carla talks to us about connective tissues my mind wanders offand I start thinking of something apparently unrelated to what we are doing.I think about the way I often tend to position myself in relation to others,from strangers, to friends, to people I work with: I realize that I use somethinglike a judgement scale that works according to largely undefined parametersformed more or less unconsciously. An example of one of these parametersI inadvertently use could be called ‘intelligence’, the ‘ability of expressingmyself through words’, or ‘formulating theoretical knowledge’. This scale ofjudgement with its parameters constantly produces a sort of negotiable butnonetheless repressive power structure where I position myself in relationto other people. I’m compelled to feel, speak, act differently, according to theposition I end up occupying on this provisional structure. There is somethingalmost ‘nano’ in this mechanism that makes me feel inadequate most of thetime: it is something that happens largely below a threshold of consciousness,something that Carla’s exercises bring to fore. But substantially this devise ofjudgement is an individualizing one, the relations it dictates are based on aseparation between individuals. It is through thinking and experiencing the161