nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

Un/making sense,moving together:on nanopolitical experimentsin the neoliberal city— The nanopolitics group 1What might nanopolitics be?The impossibility of not being affected… learning to be affectednecessarily passes through the body – it means working with the body...nanopolitics is about that... working with the body in this city, in oursituations, together... 2Nanopolitics is the name of a practice that a group of us have been engaged inLondon. A practice of sensibilities, an experiment in living politics from, withand through the body – and vice versa. Since 2010, we have spent a few daysa month together in different spaces, bringing our bodies and sensitivities towhat we experience as urgent political matters, as a mode of collective reflectionand action.We share a feeling and notion that politics does not just reside in voting,making statements, protesting, or even in our everyday/everynight movements,but that politics can be a tangible experiment of feeling and actingthat’s based in our bodies and their ways of relating. One level of this involvesworking upon the everyday, the normalised and naturalised gestures and environmentswe often find ourselves stuck within: the ways in which we inhabitthe 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 thosespaces? What happens when we contest the regimentation of certain modesof inhabitation, putting our bodies on the picket line, dancing on the roof ofa bus stop, wrangling with a police cordon, finding that our voice trembles aswe speak at an assembly...?19