nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

e concerning myself with the ‘feminised’ everydays of young, urban and politicallyactive people here, trying to learn from care as the back door that canpoint to other forms of struggle.One of the main organisational forms of care has historically been thenuclear family: a form that some consider the privileged way of organisingsocial reproduction while others consider it radioactive 4 and highly poisonous.In what follows, I will point to possible ways of reflecting on it in relationto militant cultures. Within patriarchy and capitalism, the family is mostlyhierarchical and enclosed, privileging males and structuring much of the unpaidcare labour which sustains our economies and social worlds: somethingwe’d rather not reproduce. The locus of care has been the family home, tuckedaway from political as much as work spaces, yet giving a key dimension of stabilityto many lives, including those of activists. Beyond a dichotomy betweenhyper-activism and enclosed families, may we imagine radical networks ofcare?The network has seen its emergence as a paradigmatic organisational-associationalform in relation to the internet since the 1970s. Networks organiserelations without necessarily inscribing them into hierarchies or fixed roles,by encouraging informality and leaving much space for individual choice.They have had their heyday of recognition and investment: throughout thebubble years, particularly the dot-com and creative industries booms saw digitalnetworks become primary organisational forms for economic as much associal life. We learned that the benefits of the network was that it optimizedcommunications and allowed for variable commitment while maximisingprofits via flexible accumulation as well as association. An ambivalent matter,or to put it in other words: network individualism, flexible accumulation,non-committal relations, precarious lives.In the contexts of (global) social movements and digital struggle, manypeople found that networks allowed for swarming as well as organising horizontally,flexibly and across borders. With time and intensifying neoliberalismhowever it also became apparent that networks suck time and vital energybecause of their virtuality, fluctuations, speeds and looseness, and that theformula of horizontality can lead to a disavowal of complex power relationsand differences. As well as subtle concentrations of power, a lot of unpaidand invisible work happens in networks: based on their understandings of laboursof love and home-based work, feminist voices have addressed this variously5 . Yet networks also build opposite relations to families: they facilitatequick connections and flexible relations, often at the price of producing weakties and opportunist behaviour that accustom us to low-trust interaction.The problem with network politics is often that it encourages self-interested184