nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

lackmailing, guilt-driven and thus ultimately disempowering ways of speakingof ‘care’. Care not as charity, the pitiful minding of a fucked up world,nor as naturalized gendered instinct or something to take for granted. Careas an attitude and action that we both want and need in order to affirm life,something we actively engage. Something that involves politics, conflict andnegotiation as well as work and dedication. As someone told me, in the spanish15M movement the initial ‘care’ commissions soon became commissionsfor ‘respect’, not least to avoid christian-capitalist blackmail.Care networksSo what of the seeming disconnect between the network forms that structureour work, relations and economies, and our needs and desires to support,nourish and sustain our lives? Beyond and despite the long list of grievancesagainst networks and their alienating dynamics – as well as beyond certainhyped affirmations of networks that have largely passed – as our everydayrelational bases, networks are also spaces of life and of care. The network isthe paradigmatic form not just of economic and social organisation in neoliberalism,but particularly in situations of precarity and crisis, where newforms of conviviality, association and organisation are invented despite beingattacked (by neoliberalism). The decomposition of social rights and publicinstitutions in times of accumulation by crisis and austerity make it urgentto build networks while at the same time ‘hacking’ them with care. Is thereanother way of thinking the network on the horizon, to do with the ways inwhich we reproduce our lives in relation to each other, in the context of ourcurrent impasse?We start from our own dispersed social-economic microcosms in strugglingto re-establish collective resources, and in infusing that struggle withour singular modes of love, respect, intelligence, effort and passion. For peoplewho are more or less young, educated, precarious and/or migrant thesedays, those microcosms tend to be organised as networks. Friendship, coworkand militancy compose in curious ways with our biological families,which we actually rely on quite a bit for long term support and care. Likeour bio-genetic families, our chosen network-families are spaces we perhapslament for not corresponding to the everyday we desire, often because we’renot sure we can rely on them. We appreciate network ties and negotiate ourlives within them, but still they may feel too loose to build a future on. Ourways of sharing reproductive tasks, worries, bodies and household economieswith friends, lovers and comrades are ambivalent. How can we take thoserelations seriously as sites of mutual construction, to trust and invest in them?186