nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

space and subjectivity: we have too little time and space, they are fragmentedand unstable, it’s hard to commit to projects. The long term becomes unthinkableas we are constantly busy assuring that next week and next month willwork out: and the feeling is that the crisis may tear us apart (again, as many ofus are migrants already). In London at least, we have lamented that the socialaspect of political work often amounts to an overpriced tired and impersonaldrink in a noisy pub. A sense of intense uprootedness and drifting marks relationsin the neoliberal megacity.In many nanopolitics sessions we note that through post-fordist work,we often feel alienation as guilt, insecurity and mistrust that infest relationshipsproper. It often seems utopian to imagine cultures of trust that can holdlonger term alliances, solidarities and spaces of conviviality, not to mentionpleasurable and intelligent ones. Although we may share houses and collaborate,we rarely find time to consistently be with others. We feel alone not justbecause there seems to be few people to rely on but also because we know thatfew people can rely on us. Engagements often turn out cold and awkward, reproducinga culture of activism driven by nervous and heavy affects, markedby a lack of seemingly everything: time, space, affective warmth and trust,consistency, pleasure, eroticism and a sense of future.This ‘crisis’ is a moment of intensification of dynamics that have longbeen at play, but which become more imposing than ever in their destructivetendencies. We come to nanopolitics marked by some of the complicationsand sufferings of body, mind and soul that this current cycle of capitalist destructionimplies. A destruction-subsumption of space, time, resources andenergies that’s not as hard on us as it is on those in the old colonies, in thedebt-enslaved countries at the margins of the EU or in the deepest outskirts ofour cities, but intense enough to be debilitating, since there is nothing creativeor intelligent about it. If ‘crisis’ is the moment that decides whether a patientwill live or die, then for sure capitalist destruction is becoming critical, amnyof us feel. Walking between the ruins of hospitals, universities and other publicinstitutions, across tense and fragile political spaces, nanopolitics becamea place to rest and check in with each other for some moments, across someyears.Reclaiming the future, collectivelyPrecarity fragments time and splits the future into thousands of impossiblepossibles. Meanwhile, measure and debt/credit capture our capacity to act onour own terms altogether, in submitting the future to their (moralistic-instrumental)terms:188