nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

limitations: to give up the silly promise of unlimited potential, so typical ofnetworks, and engage in crises and fragilities with care and love. We find thoseplaces in our bodies and imaginaries where things go out of control, which wethought we couldn’t confront except in the present of a therapist. The groupopened onto a collective dimension where we began to trust, understand andrespect eachother in ways thought to belong only to couples or families before.A politics of network-familiesLetting go of the very networky idea that we are just in more or less randomtransit towards something better – relationally, politically, existentially, geographically– how to draw on the many movements and changes we have incommon? Migration implies a practice of building networks, allowing peopleto connect via long distances and support eachother in finding alliances,pathways and support. To go beyond opportunism, this requires for trust tobecome somewhat cosmic: to care for the network even though we’re not incontrol of it, and there are no guarantees. Not an unproblematic situation.Even more so when we try to ‘marry’ the network with the family, two equallyfreaky spaces of relation and (non-)commitment. As someone else from nanopoliticspoints out, the relation between network and family clearly existsthough it’s hard to figure out how:[…] all of us were quite individualized, all of us in the group of friendsin London, because we weren’t committed to anything long term; wedidn’t have family responsibility, we didn’t have older people to care for,we were quite a good prototype of the neoliberal self-entrepreneurialindividual: critical, self-reflexive but absolutely free to reinventthemselves all the time without commitment, responsibility. And sothe fragility of this is more than the fragility of a more traditional wayof owing to eachother and being part of the same family, of havingsocial duties almost because of your role, because of your familyposition. But at the same time, there were commitments and we didcreate other forms of expectations between colleagues, between friends,between people sharing political projects maybe. But it’s still a kindof commitment that will always forgive... the fact that at some timeyou will go. It’s your choice, you’re always free to leave eventually, andactually maybe people would envy you if you manage. 12How to negotiate commitment with flexibility, in the context of precarity?How to find each other within and across localities, and imagine nourishing191