nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

So a second level of our work concerns how we compose with politicaland conflictual situations in embodied ways. How can we tune into situationsthrough our senses, touch, movement, voice... we learn from choreo-graphy(aswriting in chorus, with our bodies) and from experimenting with fixedboundaries and sensory habits: playing with our bodies as key compositionaland sensitive devices. Thus coming together through ‘nanopolitics’ means tofind new syntheses of movements, affects, interests, stories, struggles, refusalsand fears.Through the present text, some of us attempted to let these two levels ofour experience-experiments come into words on screens and paper: writingtogether. Moving, thinking, speaking, touching, writing, marking, saying,arguing, protesting, gesticulating... they don’t all easily match and compose.We are aware of this as we write about our experience as a group - a very bodilyexperience that entailed discussion and conversation, however this is the firsttime we sit down to write about it in more general terms, to contextualise itthrough raising questions. Thus this text should be read with the exercisesand experiences of nanopolitics in mind, some of them present in this book.Félix Guattari, who spent much time exploring problems of compositionand affinity, dropped a few words on this matter as he exited the podium of a‘Schizo-Culture’ conference in 1975 in New York:I do not believe that anything can be changed by a transmission ofinformation between speaker and listener. This is not [...] even aproblem of ideological striving or of striving for truth, as one could haveunderstood it here. It is simply this: either there will be other types ofarrangement of enunciation in which the person will be a small elementjuxtaposed to something else […], or there will be nothing. And worsethan nothing. 3Working with bodies, their surroundings and prostheses, we sympathiseand empathise with a Guattarian sensitivity to producing assemblagesthat make new things possible, rather than insisting on appeals to a pregivenrationality, an insistence that mostly comes down to little more thanmanipulating thought.The nanoIf thought is that which operates at the limit of what we can imagine or grasp,that which emerges through stuttering, pains, itches, twitches, déconneries,jumps, dances, and takes us elsewhere then it’s clear that nanopolitics is about21