nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

what Foucault talks about as both individualising and totalising forms of power.12 This, Foucault proposed, would be a politics starting from the body....politics starting from our bodiesCapital and the state never attack us as individuals, they always attack ourbodies. When they assault our bodies, they do so through recognising our individuality.13 When they take away our jobs, our housing, our welfare rights,when they render us precarious, these acts pass through the law, and representativeinstitutions that recognize us as holders of rights and responsibilities,citizens, workers, juridical subjects, in short as constituted individuals.Force decides between equal rights, ours and theirs, and yet the outcomewears the coat of legality. Our individual struggles of whatever content, aremediated through the form of the protocols of sovereign power. Our particularprotests and complaints may be recognized, our concerns addressed(more likely not), the agonism may be protracted; in any case the form of thelaw and our individuality are reproduced.But our bodies are never reducible to our individuality or to their corporeality,and our bodies are never clearly demarcated. Beyond the Gestalt of theconscious, right holding, demarcated individual, the body is affect, a multiplicity,a collective life, a part of ecologies which it reproduces and which reproduceit. Any body posits itself in a complex network of relations, it consistsof smaller bodies, partake in larger bodies, it is pulled along by some bodies,slowed down by others... Our resistance, refusal, and recalcitrance have theirown intelligences and sensitivities, which are constantly undermined by ourbecoming desensitised, through saturation or deprivation, or oversensitisedas we are pathologised by ‘higher’ rationalities. That not only the referees ofnormality (mental coaches, doctors, psychiatrists, social workers), but weourselves read the signals of our bodies as sick or pathological, or as ‘merely’psychosomatic and exaggerated, is one of the most insidious effect of power.It separates our bodies from what they can do and from the intelligence oftheir vulnerability. It demands that we translate our movements (driven bydesire, resistance, impulses of flight, etc.) into the languages of power, lestthey be deemed irrational or illegal. The high level of depression and lonelinessamong men, and the often feminised cultures of commodified and/orindividualised self-care and self-help display both our need for care, and theperverted forms this can take in the absence of political practices of care: isolatedsuffering or individualised body obsessions, and a constant work on oursouls, the strongly self-policed individualised bodies of the fitness addict andthe anorexic... 14 Against this – and against our own morbid silencing of our203