nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

No time for the sad passions— Amit S. RaiI was grappling with a momentary depression when I participated in two ofthe nanopolitics sessions. For some time, I had felt disembodied in London,having moved from the deep southeast of the USA, from a fairly depoliticizednoise music scene, even though at the time I felt the noise as politics as such.Constructing coordinates for a map without territory, I initially registered mynew political contexts only in the idioms of past struggles, my ready mademap of Marx, Deleuze-Guattari, black and queer feminisms, postcolonial anti-imperialistmovements and research, and an academicized anarchy. I wasn’timmediately able to see that some new practices of life and its reproductionwere being experimented with in these post-austerity movements. I was surprisedby nanopolitics, and today I consider the set of practices/machines(machine: think of a series of little cutting edges opening an assemblage to itsvirtual and actual becomings) as crucially important for radical politics. Whatare the implications of the set of practices brought together in the intensivespaces of nanopolitics? I begin with a declaration of depression, not to excusemy at times paralyzing inability to sense affective rhythms, but as a way ofacknowledging that the Sad Passions haunt radical practice. But this hauntingcan be turned toward an affirmation of the body’s becoming, through conceptualand practical experiments in affect, sensation, value, care, and resonance,which is what I hailed in the nanopolitics spaces. This is what nanopoliticswas for me, in/through a time that was multiplicious, cruel, and open.I think of these times along with the writers who I enjoy reading. Dossedescribes the different temporalities between Deleuze (who took months towrestle with a thought) and Guattari (who had three thoughts a minute); itwould take him quite a long time to say anything of interest to Felix’s daily letters.1 How did their timescales become embedded over the years despite (or223