nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order ofthe day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith,and a long Katzenjammer takes hold of society before it learns to assimilatethe results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the otherhand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantlycriticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their owncourse, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew;they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, andpaltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponentsonly so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise beforethem again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinitecolossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created whichmakes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves callout: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! 6Is nanopolitics in its practices – experiments, movements, discourses – theaffirmative construction of such situations of revolutionary becoming? Whatkind of situations would these be? Nanopolitics creates connections, conjunctions(a disjunctive logic of the “…and…”) ‘to the politics of affect, the politicsof intuition, of being attentive to oneself, how we feel, our emotions on theone hand, how we carry, hold, experience, live, avoid our bodies on the other.’For me, and the communities I affirm solidarities with, Marx remainscentral to understanding the contemporary crisis and developing strategiesof creating zones of autonomous practice within the neoliberal value regime.Yet the ontological turn toward material practices of creating situations, durations,capacities, ecologies tending explicitly, if sometimes ironically towardcommunisation requires also an assemblage-diagram of the human body andits machines of conjunction, rhythmed in their co-evolution. I have foundnanopolitics takes me in a non-human direction, not through the death of(White) Man (there’s discourse enough on that), but through the conjunctionsof bodies, machines, and affects becoming indiscernible, in experiencesof resonance and folding, there is always both a becoming minor and abecoming woman in revolutions. The quantum body, its telepresencing, itsanomalous conjunctions, names a fuzzy set. This brought me to the shockof what ecology I was habituated to and co-evolving with. Through these experimentsin the organization of an affective commons, varying the intensityand duration of their ingredients, a method develops of intuiting qualitativelydifferent multiplicities, and the practical construction of a smooth and increasinglyconsistent matter of indiscernibles and intensities. This is the veryontology of revolutionary becoming.225