nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

Can we, through the affective practices of nanopolitics, act in solidaritywith times to come? If so, we will have been in conjunctive spaces, developing“and” practices, crackling with the intensities of capacities returning to whatthey can do, but not intent on the knowledge or consciousness of them, wewill have ‘let go’ repeatedly, interrupting ourselves in our course, producing astammer in being, abducting the future: nanopolitics poses well what a bodycan do. I want to connect the method of intuition in nanopolitics very explicitlyto two affirmations: the feminist affirmation of embodiment as a line offlight from neoliberal regimes of value; and the affirmation that revolutionarybecoming is a counteractualization of all the sad passions sold by capital ashuman destiny (human nature, human resources, ‘business ecologies,’ psychotherapy,etc.).Feminist ssuch as Patricia Clough, Jasbir Puar, Luciana Parisi, and othershave focused on the affirmation of a body politics as a way of both critiquingand ontologizing modes of consumption, security, and production in neoliberalism.They show that neoliberal strategies of accumulation in the affectivemode provoke a thought of virtuality even as it is returned to a revitalizedmaterialism. 10 Nanopolitics takes this critique and situates ontology squarelywithin the realm of self-organising practice. It is in the interval betweenthings – breaths, people, flesh, desires, fluxes--their durational passage – thatpotential conjunctions of two or more series become possible. Virtuality mustbe intuited as the condition of qualitative change wrought through these intervalsand conjunctions: and…and…and…and… Capital ‘knows’ this in thesense that contemporary media technologies of measure directly modulatethe actual and possible conjunctions of the habituated body itself (neuromarketing,ambient and experiential marketing, the Wii and Xbox 360 consoles,etc.)It is in the face of this affect capture machine, and by pushing perceptionto the limits of what it habitually does, that nanopolitics opens experience tohaptic sensations and conjunctive series (the fuzzy logic of an incalculable‘and’). Sensation allows a passage to affect itself. Bergson writes (and let uskeep in mind affection here blurs any distinction between internal sensationand the capacity to affect and be affected):… we have considered the living body as a kind of centre whence isreflected on the surrounding objects the action which these objects exerciseupon it: in that reflection external perception consists. But thiscentre is not a mathematical point; it is a body, exposed, like all naturalbodies, to the action of external causes which threaten to disintegrate it.We have just seen that it resists the influence of these causes. It does not228