nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

to capture value, or the autonomy of a precariat to create the conditions oftheir own emancipation? But perhaps there is a category confusion afoot inToscano’s formulations? Perhaps the life of autonomous living labour, in itsqualitative difference from the entrepreneur’s mode of capture, is lived in anon-dialectical difference that does not go all the way up to contradictionor even antagonism (no doubt sometimes it is necessary for revolutionarymovements to take up and go beyond contradictions, inseparable from a becomingreactive of a subsumption of intensity into discourse). Perhaps autonomia’spolitical force, sense, and value lies in its lines of flight that createconjunctions between radical practices of communisation or reproduction 17– potentializing, anomalous, immeasurable, and experimental forms of lifethat are no longer subsumable within capital’s relations of measure. How tomake an affirmation of becoming itself, even as all around us, within us andbetween us, measure extracts value. I think I have experienced something ofthat agonistic affirmation in nanopolitics, not as an achievement of the revolution,but as a methodological search into revolutionary capacities, radicalcare networks as practices of becoming.Deleuze, through his study of Bergson, posed the question of qualitative,continuous multiplicity in relation to the sphere of duration. In this way, forDeleuze’s Bergsonism, duration was not simply the indivisible, nor was it thenonmeasurable. ‘Rather, it was that which divided only by changing in kind,that which was susceptible to measurement only by varying its metrical principleat each stage of the division’. Instead of merely opposing a philosophicalvision of duration (or a neoliberal version of autonomy) to a scientific conceptionof space (or a real politic view of contemporary capital) Bergsonismtakes the problem into the sphere of the two kinds of multiplicity, qualitativeand quantitative. 18 In this way, Deleuze brings out the variable durations inthings, for instance a cube of sugar dissolving in hot tea, or the duration of ananopolitics encounter within the timescale of an affirmation of becoming.Perhaps the two multiplcities can help us distinguish the actualized presentof a people from the virtual capacities and tendencies of their line of flight,their emergence in a revolutionary becoming? Is becoming a real thing? Insofaras becoming is real what constitutes that reality? Or is becoming toouncertain a thing for it to have a definite reality, and instead gradients of belongingto the real give us the critical thresholds of a multiplicity’s vectors,its virtual map of intensities and their actualizations? At its border, in theinter-contact-zone an indiscernible difference becomes catalytic and affirmativein the affect/passage between an historical people and its becomingOther, each implicated in different conjunctive series of thought, practice,sensation, perception, habit, and…and…and? What if the smooth spaces of231