nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

through other experiences? And how can we organise around them otherwise,in taking them seriously as embodied conditions? Can we embrace thepositive side of precarity – our vulnerabilities, our openness to change – inbuilding strength and sensitivities that at the same time allow us to fight backmore fiercely, with more pleasure even? We are fragile not just in our work,housing or migration statuses, but also within the processes most dear to us,such as politics, love and friendship. How to build strength, solidarity andempathy across those? What ‘ways out’ can we find to exit certain stuck experiences,blocked dynamics in our bodies, collective processes and socialspaces? We do not seek recipes or definitive solutions, but we like that ‘whichworks’, and go with it. Each time we meet, we try another relational dispositif.Our approach to method is messy: we play with anarchist, communist,and anti-copyright techniques as well as trying copyrighted, professionalisedand liberatory spiritual methods, we test and discuss what we come across, toundo what work, school and religion has made our bodies and subjectivities.Hence there is not a fixed methodology at the basis of nanopolitics, rather,emergent knowledges about body-playful-collective practices. Workshops,dinners, drifts, demonstrations, flashmobs, discussions; walking with eyesclosed, sitting on each other’s heads, singing; and so forth.Norms, becomings, genealogiesWe feel like we’re dealing with some sort of nanopolitical manifesto when weread, in the edition of Recherches that Guattari edited in 1973 with the FrontHomosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire: ‘The ‘revolutionary consciousness’ isa mystification if it is not situated within a ‘revolutionary body’, that is to say,within a body that produces its own liberation.’ 4While many of us draw strength and inspiration from the French and Italian‘68 and ‘77, it’s also clear that what was ‘liberating’ then is not necessarilyliberating now, the commercialisation of gay subcultures being but one example.The question of liberation being a more complex one, we might say withFoucault: ‘It’s not enough to liberate sexuality. [...]We have to liberate ourselveseven from this notion of sexuality. 5 ‘ Neoliberal capitalism wants us toliberate ourselves subculturally, to create niche markets and stable harmless‘scenes’ or at least policeable ghettos. The way Novella Bassano Bonelli speaksof the pressures of liberation in the 1970s resonates with the way we feel aboutself-improvement today:first of all you need to be virgin, to ‘do’ the mother and all these things...and it’s not true that in 1976 they don’t tell you these sorts of things25