nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

nanopolitics had brought together a set of vectors affirming revolutionary becomingin the face of an intolerable neoliberal measure machine? At stake,as Toscano explicitly points out, is the relationship between the time of capitalaccumulation and the time of politics (and indeed what Toscano himselfmeans by a ‘substantive’ autonomy). But we shouldn’t subsume the time of autonomywithin a presentist temporal disposition. Through experiments suchas nanopolitics, we can open practice to other durations in the interests of atime to come, resonant with the poetry of the future (Bue), and affirming aline of flight from our habitual refrains.Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts [to] only the set ofpreconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzschecalls the Untimely…They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’reconstantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn outhistorically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to twodifferent sets of people. Men’s [sic] only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming:the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what isintolerable. 19Nurturing an Untimely relation to our present, Deleuze presents a veritableprogram for becoming active: create conjunctive relations that exceed macropoliticalcontrol as well as its History. Within History all you have to knowis how to win or obtain a majority (the individualising autonomy Toscanorightly warns against). To make an affirmation of becoming, to avoid endingup a fascist there is no other choice but to become-black, become-women,become-child. Unlike history, untimely becoming ‘cannot be conceptualizedin terms of past and future’. For Deleuze and Guattari becoming-revolutionaryremains ‘indifferent to questions of a future and a past of the revolution;it passes between the two’. Every becoming is a block of coexistence, a haecciety.As a collective, self-organizing practice, nanopolitics is not content toreproduce “immutable models” nor is it governed by a fixed structure, insteadthe focus has been on creating a sociality of becoming, 20 or an ontology ofreproduction. An experimental method counter-actualizing sensation, habit,and memory, returning capacities to what they can do, nanopolitics will havebeen an Untimely affirmation of becoming itself.232