nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

areas are erased by gated shopping facilities and big chain stores replace oldershops. No space can be taken for granted in this city, and the desire for everydaycommons is a constant struggle.The ways in which we register London with our bodies are multiple. Exhaustion,burnout, depression, fatigue, hyperstimulation, nervousness, racinghearts, insomnia, tinnitus, allergies... These are not just individual problems,things we should sort out so we can get on with being productive, whetherthis means being revolutionary or an entrepreneur – these are the tracesof our daily encounter with neoliberal urban dynamics. Nanopolitics is thename we give to a practice of transforming these dynamics, by transformingour relations across them and reclaiming other ways of inhabiting.Political cultures, political contextNanopolitics intersects with experiences and practices of organising anddoing politics of many other groups, projects and collectives, and the widermovement. 8 But nanopolitics as a collective practice is not set up to coordinateand cohere existing ways of doing politics, or to make us all do more.With stress, fatigue and burnouts such common experiences, and guilt sucha common motivation, it is neither a question of doing more or of doing less,but of trying to do politics differently, to find ways of doing politics that arenot at odds with life, with desire and the capacities of our bodies.Clearly this is not easy, and it might be even harder than it sounds. The‘bad ways’ of regular politics on the British left, the often poor micropoliticsand marginal nanopolitical sensitivities, which become increasingly obviousas we develop our practice, are not just ‘bad’ – something that we can voluntaristicallyovercome by doing better. Rather the bad ways, they are effects ofthe conditions of the city, its modes of existence and death, its temporalitiesand spaces, and the traditions, institutions and defensive politics that havebeen passed over from the series of defeats that constitute the genealogy ofthe current socio-political predicament.The intensity of London worklife, the ever-changing neighbourhoods, thedispersal of individuals... The non-coinciding temporalities, the distances, thelack of spaces (high rents, the brief lifespan of squats that only very rarelybecome social centres)... people coming, leaving, moving around... All thismakes organising in London a constant struggle. When and where can we allmeet? In two weeks? Three? And who will have energy at the meeting? Andin the coming months? Who will be fully committed? We all have high workloadsand too many political engagements – spread betting, trying to be everywhere,in order to be where something might develop (maybe that some-32