nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

The violence of cutbacks in public spending, the repression and criminalisationof the social movements, the control and surveillance of the streetsand the ‘precaritisation’ of work were multiplying and acquiring unexpectedforms, in the face of which it was necessary for us to have a space for collectivethinking. At the same time as inventing forms of ‘doing with’ reading, we generateda space of caring, of an erotic politics and a politics of friendship. It wasthrough this that we became a group-machine for thinking, for the productionof new assemblages, between ideas, experiences, concepts and questions.registros 6Aware of our particular affection towards an ‘oral tradition’ and thinkingabout how to produce more enduring forms in our autonomous educationand reading spaces, we began to ask ourselves how to do, so that whatemerged from our meetings could be recovered in the future. These questionsled us to reflect on the theme of the record and the register in our sessions:what should we do with those discoveries that surprised us? How could wemake them last? How could we fix them? Did we want to fix them? For whatreasons? For whom? And what would we do with them afterwards?The question of the record led us to the idea of the dream: how doesone fix a dream? A oneiric moment is a free production of ideas that form apartnership without any filter, a plan without fastenings. But what happenswhen we wake up? To fix a dream one must turn it into a narrative, a story.And how much experience and information is lost in that passage intoa story! But even aware of that loss, it seems that we want to remember,because something interesting has happened there, in that dream. In ourgroup something similar happened to us. The important issue was to stickwith plans of free production, deterritorialised, in a sense dreamlike, seen asthey are what have allowed us to experience and explore lines of flight whenthinking about our context and our current situation. The how of recordingthem was then, crucial: ‘how to record, how to make registers, in a way thatcould sediment and be flight at the same time?’There was something desirable in this making durable. Could we thinkand create forms of recording that would be loyal to what was producedin our encounters? This discussion began to stir among us in an informaland intermittent way. As a response, some of us thought of writing to givesteadfastness to agreements and especially to share what had been discussedwith those who were absent. But yet, in that sense we would also questionconferring an a priori higher status to the written format over the oral. Fromthis we began to consider rather recording than writing, not only the voice, but44