nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

this way we began to produce thoughts and ideas, political spaces of care;immaterial objects with value.It is important to us to emphasise that the ‘without realising’ aspect ofthis way of wandering had nothing to do with the optimism of spontaneity.We also want to distance ourselves from the idea of a primitive essence thatspontaneously expresses its being. We consider that reducing this process toa mere expression has in fact contributed to our not seeing, at times, a wholelabour of weaving behind and throughout the process. We say that we beganto produce ‘without realising’, but recently it has been fundamental for usto face the question through the materiality and the flesh that have createdthis product: what it is made of, how it happens. We keep making, doing, wekeep inventing, there is no clearly defined narrative about us, there is no pipedreamthat thinks us from above or from outside, there is no transcendence.We do not have a need for programmatic creation, but even so we have developeda consistent task of caring and maintenance of our spaces of encounter.It has been necessary to build, care for and maintain our fields of possibility.In this way, we have found ourselves constantly undertaking the task of theproduction and maintenance of our conditions of possibility.Is this not what some have denominated the ‘becoming-woman of labour’?8 Historically there exists a classic division between the production ofgoods (fundamentally attributed to men: while there may have been othersubjects, we have always spoken in terms of male workers) and the reproductionof the work force (mainly under the charge of women in the tasksof caring, maternity, education, affection). As a consequence, this divisionhas made invisible – also historically – the production of value and wealthwhich in fact emerges from these tasks. But the current displacement of thewealth-generation model of industrial capitalism by what has been calledcognitive capitalism has shown the limitations of this dichotomy.Breaking through the classic forms of production of waged labour andof that which is recognised only in terms of ‘employment’, we currently findourselves facing a production of wealth which is born of communication, ofaffect, of sensitivity, of modes of subjectivisation and of the capacity to coordinatethe moments and spaces of encounters. Today it is no longer possibleto imagine the production of wealth and knowledge if it is not through theproduction of subjectivity, and thus the reproduction of the processes of life.Where did we position ourselves in relation to these categories? It has beendifficult for us to distinguish the limits between the production – of concreteobjects – and the reproduction, care and maintenance of our shared territories.We have inhabited an embodiment of production that comprehends (inthe sense of both comprehending and apprehending) life.46