nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

also about making knowledges about those practices circulate, as cultures ofprecedents that can irrigate and nourish collective practices.These two axes of micropolitics are linked, even if their specific tasks differ.One pays specific attention to the state of a body soaked in capitalist logicsand to the ways in which we envisage our collective ways of healing and protection,while the other poses questions about the components of passage andtransformation that we may activate.We have chosen to focus on the first question here [that of the body], inorder to unpack the problem that opens onto micropolitics in relation to acertain culture of the left and to capitalism.To take into accountIn Anti-Oedipus – a book to rediscover – Deleuze and Guattari pose the followingproblem: ‘Why do so many of those who have or should have a revolutionaryobjective keep a preconscient investment of a reactionary sort? Andless commonly, how do those with objectively reactionary interests manage tooperate a preconscious investment of a revolutionary type? Do we have to invokea thirst for justice on the one hand, a right ideological vision as good andjust view; and a blindness stemming from treachery or an ideological mystificationon the other? Revolutionaries often forget, or like to ignore, that peoplemake revolutions happen out of desire and not out of duty. 3 ‘ It’s in fact far frombeing obvious that an interest held up within a certain group – around this orthat ambition or claim – necessarily coincides with the desires that traverse thegroup. One may very well have a shared interest and objective to transform apower structure, whilst at the same time having a desire to maintain or evenacquire this same power. The revolutions of the twentieth century taught usthat the fact of changing state power doesn’t as such transform the modalitiesin which this power is enacted, nor gets rid of the desire for such power.The micropolitical point of view brings this fact to the fore: we don’t investin a project because of pure devotion, through mere reasoning of consciousness.We also bring our histories, cultures, languages, relations to powers andknowledges, our phantoms and desires to a group. Those aren’t individualstrictly speaking, in the sense of being private, but inscribe themselves acrossa multitude of geographical, social, economic and familial relations (to namebut a few) which impregnate our bodies more or less strongly.And yet it seems that the problem is often brushed aside within collectivepractices. Why? How come the micropolitical dimension is so foreign to ourways of constructing the common? These questions open onto a terrain thatlargely overwhelms us. Let’s just say that – from the point of view we want58