nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

to pursue here, which is that of groups engaged in social, political and culturalstruggles across the geographical zone called Europe – the history ofthe workers movements marks our current culture for better and for worse,and that it no doubt transports some of this forgetting of micropolitics, ordistance from it. Let’s briefly explore this hypothesis.‘That’s secondary!’Certain ways of seeing art, politics, life have been developed out of the cultureof the workers’ movement in the last century and a half. This culture wascharacterized by a majoritarian conception of class belonging that built onthe roles that workers played within the production process. The synthesisthat was produced around the working class has enabled for a certain numberof disparate forces to be captured through the articulation of new social goals,new modes of organisation and new means of action. But this synthesis alsohad a set of paradoxical effects. Let’s name two. One consists in the reductionof the movements’ constitutive diversity around one central figure: the malefactory worker. The other is to do with incorporating part of the politicaland economic programme of the bourgeoisie. Science, progress, universalism,and the position of truth were (and still are, at least when it comes to alarge part of structures created during the period of this movement) sharedreferences. These in turn produced a number of dichotomies that, at least partially,structured ways of thinking and organising: body/soul, reason/feeling,public/private, collective/individual, and so forth.One of the effects of this cultural synthesis produced by and within theworkers movement has been the creation of a habit, namely that of brushingmicropolitics away with the back of the hand, and of cataloguing it as givingrise to subjectivist drifts. The problem lay ‘elsewhere’: on one side, in the objectiveposition of the class, the evolution of relations of forces within the productiveapparatus, the strategic challenges deriving from this; and on the other side,in the construction of the party, the consciousness-raising within the massesand the strategy for taking power. The rest was secondary. Even where this ‘rest’(ecology, questions of gender, of affect, matters of desire, of forms of language...)was dealt with, it was still subordinate to the macropolitical dimension. 4This splitting apart of what is considered to pertain to important problems(macropolitics) from what is not seen as such, or only additionally so (micropolitics),has not only produced a blindness to the dimensions of ecologywithin practices, but has also given rise to a certain collective managementof desires, feelings, moments of tiredness and so forth: what else can be donethan just manage the messy ‘political economy of desires’, when we are not59