nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

IntroductionThis is a handbook that reflects on embodied experiences. It charts the journeyfrom bodies to a book (ours) back to other bodies (yours and those thatyou take part in). To do this, the book presents and proposes the practice andpolitical playing field we call nanopolitics. You can call it something else –whatever you call it; the body is political, traversed by social tensions, a siteof struggles sometimes. The book in your hands maps out some of those, andoffers a toolbox for grappling with them in your coltlectivities, relations andmovements.The nanopolitics group began in London in 2010. The problem posedmight seem simple, but it’s rich in consequences: how to think politics withand through the body? If major politics invest and organise our bodies, howdo we activate our bodily potentialities in different more desirable and consistentways, together?We created a space of experimentation, the nanopolitics group. In thisbook you’ll meet many voices speaking from, to and across that space. Theywill be sharing the tools, thoughts and questions that came out of our embodiedexperiments and beyond.The texts here may be seen as maps of the dimension we call ‘nanopolitical’.What we present here is tools, strategies and practices for navigatingthis as a playing field, and a terrain of struggle. We zoom in on the inventionof new modes of sensitivity and relation, across the situated contexts of ourpolitical engagements, labours and lives. We use our bodies to investigate theneoliberal city and workplace, the politics of crisis and austerity, our precariouslives and modes of collaborating. Exploring and doing what bodies cando in relation to specific contexts and problems – with curiosity, courage andcare – new collective subjectivations become possible.11