nanopolitics, exhaustion, biopolitics: an evening of bodies and books
London, October 9th 7pm @ no.w.here: http://www.no-w-here.org.uk
Top Floor, 316-318 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 OAG
This evening will present an encounter of three lines of thought and
practice relating to politics, bodies, life, the social and the common.
Doing so, we attempt to think across conceptions and realities of micro,
nano and biopolitics. Asking what it is that these dimensions may hold
in common, what distinguishes them, and what they may learn from each
other, we propose three short presentations followed by an open discussion.
First up is the handbook by the nanopolitics group from London,
published with Minor Compositions this fall:
http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=590. Playfully sketching out the
term ‘nanopolitics’, this handbook departs from bodies and their
encounters in investigating the neoliberal city and workplace, the
politics of crisis and austerity, precarity and collaboration. This
book, packed with excercises and tools for action draws on social
movements, grassroots organizing, dance, theatre and bodywork. As the
hosts of this evening, the nanopolitics group will propose some ways of
activating their handbook, which tries to think politics with and
through the body.
Following a similar line of research, Peter Pal Pelbart and Akseli
Virtanen will then share some tools they are developing through their
n-1 editorial project, as well as in their respective works:
http://n-1publications.org. N-1 editions has recently emerged across
Brazil and Finland and refers to the necessity to create new
organizational ideas and forms – to which “one” (leader, value, idea,
principle, community, goal) belongs only as subtracted. They say they
don’t organize to make the series, but make the series to organize. To
organize at n-1.
Peter Pelbart will notably draw on his work with the Ueinzz theatre
company in Sao Paolo, and on his book ‘Cartographies of exhaustion’,
where he asks what makes us so exhausted today, and proposes a
collective open-ended cartography that identifies breakage points where
other images, visions, notions, are extracted from the hither side of
our current biopolitical nihilism.
Akseli Virtanen will draw on his work towards ‘A critique of
biopolitical economy’ (forthcoming) as well as his ‘Dictionary of New
Work: A Map to Precarious Life’ (2006) in reflecting on experiments on
coming forms of politics and organization, among them the Robin Hood
contra-investment bank of the precariat (http://rhmam.org).
We would love to invite you for an open discussion to tie together some
threads regarding these fields of investigation and practice, to see
what useful insights we might draw from thinking across the nano, micro
and biopolitical.
All welcome!
Unfortunately the building is not wheelchair accessible.
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