The quote from Himada and Manning really sums it up for me, and is a timely riposte to critics who denigrate micropolitics as somehow ‘soft’, ethereal, or worst of all, liberal.

The very threat, or sheer radicalism of micropolitical spaces, experiments and moments is their incompleteness and what I see as their deliberate lack of ontological coherence (i.e. no rallying cry emanating from a coercive politics of identity, that is to say, an unethical politics of forced meaning).

That said, and as you point to in your response, there is still the ongoing question of how we mobilise micropolitics and in particular, how we understand, animate and deploy affect without its capture. Guattari of course suggests ethico-aesthetic experiments which SenseLab and others have done a lot of work to bring into being, but perhaps for social activist collectives who continue to work along traditional lines of affinity, there is still more convincing to be done regarding the potential of micropolitics, not as concept, but as device(s).

In response to your question on how 3Cs kept the virtual open, I’m not sure where to go with this, partly because I think one aspect of the virtual is that you can’t close it down – sure, there are limiting processes which can be enacted, but to borrow from our conversations with Derek McCormack, even constraint can be generative. Perhaps the only concrete example I can give is that 3Cs are determined to state the partiality of the cartographies, and that they outward keep the virtual open by opening their cartographies, in very material terms (i.e. interactive maps online). No doubt though that 3Cs could think some more on how to generate different virtualities/affects…