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B2 W4: Somatechnics - Lecture

How do we think about political resistance?

Street protest, legal changes, NGO's, communities

Doing politics that are not as easily visible, articulating protest in different ways

Biopolitics and necropolitics

Breathing and suffering under certain states of power

Biopolitics: Administration of life, populations and subjects in order to sustain life, populations and subjects

Biopower: way how biopolitics is operating in society. It works from beneath, on the level of life. 

"Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesales slaughter in the name of life" Foucault

Necropolitics: "Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of anmity that sets that person against his or her murderer?" Mmember p.12

Sovereign power = let live and make die (individual level) = power over death
Biopower = let die and make live (population level) = power over life
Necropower = make die (sub-populations) = power over death, making life unliveable - making some lives disposable, "bare life" Agamben - a life that doesn't have cultural capital/discursive recognition that grants rights and protection, how we reduce populations to a barely liveable life

Combat breathing and understanding

"There is no occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under those conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, and occupied ..." (Fanon) 
Breathing, just existing, is a form of resistance. The way we live in power structures has an effect on the way we live. We incorporate it into the way we breath, digest, live. 

A target body is "reduced to a soma of such utter political and economic vulnerability that the very possibility of respiration becomes the ultimate challenge..." (Pugliese 2011, 2)

Incorporation

Combat breathing materially articulates how power relations are incorporated, "how colonialism is far from being only applied on a territory's resources - in this sense colonialism is still operative through..." (Lambert 2014)

How exhausting is it to constantly make interventions in social/political situations, through challenging ideas or just simply existence? 

Combat breathing as bodily/affective action "the circular... movement between skin, emotions psyche, muscles, sores, and values undermines any 'black and white' distinctions between mind and body or between economic..." (Oliver 2004, 49)

Capitlism operates in a system that one day we will be perfect/successful/happy - proper human subjectivity - by striving we are always constantly failing - Lauren Berlant (Cruel Optimism/Slow Death)

Combat breathing as incorporation & transformation

Main terms - 

Corpomateriality - an umbrella term for diverse feminist discussions that have a "shared focus on the materiality of bodies and corporeality" (Lykke 2010, 107)

Magda uses it to work with materiality in its human material specificity, to avoid working with materiality as a universal term that designates everything without specification

Anthropocentric - theory centred on the human (the human is the ruler of the world) as in control of knowledge, world, nature

Haraway - the body as posthuman - we as human beings are not self-contained entities, we are more porous than that - we share space and breathe together - embodiment is more porous because of the way we breathe toxicity - the notion of the self does not end with our body - geopolitical locations (food deserts/junk food prevalence) influence our bodies

Matterwork - agential workings of corpomateriality. Transformative in relation to stress (IBS) - bodily reaction. Breathing is a specific reaction to a specific context. Matterwork is not just a reaction but also highlights a certain oppression. Bodily agency/material process (can sustain or disrupt life). 

"When you are afraid, anxious or stressed you breathe in a certain way," and if this process continues for a long time it can even change your daily breathing pattern. You start breathing into the top of your lungs and "more on the surface;" your inhalations are constrained by muscle tension and you don't oxygenate enough. Such breathing can make you tried and...

The materiality of the body and the functions of the body (blood circulation/metabolism/hormonal processes) - not only automatic but has specific agency - automatic breathing but also controllable or uncontrollable (hold breath/panic attack)

Corpo-affectivity - articulates (check powerpoint)

Panic attacks as form of combat breathing 

Politics of ambivalence

How can we think agency of human embodiment and affect as a form of political resistance?

Immobilisation and empowerment, holding space for complexity, politics of everyday life, individual and structural, understand our bodily functions not merely as reactions, but also as ways of transforming power

Embodiment, affect and social technologies of oppression

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