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B2 W4: Somatechnics - Take Space, Breathe

Magdalena Górska: “Take Space, Breathe: Ethics And Politics Of Matterwork” in Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability, Linköping: Linköping University Press, 2016, pp. 251- 287

"The specificity of human social, cultural, economic, biological and affective life is a saturating olfactory presence (and absence) specific to an individual, and it is recognizable by a dog" p. 260

Dogs are able to create a wind current that expels air and inhale at the same time, unlike humans. They pick up on the smell of sweat, adrenaline, chemicals that move to the surface of the skin because blood flow increases as the heart rate does, and understand vocal pitch change as well as body language. All of these make them perfect companions for those who experience panic attacks and anxiety.

"The relationship of response-ability is, therefore, a dynamic where power relations are both topological (e.g., Tarik's dependence on Matt in satisfying his dietary or physiological needs) and continually changing (e.g., the mutual negotiations of daily support for affective well-being)." p.264

"It is crucial for ethics to include the dynamics of imperceptibility and invisibility, as they are frequently constitutive of anxious and panicky living, living that is often invisible and leads to losing (or never having any) social and cultural space, losing breath in suffocation, or disappearing from the physical spaces of the political." p.265

"The -ability in response-ability is not merely a signifier of a normative and privileged productive capacity, corpo-affective ability and always active successful relating. The ability to respond is always-already embedded in incapactiy - in indifference and in-ability to engage that are equally powerful, constitutive and at play within the dynamics of response-ability in-difference and in politics of vulnerability." p.265

"Prevailing Western notions of success are embedded in ideas of a linear and monodirectional temporality, in concepts of productivity - of economic, affective and creative character, to name a few - and in normative ideas of what constitutes desirable subjectivity, ability or happiness." p.266

The relationship between Matt and his service dog, Tarik, "reconfigures relationality and the meaning of failure and success - as relational processes - through a space of "elsewhere"." p.266

"The space of elsewhere is not only a happy place but - as in the case of Matt's need to stay in bed for three days - a space where anxious and panicky suffocation can take place in a less suffocating way." p.267

"The reconfiguration takes place in the inra-active spaces of daily living, in the breathability and unbreathability of spatial, temporal, cultural, social, material, corpo-affective and trans-corporeal relationalities." p.267

"The concept of matterwork instead emphasizes that what is considered human behavior is locatable not merely in materiality, or in only one "kind" of materiality (or in psychological trait, for that matter), but in a complexity of material-cultural intra-active relationalities." p.268






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