4. To Suffocate: The Politics of Breathing
A GAS MASK CARVED IN MARBLE displayed on a marble surface (2013) by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei formally pays homage to both the modernist tradition of the readymade and to ancient reliquaries.1 Part of a series of everyday objects carved in marble or jade—materials associated respectively with European and Chinese classical sculpture—Weiwei’s marble mask alludes to the high levels of pollution in Chinese cities and the normalization of the hazard toxic air poses to breathing. It signifies protection against an impinging danger but also acts as a muted critique of the economics, politics, and social issues that, as discussed in chapter 2, underpin air pollution. The specific choice of marble as the material for this sculpture, typically associated with memorials and monuments, renders this ordinary object a memento mori of our time. The display suggests a skull resting on a tomb, both an evocation of vulnerability to air pollution and of the invisibility of breathlessness itself. The associations this gas mask evokes, however, go beyond air pollution to encompass other forms of contamination caused by abuses of air. Weiwei’s marble mask acts as a metonym for the breathing body itself, for the physicality of inhalation and exhalation, and for how breathing has increasingly become a site of governance mediated by technologies that in turn enable or impede it. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has further exposed the politics of breathing “as an aggressive and catastrophic affirmation of existing socio-economic logics; an intensified continuation of the rule rather than a break with it.”2 The entitlement to breathe, to “the universal right to breathe,”3 remains a thorny issue.
This chapter focuses on the politics of breathing in terms of the inequalities and harm caused to breathing by state powers and policing vis-à-vis breathlessness and suffocation. Drawing on our discussion on contamination, we return to the intersubjective relations established by breathing and consider the invisibility of breathlessness and suffocation across colonial paradigms and ecological and decolonial perspectives. By considering the emblematic significance of breathing masks, such as face masks and gas masks, the chapter further explores the entanglement of contamination, histories, and ethics in undermining safe breathing. It does so by following two different, though I believe interwoven threads of argument. The first thread regards the politics of breathing that emerged in the first months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and that are still current a year later; the other thread relates back to the analysis on abuses of air developed in chapter 3 through the analysis of Kurdish artist Hiwa K’s This Lemon Tastes of Apple (2011), a video of his performance on the last day of a protest in Sulaymaniyah (Iraq) during the Arab Spring when tear gas was used against the demonstrators. Harnessing the discussion on an ethics of breathing, the chapter further questions the use of the chokehold as a form of policing that led to the deaths by suffocation of Eric Garner and George Floyd.
Face Masks and the Ethics of Breathing
In May 2020, following the enthusiastic reaction to a photograph showing a wood carving printed on a face mask that Ai Weiwei had posted on Instagram, the artist developed a project using face masks in collaboration with curator Alexandra Munroe.4 He had 10,000 nonsurgical cloth face masks silk-screened by hand with images based on some of his past works, including sunflower seeds, mythological figures, and a raised middle finger, to be sold on eBay. The proceeds from the sale went to Covid-19 emergency humanitarian and human rights groups. Weiwei’s project was a direct response to the controversies the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic ignited around the use of face masks, including the accusation of “modern piracy” against the U.S. government after it was reported to be “diverting a shipment of masks intended for the German police, and outbidding other countries in the increasingly fraught global market for coronavirus protective equipment.”5 As Weiwei commented, “It is such a waste. There is so much argument around the mask. A face mask weighs only three grams but it carries so much state argument about global safety and who has it and who doesn’t have it.”6 Face masks are, indeed, emblematic of the thick net of implications around protection and vulnerability, sovereignty and restriction that SARS-CoV-2 has brought to the fore individually and collectively, at the level of the nation-state and geopolitics.
With the slow recognition of the insurgence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the reluctance to take adequate measures to prevent its spread, the use of face masks in public places and its legislation have often been slow and contested.7 The divided opinion of scientists on their potential usefulness in limiting the spread of airborne droplets converged with political uncertainty and public dissent. In the United States, the imposition of face masks in public places was seen as an infringement of individual freedom and a “muffling” of civil liberties, polarizing public opinion in ways that often reflected the factions of the already fierce political presidential electoral campaign, thus turning the wearing of face masks into a political football while the country was struggling, at the time, with high Covid-19 infection rates.8 In the United Kingdom, in the first months of the pandemic, Chinese communities were stigmatized for wearing face coverings—a standard practice in countries like China, Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan. In Japan, for instance, the wearing of face masks—whether due to pollution or potential infection—is a socially embedded practice that developed as a response to a wider and diffuse “culture of risk.”9 More generally, the debate around face masks in different countries has been rife with political inflections and contradictions, despite the difficulty hospitals faced in dealing with the surge of infections, and the shortages of protective equipment and ventilators. Meanwhile, the reality of the respiratory difficulties caused by the virus and its related deaths were—and still are—either abstracted in daily official figures, or brought to our attention through the personal accounts of patients and health workers that have circulated on social media.10 These antithetical attitudes toward face masks are turned onto themselves and given different political resonances by Chinese performance artist Brother Nut, who used surgical masks with the inscription “shut up” as well as metal clasps, tape, and gloves to silence himself as a sign of protest against the Chinese government’s censorship of information regarding the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 infection.11 During his thirty days of silent protest Brother Nut turned his face mask into a sign of political resistance and a mute assertion of freedom of expression indirectly pointing to the vacuity of the “Western” debate. Within this context, the contradictory associations to which face masks lend themselves are indicative of how the Covid-19 pandemic is also implicated in the politics of breathing and its broader ramifications.
In January 2021, as new variants of the virus are spreading and vaccination programs are underway, face masks are still crucial. A scientist at the Pasteur Institute in Lille reportedly stated on French Radio the possibility of making PPE masks mandatory in France: “As the variant is more easily transmitted, it is logical to use masks with the highest filtering power. We are not questioning the masks used up to now . . . but as we have no new weapons against the new strains, the only thing we can do is to improve the weapons we already have.”12 Relevant here is not the mandatory adoption of PPE masks but rather the military analogy: face masks as weapons. This analogy resonates with the official military rhetoric often used during epidemics—especially by politicians—that is reminiscent of wartime.13 Accordingly, nations are effectively “at war” with the ever-present yet imperceptible “enemy,” the infectious virus. I would like to question such rhetoric and consider it in relation to the debate ignited by the use of face masks.
To infect, from the Latin verb inficire, meaning “to put in, to stain, or to dye,”14 conveys the idea of penetration and the diffusion of a pathogen, from which the adjective infectious and the noun infection also derive as an expression of the power of pathogens to affect. Such terminology testifies to the cultural construction of infectious diseases and by extension of epidemics as “invasions” that have to be fought. For some people, the uncertainties and changes experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic have been a cause of anxiety, doubt, and suspicion, as “we may distrust the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch, while strangers suddenly seem unpredictable sources of potential danger.”15 Military analogies can intensify such a state of apprehension and mistrust that calls for “defense” and “safety” but can also lead to the opposite reaction, that of denial and “invincibility.” Fear is mobilized as emotional currency and framed within a rhetoric of “armament” and “victory,” drawing the focus exclusively to the self—whether as individual, group, or nation-state—implicitly stressing one’s own breathing and one’s freedom to breathe in ways that contradict the fact that we share the air we breathe and the commonality that breathing establishes. It is an aggressive response that supports an unequal distribution of breathing.
This has proved to be pernicious. The death rate from Covid-19 in UK prisons has, for instance, been more than three time higher than in the rest of the population, and in the United States it is 45 percent higher than in the overall population.16 Moreover, “longstanding health disparities affecting ethnic minorities in the UK have been made acutely visible by the COVID-19 pandemic”: data published by Public Health England reported that deaths among these groups were “two to four times greater than those among the White population in England.”17 In the United States, the American Public Media Research Laboratory has estimated “a death rate 1.7 greater for Afro-American than that of Indigenous American and 2.3 times that of white and Asian American.”18 Systemic racial discrimination as well as socioeconomic segregation and underlying chronic medical conditions are among concurring factors suggesting the persistence of historical patterns of epidemic morbidity bound up in cultural biases.19 In France and Europe in general, discrimination toward migrants and foreigners has been especially acute toward Asian groups, whereby “‘racisme sanitaire’ is reflected in discourse, attitudes, and behavior that invokes suspicion and rejection toward tourists, migrants, residents and citizens of very distant Asian origin.”20 While reflecting on the dramatic situation in India in April 2021, during the peak of the pandemic’s second wave, Arundhati Roy denounces the collision of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s politics, to which the persecution of non-Hindu ethnic minorities and political opponents is integral, with his response to the pandemic.21 She draws attention to hospitals being at breaking point “with people dying in hospital corridors, on roads and at their home” and oxygen having become “the new currency” on India’s stock exchange.22 Modi, who has modeled his governmental approach on European nationalist leaders of the early decades of the twentieth century,23 has underplayed the seriousness of the situation, taking on the Western government rhetoric of aggression while displaying callousness to the suffering and deaths of millions.24 When the virulence of the infection eventually eases, Roy observes, “The rich will breathe easier. The poor will not,” as an inevitable continuity of a status quo.25 The cultural construction of the pandemic as an “invasion” and the related “protectionist” and “defensive” manifestations have maintained, if not swelled, corrosive atmospheres of suffocation. Covid-19 seems, in fact, to have drawn attention to the breath only superficially, obfuscating ever more the inequalities that surround breathing and what can be regarded as the invisibility of systemic states of breathlessness and suffocation. As Abhijt Banerjee and Esther Duflo comment, “Despite all the talk of solidarity at the beginning of the pandemic, rich countries built sufficient capacity only to produce enough vaccines for themselves and then proceeded to corner the world supplies.”26 The cultural sedimentation of aggressive metaphors of infectiousness thus suggests ingrained frameworks in the articulation of diseases, their causes and the interrelations not only between humans and pathogens, but more conspicuously those defining the inequalities among social and ethnic groups and political forms of prevarication. The virus, not unlike Serres’s parasite, is both organic and informational matter, the molecular element of a relationship and the instigator of changes to it.27 The ways in which we read, describe, and act all count in producing our cultural formulations.
According to Isabelle Stengers, scientific knowledge is constructed around favoring the observation and analysis of some phenomena to the exclusion of others: this results in partial articulations of the multilayered spectrum of factors that characterize experience, including the interrelations within ecosystems of humans and other species.28 Extending Stengers’s consideration of the discursive articulation of human interaction with pathogens, another image of infection comes to mind. In My Memory (2017), Taiwanese artist Cemelesai Dakivali (Arsai) depicts fantastic forms of sinuous tentacled viruses in which scientific imaging merges with Taiwanese mythological motifs.29 The work stems from an incident that happened in the South of Taiwan some years ago, when “a group of young people from his tribe contracted a mysterious disease after a field research [trip] in their traditional territories. This incident reminded Dakivali of the legends told by elders that certain territories should be protected from any human intervention.”30 The resulting images of My Memory visually synthesize the overlapping of modern science and traditional lore as complementary ways of making sense of the mutually affective interrelation of humans and pathogens. Dakivali “reverses the logic of the invasive species, where humans venturing in the forest are the main factor of disruption and are attacked back in a retroactive loop.”31 His strange and menacing creatures do not undermine the risk of infection. On the contrary, they reveal the possibility of another metaphor for it, one underscored by the interrelation of humans and pathogens that repositions infection within the multilayered spectrum of experiential factors and the dynamics of interaction and affect. This, according to Michel Serres, implies not regarding “others” including microorganisms as “enemies in a battle, but as symbionts and mutualists,”32 involving a process of knowing that does not seek victory—it is not “against” microorganisms—but instead develops “with” them through a deciphering of the signs that they convey.33 Hence, the images we use for talking about viruses, including those of combat, need to change, as they themselves are the parasite that we carry in our theoretical knowledge, technologies, and practices: viruses are no longer enemies in a “race of mutation and invention,” dominance and defeat, but rather the participants of mutual exchanges.34 By asking “How can the invasive order become a reciprocal dialogue?”35 Serres restores the inseparability of matter, bodies, and meanings, the intra-actions of air, pathogens, and ourselves and of ourselves with all and everyone “other.” By positioning infection within affective frameworks of interrelations, freedom to breathe also acquires different connotations; safe breathing no longer refers solely to protecting one’s own breathing but a way of “breathing-with” as shared responsibility through the air we breathe “in-common,” as an agent of the life and knowledge that circulate through it. Pathogens are also participants of such “in-common”36 in which there are no vanquishers and losers. This suggests “attending” to the breath intersubjectively, as action and resistance, refuting images of invasion in order for us to reimagine “safety” through new images that can help us make breathing safe and equal.
Vulnerable Breaths
Protective breathing masks allude to both a means for safe breathing and its endangerment. French artist Arman’s 1960 sculpture, Home, Sweet Home, an “accumulation” of gas masks in a glass box, testifies to the antithetical significance of such an apparatus.37 The work is a reminder of the horror of warfare, alluding to the airstrikes that had wrecked European cities during the Second World War as well as to the drills that civilians would undergo with such masks in preparation for potential gas attacks. The work, not unlike Ai Weiwei’s mask, is also reminiscent of a reliquary that sinisterly evokes Nazi death chambers where inmates were asphyxiated with toxic gas. The gas mask thus acts as a modern trope of the histories and politics that pervade air with their threat and of the vulnerability of breathing itself. Such histories, as Marijn Nieuwenhuis observes, are rooted in colonial practices aimed “to discipline the body” of those who were regarded as “others.”38 Accordingly, “While breathing bodies enjoyed certain legal rights in the ‘civilized’ West, atmospheric governance worked very differently in other ‘savage’ and ‘law-less’ parts of the world.”39 Nieuwenhuis offers a historical analysis of such practices and argues that a “historisation of gassing reveals a great deal about whose right to life is legally protected and whose rights are suspended; who is allowed to access air and who is not; who is inside and who is outside law.”40 To put it another way, such historical perspective reveals the unequal distribution of breathing that the control of air exercises on individual bodies and peoples.
Today’s ongoing use of chemical warfare as well as the deployment of tear gas betrays a similar governance and control of air aimed at impeding or suppressing breathing. As our discussion of Cloud Studies suggests, attacks on breathing are not limited to war zones but are widespread instruments of policing as “the preferred technology of state power to discipline, punish, and immobilise breathing bodies.”41 At stake is the supposed “nonlethality” of tear gas and the ethical implications that such an assumption generates in legal terms, since “arguing from the principle of non-lethality helps toward expanding the legal realm of punishing bare life right up to until the point of its killing.”42 The supposed nonlethality of tear gas is haunted by suffocation as the underlying specter of the very act of breathing. Hence, as Nieuwenhuis argues, “the atmosphere becomes itself an extension of the logic of sovereignty” since gassing “makes the significance of the relationship between body and air explicit,”43 rendering breathing “a political relation between the body and the sovereign power that can switch on and off the atmospheric conditions for its animation.”44 Such a relation and its implications resonate with Hiwa K’s video, This Lemon Tastes of Apple, in which the toxic legacy of ethnic oppression manifests as breathlessness.45
The video opens in a market in Azadi Square in Sulaymaniyah on April 17, 2011, with images of men wearing face masks and holding halved lemons or bottles of water in their hands. The protest had already lasted for two months and, as the artist recounts in an interview with Anthony Downey, nine people had died and five hundred had been wounded.46 That day the stage that was used for speeches had been burned down and there was shooting: “The people were scared and they didn’t want to lose their lives,” remembers Hiwa K, “but after this attack they started to go back and I thought it was the moment that we could revitalize the protest one more time.”47 The artist himself is shown playing Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for Sergio Leone’s film Once upon a Time in the West (1966) on his harmonica as he walks. An elderly man chants a slogan in front of him. Smoke is visible in the background. A man shows a handful of bullets to the camera. Tear gas explodes in the midst of the crowd; people gag under the suffocating effect of the gas. Hiwa K himself has to stop playing to cover his face with a towel, before starting again. Lemons are passed around so the juice can be used to relieve the burning sensation in the mouth and nose. One man chokes and the sound of his suffocating breath mixes with that of the harmonica. Lemon juice is squeezed in his mouth. As the demonstration continues, more explosions are heard, and an injured man is helped by others wearing face masks; the commotion increases and then gradually the crowd disperses. The camera lingers on the blood-stained ground as feet move away.
The title of Hiwa K’s video references Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, when his troops deployed gas against civilians; survivors of the attack reported the gas smelled of apples. It also alludes to the lemons shared during the demonstration in Sulaymaniyah.48 Sensory perception mixes with the traumatic repetition of breathlessness and suffocation: both the physical harm to breathing produced by the gas and the repression of freedom and national identity experienced on an individual scale by civilians who became the target of their own authorities. In This Lemon Tastes of Apple, even the tune Hiwa K plays on his harmonica, as he observes, “has a deadly rattle.”49 The tune alludes to the expansionistic origins of the United States in its suppression of Native American people and to the making, under the pretext of liberation, of the modern myth of global, political, and economic hegemony that underscores abuses of air. “When tear gas is being fired at you,” remarks Hiwa K, “and when you play the harmonica, you must inhale and exhale to make that melody, so that was also a death rattle of sorts as I was breathing in gas.”50 Hiwa K’s haunting rattle on the harmonica marked by his gasping breath rhythmically paces his performance and confers on it what the artist refers to as its “deadly” playfulness as a “way to engage with people” and stir action, teasing a web of associations that relate not only to the persecution of the Kurds in Iraq but that extend to other persecutions and other attacks on breathing perpetrated by state powers. In this sense, what Judith Butler argues about the poems written by prisoners in Guantanamo and their primeval connection to survival—“to the arithmetic of breathing in and out”51—could be extended to Hiwa K’s performance and to other instances of breathlessness and suffocation: despite the apparent impotence against oppression, these expressions “do provide the conditions for breaking out of the quotidian acceptance of war and for a more generalized horror and outrage that will support and impel calls for justice and an end of violence.”52 It is from this need to break out from acceptance of oppression and to impel justice that resistance to the politics of breathing arises. It is a need that is integral to the rhythm of the breath itself, a need to breathe out of breathlessness and to reclaim the autonomy to breathe. It is as much a cry for justice and equality as a call for safe air—in the various entangled meanings that safe air can signify—and an end to political and ecological violence. In this cry, the question of how to account for those who live in a state of breathlessness is and remains pressing.
“I Can’t Breathe”
In John Akomfrah’s film, Handsworth Songs (1986), we hear a conversation between two women.53 One of them tells her friend how she had been stopped and chokeheld by police officers during a demonstration. The woman is Black, the officers were white. Produced by the Black Audio Film Collective, Handsworth Songs explores the events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a montage of archival film footage, still photos, and newsreel. As another woman comments in the film when answering a journalist who asks her about the unrest, “There are no stories in the riots, only ghosts of other stories.”54 Among the ghosts of those other stories suffocation looms large. Such ghosts encompass the lingering legacies of slavery and colonialism, of systemic racial violence and discrimination, and the entangled legacies of gassing and of the unequal distribution of breathing to which the governance of air subjects individual bodies and peoples.
To discuss the pervasive climate of racial discrimination in the United States, Christina Sharpe refers to the weather, a weather imbued with the ghosts of slavery.55 By reflecting on slavery through a meteorological analogy—as a condition of the air itself and of the ecologies it produces—Sharpe alludes not to “the specifics of any event or set of events that are endlessly repeatable and repeated” but to “the totality of the environments in which we struggle, and machines in which we live.”56 Sharpe asks, “when the only certainty is the weather that produces a pervasive climate of antiblackness, what must we know in order to move through those environments in which the push is always toward Black death?”57 The insidiousness of racial discrimination and systemic violence also manifests in the toxic politics of breathing and the governance of Black bodies implemented through suffocation. The oppressive climate Sharpe describes regards air both as matter and meaning, as “the necessity to breathe” as well as “the necessity of breathing space” and of “breathing spaces in the wake in which we live”58—a wake haunted by breathlessness.
In her analysis, Sharpe recounts the incident on Staten Island on July 17, 2014, when Eric Garner, an African American man was chokeheld by a police officer after having been stopped in the street on the suspicion of illegally selling single cigarettes. Garner repeated eleven times “I can’t breathe” before he stopped breathing.59 His desperate words became the rallying cry of protests against the invisibility and invalidation of civil rights for African American people in the United States when a grand jury declined to press criminal charges against Garner’s assailant. Sharpe relates Garner’s killing to the pervasiveness of suffocation as a means of policing in the United States, citing examples of police enforcement, death by suffocation in prisons, and that of fifty people asphyxiated in the cargo hold of a ship.60 In commenting on Eric Garner’s killing, Jerome Roos also emphasizes such a climate of systemic violence, stating, “We can’t breathe in this toxic atmosphere of state brutality. We can’t breathe in this travesty of justice, this sham of a democracy.”61 Roos extends his outrage to other instances of asphyxiation and police violence—including gassing—in France, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Palestine and calls on the commonality of breathing as shared responsibility for breaking such a state of suffocation. However, despite public outcry and critical reflection, breathlessness remains a form of control and coercion. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was also chokeheld by police officers and died after repeating twenty-seven times “I can’t breathe.”62
Although the deaths of Garner and Floyd have drawn attention to the fierce, systemic climate accounted for by Sharpe, breathlessness as a form of both physical control and a means to terrorize remains mostly invisible. In examining violence and forms of self-defense, Elsa Dorlin argues that oppression persists in the bodies of those who suffer it as negative cognitive behaviors and fearfulness.63 Fear manifests as hypervigilance and anxiety, while cognitive and behavioral self-defensive attitudes include bodily postures and movements meant to lessen, deflect, avoid, or dissipate oppression by making oneself almost invisible.64 Breathlessness thus appears as a sign of ingrained intergenerational trauma as an embodied, acquired response to oppression. It is as if one learned to lessen its stranglehold of power by figuratively withdrawing oneself from air. It is, in other words, as if the breather had internalized the “de-animation” implicit in the governance of air. In breathlessness we can recognize an intimation of Frantz Fanon’s notion of “zones of nonbeing,”65 since it stands both for a denial of the ontological link to life represented by the breath and a disavowal of the epistemological significance that the breath carries as a definer of subjectivity and commonality, of the relationships between self and others. “Under these conditions” of oppression, writes Fanon, “the individual’s breathing is an observed breathing. It is a combat breathing.”66 It is a breathing that embodies both vulnerability and resistance. According to Judith Butler, “precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, our fragile and necessary dimension of interdependency.”67 Considered in relation to Butler’s claim, breathing thus resides within an ethical discourse not despite but rather because of its vulnerability vis-à-vis the control and abuse of air. At the same time, suffocation shatters the foundations of an ethics of breathing by exposing its intrinsic vulnerability. With Sharpe, we might well ask, “what is the word for keeping and putting breath into the body?”68 What are the words, images, and approaches for addressing the entangled histories of breathlessness and today’s suffocation?
In discussing Garner’s death—though the arguments apply also to Floyd’s—Marijn Nieuwenhuis explains how the chokehold has been reformulated in U.S. police departmental guidelines and qualified as a side effect of a “less-than-lethal manoeuvre” that, as he states, “‘inadvertently’ allows and legitimizes for an attack on the vital lifeline of the body.”69 Breathing becomes physiologically secondary in legal and, by extension, in epistemological and political determinations. “The elemental act of breathing is, in other words,” as Nieuwenhuis remarks, “relegated as something that falls outside of law altogether.”70 By maintaining the conditions for the governance of air and legitimizing suffocation, this falling outside the law of breathing is central to an understanding of the politics of breathing. Nieuwenhuis compares the legal invisibility of the chokehold as an attack on breathing to that already observed for chemical attacks on civilians and the deployment of tear gas to control protests or social unrest, urging us to consider ways in which our right to breathe can be protected and exercised.71 In his words, “A right to air, it bears remembering, is not the same as a right to life,”72 since air is a condition that enables life itself. Nieuwenhuis is concerned with the invisibility of breathing in legal terms. Drawing on Butler, such invisibility indicates the precarity of the body, its exposure to vulnerability and its implications.73
The relevance of a right to breathe is today ever more pressing as breathing continues to be targeted. Tear gas was used during the protests that followed Garner’s death in 2014 and was also deployed in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations after Floyd’s death to protest against and call for the end to systemic racial violence in the United States. As a report by Amnesty International states, protesters were met by the repeated use of “physical force, chemical irritants such as tear gas and pepper spray, and kinetic impact projectiles.”74 The report continues by stressing,
The use of tear gas during the COVID-19 pandemic is especially reckless. As protestors took to the streets, wearing masks and attempting to socially distance due to the virus, police fired tear gas and pepper spray, escalating risks for respiratory issues and the release of airborne particles that could spread the virus.75
The same could be said of the use of tear gas during demonstrations in Hong Kong in the summer of 2020 or the farmers’ protests in Delhi in January 2021. The recklessness in deploying tear gas during a viral pandemic that affects the respiratory system shows the impossibility of separating breathing and breathlessness on every possible level—whether we consider it epidemiologically in terms of potential virus transmission, of the health risks that both tear gas and SARS-CoV-2 present, or ethically for putting lives at risk, negating freedom and the autonomy of breathers themselves. Such recklessness also evidences racial and ethnic discrimination given the high incidence of infection among Black and Asian groups, and the impact on access to treatment of social inequalities. As suggested, the pandemic has put a magnifying glass on breathlessness as a means of governance, disclosing an entangled template of causes and effects but also of knotted affects and overlapping scales. To use Butler’s terms, it has shown “how bodies are being acted on” by policing as well as by social and economic forces.76 Hence, as discussed in relation to ecological contamination and toxic violence, we are confronted with how we think about breathing, and, to use Gabriele Schwab’s words, how we think about “the reach of affect and emotion, moral thought and action”77 across places and different manifestations of abuse. We are also confronted with how we think about the breathing body in its relations with other bodies and environments, how we recognize such bodies in relation to air, both in the present and the future.
Breathlessness, however, also has its affect. For Butler, vulnerability is not a condition but rather a relation to experience, forces, and emotions that affect the individual; “vulnerability is a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one another, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence.”78 Vulnerability of breathing thus ensues within the interaction of bodies, environments, and toxicity as well as of politics, affect, and action and, as Butler argues of vulnerability more generally, it also entails resistance in “those practices of deliberate exposure to police or military violence”79 of which the exposure to tear gas is an instance. The suffocation of Garner and Floyd has affected and moved bodies, pushing them to challenge the politics of breathing through their own breathlessness, through what Butler would regard as “the mobilization of their vulnerability.”80 They have aroused impassioned calls for justice and an end to violence and suffocation. Breathlessness has brought about an affirmation of breathing. The word that Sharpe found “for keeping and putting breath back in the body,” and specifically “in the Black body” is “aspiration”81—a word that also resonates with Mbembé’s call “to hold in-common the universal right to breathe.”82 Mbembé stresses the imperative need for change to counteract breathlessness and the persistence of the politics of breathing, suggesting that a return to established “normality” will mean to succumb once again to breathlessness—as vulnerability to pollution, unequal distribution to such resources as vaccines, or as the continuation of abuses of air. How can we then aspire to breathing, how can we imagine a response to Mbembé’s call? This question requires thought and action; it requires space to breathe.
A right to breathe, “the universal right to breathe” is first and foremost an embodied right. It is a right that emerges from the vulnerability of breathing that is also the vulnerability of the body itself. Because we share air with others (human and nonhuman) it is a right that includes individuals and ecosystems as inseparable. It has the force of an aspiration but also the softness of tranquil, unharmed breathing. Breath has also distinct rhythmic cadences and motions, hence a right to breathe is perhaps a verbal rather than a written right, a right that can encompass unicity and commonality in its own articulation, a right that attends to the breath as matter and meaning: a right that is voiced and breathed.
I began my reflection on breath with the image of a paper bag that contained breathed air and its crumpling sound as air moved in and out of it. I would like to conclude with the sound of the breath and voice of artist and poet Anaïs Duplan. In You Take My Breath Away: A Sonics Freedom (2020),83 Giorgio Moroder’s song, increasingly distorted, is layered with the background sound of coughing and gasping. The coughing intensifies, meshed with sighs and panting. One feels sonically engulfed in breathlessness. From choking and acoustic deformation, Duplan’s distinct voice surfaces until its sound is also broken and compressed as they ask, “Can I pursue liberation? What kind of liberation can I pursue?”84 Duplan seeks resistance in art, in the unresolved “tension between thought and matter,” in an art that redefines paradigms and “rewrites theory with experience.”85 Such art is evoked by sensory images like childhood memories prompted by the aroma of a bakery, by the continuous immersion and interaction with one’s surroundings. But such environments can feel “alternatively supportive” and “hostile.”86 The precarity of life is haunted by “the ghosts of other stories”; for Duplan it takes the form of dreaming of lynchings and “the fear” the artist forces themself to live in. “How can art help us be free, in the words of Audre Lorde, through the chaos of knowledge?”87 In asserting that “sense is meaning,” because “without sense there is no volition, notion, participation, or communication,”88 Duplan reclaims embodied knowledge in its individuality yet beyond difference and duality, almost in breathing itself, in its being both matter and meaning, singularity and plurality. They affirm the intimate connection of sense and meaning in the sonic texture of the work, through the layered sonorities of the soundtrack, the cadences of voice and the grainy presence of breathing. From this texture, integration emerges as air, in their words, “in this single world substance, everywhere is home, everything is forever and everyone is inalienable.”89 For me, You Take My Breath Away speaks of “the universal right to breathe.” In giving a voice to it, Duplan breathes it.