1. To Breathe

To Breathe: An Entanglement

Life starts with the first gulp of air and ends when one ceases to breathe; breathing marks the interval between birth and death. Samuel Beckett’s play Breath (1969) epitomizes the elemental state of breathing but also its tangled connections to meaning.14 As Beckett himself commented:

My contribution to the Tynan circus is a forty second piece entitled BREATH . . . It is simply light coming up and going down on a stage littered with miscellaneous unidentifiable muck, synchronised with the sound of breath, once in and out, the whole (ha!) begun and ended by the same tiny vagitus-rattle.15

Breath itself is a process composed of four different phases: inhalation, pause, exhalation, pause. Its rhythm, depth, and extension are variable depending on internal physical and psychological states and external environmental conditions. The changing pattern of the breath marks how we live, as it intersects feelings and emotions, thoughts and actions, seamlessly shifting from unconscious to conscious, from involuntary to controlled. To be in the world is to breathe, and life depends on the exchange between respiration and the gaseous environment that surrounds human and nonhuman living beings.

Physiologically, respiration designates the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between an organism and the surrounding environment during inhalation and exhalation. This further enables the oxygenation of nutrients at the cellular level with the related production of energy and the elimination of waste. Breathing mostly happens automatically, adapting itself to an organism’s inner and outer circumstances. At the same time, through the passage of air in and out of the body, the breath exposes the permeability of the body itself, its porosity and sensitivity to the surrounding environment. Through respiration air is alternatively taken into the body and expelled. This exchange and movement enable a flow of sensory information, including temperature, humidity, and smell, that can be perceived through the air that is inhaled. During exhalation, one surrenders carbon dioxide to the atmosphere but also other matter (including potential pathogens) and information—whether as the smell of our own breath or as sound. In fact, the exchange of air in and out of the body makes possible the articulation of sound and thus communication so that air and breath can be regarded as the conduits for thought and its expression.16 Air is what enables us to move and communicate, it is also in itself a source of information and knowledge.17 What does it then mean to breathe? What exchanges does the breath enact through air and figuratively beyond air?

Historically, in early Egyptian, Hindu, and Greek cultures, breathing was associated with the principle of life itself—what was regarded as life force or the soul. The Vedic myth of creation conceives all the elements as interconnected, whereby time ensues from the rhythm of breath, the world is created from sound, and form from the merging of air and touch.18 According to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, pranayama is the practice related to the breath, where prana means cosmic force; through a system of exercises meant to regulate, expand, and free the breath—the three meanings overlap—one relates intimately to this force and as a result to one’s own oneness with the universe.19 In ancient Greek philosophy, the term pneuma also referred to air in motion and, by extension, to the breath. The latter was understood as that which sustains consciousness in the body. Hence for Aristotle, pneuma is a dynamic principle, “the power (dynamis) of every kind of soul,” which manifests as ether (the divine vital force and the quality of this force itself) within a living body and as such can be regarded as an “instrument of the soul.”20 For the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, pneuma is the generative principle that regulates both the individual and the universe,21 suggesting continuity through the breath between micro and macro forms of existence, physical and spiritual life. Maintaining such reciprocity, Hippocrates directly compares wind and breeze to breath, suggesting that “nothing is empty of air” and that air is in equal measure a cause of both life and disease, including what he refers to as “epidemic fever” that he relates to the sharing of the same air,22 thus foregrounding an idea of vulnerability to air. Drawing from Hippocrates, the Roman physician Galen also recognizes breathing as an essential function of the human body and further distinguishes it as either automatic or controlled. According to an apocryphal account attributed to him, “slaves, lacking any other tool of protest, foiled their masters’ plans by holding their breath until they died. Breathing was taken to be such a volitional thing that it gave any breather ultimate determination over their own life or death.”23 The emphasis on volition tightly links breathing to cognition and autonomy; it refers to the possibility of choice and of self-determination, thus rendering the breath a site of resistance in ways that resonate with contemporary utterances where breath or its suppression is invoked as protest against injustice, while freedom of breathing coincides with claims of civic and political liberties.

In antiquity, however, breathing was not related to the lungs and what we now regard as the respiratory system; it was believed to have mainly a cooling function through the pores of the skin.24 Only with advances in the understanding of animal and human anatomy and the beginnings of physiology did the role of the lungs in respiration begin to be explained. This coincided with the first pneumatic experiments in the late sixteenth century and the discovery of oxygen in 1774.25 Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier postulated that air was composed of oxygen and nitrogen, and was the first to measure the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide during respiration both at rest and during an activity, thus demonstrating the physiological purpose of respiration was that of a gaseous exchange.26 Charles Darwin, in his study The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), regarded breathing as a reflex movement that is altered under stress, partaking of the physical articulation of emotional states.27 This is, however, an involuntary response inscribed within a mechanistic model of the body. To consider breathing uniquely as a reflex undermines the role that volition can play in regulating breathing patterns, and more conspicuously divorces the breath from the web of associations that made it the permeable mediator between inner and outer life, between the individual and the surrounding environment.

Current approaches to respiration have reevaluated its interrelation with psychological and mental states as well as with physiological processes. Traditional Chinese medicine, for instance, already associated the breath with emotions and regarded its vigor as essential to well-being.28 Accordingly, any irregularities in breathing were believed to be signs of illness and psychological suffering, a correlation that has gained relevance in the current understanding of breathing,29 thus underlining the complex mediating role of respiration within the body and in its surrounding environment. The regular rhythm of the breath, which mostly remains below the conscious perceptive threshold, punctuates the position of the body in space as the breath constantly adjusts to the external climatological and physical conditions of the atmosphere.30 Coughing, gasping, shortness of breath, or hyperventilation can be due to physiological conditions and respiratory problems or may be responses to external factors, such as temperature or the presence of irritants in the air, like pollens or dust. Breathing irregularities, however, can also be related to emotional states: fear and anxiety can cause feelings of suffocation, making one gasp for air, while anger and rage tend to induce hyperventilation.

It is within such diverse interpretations that the gaseous transmutation and interchange made possible by respiration can be thought of as actualizing the inherent relationship of organisms, including the human body, with their living surroundings, establishing intraconnectivity among them locally and, since air constantly moves, more expansively elsewhere. This involves the perception of the continuous flux of matter in the air, be it pollutants or information. Even minute changes in the breath are affective events that modify and actualize the individual interaction of a body both physically and emotionally with its surrounding environment, typifying its dependency on an air-bound state and its interdependence with all other human and nonhuman entities in that environment.

To Breathe: Toward an Embodied Ethics

According to Irigaray, this dependency on an air-bound state is fundamental to being and to being in the world: to breathe designates both individuality and commonality. Breathing is both an action and an exchange, since it “corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of the living human being. To come into the world supposes inhaling and exhaling by oneself.”31 Air is a source of life and, for Irigaray, we are because we breathe.32 To be embodied and to breathe is prior to thought and thought itself manifests through the embodied action of breathing. If the dependence of life on air suggests an ontological condition of being in the world through the breath, a phenomenology of breathing—as an embodied process and autonomous action that implicates movement, transformation, and exchange—also involves a relational positioning of the self with one’s surrounding through the inhalation and exhalation of air. Irigaray’s shift from cogito to breath, from the abstract to the embodied, thus suggests a new focus on the flow of air within the body, with its palpable, physical rhythm, constant interchange, and attunement to movement—on what, drawing on ancient theories, can be regarded as the principle of life itself. The autonomous action of breathing, however, also needs attention. Drawing on Eastern philosophies and their emphasis on the breath as key to meditative practices, Irigaray underlines how an awareness of breathing acquires an ethical dimension as it is “a vehicle both of proximity and of distancing,” a site of presence but also of disappearance, since breathing is both an individual action that determines one’s own singularity and a sharing with all those (human and nonhuman) that inhabit the surrounding world.33 Breathing is thus an action of mediation between the individual and the surrounding, the self and the other, as it simultaneously encompasses both singularity and plurality. “I can”—in Irigaray’s words—“breathe in my own way, but the air will never be simply mine. To breathe combines in an indissociable way being-there and being-with.”34 This fundamental association of “being-there” and “being-with” through the breath and the sharing of air refers to both physical and figurative interactions within and without, individually and collectively. An ethics of breathing thus pertains to the body and to being embodied, as both interactions and intra-actions. It presupposes an intimate and individual experience of oneself and one’s permeability to the external flux of sensations, as well as a sense of “disappearance,” or deindividualization, through the incorporation of air itself. By breathing, we experience both autonomy and commonality as we unconsciously perceive not only our own breathing patterns but also those close to us.35

Such an ethics finds expression as an embodied and tangible experience in Breath Catalogue (2014–18), a collaboration between dancers/choreographers Kate Elswit and Megan Nicely with data scientist Ben Gimpert and composer Daniel Thomas Davis. Breath Catalogue comprises a series of what the artists refer to as “curiosities,” drawing the term from the collections of natural and cultural specimens of seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities. In the case of Breath Catalogue, such curiosities are a collection of performed actions that explore the interrelation of breath and movement through manipulation and disruption.36 “Breath,” as Elswit explains, “is fundamental to us as dancers and people, and yet itself is curious—assumed and automatic but unpredictable in the ways it shifts through so many dimensions of lived experience and slips between conscious and unconscious realms.”37 Breath Catalogue expands on the use of breath patterns by contemporary dancers for timing and coordinating movements; breathing enables them to synchronize and confer intentionality on their movements, anchoring them in an awareness of the body and its modulation of the spatio-temporal continuity defined by tempo, directionality, sequence or repetition. The performers and Gimpert use experimental dance techniques together with technologies for collecting and visualizing biodata—such as wearable sensors and audio recording—in order “to make the performers’ breath palpable to an audience, engaging with performance as a laboratory in which to explore new means of cataloguing and circulating multidimensional sensory experiences, between measurement and memory.”38 Premiered in San Francisco in 2015, Breath Catalogue evolved over a period of three years by delving into such experimentation of the physical connection between breath and movement and its inherent integration with emotional states. This is the case, for instance, in the way in which Elswit and Nicely use “flocking,” an improvisation technique in “which dancers shadow one another’s movements” in changes of direction and leading: the sharing of breath patterns, as Elswit explains, allows them “to increase accuracy in positioning and particularly timing of unison movement through a synchronization of the breath as a means for synchronizing bodily movements developed in previous improvisations.”39 This could involve exaggerated inhalation augmented by the arching of the torso or sharp exhalation combined with arm movements. While the performers, as in this example, engage with “the ways in which bodies themselves already archive and retrieve the sensory information of breath experiences,”40 many of the “curiosities” that were developed in the project also responded to and kinetically engaged with data collected through biofeedback that was presented through visualizations. In the case of “flocking,” the visualization used Nicely’s live breathing data and showed particles being condensed during the inhalation and then scattered as if blown out through exhalation. In another example, “Settling Trio,” the feedback loop, as Elswit explains, was more intricate:

Nicely, wearing a sensor, sets up a settling game, in which she moves for the length of a long exhalation, then suspends movement and breath to wait for the visualization to settle before exhaling another sequence of movement. After she establishes this pattern, I [Elswit] enter at the end farthest from the projection and Nicely turns to face me. The rest of the curio extends the duet into a trio: Nicely trails my movement, which is directed by a score based on me watching the visualization of her breath animate and settle, as she watches and follows my movement that plays the game now with her breath, producing, in turn, further chains of movement. The settling game already introduces a time-shift, and the refraction through an additional breathing body extends that cycle further.41

The use of visualization has critical relevance as a means of “recomposing the living breath investigation in a manner that shares rather than shows.”42 Breath Catalogue, in other words, offers a performative approach that aims to make palpable for the audience the breath patterns of the dancers and their affect. Indeed, as Elswit argues, “to think about the sensible qualities of breath engaged as archive before an audience requires first dealing with breath as already a medium that tangles with palpability, moving between bodies at the same time as it challenges the limits of perceptibility.”43 By assuming the possibility of archiving the breath and creating a perceptible catalogue of performed patterns, Elswit does not presume that the palpability of the breath is in itself communicative but rather that it can become so by drawing the audience’s attention to its physicality as breath and movement are disarticulated and recomposed in performance. The audience is, using Irigaray’s words, asked “to attend to the breath” and be perceptive if not attuned to its physical qualities and potential meanings in the performance. In Breath Catalogue, the association argued by Irigaray of “being-there” and “being-with” enacted by the breath is brought to bear in the forms and patterns that such embodied presence and communality entail. Neither is a stable condition but rather a modifying relation that, not unlike the breath itself, adapts its pulse and depth to the shifts and changes of the internal and external environments, to their affective, cognitive, and emotional information. Breathing thus both entangles us with otherness and generates its own volatile atmosphere of connections, responses, and articulations.

To Breathe, Once More

The continuity and reciprocity that respiration generates with one’s surrounding, as Breath Catalogue suggests, also involves an entanglement of palpability and perceptibility, of affect and communication. Such reciprocity can however be disrupted when breathing becomes difficult and one struggles for air. The Life of Breath—an interdisciplinary project that addressed the interrelation of breathing and breathlessness in terms of illness and wellbeing44—focused on the embodied experience of breathlessness and its affect by bridging medical history and anthropology, philosophy, literature, and public policy. The project examined the complexity of breathlessness, incorporating emotion, association, and the existential dimensions that are part of the experience of breathing and breathlessness into an understanding of the very experience of breathlessness, especially as a pathological condition, exposing the differences and nuances denoting it.45 Hence, for instance, the analyses of the responses given by a man suffering from respiratory chronic obstructive pulmonary disease demonstrate that breathing difficulties emphasize the complex interrelation of the different qualities that breathing can take—ranging from at rest (smooth) to under exertion (rattled, gasping, painful)—with psychosomatic perceptions and articulations of the self that breathing encapsulates. Chronic respiratory problems raise the question for the individual of who is breathing. As Havi Carel observes,

In pathological breathlessness, blood oxygen levels can drop severely, leading to dizziness, fainting, shaking, excessive sweating, and a sense of doom. It is a total and overwhelming experience of loss of control and is acutely unpleasant. It removes the breathless person from the normal course of events and can cause deep anxiety, panic attack, and trauma.46

Breathlessness generates a fractured perception of the integration of body and self that further upsets the interrelationship of matter and meaning that the inhalation and exhalation of air epitomize ontologically. The sufferer feels “trapped” in the uncertainty and fear that breathlessness causes, shrinking one’s experience and imbuing every action with foreboding.47 However, insufficient diagnostic tools and the difficulty of explaining breathlessness render chronic respiratory conditions and those who suffer from them “invisible” in medical contexts and beyond.48 This book argues that such invisibility, and the disturbance of the affective and emotional connectivity established by the breath within the individual and intersubjectively, extends beyond respiratory disorders to encompass other forms of breathlessness where ecologies, politics, and violence put breathing at risk. Issues of visibility are thus key to a critical questioning of breathing. Elswit demonstrates the circulation of breath across bodies as affect, further engaging with alternations of breathing patterns to mobilize and performatively articulate the perceptive qualities and emotional resonances that accompany the disturbance and interruption of respiration, alerting us that breathlessness engenders its own affect and emotional charge, its own motion and stillness. Breathlessness thus also moves bodies. An attention to the motions and pauses of breath, to its gasps and gaps, is key to an ethical understanding of breathing and to the necessity of making breathlessness visible in order to unpack its significance and resonances. Intersubjectivity encompasses the other and by extension the relations, exchanges, and actions that bring one into contact with others, environments, and the air itself. It is a position from which to critique spatial and temporal boundaries by acknowledging the autonomy but also the intrarelational agency (between oneself and others) that underpins and comes with breathing.

This chapter started with the image of the inflating and deflating of a paper bag connected to a bellows by a transparent tube through which air moved. I’d like to conclude with another image: a series of seven discs hanging at eye level that reflect the mirror image of the viewer. When breathed upon, however, another face emerges from the thin layer of condensation, a small photographic portrait of someone else. That other image lingers for a brief moment before disappearing. Breath (1996–2000) by Columbian artist Óscar Muñoz49 reminds us of the fleeting presence of a breath and its association with the transience of life, but also of the exchange and communality it enacts at the threshold of visibility, in the vaporous space where each breath rests and evaporates. The faces that briefly appear on the discs in the midst of a breath are those of people killed in Columbia by political violence. Muñoz collected the photographic portraits from newspaper obituaries, directly alluding to the violence that mars Columbian society through a “fading illustration of human loss” that transforms “the images of war victims into self-reflections.”50 In Breath, Muñoz gives presence to those made invisible by an authoritarian regime through the unpalpable substance of one’s breath. According to ancient Mesoamerican belief systems, the breath or wind mediated between the spirit of the living and their ancestors—what was thought to be animate and inanimate matter. Muñoz’s Breath resonates with such continuity through the encounters that a breath can reveal.

As I am writing, we are in the midst of the second wave of Sars-CoV-2. Infection rates worldwide are rising and the UK has entered its second national lockdown. Muñoz’s figurative encounter can be imaginatively transposed to the current situation as we envision our self-reflection overlapping with the features of those who have died from the Sars-CoV-2 viral infection, those who struggle with breathlessness caused by it but also with other forms of suffocation. Such encounters inform what follows as an attempt to engage with the evanescence of air and to stay with the images, forms, and movements that breathing or breathlessness reveal so as to experience their affect and contend with the questions they raise. In this sense we shall attend to the breath as embodied experience, knowledge, and action.