Abstract
This commentary makes use of the affinity between the body and the element of air to come to what I call ‘a politics of the air’. The commentary uses Peter Adey’s discussion on the relationship between the air and geopolitics as a springboard to initiate a project, which wishes to reconsider the material components conventionally considered to constitute politics. The commentary first provides a general introduction expanding on Adey’s notion of chemical affects, before moving on to explore how the act of breathing forms the hidden link between the air and the body. The commentary thereby wishes to argue that it is through the act of breathing in which we can start envisaging a politics of a different substance.
Stehen, im Schatten Des Wundenmals in der Luft
Adey (2015: 55) writes that the task of his article is partly to thematically bring together a ‘diverse’ and emergent body of research on the air. What he intends to achieve ‘more substantively’ however is ‘to attune with far more precision air with the elemental, and in so doing, explore the elemental to be more than its current rendering as physico-material agency but into a different register of more than chemical affinity’. What Adey seems to be interested in is, to my understanding, a return to a revised and revived, pre-Socratic understanding of the element of air. Such an ‘anterior’ position enables Adey to decline temptations to reduce air to ‘geophysicalist epistemologies and ontologies’ (p. 55) and allows him to construct theorizations of the air as a ‘backgrounding condition, structure or “force”, but also, and just as crucially, as method of affinitive listening’ (p. 56). The intended result is therefore an ‘elemental approach’, which does not limit itself to translations of the air as ‘only’ an expression of power. This and other recent work of Adey (2014) could in fact be said to be attempts of making the air a subject worth talking about.
This objective echoes Luce Irigaray’s (1999: 5) call for a ‘remembering of the air’ as the ‘groundless foundation of metaphysics’. Such a recalling amounts however also, as she is quick to admit, to a destruction of metaphysics itself. All that is solid melts into air as ‘[n]othing maintains itself in the same way any longer in air’ (1999: 6). The air however also brings together, if only temporarily. It is ‘the soul of the visible landscape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment’ (Abram, 1996: 226). Adey translates the capacity of the air to affectively, socially and materially draw together and pull apart as ‘affinity’. Affinity comes close to what natural philosophers described as and meant by ‘the power of chemical attraction’. Adey’s application of affinity relates to ‘notions of affinity’ that see ‘thought more as a method’ and that ‘listen to unlikely affinities, marriage and disjunctions between art, industry, poetics and conflict’ (p. 56). He is thereby interested in ‘the actual forces of intimacy and attraction implied in the notion of affinity between elements, especially air but also of […] the element itself…’ (p. 60, original emphasis).
The theme of intimacy is not explicitly explored in the article. It however silently runs through the text as a thread. Human intimate affinity with the air reveals a history that goes back a good number of billions of years. Respiration, which Irigaray (1999: 42) variously and for different purposes describes as a ‘cry’, a ‘calling’ or the ‘desire’ for the air, forms the medium that allows for humanity’s first affinity with the air. Elsewhere Adey (2014: 8) is more explicit about the importance of breath and reminds us that ‘the estimates of how much air we actually breathe in a lifetime ranges from about 265 million litres upwards’. Far from being ‘nothing’, air and our affinity with it is ‘the most elementary condition of [human] existence’ (Irigaray, 1999: 162). 2 We however rarely discuss its relevance to politics. Politics is instead all-too-often the science of what Olsen (Ingold, 2012) called the ‘hard physicality’ of the world.
It is therefore commendable that Adey’s elemental reading of air challenges the critical geopolitical tradition to ‘reconsider geopolitics in relation to its constitutive materials’. Instead, he argues, following Steinberg’s writings on the seas, we might be compelled to take notice of a range of different actors and expertise ‘as they interact with and are co-constituted by the universe of mobile non-human elements [...] including ships, fish, and water molecules’. Adey addresses the heterogeneity of the relationship to the air particularly well when he discusses how the ‘air’s affinities reveal a broader system of material, political, visual representational and economic conditions for war making as well as its defence’.
The remainder of this commentary will look at the air’s affinities through more mundane lenses. I wish to explore how we can apply Adey’s aerial affinities to the politics of air in the everyday. The strategy to de-accelerate the rhythm of the breath of the discussion is, of course, also a political decision. Slowness is resistance or, indeed, it ‘is the only defence against the historical necessity of the vicious cycle of reinforcement between speed, war and the […] state’. A slowing down of breath is in meditation practises commonly identified with the ability of bodily awareness from which one regains control over mind. Attentiveness to relating to one’s air thus enables a level of autonomy over the relationship between mind and body. The idea that breath contains knowledge and therefore politics, one that follows Adey’s proposition that we perhaps ‘require other sorts […] of thought, politics and vocabulary to address and write the air as elemental’, has led Irigaray to ask for a ‘cultivation of breath’ as a means to herald a new, more spiritually informed ethics. She (2002: 74) argues that ‘breathing in a conscious and free manner is equivalent to taking charge of one’s life’.
That is not to say that one is free in choosing which air to take in. The air’s chemical composition reveals a history and a politics in itself. It is already infused with memories, chemicals and other things of the past. Neither do we passively stay within one air. We are constantly and intermittently thrown into different, new and old airs. All these different airs transcend complicated and diverse geographies of power. Sloterdijk’s Terror in the Air, which Adey mentions in his discussion on the ‘air’s explication and its apparent excess of power’s intervention’ (p. 67), is premised on the idea that the 20th century was characterized by an attack on our breathing. Sloterdijk primarily focuses on the terrorizing airs of World War I and World War II.
We have however never stopped breathing in the moments between those suffocating airs of the past. What interests me is the silent respiration of those breaths that did and do not make it into the history books. For example, the air, which is infused with memories of home, the wet air of the sea, the dry air of the desert but also the perfumed air of the shopping mall and the sanitized air of the airport and aeroplane. I am interested in the kind of ‘unregistered air’ we tend to forget and inhale unconsciously without much thought or critical reflection. These airs also hold a function of affect, performativity, identity and politics. I thereby agree with Adey’s argument that the air is not only a subject worthy of investigation at the moment it malfunctions. It is precisely the ordinary and anonymous nature of its vital workings and omnipresence that make it worthy of questioning.
The history of the air is one that is as much intertwined with the question of life as it is with the subject of death. A breath is historically as much a symbol of life as it is a reminder of human mortality. Adey’s (2014) discussion of Joseph Wrights’ famous painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump shows, for example, how scientific endeavours into the nature of the air revealed as much about the workings of life as that of death. The painting illustrates a scene in which an audience of onlookers witnesses how a bird’s gasps for oxygen in an air pump barren of it. A little bit of air is all that balances the scale between life and death. The air holds thereby as much relevance to the study of biopolitics as to thanatopolitics. It balances between the two, not only in situations of war (Sloterdijk 2009), protest or conflict (e.g. Nieuwenhuis, 2013; Theophanidis, 2013) but also, and especially, in the politics of the everyday.
The idea of ‘good air’ and the stressed biological importance of ‘sanitary’ and ‘clean’ air is intertwined with the concepts of ‘bad’ and ‘polluted’ air. Awareness that the air is both the medium that facilitates life and the thin barrier deferring death has historically provided it with great political importance. Whitehead (2009) provides a historical account of air pollution governance in Britain and shows how scientific knowledge of clean air embodied ‘regimes of atmospheric surveillance’, ‘disciplinary control’ and led to the birth of the ‘self-governing individual’ who has an ‘atmospheric self-responsibility’. His writings show that the air, and by extension human respiration, fall under the domain of the politics of the state. Politics becomes thereby something that is inhaled. It is not only the hard physicality and visibility of the constitutive materials that define the essence of what is political. A politics of the air does neither revolve only around the visible airs of conflicts or wars. A politics of the air could equally, and perhaps especially, be centred on the concealed thing we unknowingly inhale, exhale and share with others and the world on an everyday basis (Figure 1).
Image taken by the author of a no-smoking sign displayed on a shop window in an indoor mall in Coventry, UK.
The stuff we breathe is not necessarily exclusively disciplinary; we can, as discussed by Irigaray, decide to resist and slow the rhythm of our breath and regain control over the pace of our breathing. Paul Celan (1968) dedicated an entire volume on what he called Atemwende, a ‘counterword’ (Gegenwort), referring to a metaphorical turning of breath. The disruption of breath heralds a brief pausing moment (Augenblick) in the rhythm of the body’s respiratory machine. It is this moment when speech is suspended in which language is replaced by silence and listening. The turning of breath, for Celan (2003 [1960]: 47) himself closely related to the actual doing of poetry, is a transformative exercise through which one becomes aware of the fact that we breathe independently from others. As long as we do not breathe in an autonomous manner, not only do we live badly but we encroach upon others in order to live. We remain confused with others, forming a sort of mass, a sort of tribe, where each individual has not yet conquered his personal life but lives on a collective and social respiration, on an unconscious breathing of the group, beginning with that of the family. (Irigaray, 2002: 74)
The air is because of its very nature, characterized by its links of intimacy between body and ecology, life and death, necessity and ephemerality, an element that challenges the temporal pace and the geographically imagined fixed and concrete order of politics. Adey takes this point up in his discussion of Carl Schmitt’s elemental politics to address the German thinker’s own anxiety over the totality of the air. How does the air relate to Schmitt’s own conservative earthbound nomos? Can the air be politically ordered, or can it, like the sea, ‘never be a repository of order, notwithstanding the perpetual desire to order it[?]’ (Steinberg, 2011: 273).
It is, as Adey argues, following the work of John Sallis, precisely ‘the “indefinite” in the elemental, its particular giganticism … what constitutes the elemental as elemental’ (p. 70). The ungraspable, indeterminate and yet all-too-intimate essence of air grants it its identification with freedom and the possibility of autonomy from the way we currently look at politics. Bachelard (1988) equated the air with the thinker of wind, birds and ‘aerial being’ (aérien, or perhaps better Luftwesen). He aptly described a ‘Nietzschean air’; an air of ‘infinitive substance that is crossed in a flash with a sense of offensive and triumphant freedom like a bolt of lightning, an eagle, an arrow, or an imperious, sovereign glance’ (1988: 136, original emphasis). The air’s affinity with the possibility of imagining freedom as unconcealed is perhaps exactly what makes it truly elemental.