How do we start from breath?

Worlds are crushed and born in the space of a breath. Seldom has this been more evident than it is now. We live in a time in which the struggles that matter most are those illuminated by breath and its absence. Breath has existed as little more than a subconscious fact of life, a mute background of being human, a biological baseline. When it appears, we see breath as affect, often an incidental dimension of capital briefly appearing in the exhaust vapours of labour power or the affirmative celebratory gasps that mark the act of consumption.

Where it does pronounce itself, breath tends to exist as a cinematic figure – an affect to discipline mass emotional responses. Used mainly in the affirmative tone, it trades on its innocence – love, endearment, commitment, overcoming all odds. Taking one’s breath away has rarely had the connotations it does today. The commonsense in which breath has dwelt for at least a century has suddenly begun to collapse. Such a palliative reading today sits awkwardly in the context of the pandemic and its stealing of breath in the millions. Becoming aware of breathing is more than anything to become aware of death. We sense breath as such when confronted with images and maps of the mass death and illness, and are reminded of this in the resistance of breathing through masks. In the nagging possibility of its absence, breath has become a prominent figure in knowing our collective vulnerability.

But breath reaches many dimensions of our collective present, well beyond the pandemic. To be aware of the weight of breath is to illuminate the fact that, for many, breathing has indeed never been a given. The lack of cultural visibility or significance that has been afforded to breath has also kept largely invisible certain modes of existence and structures of violence in which breath has long been the site and signifier of a sinister necropolitics – one that undergirds and makes possible the banality of capitalist breath-as-affirmation. From the uneven exposure of certain bodies to environmental and biological violence to the class violence of ‘essential work’; from the withholding of breath for those without access to private medical care to the relentless increase in parts-per-million slowly reshaping how we will breathe in the future, breath reveals much about a capitalist world that has long been predicated on death.

Breath is the most prevalent target of state violence. It is the primary site on which the state suppresses its people. The weight of one human body concentrated on another’s neck, the casual terror in which two seemingly incidental phenomena meet: gravity extinguishes breath. While this act is a haunting reminder of the murderous origins of police in the US, breath is also the site of a more indiscriminate form of oppression. Expired gas clouding city streets with banned chemical munitions, again, takes aim at breath. In this sadistic circle, we are made undeniably aware of the presences of breath itself as we bear witness to the power of the state to take it away.

But in all this, breath offers an incredible power to connect us immediately to shared, collective worlds long suppressed under the cold war of capitalist realism – a kind of ‘counter-platform’, perhaps. In attending to breath, we can no longer ignore the environmental violence of climate catastrophe when breathing under the weight of blood red skies whose ashes travel thousands of miles: in breath, we sense forests and witness their burning; we see breath as a continental figure. We can no longer look away from the racial and class violence that makes breath in certain neighbourhoods, districts and cities a toxic activity: breath is an urban condition. Nor does an attention to breath allow us to separate this invisible, atmospheric violence from the systemic brutality of another white cop stealing the breath of another black body: breath is the object of social terror. Yet it was also breath that was pronounced in the lightness of air that appeared in the April skies around the world as the collective consumption of fossil fuels dropped to record lows. Breathing, here, became an act of time travel, allowing us to visit atmospheres long since past while illuminating those that had not yet been born.

In this sense, breath is a planetary figure. Learning to sense breath as such is to become sensitive to how it makes visible other worlds: those suppressed, transparent worlds that nonetheless have persisted for centuries amidst the asphyxiation of life under capital.

What possibilities reside in breath as a figure of world making?