The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life: Niches of Liberation 3031448324, 9783031448324

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The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life Niches of Liberation

Leszek Koczanowicz

The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life

Leszek Koczanowicz

The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life Niches of Liberation

Leszek Koczanowicz Faculty of Humanities SWPS University Warsaw, Poland

ISBN 978-3-031-44832-4    ISBN 978-3-031-44833-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

Introduction: The Return of the Body The launching of ChatGPT in November 2022 stirred a heated debate on the opportunities, limitations, and risks of artificial intelligence (AI). Some of these issues are quite obvious, such as the fears that AI is soon going to replace a range of traditional jobs, including those that have so far been thought of as being creative and therefore immune to the jeopardies of technological civilization. These fears are indeed considerable, as suggested by a survey which found that 62% of job-seekers were anxious about their future work lives.1 Using AI in politics may breed equally devastating effects. As I have written elsewhere, employing self-learning software and bots to mobilize public opinion through setting up false, that is, non-human, accounts on social media has been a patent practice for some time now. In what is a more long-term and robust campaign, bots of various nations clash to produce convenient Wikipedia entries.2 We can easily imagine that a continued upsurge of such maneuvers can indeed put democratic  Lydia DePillis and Steve Lohr, “Tinkering with ChatGPT, Workers Wonder: Will This Take My Job?” The New York Times, March 26, 2023. 2  Leszek Koczanowicz, Anxiety and Lucidity: Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest (London: Routledge, 2020). 1

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societies at risk by destroying or distorting debate while at the same time supporting dictatorships and authoritarianisms disguised as democracies. Besides the identification of these immediate and acute effects of the widespread introduction of AI, there are more refined and subtle approaches that seek to fathom the relevance of AI to the very human existence, the place of humans on the Earth, and the future of the civilization they have developed. This train of thought is epitomized by a seminal essay authored by the distinguished scholars Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin, published in The New  York Times.3 The text begins with a reference to a study in which seven hundred prominent experts were polled; half of the respondents stated that there was a likelihood of 10% that humanity would disappear or its potential would be severely diminished as a result of the dissemination of AI. According to the authors, this survey gestures at a looming threat which we do not realize is there. We do not agree to have new medications put on the market before they have gone through an array of complicated clinical tests. Yet consent was given to the immediate and unrestricted introduction of AI. Admonitions against the purported hazards of AI are anchored in a certain vision of the human: In the beginning was the word. Language is the operating system of human culture. From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer code. A.I.’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By gaining mastery of language, A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to holy sepulchers.4

Furthermore, the authors emphasize that the human experience of reality is but rarely immediate, and that AI is able to make us see the external world the way it finds suitable: Humans often don’t have direct access to reality. We are cocooned by culture, experiencing reality through a cultural prism. Our political views are  Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin, “You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills,” The New York Times, March 24, 2023. 4  Harari, Harris, and Raskin, “You Can Have.” 3

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shaped by the reports of journalists and the anecdotes of friends. Our sexual preferences are tweaked by art and religion. That cultural cocoon has hitherto been woven by other humans. What will it be like to experience reality through a prism produced by nonhuman intelligence?5

Hence, generally speaking, to introduce restrictions on the use of AI appears to be the only solution giving us opportunity to gain some time and, in this way, to avoid a kind of demise in which “a curtain of illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away—or even realize it is there.”6 While some of these warnings are certainly on the mark, it is something of a concern to realize that the authors rely on the vision of a thoroughly disembodied human being, a human being that is merely a language model and that, as a result of this disembodiment, dwells in an illusory world of culture. This is the very concept of the human being that has prevailed in multiple cultures over centuries and has been powerfully dominant in the culture and philosophy of the West. The authors themselves refer to Plato’s cave, Descartes’ demon, and Buddhist māyā as meaningful hallmarks of such an approach to the human. Taking this vision as their point of departure, they fabricate an expanded narrative of risks caused by AI. I cite their argument to show to what extent the human being tends to be reduced to the mind—thinking—alone. Crucially, this is not the only truth of humans and the culture they produced, or at least not the whole truth. Quite a different image, one of a human being that acts and changes the world, has lingered in the penumbra of this overriding picture. The active stance is celebrated in Faust’s famous monologue in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s drama: Tis written: “In the Beginning was the Word.” Here am I balked: who, now, can help afford? The Word?—impossible so high to rate it; And otherwise must I translate it. If by the Spirit I am truly taught. Then thus: “In the Beginning was the Thought.”  Harari, Harris, and Raskin, “You Can Have.”  Harari, Harris, and Raskin, “You Can Have.”

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This first line let me weigh completely, Lest my impatient pen proceed too fleetly. Is it the Thought which works, creates, indeed? “In the Beginning was the Power,” I read. Yet, as I write, a warning is suggested, That I the sense may not have fairly tested. The Spirit aids me: now I see the light! “In the Beginning was the Act,” I write.7

“In the Beginning was the Act” is an assertion that compels us to understand the human being in entirely different terms than in the dualistic theories, where thought and action are dissociated, whereby the former is accorded pre-eminence. To retrace the history of the shadow of these concepts from the ancient materialists to Spinoza, the Enlightenment materialists, Marx, pragmatism, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to contemporary psychological, neuropsychological, and philosophical conceptions is nothing short of tempting, but such an overview is of course completely unfeasible here. Although the specific solutions proposed in these different frameworks vary widely, all of them paint the human being as an acting and integrated creature that not only perceives the world through the lens of culture but also actively molds this world. This inevitably entails a re-appreciation of the body, the abolishment of the drastic body/mind distinction, and the recognition of corporeality as determining what the human being becomes. This vision of the human being also applies to the social world. A vast majority of political theories primarily explored the world of ideas, which, it was tacitly assumed, initiated action, and that in turn translated into another version of the world of ideas. Major breakthroughs in this regard were marked by the work of Michel Foucault and also of Pierre Bourdieu. The former revealed that, in modernity, the production of docile bodies made it possible to control minds. In a well-known passage in his book on the birth of the prison, Foucault reversed the hackneyed metaphor of the body as the prison of the soul:  Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, trans. Bayard Taylor (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005) (electronic edition), I.iii. 7

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[T]he man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A “soul” inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.8

No matter how much of a game-changer this observation was, the body was notably treated in it as a site of oppressive operations of power, where the mind became ultimately captive. The body was framed in a like manner by the latter French thinker, Pierre Bourdieu, who built on an entirely different theoretical foundation to show emphatically that class divisions in society were mirrored in the forms of bodiliness, shaping its habitus. Bourdieu himself explicitly explained that the concept of habitus aimed first and foremost “to break with the intellectualist (and intellectualocentric) philosophy of action.”9 However, while he pushed corporeality to the foreground, he insisted that the body reproduced class divisions across the spheres of its functioning. The body’s social and political activity provides a starting point for my argument in this book. While I acknowledge and value the work of the thinkers mentioned above, I adopt a different theoretical perspective. In my approach, bodiliness is considered a vehicle for freedom and emancipation. This idea is rooted in American pragmatism, with its classics— John Dewey and George Herbert Mead—demonstrating that interactions of the organism and the environment transform both parties to this process, constructing both mind and self, as well as the setting in which the action unfolds. Although Dewey and Mead made an invaluable contribution to the development of social thought, they did not generate a coherent conception of the acting body. This failure was only redressed by the contemporary neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman, whose studies are both a starting point for and an important component of the theoretical framework of my reasoning in this book.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 30. 9  Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 120. 8

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Shusterman’s idea of somaesthetics as an interdisciplinary field that emerges from philosophy and is dedicated to the practices of somatic enhancement marks a turning point in Western reflection on the body. Somaesthetics regards the body as an ethical and aesthetic project to be actively engaged in. I reason along these lines to illuminate the relevance of thus-conceived corporeality in the social and political spheres. Capturing this significance is premised on looking beyond the individual and locating the individual bodiliness project within a broader—communal—context. I refer to this collective aspect of somaesthetics as somapower. This concept is supposed to distinguish my position, inspired by Shusterman’s pragmatist thought as it is, from the various iterations of biopower, which are proliferating today. My theoretical goal primarily lies in conveying the meaning of the body as a vehicle for emancipation and liberation, rather than merely as a site of the oppressive workings of power. To achieve this goal, I need to interrogate some of the key notions cherished in contemporary political theories. In doing this, my key point is to examine politics through the lens of everyday life, because it is mainly in this sphere of human activity that the body features as an emancipatory medium. This approach requires overcoming some petrified schemes that organize explorations of political life. First of all, the political sphere must not be regarded as an autonomous being that is governed by its own set of laws. With this in mind, I scrutinize people’s everyday relationships, the common matters that preoccupy them, and the places where they routinely appear for signs of protest against the existing social order and/or the ways of doing politics. I call such areas niches of emancipation or, synonymously, niches of liberation, dubbing the mechanisms that make them work the microphysics of emancipation. Throughout this book, I depict the operations of these niches, which, while often not explicitly political, are productive of alternative models of life and heterodox accounts of social reality that are eventually capable of making political change happen. One of my motives for producing this book was the memory of the authoritarian regime under which I lived a

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considerable portion of my life. I remember the devices, ploys, sidesteps, and contrivances that we marshaled to find fissures in the system and set up in them what I now dub niches of liberation. I also remember the process in which activities undertaken in such places, cultural events, abstract discussions about books, and the like pursuits all of a sudden, or so it seemed, aggregated into strictly political gestures and content. After the transition to democracy and the free-market economy, I saw, to my astonishment, that nearly identical mechanisms were at work in democratic societies. Of course, those avail themselves of quite different measures to impose ideologies, but this does not remove the need for establishing places of emancipation where people can feel a waft of freedom from the dominant hegemony, even if only on a tiny scale and for a fleeting moment. I do not investigate this issue in much detail in this volume, but it certainly deserves further studies, and I hope to take up this challenge soon. The three chapters that make up this volume offer readers a close look at the logic of my argument. In Chap. 1, I analyze my fundamental concepts, specifically, somapower, the microphysics of emancipation, and niches of emancipation in the context of the politics of everyday life. In Chap. 2, I apply these concepts to interpret social and political life in authoritarian systems and in liberal democracy. In Chap. 3, I focus on the pandemic, which I examine as a liminal example of how the body functions under threat and social isolation. I wrap up the book with a brief conclusion that brings together my major insights. While being a self-standing study, this book is informed by some of the ideas I developed in two of my previous publications: Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (2008) and Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (2016), and, as it were, it caps my series of three politics—inquiries into three different aspects of today’s political life. The research that went into this book was funded from the National Science Center Poland’s grant: Somapower and Microphysics of Emancipation: Toward a Culture of Liberation (No 2018/29/B/

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HS2/00041). I am grateful to the National Science Center for the support offered when my research was in progress. As already explained, my research draws on the concepts of Richard Shusterman, with whom I was able to consult my ideas on multiple occasions. I owe a lot to these discussions and to his kind support in carrying out this project, for which I am deeply grateful to him. Wroclaw, Poland

Leszek Koczanowicz

References Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J.D.  Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

DePillis, Lydia, and Steve Lohr. 2023. “Tinkering with ChatGPT, Workers Wonder: Will This Take My Job?” The New York Times, March 26. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 2005. Faust. Translated by Bayard Taylor. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Harari, Yuval, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin. 2023. “You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills.” The New York Times, March 24. Koczanowicz, Leszek. 2020. Anxiety and Lucidity: Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest. London: Routledge.

Contents

1 Concepts:  Somapower, the Microphysics of Emancipation, and the Politics of Everyday Life  1 1.1 Blurred Boundaries in Lethargic Modernity   2 1.2 Politics, the Political, and Everyday Life: The Trouble with Definitions   3 1.3 The Microphysics of Emancipation and Niches of Liberation  18 1.4 The Political Body: Somaesthetics and Somapower  29 References 39 2 Applications:  Everyday Life, the Body, and Strategies of Resistance 43 2.1 Niches of Emancipations as Strategies of Resistance in Totalitarianism and Democracy  43 2.2 The Political Body and Niches of Emancipation  59 2.3 Two Examples: A Poet’s Apartment and the Women’s Strike  76 Miron Białoszewski: The Poet of Everydayness   76 The Women’s Strike: The Somapower Lessons of Lost Political Battles   80 xiii

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2.4 Conclusion  85 References 86 3 The  Pandemic and the Politics of the Body 91 3.1 The End of the Pandemic: Relief and Anxiety  92 3.2 What We Have Learned About the Body: The Lessons of the Pandemic 103 3.3 Conclusion: There Was a Pandemic 117 References121 4 C  onclusions125 I ndex129

1 Concepts: Somapower, the Microphysics of Emancipation, and the Politics of Everyday Life

Abstract  This chapter explains and discusses the main concepts that underpin my argument in the book. First, the relationship between everyday life and politics is explained in the context of the distinction between politics and the political. Subsequently, the key notions of the microphysics of emancipation and niches of emancipation are elucidated. These concepts foster a space in which the body can become a vehicle for emancipation. Finally, based on Richard Shusterman’s framework of somaesthetics, the concept of somapower is crafted to capture the body’s capacity to liberate itself from oppressive social conditions. Inherently liberatory, somapower is explicitly opposed to biopower, where the body is a site of oppression and manipulation. Keywords  Politics, the political, everyday life • Microphysics of emancipation • Niches of liberation • Somaesthetics, somapower • Political body

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Koczanowicz, The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1_1

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1.1 Blurred Boundaries in Lethargic Modernity The body, everyday life, and emancipation are three notions that to a large extent determine the frames within which we live our lives. Examples of this nodal connection are obvious; one might even say trivial. The pandemic, which has recast the lives of most, if not all, people on the planet, can also be captured in these three concepts. The defense of the body, or more precisely, the control of the body in order to defend it. Changes to the rituals of everyday life imposed by political powers that be, but also implemented with conviction by at least some of those who yielded to them. And the crucial question whether there were any germs of emancipation buried in the pandemic. I will answer this question in one of the following chapters; here, let me only observe that the pandemic has revealed how elusive the division between the purely political and purely personal spheres is, and how easily the line between the two becomes blurred, if not downright obliterated. This blurring of the boundaries that were once enshrined as the hard core of liberal democracy is also evident in all the movements rallying to defend the biologically conceived body, its subsistence, its autonomy, and its integrity. The Black Lives Matter movement is an evident example, committed to the protection of corporeality, as it is. It is from this central preoccupation that its other demands stem: reform of the police, radical change in the political system, and reforging of cultural-psychological attitudes. The issue of reproductive rights also illustrates the intersection of the private and political spheres, where the activist focus is on the protection of the female body against the intrusion of the state apparatus. The mass demonstrations that swept across Poland in the wake of the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling that practically banned abortion carried the seeds of a proto-populist movement pursuing an all-out repair of democratic procedures. The occurrence and study of these and similar social developments compel a thorough revision of the classical notions of liberal political philosophy, which no longer correspond to social reality. Liberalism and socialism, the engines that once set in motion the forceful transformation

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of the world called modernity, seem to have stopped working. Modernity is slowly dying down, sinking in lethargic slumber. The emergent forms of life, including political life, have not found their own language yet. To propose some new ways of describing them is what this chapter, as well as this book as a whole, seeks to do.

1.2 Politics, the Political, and Everyday Life: The Trouble with Definitions The purpose of this part is to establish the connection between two vast domains: politics and everyday life. Each of them has its own extensive literature, which is basically impossible for one person to go through, let alone master. If I anyway decided to address this issue, it was because I saw a lot of misunderstanding coming from both sides of the equation. Regarding the concept of politics, there is an ever stronger tendency to treat politics as something above, or at least beyond, everyday life. The common distinction between “politics” and “the political” (French: la politique and le politique; German: die Politik and das Politische ) means that these two dimensions—politics and everyday life—find themselves in different ontological spaces. Carl Schmitt is considered the founding father of this opposition. The Concept of the Political, his seminal work where this binary was first articulated, has been dissected and interpreted so many times and in so many different fashions that it is sufficient here to list the main tenets of his approach.1 Schmitt’s main purpose in introducing the division into politics and the political was to discredit liberal democracy. Liberal democracy, as Tracy Strong explains in her “Foreword” to Schmitt’s book, cannot survive for three reasons: First, it is a system which rests on compromise; hence all of its solutions are in the end temporary, occasional, never decisive. Second, such arrangements can never resolve the claims of equality inherent in democracy. By  Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 41–3.

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the universalism implicit in its claims for equality, democracy challenges the legitimacy of the political order, as liberal legitimacy rests on discussion and the compromise of shifting majority rules. Third, liberalism will tend to undermine the possibility of the political in that it wishes to substitute procedure for struggle. Thus, last, legitimacy and legality cannot be the same; indeed, they stand in contradiction to each other.2

From my perspective, the criticism of liberal democracy as based on dialogue and compromise is Schmitt’s most important claim. Since these features of liberal democracy are, as I have shown elsewhere,3 the universalization of everyday life practices, Schmitt must impose a strict division between everyday life and politics. Consequently, he defines the political in terms of a friend/enemy dichotomy, which transcends all dimensions and aspects of everyday activities because, in his definition, the political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.4

Politics is then a separate sphere that by default excludes any “normal” relationships that are woven into the texture of our social life. All other interpersonal relations can be inscribed in the political, in as far as they can be used for antagonistic potential. Schmitt reasons: Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings  Tracy Strong, “Foreword,” In Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ix – xxviii, on p. xv. 3  Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 4  Schmitt, Concept, 27. 2

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e­ ffectively according to friend and enemy. The political does not reside in the battle itself, which possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws, but in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy.5

“[A] mode of behavior […] being able to correctly distinguish between the real friend and the real enemy” is a key phrase, in my view, because taken literally it reduces politics to a subjective phenomenon. Of course, this subjectivity can be curbed or seemingly avoided by appealing to overarching objective goals, for example, human nature or objectified culture. However, in such a case, the autonomy of the political may be called into question. Moreover, this also begs the question of the relationship between the practices of everyday life and the political. It is clear that daily pursuits may have an antagonistic component to them, but it is also clear that, as I have argued elsewhere, any society, even a totalitarian one, needs everyday dialogue to exist.6 Schmitt seems to have ignored this positive aspect altogether, as Ágnes Heller demonstrates: In this vision actions undertaken on behalf of something and not at the same time against someone, are, by definition, unpolitical; so are speech acts aiming at mutual understanding. My main objection to Schmitt’s version of the concept of the political is not that it is one-sided […] but that it acquires its philosophical thrust from exclusion. It is therefore more than radical: it is an outright tyrannical formulation of the concept of the political.7

This tyrannical formulation is, partly at least, I think, a fallout from the strict division between the political and the everyday. One would be hard-pressed to deny that there is room for compromise and negotiation in day-to-day politics, but the concept of the political as the constitutive condition of day-to-day politics forestalls such practices. The empirical  Schmitt, Concept, 37.  Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue. 7  Ágnes Heller, “The Concept of the Political Revisited,” In Political Theory Today, ed. David Held (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 330–43, on p. 333. 5 6

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politics in place must always be described as infected by trivial, apolitical practices that obscure the explicit essence of the political, which is erected into a more or less “transcendental” phenomenon from such a perspective. Moreover, for Schmitt, any kind of such normal human relationships is dangerous to the political, and to some extent to politics as well, because it leads to what he calls “depoliticization,” that is, finding an apparently neutral ground that would remain outside the political struggle. Schmitt views modern European political history as a series of failed attempts at identifying such a neutral ground.8 Theology, metaphysics, and technology seemed eligible candidates, but they have all fallen short. A radical example of depoliticization is to be found in the totalitarian state—the Soviet state—in which all areas of social life are entirely submitted to the power of the state, and the economy becomes the dominant sphere of social life. In such a state, the concept of the political dies out, since the state is identical with society. The antagonistic potential disappears, just as the political disappears. To restate, Schmitt equates the political with antagonism and liberal democracy with rational consensus. If the totalitarian state represents the opposite of liberal democracy, as it controls all the dimensions of social life by force, while liberal democracy pretends to control nothing, both trigger the atrophy of politics, as its conditions (the political) dissipate. The fear of depoliticization also haunts the models that seek to improve contemporary democratic practices with recourse to Schmitt’s ideas. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic democracy is perhaps the most compelling, albeit controversial, proposal in this category. To distinguish politics from the political is crucial to Mouffe: I have proposed the distinction between “the political” and “politics.” “The political” refers to this dimension of antagonism which can take many forms and can emerge in diverse social relations. It is a dimension that can never be eradicated. “Politics,” on the other hand, refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order

 Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” In Schmitt, Concept, 80–96.

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and to organize human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflicting, since they are affected by the dimension of “the political.”9

Following Schmitt, Mouffe accepts the necessity of the conflictual nature of the political: “Consensus in a liberal-democratic society is—and will always be—the expression of a hegemony and the crystallization of power relations.”10 However, she argues that this antagonistic potential is mitigated to some extent by the principles of democratic politics. As a result of such an attenuation, antagonism turns into agonism and an enemy into an opponent, enabling people to reach a “conflictual consensus.”11 The political program that emerges is the radicalization of democracy: The fundamental difference between the “dialogical” and the “agonistic” perspectives is that the aim of the latter is a profound transformation of the existing power relations and the establishment of a new hegemony. This why it can properly be called “radical.” To be sure, it is not the revolutionary politics of the jacobin type, but neither is it the liberal one of competing interests within a neutral terrain or the discursive formation of a democratic consensus.12

Mouffe is certainly on the mark in her criticism of the threat to liberal democracy that comes from underestimating the antagonistic/agonistic potential of democratic politics. This danger is palpably exemplified by the rise of right-wing populist movements, which sometimes contest the rule of the democratic state. However, her assertion that liberal democracy only needs formal principles to function is questionable. In my view, a democratic society needs “something more” to exist, and it derives its strength from the daily interactions of life, the daily dialogical relationships that largely determine the conditions and rules of political struggles. If looked at from this angle, liberal democracy appears to rely not so

9  Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London and New  York: Verso, 2013), 28. 10  Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 49. 11  Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 52–3. 12  Mouffe, Political, 52.

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much on consensus, as rather on mutual understanding and non-­ consensual dialogue.13 However, if this perspective is adopted, whether the sphere of mutual understanding can be harmonized with politics or not remains an open question. Political life is undeniably replete with aggression and antagonism and, undeniably as well, this aggressiveness needs one or another concept of order and rules as its limit. Perhaps the greatest puzzle for political theorists to solve is how these contradictory moments of social life can coexist in the same space. The answer offered by Schmitt and his followers is that antagonism is the constitutive moment of the political. Therefore, episodes of cooperation, which are as a matter of fact common in everyday life and also occur in politics, are incidental and consequently irrelevant to the political. Paul Ricoeur, in his landmark work “The Political Paradox,” reversed Schmitt’s position and made the rule-based order constitutive of the political (le politique) or politics (la politique). However, he agreed with Schmitt that what he called “political alienation” was far from any ordinary human relations: “[P]olitical alienation is not reducible to another, but is constitutive of human existence, and, in this sense, […] the political mode of existence entails the breach between the citizen’s abstract life and the concrete life of the family and of work.”14 Ricoeur wrote these words in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s horrifying invasion of Hungary in November 1956 to illustrate the tension between the shared perception of the common good or justice (the political) and the struggle for power (politics). The political paradox is that even though the pushes and pulls of these two factors have opposite vectors, they are both essential to the operations of society. Given this, Ricoeur insists: It is necessary to hold out against the temptation to oppose two styles of political reflection, one which stresses the rationality of polity (le politique), drawing upon Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hegel, the other emphasizing the violence and untruth of power, following the Platonic critique of the  Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue.  Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” In Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 247–70, on p. 260. 13 14

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“tyrant,” the Machiavellian apology of the “prince,” and the Marxist critique of “political alienation.” This paradox must be retained: that the greatest evil adheres to the greatest rationality, that there is political alienation because polity (le politique) is relatively autonomous.15

Thus, the existence of society is premised on rationality and freedom instituted by the state, while at the same time it requires violence and power, which are also attributed to the state. In other words, while no society can exist without a minimal social order, which must be stable enough to withstand various forms of political turmoil, such an order does not prevent political evil, but even presupposes it. How is a democratic state at all possible then? Ricoeur’s answer is that the only way to maintain a democratic political order is to promote and develop dialogue between different groups: “[I]t is just as certain that discussion is a vital necessity for the State; through discussion it is given orientation and impetus; discussion curbs its tendency to abuse power. Democracy is discussion.”16 Discussion, which I prefer calling dialogue, is an integral part of the democratic order. Discussion makes it possible for citizens to collectively decide on the political order amidst the variety of divergent viewpoints brought in by individuals and groups. The organization of debate is essential, and in a democratic state political parties are tasked with this responsibility. Ricoeur’s implicit, though never actually articulated, idea in the essay is that democratic discussion can soften, or even abolish, the distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique), especially since the state of free debate is opposed to the totalitarian state, where debate is non-existent or at best illusory. As mentioned above, “The Political Paradox” was designed as a critique of the socialist state with its abuses of power, with Ricoeur impugning the concept of one-party state, a typical model of the socialist political order. This political organization must curtail any genuine debate, as it intrinsically involves a confrontation of different, often hostile, points of view. To effect this blockage, the single-party state must prevent citizens from 15 16

 Ricoeur, “Political Paradox,” 248–9 (italics original).  Ricoeur, “Political Paradox,” 270 (italics original).

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exercising their right to freedom. Freedom, as Ricoeur points out in the closing sentence of his essay, is the core problem of politics: “whether the State founds freedom by means of its rationality, or whether freedom limits the passions of power through its resistance.”17 In terms of my argument, two issues are pivotal in Ricoeur’s reasoning. One of them is his preoccupation with freedom, which indicates that, while insisting on a clear division between le politique and la politique, Ricoeur finds in freedom a concept that unifies the two spheres, at least in the sense that freedom is the axis around which all actions and discourses revolve in both. The other issue is Ricoeur’s insistence that debate forms the core of the democratic order. The two issues are intertwined, as defending freedom is at the same time defending free debate, which needs unfettered individuals capable of expressing their opinions openly. Yet Ricoeur must face the quandary where the political (le politique) generates the rules of political order, thus making society possible, while politics (la politique) introduces violence, strife, and conflict into society. These two facets of society are dialectically linked, as each presupposes the other. Violence is only possible if there is an established order that it could destroy or undermine. The meaning of the social order can only be grasped when confronted with violence. When the two moments are pitted against each other, everyday life must side with the order, despite the fact that it is defined by principles external to everyday life. Ricoeur attributes both conflict (politics) and the political to the state as a political subject, whereby the state becomes hypostatized as the sole source of politics in its composite sense encompassing the political as well; at the same time, everyday life remains exterior to politics. Even though Ricoeur’s approach, unlike Schmitt’s, leaves some margin for harmonious social life, it reproduces Schmitt’s notion of the inevitability of conflict as the main form of political activity. Political extremism and exclusion are, as Heller rightly notes, inscribed in almost all conceptions of what is political. She views Hannah Arendt as an exception insofar that Arendt is attached to liberal democracy. For all her appreciation of Arendt’s overall political allegiance, Heller exposes inconsistencies in her thought as it also exhibits an obsession with exclusion. In this sense,  Ricoeur, “Political Paradox,” 270 (italics original).

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Arendt’s concepts are aligned with the radical trend in political philosophy. Heller clarifies that: Again, it is not the resolute one-sidedness of Arendt’s political vision that I question here; I rather take issue with her self-created dilemma, namely a commitment to democracy on the one hand, and an exclusion of a wide variety of issues men and women perceive as political affairs of the greatest urgency in their daily lives on the other. This obsession with the exclusively political, as well as the disregard for “merely daily practices” is a typical problematic feature of the radical branch of political philosophy.18

In my view, Arendt’s exclusionary stance is informed by the same factor as Schmitt’s—a radical break between the everyday and politics, where the latter is regarded as merely a form of the political. Thus, if we consider politics to be an extension of everyday life practices, we must endorse politics as a mixture of pursuits that can be valued differently: those of cooperation and those of competition and even aggression. The concept of the political helps us remove purported impurities from this mosaic of activities, but this comes at the price of espousing a strong a priori assumption that real politics (the political) is antagonism, as in Schmitt, or the pursuit of values in the public sphere, as in Arendt. Given this, I subscribe to Heller’s appraisal that “they [radical philosophers] have all ended up by excluding large territories of the political from the concept of the political. Worse still, many of them ended up in excluding ‘the others,’ that is, whole human groups, from the political domain. This was the result of supplying a substantive political definition of the concept of the political.”19 Of course, according to Heller, a simple dismissal of the notion of the political is not a viable solution, because “[t]he political philosophy of an epoch without political classes, one of increasing complexity and increasing opacity, needs a concept of the political. This concept has to be substantively, but not exclusively, defined. Moreover, the substantive definition must not be political in nature.”20 In search of this definition, Heller elucidates that “men and women can thus  Heller, “Concept,” 336.  Heller, “Concept,” 337. 20  Heller, “Concept,” 337. 18 19

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politicize all issues which affect the conditions of the use of their potential freedoms in non-political institutions as well as in daily life […] The actors themselves decide whether or not a particular issue should be brought into the public space.”21 Having offered this observation, Heller goes on to specify what “the political” means in her framework: “The practical realization of the universal value of freedom in the public domain is the modern concept of the political. The concept defines the domain of ‘the political’. Whatever enters this field becomes political; whatever exits from it ceases to be political.”22 In terms of my book, the salient point of Heller’s approach is that she directly connects the concept of the political and everyday life: The concept of the political which has been suggested here links politics with the daily life of men and women. Modern political philosophy need not be a dithyramb about the Great Event writ large nor a choreography for exceptional political movements. Although politics can be pleasing or displeasing, modern political actors and thinkers should not give preference to aesthetic values, such as elegance, sublimity or perfection over freedom in case of conflict. It is time to bid farewell to the legacy of our aristocratic ancestors.23

For Heller, then, the decision on what is and what is not political is rather a matter of a tangle of contingent circumstances, which are never arranged upon a preconceived pattern. In this way, she reiterates John Dewey’s idea that the lines between what is public and what is private are relative and depend on the context in which actions take place: When A and B carry on a conversation together the action is a transaction: both are concerned in it; its results pass, as it were, across from one to the other. One or other or both may be helped or harmed thereby. But, presumably, the consequences of advantage and injury do not extend beyond A and B; the activity lies between them; it is private. Yet if it is found that the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two directly  Heller, “Concept,” 340.  Heller, “Concept,” 340 (italics original). 23  Heller, “Concept,” 343. 21 22

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c­ oncerned, that they affect the welfare of many others, the act acquires a public capacity, whether the conversation be carried on by a king and his prime minister or by Catalina and a fellow conspirator or by merchants planning to monopolize a market.24

In Dewey’s view, what defines the public sphere is that interplays between various social actors not only have impact on the parties involved, but also bear effects on other individuals and groups. The public for Dewey, Robert Westbrook writes, consists of “all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transaction to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.”25 Unlike Heller, Dewey does not single out any particular value as determining the public sphere; nor does he assume that there is such a value in the first place. Dewey developed his conception of society in a critical exchange with Walter Lippmann, whose influential book Public Opinion (1922)26 argued for the conclusive role of experts in deciding on most social issues. Lippmann averred that intricacies of social and political life in modern societies made ordinary citizens unable to deal with most of the problems affecting their lives. Given this, these issues should be conceptualized and solved by politicians in collaboration with publicists. Dewey fervently disputed this viewpoint and, as Westbrook notes, claimed that society was in fact always a plural noun. In Dewey’s account, societies, or rather constellations of different societies, arose time and again in response to new kinds of transactions, and the state, the embodiment of the public movement, was constantly being reconstructed and reshaped. Dewey even contended that whenever a newly organized public appeared, a new state was created. I believe that this Deweyan perspective stems from the pragmatist idea of continuity between everyday life and politics.27

24  John Dewey, “The Public and Its Problems,” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. Volume 2: 1925–1927. Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and The Public and Its Problems, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 235–372, on p. 240. 25  Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 302. 26  Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1992). 27  I analyze this idea in detail in Chapter 1 of my book Politics of Dialogue.

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Yet this idea inevitably leads to the question of the difference between politics and other phenomena of everyday life. In a sense, we have come the full circle, returning to the question from the beginning of the chapter, namely, the necessity of the “political division.” As can be seen, if this question is answered by designating a particular value or underscoring separateness, an exclusion of significant spheres of public life from the domain of politics follows; consequently, considerable groups of citizens are deprived of the opportunity to engage in social activism as a fully political gesture. For its part, the solution suggested by Dewey, that the distinction between the public and the private depends on the compass of outcomes produced by interactions (transactions), is flawed as well. It is defective because Dewey’s criterion is vague and ambiguous in that it hangs on the intuition of the observer. If everything is, or can be, politicized, the very idea of politics as a separate entity or notion becomes dissolved, which is obviously counterintuitive. The problem resurfaced with the hatching of theories that show the politicization of everyday life. This approach is superbly epitomized by Michel Foucault’s concept of modernity and power. Foucault’s work has been discussed from every conceivable angle; for my purpose, it is enough to observe that, for Foucault, everyday life is a set of coercive activities that impose strict rules of subordination on the most ordinary social interactions. The problem this model produces is that the ubiquity of power relations, which Foucault portrayed as political par excellence, makes the political disappear. Hans Sluga, in his excellent book on the common good, points out that Foucault described politics in terms of power relations and spoke of power as being everywhere so that all kinds of relations and interactions turn out to be genuinely and literally political […] Power relations could, moreover, be conflictual relations but also cooperative ones; Foucault thus bypassed the dilemma that Schmitt and Arendt had faced in asking whether politics should be understood in terms of conflict or in terms of cooperation. For Foucault both could be equally political.28

 Hans Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 174–5. 28

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Foucault might have gone further than Schmitt and Arendt, but his framework was anyway bedeviled by the problem of accurately delineating the political field. Sluga claims that the predicament involved in using Foucault’s conceptual vocabulary can be handled by introducing a precise definition of political relations vis-á-vis power relation and proposes that: “There exist among power relations a particular subset of strategic relations that coordinate and direct force relations in society. Political relations are relations of power whose objects are other power relations. We may speak of them as supervenient on other power relations which they establish, coordinate, and control.”29 Having offered this layered view of power relations, Sluga goes on to explain the relationship between power relations and political strategies in more detail: There are certainly non-strategic, non-supervenient relations for Foucault. They constitute “the set of relations of force in a given society [that] constitutes the domain of the political,” i.e. the set of relations to which supervenient political strategies are directed. But not every relation in that domain will at every moment be actually subjected to political intervention. Political economy forbids this. There exist then in every society power relations that are at a given moment politically dormant. These may have been produced and controlled by the strategic power relations at an earlier time and they may once again become so later on. This defines, indeed, their status as belonging to the political field. All such relations are “potentially politicized”; they are all “politicizable.” But such politicizable relations must still be distinguished from actually politicized ones.30

Sluga’s interpretation of Foucault pictures another variant of relations between everyday life and politics. If everything potentially is or can be politicized, not everything actually is so, with some power relations that are per se political receding into political neutrality at some point only to become political again, should certain circumstances occur. When looked at through this lens, the difference between power relations that permeate everyday life and those that are political is a matter of the context rather than of nature. 29 30

 Sluga, Politics, 190.  Sluga, Politics, 191.

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The overview above suggests that there are a handful of positions on the relationship between politics, everyday life, and the political. First, there are thinkers who believe that the political occupies a separate ontological niche that has its own specific dynamics. This group comprises: Schmitt’s model, which sketches the political as a domain of inevitable hostility, encapsulated in the figure of friend and foe; Arendt’s model, which images politics as existential and directed toward the pursuit of values embodied by Athenian democracy, whose citizens are free from any economic and cultural necessity; Ricoeur’s reversed view of Schmitt, where the political (le politique) signifies order and harmony, as opposed to politics (la politique), which is a realm of conflict and struggle; Mouffe’s “domestication” of Schmitt’s perspective, where the enemy/friend dichotomy is transformed into the adversary/ally division, and antagonism is transfigured into agonism; and Heller’s conception of freedom as the value that distinctively marks the field of the political. Second, there is a strand of political concepts that deal with the formal and contextual characteristics of political difference, rather than with the actual ones. Dewey distinguishes the public from the private based on the reach of the effects that actions have on social transactions. For his part, Sluga demarcates political relations as a particular set within power relations, which, as Foucault argues, are omnipresent in everyday life. This bipartite classification is not exhaustive, however, as some of the thinkers referenced above attempt to combine the two approaches. For example, Heller is poised on the line between them, as she points to freedom as a key value for contemporary politics, but at the same time assumes that any action can be politicized under the right circumstances. Similarly, Ricoeur emphasizes that open democratic debate is a prerequisite of democratic politics. This brief review of standpoints on the political as different from politics reveals their shortcomings, but also suggests possibilities of crafting a common denominator that could help delineate a common field—or rather a common horizon of definitions—of the political as related to politics and, importantly, to everyday life as well. At this point, a pertinent question arises of whether we are in fact able to formulate a definition of politics and the political that would fit all the existing political regimes. Surveying the above definitions from this angle, we are in for a

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fair share of perplexity, because they avoid answering this question unequivocally, even if their founders recognize that what is called politics may fundamentally vary across different social and cultural contexts. My position is that every political regime has its own internal power structure, and that this structure determines the complex ways in which political power is linked to other spheres of social life, including everyday life. What makes this issue even more labyrinthine is the fact that different political regimes boasting different ways of organizing political power can emerge and operate in the same cultural and economic context. Besides liberal democracy, modernity has spawned a communist regime, a fascist state, and an authoritarian state, with their sundry social and political varieties. Given this, politics and the political, that is, the conditions for doing politics, must reflect a complicated ensemble of certain universal features of modernity, specificities of a particular system of political institutions, and culturally conditioned habits of everyday life. While these elements are combined in unique ways in every system, they are all bound together by dialogue. As I have shown elsewhere, dialogic relations permeate all social relations, but how they work in politics depends on the shape and direction of the trajectory of social life.31 In a totalitarian/authoritarian system, what is political is defined by monologic relations in the system of power, as opposed to dialogic relations in everyday life. Against this background, democracy enjoys a special status as a system that presupposes, at least potentially, the active participation of all citizens in public and political life. In other words, in a democratic society, dialogue is presumed to be seamlessly transferred from everyday life to politics. Defining politics in terms of dialogue transposed from everyday life, however, requires a reformulation of the concept of dialogue. One of the paradoxes of democratic theory is that, with the notable exception of Habermas, it has hardly studied dialogue itself. Dialogue has been treated as a completely transparent phenomenon that needs no separate considerations. Following Mikhail Bakhtin and pragmatist philosophers, I have developed the concept of dialogue as a tool of understanding, rather than of consensus or agreement. On this model, democratic politics is crucially 31

 Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue.

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predicated on the willingness of all the parties involved in the democratic struggle to commit to the process of dialogic understanding. This criterion obviously entails something more than the mere fulfillment of the formal requirements of democracy, such as election results, which is considered a sufficient condition by many political theorists, often regardless of their ideological orientations. Against their “formalist” conception of democracy, I argue that politics, or political culture, is part of broader culture, an important factor of which is the preparedness to dialogue beyond everyday life—across the levels of social life. To restate, everyday dialogue is essential to the survival of any society, whatever its political regime, as it is an inherent feature of individual existence. However, as a result of some important historical and cultural developments, dialogue is elevated into the main axis of the public sphere in some societies. Of course, such historical and cultural conditions are not deterministic; rather, they are largely contingent and can mutate with shifting political events. Culture and politics thus stand in a hermeneutic relationship with each other, woven into a kind of hermeneutic circle. Politics is not only part of culture; in fact, politics, especially the politics of dialogue, can fuel certain transformations in culture, which in turn help effect changes in politics. The point is that, in every instance, this complex relationship is unique and probably unrepeatable. Hence, the failures of any mechanical imposition of policy patterns that work in one cultural context on other cultural configurations. Such operations only stand a chance of success if they are carried out dialogically, that is, if foreign political patterns are grafted onto local culture to commence the process of hybridization, breeding a new political culture or, to use the vocabulary of political philosophy, a new concept of what is political.

1.3 The Microphysics of Emancipation and Niches of Liberation The central takeaway from the previous section is that, as Heller avers, conditions for practicing politics (the political) are inseparable from freedom and, consequently, that politics and everyday life are closely interconnected. At the same time, as I have pointed out, this link has two

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major dimensions. First, it depends on the specific ways in which the various elements that make up the political sphere and the sphere of everyday life are interrelated. Second, the practice of freedom is determined by the universal standards of modernity. Historically, these two threads have been knit together by the integrated narratives of emancipation, which Jean-François Lyotard famously called grand narratives or metanarratives.32 Grand emancipation narratives have had a mobilizing potency under specific political and cultural circumstances, and multiple emancipatory variants have emerged to champion the great promise of socialism, technological capitalism, and the like to various societies. Promises of emancipation are invariably promises for everyday life. Therefore, policies fashioned within this framework (and other ones have been few, if any, in the recent history of the Western world) have promised a radical redrawing of relations in everyday life. In grand narratives, the promises of change always envisage an attunement of the empirical conditions of human life to its essence. The human being is inherently free and autonomous, but the social conditions preclude the exercise of freedom and autonomy and, so, must be reformed. The human being has an innate creative potential, but creative practices are hindered by the economic system in place, which must be radically changed. The human being can be relieved from physical hardship through the development of technology, which will also bring a radical social change. These are but a sample of emancipatory visions, identifiable with liberalism, socialism, and technologism, respectively. In all cases, the grand narratives have negotiated with the local conjunctures, spawning a range of ideological and political hybrids, where the emancipation metanarratives were accommodated to societies’ real conditions of life. Crucially, this relationship is also two-sided, as many of the emancipatory ideas grow out of critiques of everyday life. The starting point of this process is revealing the utter coerciveness and misery of daily life, which

32  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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make change imperative. This interwovenness of daily life and political life was masterfully depicted by Henri Lefebvre: Everyday life includes political life: the public consciousness, the consciousness of belonging to a society and a nation, the consciousness of class. It enters into permanent contact with the State and the State apparatus thanks to administration and bureaucracy. But on the other hand, political life detaches itself from everyday life by concentrating itself in privileged moments (elections, for example), and by fostering specialized activities. Thus, the critique of everyday life involves a critique of political life, in that everyday life already contains and constitutes such a critique: in that it is that critique.33

This type of criticism lies at the heart of leftist thought. The founders of historical materialism detailed the wretchedness of workers’ daily lives, demonstrating how far removed they were from human nature (das menschliche Wesen). In his Manuscripts (1844), Karl Marx wrote bitterly that: labor, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.34

Human life and animal life thus swap places: that which is specifically human, that is, work—a creative activity that transforms the world— becomes merely a means to what is deemed real life: the life of leisure, where the most important activities are those that do not distinguish humans from animals. While Marx’s considerations were rather abstract and his observations generalizing, Friedrich Engels undertook a sociological study of the position of the working class in England. He itemized particular aspects of  Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2014), 114 (italics original). 34  Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Miligan (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988), 76 (italics original). 33

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the daily life of workers and concluded that, in essence, the upper classes, the bourgeoisie were perpetrating a systematic murder of workers: [W]hen society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; […] the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.35

Notably, in both quotations above, the dismal situation of the working class is rendered through corporeality. Marx bemoans the primacy of “animal functions,” that is, the bodily, over creative labor, while Engels lists social and physical deprivations that cause irreparable damage to the corporeal operations. The body is thus a manifestation of how the social relations in place reduce a considerable part of society to outcasts doomed to a sordid existence and barred from realizing their potential. The depiction of this situation is at the same time a vocal call for its overhaul. However, the reach and the effectiveness of this type of criticism were limited by the treatment of corporeality as inferior, as something that must be raised to a higher level by the forces external to it, an attitude deeply entrenched in Western culture. The process of emancipation is the main of such forces, and for Marx and Engels it entails the proletariat’s self-liberation from the fetters of capitalism and, as a result, the liberation of society as a whole. This type of criticism combined with the emancipatory concept has been characteristic of leftist thought, though by no means its monopoly. The technological utopia and free-market capitalism are similarly structured and rely on a similar mechanism. Enslavement and the way out of it through the preconceived gears of liberation are described everywhere. 35  Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Panther Press, 1967 [1845]), 126.

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I call this kind of critique a critique of everyday life. Its importance lies in moving from abstract, theoretical constructs to the deficits of everyday life. Such a strategy is instrumental in mobilizing social and political support for more or less radical reforms. At the same time, however, the reforms themselves are designed from the perspective of the same abstract construct that was the basis of the critique. Actually, ordinary life in and of itself is not the starting point of the critique; rather, it is a site where theory is to prove its validity. Similarly, the ultimate shape of the new utopian society is deduced from abstract intellectual constructs. This pattern of emancipatory social critique recurs in various incarnations, including, for example, Lefebvre’s deliberations as quoted above. In his monumental analysis of everyday life, Lefebvre showed the enmeshment of everyday life in capitalist reproduction and the centrality of what he called the reclamation of the everyday as a source of political activity.36 Yet the most elaborate analytical system of everyday life continuing the Marxian tradition of critique was propounded by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s numerous works trace the ways in which the capitalist society (re)produces class divisions at every level of social life, therein everyday life. Most relevant from our perspective is Bourdieu’s concept of habitus defined as a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class and constituting the precondition for all objectification and apperception: and the objective coordination of practices and the sharing of a world-view could be founded on the perfect impersonality and interchangeability of singular practices and views.37

For all the theoretical depth and immense empirical commitment of Bourdieu’s work, it paints social structures as, in principle, petrified by the processes of reproduction. Thus, these processes rehearse the pattern of emancipation, which can only take place as a consequence of radical  Jen Hui Bon Hoa, “Totality and the Common: Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot on Everyday Life,” Cultural Critique 88 (Fall 2014): 54–78. 37  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977), 86. 36

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social change prompted by the theoretical recognition of the sources of inequality. In this respect, Bourdieu’s sociological insights are aligned with the tradition of grand emancipation narratives. My intention is to propose a different understanding of emancipatory processes, which is also related to a different understanding of the social critique that instigates them. My approach rests on two pillars: first, emancipation takes place in everyday life and, second, it requires the active involvement of social actors, who largely establish its goals themselves. As to the former aspect, emancipation is not global; on the contrary, it is local and often concerns small areas of everyday life. I call this the microphysics of emancipation, obviously referencing Foucault’s concept of the microphysics of power. Such microphysics of emancipation unfolds in everyday life, where niches of liberation are created. This is most evident in totalitarian and authoritarian systems, in which the entire public sphere is hijacked by the official ideology. However, even under such strictures, private conversations and relationships can sprout and thrive, which, while not necessarily political in nature, foster circumscribed islands of liberation from the totalitarian ways of thinking. The American sociologist and cultural researcher Jeffery Goldfarb has famously discussed kitchens of small apartments in communist concrete houses as special hubs of freedom: [O]ur first picture is of a general but significant location: the kitchen table in Poland and elsewhere in the old bloc. During the Soviet period, small circles of intimate friends were able to talk to each other without concern for the present party line around the kitchen table. […] Any denigration of private space was viewed with suspicion. Any attempt to make private questions political seemed exactly wrong.38

Of course, such private meetings were limited in scope, and their immediate significance may seeming have been minor. Nevertheless, while they were as a rule not explicitly political, they nurtured an atmosphere of freedom and open exchange of ideas, which could develop into an openly  Jeffrey Goldfarb, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 10.

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political strategy with time. A similar role was played, on a larger scale though, by cultural and artistic events which, while not directly political either, encouraged and channeled ethical questions concerning, for example, responsibility in social life and related matters. Such questions were in turn implicated in making political decisions. To some extent, these modes of emancipation converge with the practices of everyday life that their renowned researcher Michel de Certeau dubs tactics, as distinct from strategies: [S]trategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed. They combine these three types of places and seek to master each by means of the others. They thus privilege spatial relationships. At the very least they attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the analytical attribution of a proper place to each particular element and through the combinatory organization of the movements specific to units or groups of units […]. Tactics are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time—to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms, etc.39

Of course, this distinction primarily applies to the contemporary capitalist system with its control of society through consumption, but I believe that it lends itself to universalization. Tactics, according to de Certeau, are the ways in which dominant discourses (strategies) are subversively challenged and transformed. De Certeau considers them dependent on dominant strategies and thus having no place of their own. From my perspective, however, tactics can crystallize into niches of liberation by taking the place of strategies. Goldfarb recounts how official cultural events were intercepted by the oppositional ideology in Poland. His prime example is the 1968 production of Adam Mickiewicz’s  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 38. 39

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Forefathers’ Eve (Dziady), a Romantic drama reputed as a Polish national masterpiece. The auditorium became a venue of dissident manifestations, which moved to the street, sparking students’ strikes throughout the country. As Goldfarb emphasizes: [T]his distancing from official ideology was achieved, as we have seen, in theaters and beyond starting in 1968, using the expressive techniques of face-to-face interactions. These techniques turned the anti-Russian lines of a nineteenth-century play into a major challenge to the totalized order of previously existing socialism. They made the kitchen tables of that old order into nascent free public domains. They turned many private apartments into a network of independent bookstores, and they turned a few apartments into central public forums.40

Thus, the moment that tactics shape up into more or less ephemeral niches of liberation, they take on a spatial existence. The squares and plazas where demonstrations take place are good examples of momentary niches of liberation. Private apartments which bring together groups of friends become more permanent centers of liberation. Periodically held art festivals rear communities that, though temporally discrete, occupy a specific place and, through their cyclicity, consolidate values in opposition to existing ideologies. In most cases, with the obvious exception of some demonstrations, such niches of emancipation are not explicitly political, but they have an implicit political potential. This potential burgeons in moments of crisis, but it can incrementally germinate for years before shooting in the open. The other condition for, as well as a facet of, emancipation processes in everyday life is the activity of actors. This aspect has also been neglected by the grand narratives of emancipation, as they have primarily attended to macro-scale social developments, even though some trends in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities have indeed foregrounded and appreciated the activity of individuals. Within Marxism, there has always been a dispute over the importance of human activity for change in the social system. The determinist 40

 Goldfarb, Politics, 34.

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concepts of the Second International were criticized by theorists such as Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramsci, who developed concepts of social change through the involvement of the popular masses. However, since activism as envisioned by such thinkers was collective and concerned with social classes, it entirely fell within the category of grand narratives. Evaluating pragmatism with its concept of creative action, to use Hans Joas’ phrase,41 is a more complex venture. I have written extensively on the notion of activism in pragmatism, so I will briefly summarize my position on this issue here.42 Pragmatists, in particular George Herbert Mead, came up with a coherent conception of action as a basis for the formation of mind and self. This concept can be (and has been) linked to political philosophy in at least two respects. First, social action, with most human activity in fact falling under this rubric, is always a sequential activity, consecutive phases of which are performed by either individuals or groups. Second, undistorted communication is essential for action— and thus for the formation of self and mind as well—to take a smooth course. These conditions can only be met in a democracy. Hence, Dewey insisted that democracy was “more than a form of government”; he thought of democracy as, first and foremost, “a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”43 The pragmatist approach brings democratic politics closer to everyday life, as shown in the first section, but it does so declaratively—on the level of philosophical reflection. Given this, it can be an effective inspiration for empirical research to trace the microphysics and niches of emancipation in action. This is how it has actually been used by the French sociologist Luc Boltanski. He calls his theory a pragmatic sociology of critique, in contrast to the critical sociology practiced by Bourdieu. As Boltanski himself explicates, the difference between the two lies in that: The actors whom these works have made visible were very different from the agents who feature in the critical sociology of domination. They were  Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). 42  Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue, Chapter 1. 43  John Dewey, “Democracy and Education,” in Dewey, Middle Works, vol. 9, ed. JoAnn Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1983), 93. 41

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always active, not passive […] They made their demands, denounced injustices, produced evidence in support of their complaints, or constructed arguments to justify themselves in the face of the critiques to which they were themselves subjected. Envisaged thus, the social world does not appear to be the site of domination endured passively and unconsciously, but instead as a space shot through by a multiplicity of disputes, critiques, disagreements and attempts to re-establish locally agreements that are always fragile.44

This approach regards evaluations of social reality in daily life as pivotal to the devising of its alternative future scenarios. Such assessments form a basis for ideological concepts of social critique to become a driving force in changing the system in place: [C]ritical theories feed off these ordinary critiques, even if they develop them differently, reformulate them, and are destined to return to them, since their aim is to render reality unacceptable, and thereby engage the people to whom they are addressed in action whose result should be to change its contours. The idea of critical theory that is not backed by the experience of a collective, and which in some sense exists for its own sake— that is for no one—is incoherent.45

What Boltanski labels as existential tests of social reality have a key part in this daily critique. They are based on “experiences, like those of injustice or humiliation, sometimes with the shame that accompanies them, but also, in other cases, the joy created by transgression when it affords access to some form of authenticity.”46 Essential though these experiences are, they are notoriously challenging to conceptualize because “there exists no pre-established format to frame them, or even because, considered from the standpoint of the existing order, they have an aberrant character.”47 This paradoxically makes them both vulnerable (easily belittled or dismissed) and potent, since “situated on the margins of  Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliott (Malden: Polity Press, 2011), 26–7 (italics original). 45  Boltanski, Critique, 5 (italics original). 46  Boltanski, Critique, 107. 47  Boltanski, Critique, 107–8. 44

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reality—reality as it is ‘constructed’ in a certain social order—these existential tests open up a path to the world. Hence they are one of the sources from which a form of critique can emerge that might be called radical, in order to distinguish it from reformist critiques intended to improve existing reality tests.”48 The one-of-a-kind nature of existential tests makes it possible, I believe, to connect them to the niches of emancipation as sketched above. For if we treat those as islets of freedom amidst an ocean of political, economic, and/or mental enslavement, they will naturally induce an intense experience of distinctiveness and arouse a belief in the uniqueness of the space which one inhabits. For their part, niches of liberation can trigger the mechanism of the microphysics of emancipation. To do so, they by no means need to be institutional; it is rather the matter of them spreading a different style of thinking, a theoretical perspective, or an ethical commitment that differs from the ways of the official society. The socio-psychological dimension of this mechanism was described by Valentin Voloshinov, a linguist and Bakhtin’s associate, in his critique of Freudianism published in 1927.49 Voloshinov basically construed the Freudian division into consciousness and subconsciousness as a division into official ideology and life (behavioral) ideology. Official ideology blocks the avenues of the open expression of desires and aspirations that are not accepted in it. Consequently, “[m]otives under these conditions begin to fail, to lose their verbal countenance, and little by little really do turn into a ‘foreign body’ in the psyche. Whole sets of organic manifestations come, in this way, to be excluded from the zone of verbalized behavior and may become asocial.”50 However, Voloshinov acknowledges a possibility, despite obstruction from official ideology, for the views pushed by it out of the public sphere to break through in isolated group of friends. Over time, they can meander their way into official ideology and gradually change it.

 Boltanski, Critique, 108 (italics original).  Valentin N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, ed. Irwin R. Titunik and Neal H. Bruss, trans. Irwin R. Titunik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1976 [1927]). 50  Voloshinov, Freudianism, 91. 48 49

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Thus, niches are, so to speak, incubators in which new forms of human relations and ideas are engendered, nursed, and tested. They are on the whole not politically invested, but via existential tests they can make it possible to question the existing social reality. Therefore, they also support the expression and development of views that contradict official ideology. For obvious reasons, the impact of niches of emancipation is limited. These circles deliberately situate themselves on the margins of official life, denying or ignoring it. Nevertheless, their very existence activates the mechanism of the microphysics of emancipation. The sense of freedom, independence, and uniqueness attained in them can irradiate the whole of society and change it little by little. This diffusion does not happen automatically but requires the conscious involvement of the actors. While, in general, their undertakings are not directly political, in some cases, particularly in autocratic regimes where the line between the political and the private is blurred, they can be perceived as such. More often than not, however, what makes these niches relevant to recasting society as a whole is that they foster and cultivate new human relations informed by the belief that official social ideologies limit individuals’ ability to flourish. This sense of constraint, whether political, economic, or cultural, is felt to hinder the development of creative forces and unfettered relationships with others in everyday life. Novel forms of interpersonal relations (and self-attitudes) grow into a tempting alternative to official ideology. Crucially, such competition is not—or, at least, not at first—political in the sense of power struggle. In order for it to accrue the political charge, certain conditions must be met, the most obvious of which is counteraction by those in power. When this happens, the microphysics of emancipation can turn into a radical critique of the existing order and unleash political struggle.

1.4 The Political Body: Somaesthetics and Somapower In The Politics of Small Things, Goldfarb’s central (and synecdochic) example is the cramped kitchen in a small apartment in communist Poland. This is by no means a random choice. Crampedness is a

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contradiction of officialdom. Official ceremonies are always staged in spaces that prevent intimate contact, instead enforcing a sense of reserve and emotional distance. While this ties in with the political importance of the body in space, it also ushers in the problem of the political body. The key issue in my argument is to find a concept capable of adequately capturing and explaining the meaning of corporeality in and for politics. It must illumine two interrelated issues. One of them is the place that the body occupies in thinking about politics, and the other is the extent to which corporeality can be a causal force in achieving political goals. Such questions are difficult to ask, let alone answer, in classical political theories, which are primarily about ideas. Bodies are just ancillary as illustrations or epitomes of thoughts. The beheaded King Louis XVII is merely a metaphor for the vanquished idea of feudal monarchy. This approach stems not only from the mindset of political theory, but also from the practice of politics itself, which for centuries has pretended and still continues to pretend that the body politic does not exist. In the Middle Ages, this idea was sealed by the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, evocatively described in Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous book.51 The king’s physical body was a material shadow completely subordinate to the theological and legal body. Today, this tendency is very much in place. Democratic politics is first and foremost about the minds of citizens, about how they can be persuaded to vote for a certain party. The body appears in the political context as a kind of aberration, even a scandal in liberal democracy. It appears when demonstrations hit the streets, acts of terror erupt, or other forms of physical resistance are launched. Such iterations of political activity are treated as marginal not only because they violate the paradigm of liberal thinking about politics, but also because theoretical tools to examine them are missing. This dearth of analytical instruments may be baffling, seeing that there are concepts in which the body is brought to the forefront. My discussion focuses on somaesthetics, a project developed by the American philosopher Richard Shusterman, but before I move on to it, I look into two  Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 51

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theories that place the body at the center of social problems: Herbert Marcuse’s utopia of the body and Foucault’s biopolitics. Marcuse was among the first thinkers to propose that the process of liberation could run through the body and not just lead to the release of the potential of corporeality. He noted that the body as an object of pleasure in previous societies was marginalized and subsumed under perversion: Mankind was supposed to be an end in itself and never a mere means; but this ideology was effective in the private rather than in the societal functions of the individuals, in the sphere of libidinal satisfaction rather than in that of labor. The full force of civilized morality was mobilized against the use of the body as mere object, means, instrument of pleasure; such reification was tabooed and remained the ill-reputed privilege of whores, degenerates, and perverts.52

The memory of the bodily capacities and the utopian civilization founded on them had only survived in myths and art in a culture that went the way of imperative efficiency, the way of Prometheus. According to Marcuse, the time was ripe to realize the alternative Orphic vision. Ample opportunity for this venture was afforded by the arrival of technology and economic standards that permitted improving human life. If this was not happening, it was only because the political forces worked to maintain “artificial scarcity.” What was needed, therefore, was a radical change that would lead to a transformation of corporeality and, with it, to the remodeling of social relations from everyday life to politics. In Marcuse’s vision: The regression involved in this spread of the libido would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure. This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institu-

52  Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge 1998), 200–1.

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tions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family.53

Marcuse’s idea of revolution through the body is undoubtedly both original and inspiring. Following this path, I believe, does not require recourse to psychoanalysis. Reasoning along similar lines may be effectively underpinned by Shusterman’s framework, which urges perfecting the body and meliorating social relations in this way, but in an entirely different context. Shusterman draws on pragmatist philosophy, where corporeality is bound up with action. As a result, enhancing the awareness of the body translates into a betterment of overall social relations. The same is also true of Marcuse’s other important concept, namely, that political struggle takes place in everyday life. Capitalism is informed by the principle of productivity, and patriarchy is its guardian. In substantiating this conclusion, Marcuse built on (and considerably modified) Freud’s story of the origins of humanity, which has it that the sons took over the defeated father’s strategy of domination and exploitation. Marcuse insisted that breaking this sequence of injustices required a thorough makeover of family relations, which itself was a condition and also the goal of the liberation of the body, as explained above. In this way, Marcuse elucidated the mutual entanglement of seemingly distant elements, such as the capitalist mode of production and relations within the family. Not surprisingly, he was one of the first thinkers to recognize the political significance of feminist movements seeking to transform traditional family relations. We may not accept the Freudian-Marxian machinery set in motion for this purpose, but in retrospect we cannot but recognize the importance of highlighting the non-economic and non-­ political sources of alienation. Regrettably, current developments imply a relative failure of the utopia of the body envisaged by Marcuse. The utopia failed because it treated the body one-sidedly, merely focusing on its sexuality. Of course, the social transformation of sexual relations initiated in the 1960s has meaningfully impacted the shape of democratic society, but it was too weak to effect a radical political change. In recent times, some regression seems to have  Marcuse, Eros, 201.

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taken place in this regard. The apparently unassailable gains of the 1960s are being undermined by both the neoliberal capitalist economy and the conservative and populist political movements. Neoliberalism treats the body as a commodity and commercializes the achievements of the 1960s, as pointed out by Boltanski in a book he co-authored with Ève Chiapello. The authenticity and the liberation of corporeality are being commodified to increase sales figures and revenues of multinational corporations. At the same time, spreading populism and conservatism seek to impose restrictions on corporeality in general and women’s reproductive rights in particular. Attitudes to corporeality thus seem to mirror the general situation of liberal democracy, which is increasingly threatened by authoritarian tendencies.54 While Marcuse’s works presented a utopia of the body as a vehicle for emancipation, Foucault’s views can be described as a dystopia of corporeality. Foucault coined a range of notions, such as docile bodies and biopower, to spotlight the status of the body as a locus of control in modernity. It is through bodies that the microphysics of power operates, as bodies are molded and tailored to suit the social conditions of modernity. In general, however, Foucault was much more interested in the operations of biopolitics on the population than in the application of it to the individual. As observed by Thomas Lemke, “discipline is not a form of individualization that is applied to already existing individuals, but rather it presupposes a multiplicity.”55 On the whole, this insight is true not only about Foucault but also about the rich and varied literature on biopolitics. Nonetheless, many incarnations of biopolitics (in Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Antonio Negri, and other authors) are predominantly concerned with how collectives and institutions exert influence on the individual body. Of course, Foucault himself tried to show that corporeality could be active vis-á-vis society. In a seminar he conducted toward the end of his life, he introduced the concept of technologies of the self, which are defined as “permit[ting] individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their  Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. George Elliot (London: Verso, 2005). 55  Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. Eric Trump (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 37. 54

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own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”56 This and similar propositions may be regarded as marking a turn in thinking about individual/power relations, a shift toward the aesthetics of existence and care for the self. Such a reading is offered, for example, by Alexander Nehamas: In the third and final period of his writing, Foucault turned from the power exercised on, and forming, individuals to the power individuals exercised upon, and through which they formed, themselves. That was part of what he meant by “ethics”—the subject that preoccupied him during the last years of his life. Morality, Foucault argued, is not exhausted by our relations to others, by codes of moral behavior that govern the interaction of various individuals and groups with one another. It also concerns the ways in which individuals relate to and regulate themselves—the ways in which we practice self-government and at the same time constitute ourselves as the moral subjects of our own desires and actions. Ethics is the care of the self.57

However, in this train of thought, individuals, as it were, reverse the direction of the forces pressing them in order to constitute themselves as moral subjects. Given this, there is in Foucault’s work no horizon of emancipation proper in the sense of transcending the social standards; rather, what happens is finding one’s place within them. This drawback also plagues the concept of biopower, which directly ties in with the process of subjectivation. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, who relied on Foucault’s framework to describe patient empowerment, defined biopower as a tripartite concept: [T]he concept of biopower seeks to individuate strategies and configurations that combine three dimensions or planes—a form of truth discourse about living beings and an array of authorities considered competent to  Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49, on p. 17. 57  Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 179. 56

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speak that truth; strategies for intervention on collective existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals can be brought to work on themselves, under certain forms of authority, in relation to truth discourses, by means of practices of the self, in the name of individual or collective life or health.58

This definition of biopower undoubtedly delineates a perspective on liberation within a certain system (in this case, health care) which is centrally important in the politics of the day. However, like Foucault’s original concept, it presupposes the individual’s confinement within that system. While, based on it, the individual can win a better place in the system, no radical change in the system actually takes place. As opposed to this, the radical emancipatory potential of corporeality is appreciated in Shusterman’s model, which he himself calls somaesthetics. Somaesthetics is defined as a discipline that “beyond reorienting aesthetic inquiry […] seeks to transform philosophy in a more general way. By integrating theory and practice through disciplined somatic training, it takes philosophy in a pragmatist meliorist direction, reviving the ancient idea of philosophy as an embodied way of life rather than a mere discursive field of abstract theory.”59 The theoretical root of somaesthetics is traced to pragmatist philosophy, with its emphasis on action and corporeality. Dewey, whose works are of particular importance in this regard, believed that the mind emerged from complex interactions between an organism and its environment and granted preeminence to the body as a natural vehicle of these interplays. The other, and perhaps more important, aspect of the pragmatist approach is its inherent dedication to improvement and enrichment. Productive though they are, the two aspects also pose some problems. For the former, there is an aporia in Dewey’s reasoning, which Shusterman insightfully identifies: [H]ere then is the core practical dilemma of body consciousness: We must rely on unreflective feelings and habits—because we can’t reflect on every Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1(2) (June 2006): 203–4.  Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. 58

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thing and because such unreflective feelings and habits always ground our very efforts of reflection. But we also cannot entirely rely on them and the judgments they generate, because some of them are considerably flawed and inaccurate. Moreover, how can we discern their flaws and inadequacy when they are concealed by their unreflective, immediate, habitual status; and how can we correct them when our conscious, reflective efforts of correction spontaneously rely on the same inaccurate, habitual mechanisms of perception and action that we are trying to correct?60

Somaesthetics remedies this deficiency through its insistence on expanding and honing the awareness of the body through bodily practices. Shusterman underscores this preoccupation in his definition of somaesthetics, which spells out that it aims at “studying the ways we use our soma in perception, performance, and self-fashioning; the ways that physiology and society shape and constrain those uses; and the methods we have developed or can invent to enhance those uses and provide newer and better forms of somatic awareness and functioning.”61 The notion of meliorism, which is axial to the pragmatist view of society, needs to be clarified to illumine how it ties in with corporeality. The works of the classics of pragmatism do not really specify how the enhancement of the body is related to the improvement of society. Of course, such a correlation can be gleaned from Mead’s and Dewey’s reasoning, as they believed that self and mind emerged from and in interactions between organisms in the process of communication through either gestures or meaningful symbols. The fewer barriers there were to overcome, the greater the chances of developing a full and comprehensive individual personality, which in turn translated into an improved social system—an increasingly refined and inclusive democracy. Nevertheless, the exact connection between boosting the body and amending the political system is not entirely clear in classical pragmatism. Somaesthetics offers an opportunity to throw light on this relationship, but, as already mentioned, this requires a revision of the way we think of politics and the possibilities for emancipation inscribed in  Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 212. 61  Shusterman, Thinking, 188. 60

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everyday life. Based on the observations above, we can outline the somaesthetic involvement of the body in politics. I will refer to this moment of somaesthetics as somapower. Somapower is not a simple extension of somaesthetics into the political sphere. In order for somapower to emerge, several conditions must be met both by society where it surfaces and by the acting body itself. By the latter I mean that the body is not only subject to the formative impacts of social conditions, but that it can also actively change these conditions in and through the process of augmenting its awareness by means of various techniques of corporeality enhancement promoted by somaesthetics. In other words, somaesthetics turns into somapower when a personal body improvement project has to cope with the restraints imposed by oppressive social conditions. This is where we enter the realm of the microphysics of emancipation, since such checks are usually seen as “technical” or “administrative” and are not initially identified with big politics. One reason why such clashes arise is that projects of developing or transforming physicality have a pronounced and mostly concrete ethical dimension, as exemplified by the teetotal movement, vegetarianism or veganism, and the like. They presuppose the achievement of a clearly defined and not infrequently palpable value. Their concreteness tends to put them in conflict with abstract ideology and renders them a threat to any totalitarian or authoritarian regime. A moving literary example of bodily tangibility pitted against abstruse elusiveness is found in Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita, where Yeshua answers the canonical question “What is truth?” during his first (and only) face-to-face encounter with Pontius Pilate, in a re-imagined rendering of the Gospel episode: [T]he truth is, first of all, that your head aches, and aches so badly that you’re having faint-hearted thoughts of death. You’re not only unable to speak to me, but it is even hard for you to look at me. And I am now your unwilling torturer, which upsets me. You can’t even think about anything and only dream that your dog should come, apparently the one being you are attached to. But your suffering will soon be over, your headache will go away.62 62  Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 97.

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The abstract question of truth is answered by evoking the body in its sensibly physical condition, its pain and suffering. The body, sentient and conscious, is the locus of and the point of reference for the existential test, to use Boltanski’s concept. Of course, this concreteness is also a dimension of the somaesthetic involvement of the body. The potential for liberation from abstract ideologies is contained in the practices aimed at perfecting the body. The social meaning of the emancipating body has been compellingly described by Marcuse, although, as argued above, it is difficult, and perhaps not really fruitful, to share his preoccupation with sexual practices as the most important facet of this liberation. Despite equating the development of the body with pleasure, he was absolutely right to claim that it posed a threat to any oppressive social form spawned by the capitalist obsession with efficiency and profit. Somaesthetics addresses the same problem but propagates an all-encompassing growth of the body, not limited to a single aspect. Body consciousness is holistic and extends, as Shusterman states, over all areas of somatic functioning. At the same time, body consciousness can be viewed as a liminal point in the political meaning of corporeality. In political practice, we usually attend to one particular corporeality-related issue. Abortion is an excellent case in point, as it ultimately ushers in the fundamental problem of the freedom and autonomy of the body and the limits of liberalism in confrontation with conservative and oppressive ideology. Regardless of which aspect of corporeality becomes pivotal in such a face-off, what matters is that the emancipatory politicization of the body focuses on the body for its own sake. This approach helps set the somapower perspective apart from the standpoint in which the body is treated instrumentally in political struggles. Totalitarian regimes have turned docile bodies into spectacles of their power in parades or mass gymnastic shows, and terrorist organizations have taken the instrumentalization of the body to the extreme in suicide attacks. Both are glaring examples of ideological subjugation, in which the Foucauldian microphysics of power transfigures into open power subordinating the body and weaponizing it. If we juxtapose somaesthetics and docile bodies, we can see that they represent two radically different ways of tapping into the potential of

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corporeality. While Foucault showed how society could shape individuals through their bodies, Shusterman argues for the emancipatory potential of the body, which can, I believe, transform social relations. These two perspectives may seem contradictory or mutually exclusive, but they are in fact complementary. Without a doubt, the body is shaped by social relations, which leave their mark on it. However, this does not mean that this is the only fate there is and that the body is doomed to it. People are active in changing the world around them and seeking to make it a better place to live. One of the paths to accomplishing this goal leads through the improvement of the body and the resultant improvement of social relations, of which the body is a significant medium. This process can unfold in two ways. One of them involves defending the body’s autonomy and freedom against oppressive social, legal, and/or ethical regulations. The other consists in the  improving body challenging the social mechanisms that thwart its development. Of course, in the real social world, these two moments (subjugation and emancipation) co-occur in the complex fabric of complementary and contradictory relationships that make up society. It is impossible to foresee which of them will take the upper hand at any given instant. One thing that can be said with a lot of certainty, though, is that the impulses to develop the body and to advance its consciousness are deeply anchored in culture, and this is where the ever-renewing emancipatory impulse of corporeality comes from.

References Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Translated by Gregory Elliott. Malden: Polity Press. Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulgakov, Mikhail. 2007. The Master and Margarita. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Penguin Books. de Certeau, Michel 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Dewey, John. 1980. “Democracy and Education.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey. Volume 9: 1899–1924. Democracy and Education, 1916, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1984. “The Public and Its Problems.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. Volume 2: 1925–1927. Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and The Public and Its Problems, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 235–372. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1967 (1845). The Condition of the Working Class in England. London: Panther Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H.  Hutton, 16–49. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Goldfarb, Jeffrey. 2005. The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heller, Ágnes. 1991. “The Concept of the Political Revisited.” In Political Theory Today, edited by David Held, 330–343. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hoa, Jen Hui Bon. 2014. “Totality and the Common: Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot on Everyday Life.” Cultural Critique 88 (Fall): 54–78. Joas, Hans. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Koczanowicz, Leszek. 2015. Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2014. Critique of Everyday Life. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso. Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. Translated by Eric Trump. New York: New York University Press. Lippmann, Walter. 1992. Public Opinion. New  York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1988. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Routledge.

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Marx, Karl. 1988. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Miligan. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1988. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London and New York: Verso. ———. 2005. On the Political. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2017. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London and New York: Verso. Nehamas, Alexander. 1998. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. 2006. “Biopower Today.” BioSocieties 1(2): 195–217. Ricoeur, Paul. 2007. The Political Paradox. In History and Truth by Paul Ricoeur, 247–70. Translated by Charles A.  Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shusterman, Richard. 2008. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sluga, Hans. 2014. Politics and the Search for the Common Good. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, Tracy. 2007. “Foreword.” In Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab, ix–xxviii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Voloshinov, Valentin N. 1976 (1927). Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, edited by Irwin R.  Titunik and Neal H.  Bruss. Translated by Irwin R.  Titunik. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

2 Applications: Everyday Life, the Body, and Strategies of Resistance

Abstract  This chapter shows how the concepts defined in Chap. 1 work and can be analytically applied. In the first part, niches of emancipation in authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies are explored. The second part offers two extended examples: one presents emancipation through artistic pursuits in communist Poland and the other investigates what came to be called the women’s strike, that is, waves of protests against the tightening of abortion law in Poland. The last part reflects on the general role of the body in the process of emancipation. Keywords  Niches of emancipation • Political body • Emotion • Women’s strike in Poland • Poetry and society

2.1 Niches of Emancipations as Strategies of Resistance in Totalitarianism and Democracy In the previous chapter, I outlined my conceptual framework linking emancipatory politics to everyday life and corporeality. The gist of this part is that the interrelations of these concepts may differ from society to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Koczanowicz, The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1_2

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society, as they hinge on the local economic, social, and cultural conjunctures. Only having examined the combination of these factors can we hope to offer a relevant account of viable resistance strategies in particular circumstances. Nevertheless, to consider each local configuration separately as a distinct political ontological entity would be complex to the point of being impracticable. Hence, our purpose will be better served by distinguishing certain types of societies, depending on their political arrangements. The distinction between democracies and non-democratic regimes seems to be the most obvious division in this respect. Strategies of resistance, niches of emancipation, and the microphysics of emancipation play a different role in either of these groups. By way of example, let us consider two poles of political regulation: full totalitarianism and full liberal democracy. The former was depicted by Hannah Arendt as undifferentiated masses subjected to political control: Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions.1

Furthermore, the totalitarian system thoroughly controls the behavior of individuals and even seeks to monitor their thinking. As a result, any possibility to function outside the official structures of the state is precluded. As Arendt observed, “[n]othing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives. After a few years of power and systematic co-­ordination, the Nazis could rightly announce: ‘The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.’”2 Arendt described  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1976), 311.  Arendt, Origins, 338–9. In the footnote, Arendt adds: “The remark was made by Robert Ley.”

1 2

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the Stalinist version of totalitarianism in similar terms. Despite the controversy sparked by her views (particularly by her equation of the two totalitarianisms), I believe that, overall, she accurately captured the reality of the totalitarian system with respect to its politicization. However, as signaled in the previous chapter, the relationship between politics and everyday life is more complicated and involves more factors than just political control and propaganda. Indisputably, no political activity whatsoever could evade the scrupulous control of the regime in the USSR for a long time. However, even at the worst peak of the Stalinist terror, there were pockets of discussion free enough to merit the moniker of niches of emancipation, severely circumscribed though they might have been. Often, they were crushed down by the secret police before they had a chance to expand, but some of them survived, especially if the discussions held within them dealt with apparently esoteric or strictly professional themes. If their formal history is yet to be written, we do have literary testimonies of them at our disposal, such as the celebrated novels by Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago) and Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate). Niches of emancipation emerged, propelled by doubts about the viability of passing on the revolutionary message to the next generation. As the historian Yuri Slezkine argues in his monumental study of the House of Government, the Bolsheviks “managed to take over Rome long before their faith could become an inherited habit, but they never figured out how to transform their certainty into a habit that their children or subordinates could inherit.”3 Slezkine compares the Bolsheviks to the sect of Millenarists, whose remarkable success did not prevent, or perhaps even triggered, their failure to maintain their creed. Reflecting on the collapse of communism in Russia, Slezkine notes that at the height of repression and propaganda, “when anyone connected to the outside world was subject to sacrificial murder, Soviet readers and writers were expected to learn from Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe.”4 Rather than studying revolutionary writings, the children of the first generation of the Bolsheviks read world classics and Russian literature, the two

 Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), xii.  Slezkine, House, 953.

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characteristically sharing “anti-millenarian humanism.”5 Whether or not one accepts the millenarist conception of the October Revolution, Slezkine shows that complex ethical reflection was at work in the totalitarian system of Soviet communism in the Stalinist era. If anything, this complexity was enhanced by the failure to knit Marxism into the texture of everyday life, which Slezkine also discusses: “[T]he dictatorship of unchained proletarians would automatically result in the withering away of whatever got in the way of Communism, from the state to the family. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks never worried very much about the family, never policed the home, and never connected the domestic rites of passage—childbirth, marriage, and death—to their sociology and political economy.”6 This observation, I believe, holds not only for the Stalinist period but actually for the entire age of communism in its various forms. As I argued in my Politics of Time, using Michel Foucault’s concepts, real socialism was never able to develop its own form of subjectivation.7 Therefore, the Marxist ideology lost in the clash with other ideologies, such as Christianity, in everyday human relations. These general processes of eroding the grip of the totalitarian worldview with its dictates overlapped with political changes, especially those involved in de-Stalinization, and the unique arrangements and legacies of the individual countries of the socialist camp. Those to a large extent determined the “degrees of freedom” in respective societies and, consequently, the relevance of their niches of emancipation. Of course, by principle, the communist state owned a monopoly on strictly political activity, but there were always sites within it which, their apparently non-­ political investment notwithstanding, proved capable of affecting the perception of the social world and, thus, of politics as well. Further in this book, I will focus on Poland, which owed its special position in the East Bloc to two relatively independent institutions: private property in agriculture and the Catholic Church. Despite the concerted and repeated effort the communist state made to radically limit  Slezkine, House, 953.  Slezkine, House, 952. 7  Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 83–97. 5 6

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their independence, their very existence deflected the trajectory of social and cultural life. The dynamics within the Communist Party (which went by the name of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Poland) were also an impactful factor. The Party’s leadership ultimately retracted on its demands for socialist realism in art, consenting to any formal experimentation in art and literature, as long as artists and authors did not violate political taboos, which, by the way, varied across the communist period in Poland. This is not the place to recount the history of the communist system, but it is always worth noting, if only sketchily, that a complex dialectic was at play between the general rulebooks of the system and its local and historical variants. One vivid exemplification is to be found in the momentous shifts from Stalinism to the Khrushchev “thaw,” to Brezhnev’s stagnation in the Soviet Union, whereas in Hungary, the period of massive repression in the wake of the Soviet intervention was followed by a time of “goulash socialism,” marked by a relative economic prosperity and liberalism in culture. Any such change created new opportunities for setting up niches of emancipation and, more importantly, opportunities for them to influence the public sphere. The latter notion is rather elusive in the context of the communist state, which sought to politicize the public sphere and subordinate it to the dominant ideology. Under such circumstances, a hybrid entity came into being, which I have given a paradoxical label of the private-public sphere.8 The informal networks of family, friendship, and/or work contacts took over the role of the non-existent free media and opinion-forming organizations. They functioned as niches of emancipation outside the orchestrated system of ideology, and ideas circulated and were transferred between them. Obviously, niches of emancipation were not limited to private liaisons alone. Some of them are even known to have been institutionally sanctioned as, for example, discussion clubs or art movements, particularly in times of a relative liberalization of the system. Such initiatives were most often “hooked up” to official organizations and institutions, which helped lull the vigilance of the authorities, at least for a time.  Leszek Koczanowicz, “Civil Society as an Ethical Challenge: Paradoxes of the Creation of the Public Sphere in Post-Totalitarian Poland,” Human Affairs 13(1), 2003: 20–33. 8

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A tentative taxonomy of niches of emancipation I propose based on the criteria of their range, extent of institutionalization, and degree of politicization includes seven elements. 1. Family ties and friendship networks. One of the many paradoxes of the communist system was that, despite its attempts to limit the role of the family,9 it made family a paramount part of social life, as important as close bonds of friendship. This resulted from two core properties of the system: its structural inefficiency and the shortage economy.10 Family and friends were essential for survival amidst the complex system of distribution and the scarcity of merchandise, often including basic goods. They formed a “safety net” for getting by in difficult life situations. Equally importantly, these networks persisted because of their members’ mutual trust, which transcended any official systems of loyalty. Communication within them was relatively opened and covered all parts of society. Also, they served to pass on the results of “existential tests,” to use Luc Boltanski’s term. Consequently, many of such ties may be said to have become islands of liberation—niches of emancipation. Nevertheless, their impact and reach were severely restricted. This resulted from the very nature of existential tests, which, being emotionally intense, tend not to be generalizable and thus have a limited theoretical capacity. 2. Meetings of friends or close acquaintances united by mutual trust. Such meetings grew out of family and friendship networks but had more “theoretical” leanings. They provided a forum for conversations which revolved around cultural themes but also tackled ethical issues. As already indicated, the official ideology was unable to accommodate ethical reflection on the dilemmas of everyday life. Friendly conversations would often take a book or a recently seen movie as a pretext, with art patently serving as a placeholder, and morph into a substitute for the absent political or ethical discussions. At turning points, such as the post-Stalin thaw, such get-togethers would become more politi Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta Books, 2005). 10  Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 9

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cized and sometimes proved a wellspring of ideas. The ideas they fostered often trickled into official circulation, in a toned-down form, through the press, the radio, or television. 3. Islands of artistic or cultural freedom. They were formed by groups clustered around outstanding individuals, such as artists. Crucially, the individual at the center of the group was not only an authority on art but also a moral authority. The activities and engagements of such circles varied. Whether they involved reading and commenting on literary works or home-staged theatrical performances, their meetings were not strictly political, but their political relevance was essentially preordained by the official ideology and its political agents.11 If the regime sought total control, any pursuit that dodged the official media channels was by default seen as a dangerous anti-state activity. If only a certain level of tolerance was in place, like in Poland, such artistic practices could continue and even thrive. 4. Discussion clubs and other semi-public forums. This category includes various intellectual initiatives that were as a rule affiliated to official organizations or institutions of the regime. Typically, such hubs were intended to be “transmission belts” for the official ideology, with participants studying and discussing the classics of Marxism-Leninism and/or their contemporary interpretations consistent with the party line. However, especially in the periods when the regime declined and relaxed its coercive measures, discussion clubs transfigured into authentic platforms for the sharing of ideas. One notable example is the Club of the Crooked Circle, which was established in Poland after the Thaw of 1956 and disbanded in 1962. As David Ost comments, the club made no appeals to society at large and produced no samizdat (self-published) literature, but it took a critical stance toward the increasingly repressive post-October status quo. The fact that it was tolerated for as long as it was seemed to many members to suggest that the government might still be capable of reform. It also indicated that the Party was indeed concerned with the views of the intelligentsia,  Alik Ginzburg’s apartment is a perfect example of such a club in the former USSR. See Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 11

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and that it might still be persuaded, through the enlightened pressure of the intellectuals, to move society in a more democratic direction.12 5. State-authorized large-scale art events that expanded the scope of freedom. This category encompasses the forms of activity that redrew the boundaries of what was allowed by the official ideology. Again, their significance as niches of freedom was largely a fallout from state policies. For example, jazz was banned in communist countries in the early 1950s, which meant that performing or playing it teetered on the edge of illegality. After the Thaw, jazz was no longer politicized in Poland, but various restrictions remained in place in the USSR.13 Events such as art festivals had an important part by offering an alternative to the official ideology throughout the history of the communist system. They made audiences aware that the propagandist image of capitalist societies was simplified, concomitantly making them realize that their own system was seriously flawed and should be changed. The already mentioned Open Theater Festival, held in my hometown (Wroclaw) in the 1970s, brought together the best independent theaters from the U.S. and Europe. Since their productions were very often critical of capitalism, particularly at that time of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the communist authorities regarded them as being usefully in sync with the official ideology. However, to the Polish (and other East European) audiences, their performances communicated and bore out the importance of the freedom of speech and critical artistic engagement. 6. All of the pursuits listed above could be translated into politics at some point. I include politics in niches of emancipation but with certain reservations and under some conditions. Oppositional politics in the totalitarian state had a special status, because the people involved in it could hardly dream of seizing power. Politics was more about bearing witness to the truth or deliberately ignoring the state and its ideology. As a result, swathes of gray area arose, with lines blurred between what state agents could countenance as “cultural pursuits”  David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47. 13  Zubok, Zhivago’s Children; Leopold Tyrmand, Diary 1954, trans. Anita Shelton and Andrew Wrobel (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 12

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and what they inevitably saw as anti-state demonstrations or anti-­ socialist activity. In many cases, the crossing of the Rubicon was in fact forced more by state interventions than by the artists or intellectuals themselves. Such oppositional involvement was by no means limited to the intelligentsia. The workers’ struggles for better working conditions were even more dangerous for the communist state. What usually began from grumbling about daily inconveniences sometimes escalated into riots and strikes with elements of a political agenda to them. 7. Anti-politics represents a special case of an overlap between politics and niches of liberation (microphysics of emancipation). In communist times, anti-politics was almost synonymous with civil society14 and, as I have argued elsewhere, anti-politics and civil society under the communist system were all about organizing society against the totalitarian state.15 Most importantly, however, they were never about grabbing political power. Even at the most triumphant peak of this tactic, in the wake of the strikes of 1980 and the founding of Solidarity in Poland as the first independent trade union in the communist camp, political demands were avoided. As Ost explains: “Poland’s ‘revolutionaries,’ however, did not seek to overthrow the state. They carefully refrained from demanding changes in the party or state structure, for that was ‘politics,’ and the new union movement stated clearly from the beginning that it did not want to be a political movement.”16 Of course, the tactic of sidestepping explicit political demands was in part driven by the fear of communist reprisals, but there was more to it than that. The dissidents, or at least some of them, believed that communist rule had corrupted society, and that the public therefore primarily needed an ethical transformation. Thus, anti-politics and civil society stood for the moral recovery of society, rather than for a network of nongovernmental organizations. In my view, this tactic embodied a universalization of the private niches of

 Ost, Solidarity.  Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time, 41–50. 16  Ost, Solidarity, 75. 14 15

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emancipation, now extended over a larger scale and informed by a conscious intent. The specificity of the microphysics of emancipation under the totalitarian and authoritarian regime lay in seeking liberation from the state’s claim to control vast areas of social life. For this purpose, people used the pockets of freedom, which periodically changed as a result of political infighting at the top of the Communist Party’s hierarchy. The main issue in this tension between the niches of liberation and the politics of the regime was the freedom of speech and its limits, which in turn determined the possibilities of making demands addressed to the regime. The place of the freedom of speech and expression in the structure of society is the main factor that differentiates niches of emancipation in totalitarianism and in liberal democracy. The freedom of speech is like a dogma in liberal democracy, considered one of its cornerstones. Preventive censorship, which was a nightmare in communist states, has never existed or has had very limited power in democracies. However, economic pressures have repeatedly been shown to work as a powerful means of control of publications and media. Therefore, the diffusion of political and social attitudes emerging from niches of emancipation is not so much a matter of confronting the state apparatus as rather of establishing channels of communication beyond the control of the establishment. As documented time and again, the state apparatus is connected to the capital-controlled media, which makes the venture even more difficult. In short, if the main reason for fear in the totalitarian state is the risk of being exposed as a political enemy and persecuted, in the capitalist liberal democracy, where there is freedom to create niches of liberation, fear is induced by the likelihood of being entirely neglected or marginalized. This fear is widespread, as shown by the recent discussion around so-called cancel culture, which is said to have discouraged right-wing thinkers from openly articulating their views. Thus, the freedom of speech is always contextualized and weaponized within the existing system of social and cultural domination.17  Martin Jay, Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Chapter 13 “The Weaponization of Free Speech,” 204–18. 17

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This precarious status of the freedom of speech is coupled with the production of “false needs,” to use Herbert Marcuse’s expression18: “False” are those [needs] which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others’) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.19

Although since Marcuse’s time we have amassed new evidence for the perverse power of capitalism to regulate people’s needs in line with its own logic of profit, his analyses laid the groundwork for understanding the mechanism of such interventions. Subsequent studies have shown the validity of Marcuse’s approach under changed social and cultural conditions. They have illumined the protean nature of capitalism and its ability to absorb and reappropriate new social phenomena, even those that seem far removed from its basic tenets. For example, Luc Boltanski and Ėve Chiapello have convincingly argued that capitalism was able to repurpose the main slogans of the counterculture of the 1960s for its own ends.20 Their The New Spirit of Capitalism is particularly interesting from my point of view, because it explains how marginalized movements that meet the criteria of niches of emancipation can transform human relations in society as a whole. There was a countercultural group stemming from certain social circles, such as students and intellectuals, that gained momentum in May 1968. The interpretation of its activity has followed two parallel trajectories. One,  Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1964). 19  Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7. 20  Luc Boltanski and Ėve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007). 18

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accepted by Marcuse, states that the movement was a failure and that the capitalist libidinal mentality ultimately won, while the other, endorsed by Boltanski and Chiapello, claims that the movement represented the most successful counterculture ever, but that its success was poisonous. If the capitalist economy was indeed able to make the conditions of work more humane, more creative, and more authentic, this occurred at the cost of putting new forms of exploitation in place. Boltanski and Chiapello outline the complicated dialectics of the process in which a critique of capitalism as destroying people’s authenticity (Marcuse’s false needs) triggered fundamental changes in capitalism but also redrew the concept of authenticity itself. “Liberation, and especially sexual liberation; autonomy in personal and emotional life, but also in work; creativity; unbridled self-­ fulfilment; the authenticity of a personal life as against hypocritical, old-­ fashioned social conventions—these might seem, if not definitively established, at least widely acknowledged as essential values of modernity,”21 they assert, insisting nevertheless that it is necessary “to bring out the potential for oppression contained in the new mechanisms of accumulation, and identify their perils for the possibility of authentic relationships, while taking the generalization of demands for liberation and authenticity as established.”22 Artistic critique, which was even more instrumental than social critique in bringing about this change, was helpless to identify the new forms of exploitation, let alone prevent them. As Boltanski and Chiapello explicate: By helping to overthrow the conventions bound up with the old domestic world, and also to overcome the inflexibilities of the industrial order— bureaucratic hierarchies and standardized production—the artistic critique opened up an opportunity for capitalism to base itself on new forms of control and commodify new, more individualized and “authentic” goods.23

 Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit, 419.  Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit, 420. 23  Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit, 467. 21 22

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As already mentioned, art has always boasted a potential for fostering niches of emancipation capable of having impact on society as a whole. In a sense, the counterculture of the 1960s was as much of a social experiment as it was of an artistic one. Yet when its exploits were co-opted by capitalism, a need for new niches emerged. To restate, in liberal capitalist democracies niches of emancipation arise as a response to the economic and cultural impositions and constraints of the system. They are also political insofar that the form of liberal democracy (or just democracy) actually in place is functional and protective of capitalism. When they are openly political, they are usually preoccupied with abolishing particular instances of injustice, rather than with changing the system itself. Most social movements since the 1960s have relied on a combination of social engagement and personal ethical commitment. If counterculture at its height aspired to build a thoroughly new society, it later ramified into an array of more “specialized” branches, such as environmental, animal-rights, fair-trade, and other movements. They gave the people involved a sense of emancipation from the oppression of capitalist society, even if it was a somewhat more humble micro-­ emancipation. The activists could feel that they were transcending the illusionary necessity of capitalist ideology. Some of such niches can transfigure into full-fledged political activity, the most striking example of which is the Green Party in Germany. The history of this party tells a complicated narrative of the gradual transformation of a civil movement into a political party, a process that was to some extent compelled by the demands of the political system. What is even more interesting is that, in its current form, the Green Party is a fusion of the still dominant West German post-countercultural trends and the East German clandestine grassroots environmental organizations. The background to this story is provided by an increasing ecological sensibility and an awareness of the threats that technology poses to the environment.24 This story also perfectly exemplifies the complicated relationships between niches of emancipation, civil society, and political movements in  Sebastian Bukow, “The Green Party in Germany,” in Green Parties in Europe, ed. Emilie van Haute (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 112–39.

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liberal democracy. With the lines between them blurred, they can smoothly interpenetrate, overlap, and morph one into another, but this does not preclude observing some regularities. Niches of emancipation, as I understand them, are of ethical, often personal, nature. They tend to emerge as an expression of disapproval of state policies or the practices of the capitalist economy. As such, they are loose and amorphous, lacking clear spatial or temporal boundaries. They can take the form of individual dissent and also of more or less spontaneous group protests, such as demonstrations, performances, or other artistic initiatives, for example, street theater. In other words, niches of emancipation arise in the private sphere, but at some point, they drift into the public sphere, becoming part of civil society as defined by Jürgen Habermas in his influential book on the bourgeois society. Habermas argues that “[t]he bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.”25 I propose two modifications to Habermas’ definition by juxtaposing it with my concept of the niche of emancipation. First, I argue that ideas can be formulated and developed in the private sphere and that they become part of the public sphere the moment they are explicitly expounded as social and propagated as such. Second, Habermas claims that this depiction refers to the bourgeois society, whereas I have shown above that for the totalitarian and authoritarian political systems, there are other mechanisms of transferring niches of emancipation into the public sphere. The niches of emancipation in liberal democracy can be politicized in two ways. They provide a basis for political movements via civil society. The ethical ideas tested in these niches permeate into the public sphere and, thence, into the political sphere. A group of friends can practice certain ethical virtues and then set up a discussion club, which subsequently transforms into a political movement. There is also an easier way that directly leads from niches of emancipation to a political party. This  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 27. 25

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trajectory is conspicuous for niches that take the form of demonstrations for a cause. In such cases, the temptation arises to transform an event into something more solid, such as a stable organization. This organization could be part of civil society; it also could be a political party. To what extent such a political movement is able to preserve its original experience of liberation from oppression that fueled its establishment is, of course, quite a different matter. Such a direct transformation is characteristic of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. In the “magic” year 1989, we could see how quickly dissident groups, which often had a very limited influence on society as a whole, but were kindled by a strong ethical commitment, became leaders of mass movements. The predicament of the post-­ communist countries was in many cases the clash of ethical beliefs cherished in their niches of emancipation with the realities of regular democratic politics. In liberal democracies, this confrontation is probably less harsh since the greater openness of the liberal democratic system promotes a relatively early comparison between conceptions hatched in niches of emancipation and their external political environment. Nevertheless, liberal democracy is a hybrid project. It consists of two components: popular sovereignty and individual rights, which can be (and historically often are) set on a collision course. The recognition of women’s rights or the rights of sexual minorities is a classic example. From the perspective outlined above, such political liberation processes involved a transition from communities enclosed in their niches of emancipations to ones openly voicing political demands. Two processes overlapped here. The official ideology had been weakened to the point of being unable to prevent the increasingly open expression of demands that were no longer relegated to the private sphere. At the same time, the demands for equal rights for women and sexual minorities dovetailed with the demands for equality and freedom, which were at the core of the official ideology of liberal democracy. All this caused a radical change in this segment of the official ideology, which was followed by political and legal changes. The politicization of ethical commitments produces a social and ideological vacuum that can be filled by new niches of emancipation, which can in turn transmute into a new political movement. This pattern is

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vividly illustrated by the suffragette movement, which succeeded in the fight for the enfranchisement of women in the U.K. This success only prompted the realization that the roots of women’s oppression went deeper than the lack of formal equal rights. As Nancy Hartsock comments: [S]mall-group consciousness raising at the beginning of the contemporary women’s movement—with its stress on clarifying the links between the personal and the political—led women to conclude that change in consciousness and in the social relations of the individual is one of the most important components of political change. Women talked to each other to understand and share experiences and to set out a firsthand account of women’s oppression.26

As these developments found expression in the public and political spheres, the quandary arose about how to cultivate the new sense of self and community forged by these groups and at the same time participate in the political game of traditional society. Hartsock has shown that the awareness of this dilemma actually redirected the course of political activity: We must constantly ask: To what extent must we build organizations that mirror the institutions we are trying to destroy? Can organizations based on power as energy and initiative be effective tools for changing sexist, heterosexist, racist, and classist institutions such as the media, the health industry, and the like? To what extent will both we and our organizations be transformed by the struggle for power (domination)? Can our organizations serve as tools for taking power for women and still lay the groundwork for new nonsexist, nonracist, nonclassist societal institutions? While there are no easy answers to these questions, we must continue to ask them as we work to create political change.27

One takeaway from this well-documented history is that the concepts and sensibilities nurtured in ethical niches of emancipation can be  Nancy C.M. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2019), 52. 27  Hartsock, Feminist Standpoint, 59–60. 26

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preserved in a political movement, but this gives rise to a constant tension between its origins and its full-fledged organization. By no means unique to feminist activity, this tension is pervasive in most new social movements. Almost all of them search for ways to safeguard their original feelings of resistance and, at the same time, for effective methods to launch political change. Most of them are single-cause movements (as eminently epitomized by climate activism), which makes their relationship to the original niches of liberation more intimate than in classical political organizations. This engagement influences the objectives they pursue and their modes of action, which are more differentiated and more complex than the regular ways of liberal democracy.

2.2 The Political Body and Niches of Emancipation In Chap. 1, I emphasized the centrality of the body and corporeality in creating and maintaining niches of emancipation. This centrality is evident in a number of separate, yet related, areas. One of them comprises emotions, feelings, and sensations, which are physical responses to external circumstances. Another covers the political use of the body—the weaponization of the body. The third area concerns the body as a vehicle for emancipation. This third dimension is crucial in terms of the main theme of this book, because it aggregates the liberating potentials of corporeality. Given this, the third dimension is the pivotal site of somapower. Below, I discuss the three aspects one by one, but at the end of this chapter I will show how they work together to secure the autonomy and freedom of the body. Niches of emancipation emerge from the most rudimentary, elemental emotions and sentiments. They are undoubtedly inscribed and concretized in corporeality. Corporeality is a locus of concreteness and is therefore relatively resistant to abstract ideologies. This is very clear when we talk about our personal relationships with other people. Physical reactions to them can convey a range of attitudes, from love to hate, and we are as a rule unable to control them consciously. “I can’t stand him/her”

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is commonly uttered as an expression of feelings that have no conscious representation, but may signal a basic visceral attitude. This analytical perspective has largely been neglected in political theory. Instead, emotions have been treated as obstacles to rational discourse, an essential prerequisite of liberal democracy, as it were. The black legend of irrational crowds and irrational masses, which originated in the early nineteenth century and was “scientifically” substantiated by Gustave Le Bon’s famous book, dominated the narrative on the political significance of emotions for a long time. Of course, there were historical grounds for thinking about politics in this way. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century manipulated emotions to incite citizens against their enemies. Experts have been horrified to see how easy it was to provoke hatred and anger against innocent people whose only sin was their wrong race or class. An ingenious system of perverted language use, so impressively described by Victor Klemperer in his Lingua Tertii Imperii, enabled the propagandists of the Third Reich to alter the cognitive image of social reality in ways that dehumanized the Jews, which in turn facilitated aggression against them.28 Such observations and experiences made it seem safe to consign emotions to the realm of evolutionary relics to be eradicated from the public sphere, which chimed with Immanuel Kant’s seminal definition of it. Serious reflection on emotions as an important factor in social bonding was rather scarce, with the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith, being some of the notable exceptions. Richard Rorty pointed out that David Hume’s emphasis had primarily been on the growth of sympathy among people, on their ability to embrace with compassion those who belonged to other, often alien, cultures. Drawing on Annette Baier’s work on Hume, Rorty concluded: Baier would like us to get rid of both the Platonic idea that we have a true self, and the Kantian idea that it is rational to be moral. In aid of this project, she suggests that we think of “trust” rather than “obligation” as the fundamental moral notion. This substitution would mean thinking of the  Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii. A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 28

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spread of the human rights culture not as a matter of our becoming more aware of the requirements of the moral law, but rather as what Baier calls “a progress of sentiments.” This progress consists in an increasing ability to see the similarities between ourselves and people very unlike us as outweighing the differences. It is the result of what I have been calling “sentimental education.” The relevant similarities are not a matter of sharing a deep true self that instantiates true humanity, but are such little, superficial, similarities as cherishing our parents and our children—similarities that do not distinguish us in any interesting way from many nonhuman animals.29

If we accept this reading of Hume’s social philosophy, it will represent an original version of the Enlightenment conception of reason as governing the world, in the sense that it will not be a matter of obeying a priori rules, but rather of thinking about human relationships and how such relationships can be promoted or destroyed by laws and institutions. In his discussion of moral sentiments, Adam Smith, Hume’s compatriot and largely a continuator of his thought, explicitly posited that no general idea could be contrary to the desires and attitudes of people who were to form a society. He argued that a person who rigidly adhered to their doctrine—one he dubbed “the man of system”—would seek to arrange people in society in the same way as one arranged pawns on a chessboard: He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful.

29  Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present, ed. Micheline R. Ishay (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 413.

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If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.30

Smith’s insights complement Hume’s views, for they emphasize not only that social progress is accomplished by reinforcing sympathy, but also that any technique of government must reckon with people’s habits and attitudes and often with their petty idiosyncrasies. Thus, the private sphere with personal tempers and intimate leanings falls within the scope of politics in the same way that the grand programs for repairing the public sphere and transforming society’s institutions do. However, Rorty’s reference to Hume seems to center on emotions as an object of education and training. While this is by all means a valid focus, such an approach overlooks another facet of the relevance of emotions, namely their role as indicators of injustice in social relations. This issue was examined to an extent by Boltanski in his concept of existential tests, which I discussed in Chap. 1. At this point, let me only remind that these tests are personally experienced direct feelings of injustice. Though acknowledging the pertinence of emotions, Boltanski did not probe the underlying psychological mechanisms. This endeavor was undertaken by Sara Ahmed in her groundbreaking book The Cultural Politics of Emotion,31 where she framed her approach as an attempt to answer the following questions: [H]ow does a nation come to be imagined as having a “soft touch”? How does this “having” become a form of “being,” or a national attribute? In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explore how emotions work to shape the “surfaces” of individual and collective bodies. Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others.32

She concludes by defining emotions or, more precisely, the way they operate and accomplish things: “The ‘doing’ of emotions, I have suggested, is bound up with the sticky relation between signs and bodies: emotions work by working through signs and on bodies to materialize  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I976), 234.  Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 32  Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 1. 30 31

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the surfaces and boundaries that are lived as worlds.”33 Ahmed uses this concept of emotions as an angle from which to scrutinize justice and injustice, showing how they are reflected in emotions and how emotions deal with them. From my perspective, Ahmed’s crucial insight is that the feelings of justice and injustice are actually sparked by the tension between the public sphere and the intimacy of our bodies: “The objects of emotions slide and stick and they join the intimate histories of bodies, with the public domain of justice and injustice.”34 While Ahmed’s impressive account of emotions deals with how they are caught up between the macroscale and the microscale, it is the middle level that is most intriguing from my point of view. Niches of emancipation are where the clarification and understanding of emotions take place, which, according to Ahmed, add up to the most important stage in the social transformation of emotions. As she argues: The emotional struggles against injustice are not about finding good or bad feelings, and then expressing them. Rather, they are about how we are moved by feelings into a different relation to the norms that we wish to contest, or the wounds we wish to heal. Moving here is not about “moving on,” or about “using” emotions to move away, but moving and being moved as a form of labor or work, which opens up different kinds of attachments to others, in part through the recognition of this work as work.35

I assume that a considerable part of the “recognition of this work as work” happens in niches of emancipation. They enable people to meet and acknowledge each other’s scars. The body is inevitably a  medium of this effort: [T]he scar is a sign of the injury: a good scar allows healing, it even covers over, but the covering always exposes the injury, reminding us of how it shapes the body. Our bodies have been shaped by their injuries; scars are traces of those injuries that persist in the healing or stitching of the present. This kind of good scar reminds us that recovering from injustice cannot be  Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 191.  Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 202. 35  Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 201. 33 34

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about covering over the injuries, which are effects of that injustice; signs of an unjust contact between our bodies and others. So “just emotions” might be ones that work with and on rather than over the wounds that surface as traces of past injuries in the present.36

Even if this work is usually hidden from the public, it is, through channeling self-understanding, a preparatory phase for social action. Niches of emancipation can take different forms, such as consciousness-raising groups or more directly political clusters. But regarding emotions, the crucial foci, as Ahmed rightly emphasizes, are justice and injustice, which are the axes of Boltanski’s existential tests, themselves proofs of the reality of reality. In a sense, then, emotions are refined and funneled within the niches, which in this way also play the educational role that Rorty demanded. However, it is not an education that makes emotions more “civilized”; rather, they are helped to find their proper object and form in the niches. The resulting anger and resistance are carried into the public sphere and transformed into political actions: demonstrations, performances, and the like ventures. From the somaesthetic point of view, the refinement of emotions is closely related to the improvement of the body as a whole. Such a comprehensive amelioration can be treated as a liminal point that is difficult to attain in real social conditions. However, changing one element of the body’s complicated machinery cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, leave its other parts intact. At this juncture, we are touching on the two other aspects of the body’s role in niches of emancipation. In both cases, emotions are crucial to the politicization of the body. Making the body a weapon of ideology hinges on a strong emotional component that can fuel motivations for political action based on that ideology. In liberation efforts, it is requisite to have a clear sense of the need to overcome oppression even at the individual level. However, the relationship between emotions and the body is bilateral. If, as Ahmed aptly highlights, the body is shaped by emotions, it can also itself ignite emotions. This ability is described in the James-Lange theory of emotion, which states that emotions are reactions to changes in the body. John Dewey concluded his  Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 202.

36

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analysis of the James-Lange theory by observing: “[W]e may say that all so-called expressions of emotions are, in reality, the reduction of movements and stimulations originally useful into attitudes.”37 Somaesthetics is, of course, very much concerned with the formation of bodily attitudes, which in turn lead to the formation of emotions. This is a very complex process because the influence of attitudes can happen through different avenues. As Dewey explains: [W]e note a difference in the form and nature of the reduction, and in the resulting attitudes, which explain the apparent diversity of the four principles of “serviceable associated habits,” of “analogous stimuli,” of “antithesis,” and of “direct nervous discharge.” A given movement or set of movements may be useful either as preparatory to, as leading up to, another set of acts, or in themselves as accomplished ends.38

This concept of emotion and Ahmed’s model are complementary in some measure. External stimulation finds its way into the body through pre-­ existing attitudes, which trigger emotions. The entire process is heavily influenced by the respective social environments in which individuals exist. Therefore, the process of eliciting emotional responses can be manipulated by maneuvering various inputs. Since bodily attitudes have a substantial capacity to modify, or even spawn, emotions, totalitarian regimes have always endeavored to harness all physical activity to their purposes. They put great emphasis on the efficiency of the body and its development, but it was not for the sake of the body as such. Clear utilitarian motives were at stake: healthy and efficient bodies were an ideal resource to deploy to maintain and buttress the regime, especially in the armed forces, but also in the projects of industrialization and urban modernization, the goals cherished by all totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. To engender the feelings of commitment to the national community and hatred of the enemy was an equally and, indeed, probably more important goal. 37  John Dewey, “The Theory of Emotion. I: Emotional Attitudes,” Psychological Review 1(6), 1894: 553–69, on pp. 568–9. 38  Dewey, “Theory,” 569.

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All totalitarian regimes were eager to organize parades, marches, and rallies that created a sense of unity through the harmonized movement of bodies. Susan Sontag, in her penetrating essay on Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries, writes: “All four of Riefenstahl’s commissioned Nazi films— whether about Party congresses, the Wehrmacht, or athletes—celebrate the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistible leader.”39 In her productions, Riefenstahl captured what was axial to the fascist totalitarian ideology: an utter idolization of the body bound up with the cult of the leader, who symbolized the body of the nation. The fascist politics of the body was multilayered, and its philosophical and ideological anchoring has been scrutinized by several thinkers. As a paramount contribution to this inquiry, Emmanuel Levinas showed in his article in Esprit (1934) that the simplistic philosophy of Hitlerism was opposed to the entirety of Western metaphysics with its Judeo-Christian roots. The main point of this contrariety was the idea of the body as a decisive factor in founding a community of blood. As a consequence, Levinas insisted, [s]uch a society loses living contact with its true ideal of freedom and accepts degenerate forms of the ideal. It does not see that the true ideal requires effort and instead enjoys those aspects of the ideal that make life easier. It is to a society in such a condition that the Germanic ideal of man seems to promise sincerity and authenticity. Man no longer finds himself confronted by a world of ideas in which he can choose his own truth on the basis of a sovereign decision made by his free reason. He is already linked to a certain number of these ideas, just as he is linked by birth to all those who are of his blood. He can no longer play with the idea (jouer avec l'idee), for coming from his concrete being, anchored in his flesh and blood, the idea remains serious.40

Such a metaphysical engagement of fascist ideology went hand in hand with the tactical, propagandistic, and political use of the body. This  Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 86.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand, Critical Inquiry 17(1), 1990: 62–71, on p. 70. 39 40

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dangerous amalgamation led to an extreme form of biopolitics, which morphed into necropolitics. Beautiful and efficient bodies were ultimately put into the service of death. The attitude to the body in the Soviet totalitarian version of communism differed from that embraced in fascism, despite their superficial similarities. In my view, the major difference resided in the idea that the body could and should be “scientifically” manipulated. This idea found expression in various fields, from the prominence accorded to Pavlovian psychology to more humanistic psychological models (e.g., that of Lev S. Vygotsky), from the practice of collective and individual physical exercise to the dreams of extending human life. In other words, the body was treated as a material that could be molded for ideological and political purposes. In extreme circumstances, it was considered totally disposable if its destruction could serve higher ends. Because of this ambiguity inherent in the very concept of the scientific body, the politics of the body was in flux, mutating along with changes in the broader conjuncture. Joy Neumeyer pithily summarizes these transformations: [B]y the late 1960s, the socialist dream of mastering human and natural energies was overshadowed by fatigue; even gigantic construction sites had lost their power to convince. The late Soviet health establishment transferred the collective energy associated with rapid industrialization, the conquest of space, and other mass projects to prolonging the biological life of the population. The state longevity campaign, made possible by the country’s improved living conditions, attempted to promote comfort and consumerism while staving off disease and dissipation. Rather than sacrificing their bodies to a world-historical cause, Soviet citizens were now tasked with eating vegetables and jogging throughout an active old age.41

Besides the control of health and daily activities, the parade was the main instrument for implementing the Soviet politics of the body. Mass pageants had the same function as those staged by the fascist regimes, that is, to bolster community feelings and to consolidate the power of the  Joy Neumeyer, “Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life,” in Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 195–225, on p. 197.

41

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state over the body. But as the Marxist ideology of the Soviet Union lacked the kind of the metaphysics of the body crafted in Nazi Germany, public spectacles were rather an exposition of the beauty and power of youth, which foregrounded the brilliant future of the socialist state. In the words of Karl Schlögel, a historian of everyday life in the Soviet Union: [T]he fizkulturniki parades provide the clearest proof that the Soviet Union had its own conception of the human body and that its notions of beauty circled around a physical ideal that derived in some respects from antiquity and the Renaissance, but added something new that had to do with the proletarian state and the altered status of human labor in modern society— with a different “modernity,” in fact. The ideal Soviet physique had its own moment of blossoming, but also its own decline.42

Schlögel traces the idea of the importance of physical exercise back to social culture as it developed in Imperial Russia. He emphasizes the impact of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s book What Is to Be Done?, which “assigned a major role to asceticism, self-improvement, and physical training in the development of the new people.”43 Rakhmetov, its character scripted as an ideal revolutionary, makes physical exercise a vital part of his life: When Rakhmetov came to Petersburg at the age of sixteen, he was an ordinary youth of somewhat above-average height and strength, but by no means remarkable. Out of any ten of his peers, two could probably have gotten the better of him. But in the middle of his seventeenth year he decided to acquire physical prowess and began to work hard at it. He took up gymnastics with considerable dedication. That was all right, but gymnastics can improve only the material available; one has to provide oneself with such material. And so, for a while, he spent several hours every day, twice as long as he practiced gymnastics, working at common labor that

 Karl Schlögel, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), 573. 43  Schlögel, Soviet Century, 575. 42

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required physical strength. He carried water, chopped and hauled firewood, felled trees, cut stone, dug earth, and forged iron.44

Physical labor was, of course, closely associated with the socialist narrative of the special position of the proletariat. In Marxist theory, the proletariat’s central role resulted from the situation of the working class in capitalist society, but the nature of the work done by workers was not irrelevant. As in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the slave who shaped and created things was the prospective figure in the development of the Absolute. Therefore, the process of constructing the environment with one’s own hands had a profound metaphysical significance. Given this, the state authorities put a lot of effort into coordinating and propagating fizkultur (literally: the culture of physical exercise). Its purpose was twofold: exercises were supposed to be an engine for emotional attachment to the state, and at the same time they were treated as a means of self-discipline and preparation of the body for manual work, which was expected to give solid metaphysical grounding to class consciousness. This history is an interesting case of the transfer of ideas cultivated in niches of emancipation to the level of the state, where they metamorphosed into an instrument of oppression. The techniques of self-improvement and methods for developing ethical independence from the coercive tsarist regime were seized by the Soviet state to control people and further their identification with the dominant ideology. However, I believe that there is an ambiguity to this story. The ethical message of individual self-improvement and self-discipline was at odds with the state-enforced discipline and adherence to collective ideology. The original message was still recognizable, though blurred by the political circumstances. In depicting the oases of freedom, Schlögel explains that they could be found in places where people had to rely on themselves and thus developed the ethical virtues of individual self-­discipline. One model for such an adventure was offered by geological fieldwork:

44  Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Michael Katz and William Wagner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), epub edition, 648.

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[E]veryone had already travelled to regions far from the capital, to places where there were no roads, where you had to wait days for the next boat or for a bus that ran only once a week, and where you might have the good luck to be picked up and given a ride by a passing helicopter. […] The equipment of these groups standing in front of railway stations or on the platforms had something professional about it and yet they were masters of improvisation who knew how to deal with any emergency situation, no matter how complicated. They evidently had a model to follow: the expeditions of geologists, soil scientists, cartographers—the core troop of those opening up the expanses of the Empire, people who were forced to make their own way for weeks on end without anyone to rely on but themselves.45

The romanticism of geographical expeditions came complete with distinctive cultural forms, such as song, literature, and stage performances. Still, the forging of one’s character was the most important end. The famous Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky was once sent on such an expedition upon an intervention from his mother, who “exiled the would­be director to the East, to prevent him wasting away among Moscow’s stilyaga, the dandified Russian equivalent of the Beat Generation.”46 The year-long trip was one of the most consequential events in Tarkovsky’s life: “[N]ature is ever present in his films—often celebrated, always mysterious—as is the lone protagonist, struggling to come to terms with his own life and the world around—and within—him.”47 Granted, this episode is sourced from the biography of an artistic genius, but to escape oppressive conditions by heading to remote areas of the country, where one could live in harmony with nature, was a widespread practice. It involved, almost by default, self-improvement through physical disciplines, an important part of which was menial labor. Paradoxically, this represented a return to the old socialist ideals that had been appropriated by the totalitarian state. This story vividly shows how niches of liberation were constructed and how the process of microphysics of emancipation was set in motion. The spatial shift made it possible to transform everyday life and expand the pockets of freedom in the  Schlögel, Soviet Century, 265.  Sean Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005), 17. 47  Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky, 17. 45 46

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totalitarian state, whose peripheries tended to be less tightly controlled than the center. Spatial relocations of this kind may have nothing spectacular about them, but it seems that, at least under totalitarianism/ authoritarianism, they facilitate the establishment of islands (or oases) of liberation as a milieu where self-improvement is pursued and free human interactions flourish. I call such oases niches of emancipation as long as they are relatively stable and offer possibilities of transcending the regulation of oppressive regimes. Clearly, the translocations of this kind are not unknown in liberal democracy. They are embarked on by people in a bid to escape the commodified conditions of life, as famously illustrated by the hippie movement with its idea of setting up communes, which were supposed to function as oases of freedom from hypocritical society. Such a spatial reconfiguration of everyday life can be seen as a facilitating condition of the microphysics of emancipation through bodily practices. While their relevance is fundamental, to distinguish between bodily activities that bear an emancipatory potential and those that do not pose a theoretical question and a practical problem. We can easily imagine taxing physical practices devoid of emancipatory force: young people training their bodies to demonstrate their attachment to an oppressive ideology, terrorists hardening their bodies for a suicide attack, and soldiers drilling to fight in war with lethal efficiency. I have outlined an important criterion for telling emancipatory bodily activities from non-emancipatory ones elsewhere, stating that “the soma becomes a site of emancipation only on condition that bodily activity and somatic practices are autonomous and do not serve any purpose exterior to the soma itself and the development of its potential. Ultimately, this translates into intellectual growth, increased emotional sensitivity, and richer and more complete social relationships.”48 From the perspective of somaesthetics, this general criterion must be described in more detail. A good starting point for such a specification is provided by Richard Shusterman’s essay “The Somatic Turn: Care of the Body in  Leszek Koczanowicz, “Somaesthetics, Somapower, and the Microphysics of Emancipation,” in Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art, ed. Jerold J. Abrams (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 61–73, on pp. 72–3. 48

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Contemporary Culture.”49 As one of the seminal texts of somaesthetics, this essay contains an important distinction in the areas and applications of somaesthetics: “[I]t can be useful to distinguish […] between representational and experiential somaesthetics, between practices that focus primarily on beautifying our external form and those that instead concentrate on making us ‘feel better’ in both senses […] more satisfying experience and more acute perception.”50 To be useful in my argument, this division must be modified. Representational somaesthetics would involve not only beautifying the body but also, in a broader sense, any instance of putting it on display. The spectators of such shows would be real or imaginary. This would accommodate, for example, preparing the body for a parade, a public gymnastic show, and the like in front of a real audience. But those who exert themselves to sculpt their bodies into shape do so not only for concrete people but also, perhaps especially, for the invisible eye of cultural norm. Michel Foucault’s celebrated metaphor of the panopticon elucidates that the sense of being constantly visible is part and parcel of modernity,  and that “docile bodies,” shaped in accordance with the rules of culture, are products of this arrangement.51 Unrestricted visibility is even more important when the body is subordinated to ideology or politics, when it is treated as a weapon in ideological or political struggles. Then the invisible eye is that of ideological goals and canons. In extreme cases, the invisible eye can be the imaginary one of the charismatic leader who embodies a given ideology. Experiential somaesthetics sits at the opposite pole of the social significance of the body. Its focus is on perfecting the body, rather than putting it on display. Therefore, as Shusterman emphasizes, the techniques used for this purpose substantially differ from those applied in representational somaesthetics. They are geared to heightening the awareness of the body, making the most of its potential, and enhancing its cognitive and social  Richard Shusterman, “The Somatic Turn: Care of the Body in Contemporary Culture,” in Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Arts (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 154–81. 50  Shusterman, “Somatic Turn,” 159. 51  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977). 49

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capacities. This does not make experiential somaesthetics an any less complicated issue, because our efforts to improve our bodies are always informed by ideology, worldviews, and/or ethical values. As a result, we are faced with borderline cases where it is not easy to judge whether an activity is performed for the sake of the body or for the sake of external precepts. An interesting example was cited by Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus in their conversation with Michel Foucault. Discussing the modern self and its relation to arts, they told the story of their Berkeley neighbors: “[O]f course, that kind of project is very common in places like Berkeley where people think that everything from the way they eat breakfast, to the way they have sex, to the way they spend their day, should itself be perfected.” Foucault’s response was much revealing: “But I am afraid in most of those cases, most of the people think if they do what they do, if they live as they live, the reason is that they know the truth about desire, life, nature, body, and so on.”52 The value system that ensured a healthy and conscious life, which Rabinow and Dreyfus presented as an example of life as art, was dismissed by Foucault and rightly so. He discredited it as encapsulating the belief in possessing the ultimate knowledge of what the body should be. This, however, never happens in art; creative work is always unpredictable, even though artists rely on conventions, patterns, and the like in their pursuits. From the perspective of somaesthetics, it is clear that Berkeley residents applaud and enact representational somaesthetics rather than experiential somaesthetics. They transform their bodies and bodily activities not for the sake of the body but in order to comply with certain cultural principles at work in their social milieu. Notably, somaesthetics does not reject knowledge. On the contrary, it relies on evidence-based ways to augment the capabilities of the body. Thus, it distances itself from Foucault’s veneration of art as the ultimate basis for the aesthetics of existence, as well as from any standards, whether ideological, political, or cultural, imposed on the body. Emphatically, it is only by treating the body in such a way that somapower is made possible. Overcoming the limitations of the body gives it  Paul Rabinow, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 229–52, on p. 236. 52

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power to cope with external impositions. I have already described this process in niches of emancipation, where an increasing awareness of the body can be pitted against oppressive ideology. To grasp these developments with tolerable accuracy, we must make a central distinction between somapower that has developed in relatively stable niches of emancipation over time and somapower that emerges in temporary niches, such as demonstrations, occupations, and performances. The latter are impressively described in Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly,53 where she highlights the unique position of bodily performances in the practice of democratic politics: The specific thesis of this book is that acting in concert can be an embodied form of calling into question the inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political. The embodied character of this questioning works in at least two ways: on the one hand, contestations are enacted by assemblies, strikes, vigils, and the occupation of public spaces; on the other hand, those bodies are the object of many of the demonstrations that take precarity as their galvanizing condition.54

Butler goes on to say that neoliberal economic policies harm the body, and they should be challenged by the body or bodies acting together: “[I]t is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt; it is this body, or these bodies, or bodies like this body or these bodies, that live the condition of an imperiled livelihood, decimated infrastructure, accelerating precarity.”55 Butler invokes biopolitics as the main mechanism behind the situation in which there is a growing social uncertainty. Precarization not only leads to poverty but also literally puts bodily security at risk. The body loses its basic anchors of sustenance, accommodation, and necessary medication. What matters in this context of deprivation is the act of resistance itself and the act of assembly

 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 54  Butler, Notes, 9. 55  Butler, Notes, 10 (italics original). 53

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itself.56 It vividly bespeaks the existence (or possibility) of democratic solidarity, a function evocatively rendered by Butler: “What does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? Such an impasse can become the paradoxical condition of a form of social solidarity both mournful and joyful, a gathering enacted by bodies under duress or in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance.”57 Butler’s reflections dovetail with the somapower perspective in two ways. First, she shows that most contemporary pro-democratic gatherings are demonstrations in defense of the body. Second, she insists that the resistance of the body is a value in and of itself. This point is central to somapower. By taking part in a demonstration, the body not only fights for liberation but also liberates itself through the very fact of participation. In somaesthetics, from which the concept of somapower originated, much more emphasis is put on the development of the body and on increasing its autonomy, while in Butler the body emerges during and through performance. For somapower, the body in a democratic assembly is ultimately constituted as a vehicle for emancipation. This happens in political struggles, where bodies are weaponized, and their intimate histories must confront the public feelings of injustice and solidarity. Yet the body is not reducible to its participation in a temporary event, powerful though this act may be. The body outgrows it and becomes ready for another political event, where readiness is not circumscribed to new experiences alone.58 Rather, it encompasses the entire history of ­bodies’ fight for emancipation, which cumulates in an increasingly autonomous corporeality.  An intriguing prefiguring of Butler’s notion can be found in Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the utter bodily deprivation of social outcasts is foregrounded as an irreducible, though animalesque, property of humankind (“Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art,” III.iv.105–6), whose humanity can be salvaged by compassionate mutuality and cooperation. 57  Butler, Notes, 23. 58  Rather suitably, Shakespeare’s King Lear proposes that “Ripeness is all,” echoing Hamlet’s “The readiness is all.” While these phrases are commonly associated with preparedness for death, the characters that utter them (Edgar and Hamlet, respectively) are actually preparing for armed duels supposed to vindicate their rights and to repair, symbolically at least, the world’s ills. The experience of physical ordeals their bodies have amassed primes them both to act and to face the unknown. 56

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2.3 Two Examples: A Poet’s Apartment and the Women’s Strike Among the multiplicity of niches of emancipation, I propose distinguishing two main types: those centered on inwardly directed self-enclosure and those involving outwardly oriented active opposition. People can shut themselves off in confined spaces to develop their minds and bodies against the hostile world, or they can actively protest against injustice and liberate themselves by liberating the world. My examples below picture these two species of niches of emancipation. One of them is the story of an avant-garde homosexual Polish poet who created a meeting place for his friends, inclusive of a home theater, at his apartment in a typical communist modernist building. Apolitical by design, their activities hatched another cultural reality, worlds apart from that outside the window, and were as such in fact political, insofar that politics means striving for an alternative social world. The other example is the already addressed women’s strike in Poland—a series of demonstrations defending the right to abortion. Even if the manifestations failed to avert the conservative policies of the governing party (Law and Justice), they have had far-reaching consequences for the cultural and ethical transformation of society.

Miron Białoszewski: The Poet of Everydayness In his brilliant essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Theodor W. Adorno discussed the role of the poet in contemporary society. For Adorno, the paradox of the genre is the major issue to look into. A lyric poem is an intimate artform pare excellence, with the I-speaker, as the poet’s voice, telling a strictly personal story, but at the same time, as Adorno insists, “the universality of the lyric’s substance […] is social in nature. Only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what the poem is saying; indeed, even the solitariness of lyrical language itself is prescribed by an individualistic and ultimately atomistic society, just as conversely its general cogency depends on the intensity of its

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individuation.”59 To describe the versatile universal substance subsumed in poems, Adorno coins the concept of collective undercurrents (kollektiven Unterstrom): A collective undercurrent provides the foundation for all individual lyric poetry. When that poetry actually bears the whole in mind and is not simply an expression of the privilege, refinement, and gentility of those who can afford to be gentle, participation in the undercurrent is an essential part of the substantiality of the individual lyric as well: it is this undercurrent that makes language the medium in which the subject becomes more than a mere subject.60

From Adorno’s perspective, Miron Białoszewski’s work is evidently first and foremost about the appreciation of the everyday as a source of defense against any totalitarian ideology. Białoszewski was not the only one to espouse and extol this idea. Born in 1922, he belonged to a generation whose youth was shaped by the Second World War61 and who, having lost faith in traditional values, sought a new language to describe and make sense of their experiences. In the wake and aftermath of wartime atrocities, everyday life became for them a place of consolation and also a place where values could be remodeled. Of them all, Białoszewski most consistently submerged himself in the domain that had traditionally lain beyond the province of poetic expression. His work can be seen as a painstaking effort to convey everyday language and to spotlight its power to render and assess social reality. Except for the Stalinist period, when his avant-garde poetry, far removed from socialist realism as it was, was banned from publishing, Białoszewski was never seriously persecuted by the government after 1956. Of course, like all writers of the time, he had to grapple with some preventive censorship, but he was renowned as an outstanding and widely 59  Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54, on p. 38. 60  Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 45. 61  See Madeline G. Levine, “Translator’s Introduction” in Miron Białoszewski, A Memoir of Warsaw Uprising, trans. and introd. Madeline G.  Levine (New York: New  York Review Books, 2015), vii–xix.

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published author. His home theater was even supported by modest subsidies from government agencies. His apartment was a venue visited by a range of distinguished foreign guests, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Allan Ginsberg, and Mary McCarthy.62 This tangle of aspects was inscribed in what Hanna Kirchner, the editor of a volume of reminiscences about Białoszewski, calls “a unique theater of human interactions (osobliwy teatr międzyludzki) that Miron created around him.” Kirchner goes on to elaborate on this “singularity”: “Interacting with him was like taking part in a collective holiday, in an improvised performance, in special magic rituals, folkloric and poetic at once. The boundaries between life and writing were blurred, as one transfigured into the other.”63 This lifestyle was cultivated in Białoszewski’s circle even in the Stalinist period. He and his friends met at the apartment of Białoszewski’s friend, the poet Swen Czachorowski, in the Warsaw suburb of Kobyłka, where they read poems and developed their performances. As recalled by Wanda Chotomska, herself a poet: “Kobyłka was an island. Suddenly we entered another world. We talked about books, listened to music… We read Swen’s poems. A lot of Swen. Long poems, from metaphor to metaphor, and so we passed to Miron; one felt relieved and breathed.”64 The like sentiments and observations are reiterated in many memories published after Białoszewski’s death. His friends came and went, younger people appeared in his circle, but the spirit of the group persisted largely unchanged. In his new apartment in a typical communist modernist building, Białoszewski revived his theater as “Teatr osobny” (Eng.: Theater Apart) in collaboration with Ludwik Hering and Ludmiła Murawska. Memories of people who were fascinated by involvement with this group exude their striving to put its uniqueness into words. While elusive and not easy to pinpoint, this uniqueness certainly comprised the intensity of experiences, the constant experimentation with oneself, and  Tadeusz Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 91–3.  Hanna Kirchner, “Człowiek Miron,” in Miron: wspomnienia o poecie, ed. Hanna Kirchner (Warszawa: Tenten, 1996). 64  Quoted in Sobolewski, Człowiek, 229. 62 63

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people’s complicated relationships within the circle, especially with Białoszewski. All this was true, but at the same time and in the social context of the communist state, the avowedly apolitical nature of this group and their bracketing off of political reality opened avenues to emancipation. This potential was only bolstered by the physical, corporeal activity of an experimental theater with its language of the body. There was also walking, walking on end. Białoszewski was an ardent walker who mainly wandered through the urban landscape, but also hiked in the Polish mountains. Tadeusz Sobolewski, Białoszewski’s close friend and an eminent Polish intellectual, writes in his introduction to Białoszewski’s Tajny dziennik (Secret Diary): “In a communal room with a kitchen, nagged by the administration, summoned—as was common in his milieu—for questionings, he lived the life of a French surrealist or an American beatnik.”65 Sobolewski is spot-on in observing that Białoszewski’s life was consistent with his writing, his creative attitude. Even more importantly, he was able to create this unique reality not only for himself but also for a sizeable group of people with whom he had closer or looser ties. Such niches of emancipation were certainly not unheard of in democratic countries as sites of resistance to  the bourgeois society, but in Poland they boasted special intensity and relevance. They offered a glimpse of another possible social order, however utopian it might be. In this sense, Białoszewski’s niche of emancipation was an instantiation of “collective undercurrents.” Adorno ascribed the mission of incarnating those to lyric poetry. Yet the meaning of Adorno’s concept can be expanded to perceive the lifestyle of a poet and his companions as an exercise in somaesthetics and somapower. This exercise heralded an opportunity for better human interactions. If we remember Białoszewski’s fascination with everyday life and language, we can decipher his lifestyle as a refined version of the everyday, as an expression of what was hidden in it, but existed as a potentiality—one that even if never fully actualized always looms as a challenge to the present.

 Tadeusz Sobolewski, “Człowiek Miron,” in Miron Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 5-10, on p. 8.

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 he Women’s Strike: The Somapower Lessons of Lost T Political Battles I have not yet discussed the notion of potentiality, which is one of the axes of niches of emancipation or, more precisely, their mechanism of social influence. What happens in such niches is an experiment, determined by the number of those involved, spatial boundaries, social constraints, and the like factors. Whatever its modulations, the strength of everyday emancipation rests on two pillars. First, it envisions the possibility of a different social order, and through this, it opens the door to a critique of things as they are now or the reality of reality, to use Boltanski’s coinage. Second, potentiality contains the seeds of a new world, and even if they are destroyed, the message itself will stick around. Much of the politics of protest that characterizes contemporary political life is ambivalent. People gather in the name of a very concrete cause and marshal a range of techniques to express their discomfort, from chanting political slogans to staging artistic performances. While they seek to achieve their political goals in this way, at the same time in and through this activity, they also change themselves. That this is the case has been known for a long time, with Karl Marx’s Thesis III in his “Theses on Feuerbach” being perhaps the best phrasing of this truth: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionizing practice.”66 Admittedly, the somaesthetic and somapower perspective is different from (and more concrete than) Marx’s in bringing into relief corporeality, rather than the dialectics of the subject and their activity. But the overarching idea is similar in both models. In my conceptual framework, participation in protests is tantamount to being included in a niche of emancipation. As the practices of protest change the bodily habits of the actors, a potential is generated that can be activated in another—identical or similar—contestation. Therefore, if political effectiveness is one meaning of protest, its other meaning is its power to transform the participants. This change consists  Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 143–5, on p. 144. 66

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in bringing forth a potentiality, in the nourishing of an attitude that, even if dormant for a time, can be activated under favorable circumstances. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a failed protest. Protests can be, and often are, ineffective in obtaining their immediate goals, but they are nonetheless effective as instruments of social transformation through the implementation of their actors’ new capacities. It is from this angle that I examine women’s protests against amendments to the abortion law in Poland. The protests began in September 2016 as a vehement response to a bill that radically restricted the possibility of abortion by banning “abortion in all cases, including serious fetal damage, and stipulated up to five years in prison for women undergoing abortions.”67 Labeled as Black Monday, the women’s mobilization was a great success at that time not only because it blocked the change in the law but also because it saw the mass participation of women from various social groups: [I]n the Black Protests and the Women’s Strike, feminism ceased to be a movement of metropolitan women, not only on social media, but also in street protests. This was made possible by several strategic shifts—especially that from a liberal toward a socialist narrative, as well as that inviting women to somehow “rehearse” their political involvement over social media before taking it to the streets. For most women, it was safe to join the protests after they had already made the first step—the hashtag and the selfie were really effective this way. The charges of elitism, which feminists have endured since the early 1990s, have dissipated in recent years.68

The next phase in the fight for women’s rights followed in autumn 2020 when, on October 22, the Constitutional Tribunal, which had been taken over by the governing party, issued a decision that effectively banned abortion. This time the demonstrations were more numerous, more massively attended, and stretched over a longer period than during the Black Monday. Crucially, the issue of women’s right to their own 67  Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 143. 68  Ewa Majewska, Feminist Antifascism: Counter-publics of the Common (London: Verso, 2021), 144–5.

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bodies became a nodal point for the establishment of a broad coalition not only against what was dubbed the war on women (capped by the Tribunal’s ruling) but also against the culture of patriarchy, deeply rooted in Polish society, as it was. Undoubtedly, the most striking slogan of the rallies was “Fuck you all!” which conveyed a range of broader meanings besides the protesters’ immediate frustration. It gave expression to a radical dissatisfaction with the policies of the Law and Justice Party and communicated that compromise possibilities had been exhausted. In this sense, it resembled the slogan of the 2001 riots in Argentina, when virtually all economic and social structures collapsed. The rioting crowd then shouted ¡Que se vayan todos! (“They must all go!”), vocally venting the public’s utter distrust of the entire political class. Such a drastic situation has not happened in Poland yet, but the enduring popularity of the phrase has made it crystal clear that the patience of a significant part of Polish society has been all but depleted. These protests have shown the limits of what, following Michel Foucault and others, we have called biopolitics. In its many incarnations, the concept of biopolitics has been instrumental in illumining how bodies become tools of power and how they are shaped and subjugated to become obedient. And suddenly these obedient bodies rebel. The body proves to be capable of transmuting into a vehicle for emancipation, a new quality of political struggle. During the women’s strike protests, a strange paradox emerged. On the one hand, they were set off by cultural backwardness, amidst which Poland’s political class, which had originated from the anti-communist opposition, did not treat moral questions as a political issue. On the other hand, the protests heralded a new era and a new front of political struggle. This is “body politics” in which the body becomes an arena of political struggle. The struggle for the freedom of the body, so relevant to modern biotechnologies, represents a reversal of modernity’s dominant trend to increasingly subordinate biological life to political power. While this shift has already been anticipated and discerned, it has not developed a language of its own and no germane lexicon has been minted for it. “Fuck you all!” sounded thus appropriate, because it indicated the first step articulated with firm insistence: away from our bodies, away from our lives. The women’s strike demonstrations vividly confirmed my claim that biopolitics is one-sided,

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because it only addresses the passive facet of corporeality. The protesters showcased the emancipatory power of the body, which I refer to as somapower. They were able to make it the fulcrum of an ensemble of demands that questioned not only the legitimacy of the Constitutional Tribunal’s particular verdict but also the political and cultural setup of the Polish state as a whole. In purely political terms, the protests were ineffective. The government weathered the challenge, and the Law and Justice Party fully supported the Tribunal’s ruling. Things remained in place as if nothing had happened. However, if we use the criterion of long-term change in the political environment, the October 2020 demonstrations were successful in bringing the issue of abortion to the center of political discourse. The Civic Platform, the main opposition party, pledged that if it won the election, it would overturn the so-called abortion compromise, endorsed by Poland’s Parliament in the 1990s, an arrangement that had ruled out abortion on social grounds, only leaving three permissible circumstances for the termination of pregnancy: incest or rape, a serious threat to the health or life of the pregnant woman, and irreversible severe fetal damage. The third condition was removed by the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment that sparked the women’s strike marches. The compromise on abortion had been a cornerstone of moral politics in Poland for decades, and the main political parties had usually avoided addressing, let alone proposing to revise, it. However, after the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling and the protests against it, a radical shift in public opinion on this issue was recorded. According to sociological surveys, support for abortion in the early stages of pregnancy (up to 12 weeks) surged from 53% in February 2019 to 70% in November 2022.69 These quantitative indicators register a significant impact of protesting on the views upheld by the public and the way it thinks. In terms of somapower, this effect can be explained as the radiation of the niche of emancipation. If we regard the demonstrations of autumn 2020 as a temporary but intensive niche of emancipation, in which the full liberation  Magdalena Chrzczonowicz, “Takiego wyniku jeszcze nie było! Rekordowe poparcie dla aborcji do 12. Tygodnia,” oko.press, 14 November 2022, https://oko.press/rekordowe-poparcie-dla-aborcjido-­12-tygodnia-sondaz-oko-press (accessed 7 May 2023). 69

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of the body was briefly achieved, then that massive moment of liberation could not but have an influence on the whole of society. Crucially, that temporary niche of emancipation did not appear out of nowhere. It was preceded by the grassroots efforts of numerous women’s rights organizations and the Black Monday protests. As the 2020 demonstrations themselves accumulated this energy in a snowball effect, they conferred a new significance on the old cause, especially through their ubiquitous visibility and mass participation. The major mechanism of these changes lies in the self-transformation of the participants of the revolt through the development of new bodily habits that enable them to fight for the liberation of the body. Quoted above, Marx’s idea that revolutionary activity involves changing the world and changing oneself is echoed by Foucault in his lectures on the hermeneutics of subjectivity: And finally, we should not forget that from the nineteenth century the notion of conversion was introduced into thought, practice, experience, and political life in a spectacular and we can even say dramatic way. One day the history of what could be called revolutionary subjectivity should be written […]. So the problem is to see how this element, which arises from the most traditional technology of the self […] was introduced, how conversion, this element of technology of the self, was plugged into this new domain and field of political activity, and how this element of conversion was necessarily, or at least exclusively, linked to the revolutionary choice, to revolutionary practice.70

While Marx’s statement is very general, so that it calls for a more detailed description of how a self-transformation he evokes can take place, Foucault seems to limit himself to the individualistic notions of technologies of the self and the aesthetics of existence. He is quite skeptical about the possibility of collective action and, overall, about the possibility of true revolution:

 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-82, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 208–9. 70

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We would also have to see how this notion of conversion was gradually validated, then absorbed, soaked up, and finally nullified by the existence of a revolutionary party, and how we passed from belonging to the revolution through the schema of conversion, to belonging to the revolution by adherence to a party. And you know that these days, now, in our daily experience […] we only convert to renunciation of revolution. The great converts today are those who no longer believe in the revolution.71

From the Foucauldian point of view with its doubtfulness about, if not neglect of, collective action, pursuits such as the women’s strike are incomprehensible. They are only perceived as the body’s passive resistance to the pressure of conservative ideology. However, springing from the pragmatist thought, somaesthetics and somapower as its extension underscore the social nature of the body, which transpires not only in its being shaped by the authoritarian powers of modernity but above all in its ability to become the kingpin of social liberation. Sociological studies carried out in the aftermath of the women’s strike protests have found that two main strategies were employed to cope with their political failure. One of the strategies, which the researchers have called “narrative,” consisted of imaginary preparations for facing difficult situations, such as unwanted pregnancy. The other strategy was more communal or “activist,” as it focused on identifying niches where it would be possible to act beyond the control of the state.72

2.4 Conclusion Somaesthetics is defined by Shusterman as an “embodied way of life rather than a mere discursive field of abstract theory.”73 In somaesthetics and in the tradition from which it stems, how to live is always how to live  Foucault, Hermeneutics, 209.  Monika Frąckowiak-Sochańska and Maria Zawodna-Stephan, “Uwięzione między lękiem a gniewem? Powstanie i rozpad wspólnoty buntu w czasie protestów kobiet po wyroku Trybunału Konstytucyjnego,” Studia Socjologiczne 1(244), 2022: 9–35. 73  Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. 71 72

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in society. Improving the body has a social relevance to it that varies across different socio-cultural contexts. Yet the development of the body is premised on certain conditions, and such conditions are often stifled or precluded by oppressive ideologies that underpin oppressive regimes. Foucault and many others after him have convincingly shown that modern states have significant political interests in controlling and shaping “docile bodies.” At the same time, they have, to some extent, overlooked the other side of the coin, that is, the stubborn and unruly bodies that resist or defy these regulatory measures. To conceptualize this somewhat underestimated facet of the politics of the body, I have developed the concept of somapower as an extension of somaesthetics into the political realm. One of the paradoxes of somapower is that the emancipatory nature of the body need not be overtly political. Everyday activities can surface as a means of transforming and improving the body. The spaces, real or imaginary, in which such activities take place have a pivotal part in fostering visions of a different social order. These niches of emancipation may and have indeed on various occasions become the incubator of political movements, which in their performative aspects are themselves temporary niches of emancipation. Or, they stand as testimony to the possibility of another world.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” In Notes to Literature, Volume One by Theodor W.  Adorno, edited by Rolf Tiedeman, 37–54. Translated by Shierry W. Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co. Boltanski, Luc, and Ėve Chiapello. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Bukow, Sebastian. 2016. “The Green Party in Germany.” In Green Parties in Europe, edited by Emilie van Haute, 112–39. Oxon: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chernyshevsky, Nikolai. 2014. What Is to Be Done? Translated by Michael Katz and William Wagner. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chrzczonowicz, Magdalena. 2022. “Takiego wyniku jeszcze nie było! Rekordowe poparcie dla aborcji do 12. Tygodnia.” oko.press, 14 November 2022, https:// oko.press/rekordowe-­p oparcie-­d la-­a borcji-­d o-­1 2-­t ygodnia-­s ondaz-­o ko-­ press. Access May 7, 2023. Dewey, John. 1894. “The Theory of Emotion. I: Emotional Attitudes.” Psychological Review 1(6): 553–69. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House. ———. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frąckowiak-Sochańska, Monika, and Maria Zawodna-Stephan. 2022. “Uwięzione między lękiem a gniewem? Powstanie i rozpad wspólnoty buntu w czasie protestów kobiet po wyroku Trybunału Konstytucyjnego.” Studia Socjologiczne 1(244): 9–35. Graff, Agnieszka, and Elżbieta Korolczuk. 2022. Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. London and New York: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hartsock, Nancy C.M. 2019. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, and Other Essays. New York: Routledge. Jay, Martin. 2020. Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kelly, Catriona. 2005. Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero. London: Granta Books. Kirchner, Hanna. 1996. “Człowiek Miron.” In Miron: wspomnienia o poecie, edited by Hanna Kirchner. Warszawa: Tenten. Klemperer, Victor. 2015. Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii. A Philologist’s Notebook. Translated by Martin Brady. London: Bloomsbury. Koczanowicz, Leszek. 2003. “Civil Society as an Ethical Challenge: Paradoxes of the Creation of the Public Sphere in Post-Totalitarian Poland.” Human Affairs 13(1): 20–33.

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———. 2008. Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2022. “Somaesthetics, Somapower, and the Microphysics of Emancipation.” In Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art, edited by Jerold J. Abrams, 61–73. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Kornai, Janos. 1992. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Translated by Sean Hand. Critical Inquiry 17(1): 62–71. Levine, Madeline G. 2015. “Translator’s Introduction.” In A Memoir of Warsaw Uprising by Miron Białoszewski. Translated and introduced by Madeline G. Levine, vii–xix. New York: New York Review Books. Majewska, Ewa. 2021. Feminist Antifascism: Counter-publics of the Common. London: Verso. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London and New York: Routledge. Martin, Sean. 2005. Andrei Tarkovsky. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Marx, Karl. 1978. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed., 143–5. London: W.W. Norton & Company. Neumeyer, Joy. 2023. “Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life.” In Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour, 195–225. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ost, David. 1990. Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rabinow, Paul, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michel Foucault. 1983. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 229–52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, Richard. 1997. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present, edited by Micheline R. Ishay, 410–14. London and New York: Routledge. Schlögel, Karl. 2018. The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Shusterman, Richard 2000. “The Somatic Turn: Care of the Body in Contemporary Culture.” In Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Arts by Richard Shusterman, 154–81. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000.

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———. 2013. Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. 2017. The House of Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Adam. 1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sobolewski, Tadeusz. 2012a. Człowiek Miron. Kraków: Znak. ———. 2012b. “Człowiek Miron,” In Tajny dziennik by Miron Białoszewski, 5–10. Kraków: Znak. Sontag, Susan. 1981. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage Books. Tyrmand, Leopold. 2014. Diary 1954. Translated by Anita Shelton and Andrew Wrobel. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Zubok, Vladislav. 2009. Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

3 The Pandemic and the Politics of the Body

Abstract  This chapter focuses on the social, political, and cultural consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is viewed as a liminal case of the politics of the body, given the radical restrictions imposed on bodies in its wake. Two interpretive frameworks—biopower and somaesthetics—are contrastively employed to explore body/power relations and the soma’s potential. It is shown that, contrary to the fears of the utter subjugation of the body to the state ignited by the biopower perspective, the pandemic was an opportunity for the development and improvement of the body, which can be recognized and appreciated if the somaesthetics perspective is adopted. Keywords  Pandemic • Biopower • Somaesthetics • State of exception

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Koczanowicz, The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1_3

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3.1 The End of the Pandemic: Relief and Anxiety On May 5, 2023, the World Health Organization announced the end of the pandemic, lifting the emergency measures it had put in place three years earlier. At the moment, it is even difficult to estimate the immediate losses, let alone the far-reaching consequences of the pandemic. The compass of its multifarious ramifications is suggested by preliminary assessments offered by WHO officials: “Covid-19 has been so much more than a health crisis: it has caused severe social upheaval,” said Dr. Tedros, describing crippled economies, closed borders, shuttered schools and millions of people suffering in isolation. “Covid-19 exposed and exacerbated political fault-lines within and between nations,” he said. “It has eroded trust between people, governments and institutions fueled by a torrent of myths and misinformation. It has laid bare the searing inequalities of our world, with the poorest and most vulnerable communities the hardest hit and the last to receive access to vaccines and other tools.”1

These expressions summarily capture the experiences and effects of the pandemic, but they are by no means its comprehensive analysis. We are likely to spend many years to come discussing and disputing the meanings of what it was that actually happened and trying to appraise how and to what extent the pandemic has changed our lives in their various dimensions. Such explorations are bound to focus not so much on the immediate fallout from the pandemic (which will eventually be estimated), as rather on what facets of our civilization the pandemic has unveiled and how it has made us reconsider what we thought we knew of the human being. In my argument, I will mainly seek to analyze the pandemic from the somaesthetics perspective, but before doing that, let me briefly consider the singularity of this pandemic, as compared with the previous ones, in  Stephanie Nolen, “W.H.O. Ends Global Health Emergency Designation for Covid,” New York Times, May 5, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/health/covid-who-emergency-end. html (accessed 27 June 2023). 1

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the social and cultural context in which it took place. Of course, humanity has grappled with epidemics over millennia, and these struggles have been comprehensively researched, with the relevant literature describing both the causes and the socio-cultural effects of such diseases. However, there is a fundamental difference between them and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Briefly and tentatively, the difference lies in that while the previous epidemics came, so to speak, from outside and were a bane, a punishment visited on people unexpectedly and equally unexpectedly disappearing, this pandemic began at the very center of our civilization and culture and can be said to have been their product. Disputes over the origin of the COVID-19 virus are still rife, and vehement too, but whatever hypothesis is advanced, it basically corroborates the insight above. If, as proponents of conspiracy theories have it, the virus was spawned by a medical experiment or a biological weapon test gone awry, this confirms the idea that, once set in motion, technology cannot be controlled and its effects are unpredictable.2 On this take, the pandemic is a species of the “sorcerer’s apprentice effect,” as the powerful forces invoked prove unstoppable and imperil human survival. We are faced with a “moral catastrophe,” to use a phrase Carlo Bordoni employed in his discussion of the crumbling of the Enlightenment belief in human capacity to control the powers of nature: [T]he great certainties of a technology that can prevent and avoid natural catastrophes collapsed in the face of the fact that nature will not be bent, in addition to the occurrence of so-called “moral catastrophes” caused by man, which are often much more serious than the natural ones, in a sort of competition as to who is more skilled in the field of destruction.3

At the same time, if we endorse the hypothesis of the animal source of the pandemic unleashed by eating pangolins or racoons,4 the conclusion is  Alison Young, Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk (Nashville: Center Street, 2023). 3  Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni, State of Crisis (Cambridge: Polity Press 2014), 55. 4  Ian Sampler, “New Data Links Covid-19’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market,” Guardian, March 17, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-19-origins-raccoondogs-­wuhan-market-data (accessed 27 June 2023). 2

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quite similar. Namely, the pandemic is revealed as “nature’s revenge” for exploitation: humans’ protracted and monstrous abuse of nature ultimately backfired. On this model, the pandemic fits into the trend in social thought that admonishes against the consequences of science and technological development as strategies of instrumental reason, which fuels human strivings to dominate nature.5 Obviously, today, with the climate crisis escalating as we speak of it, nobody needs persuading that advances in science and technology often yield dramatic results. Without negating its direct lethal impact, the pandemic is a threat not only in and of itself, but also as a sign of transformations observable in a range of areas. This is the position adopted by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, who in his illuminating essay “The Universal Right to Breathe,” produced at the beginning of the pandemic, highlighted two fundamental issues related to it. One of them was the return of the body: Try as we might to rid ourselves of it, in the end everything brings us back to the body. We tried to graft it onto other media, to turn it into an object body, a machine body, a digital body, an ontophanic body. It returns to us now as a horrifying, giant mandible, a vehicle for contamination, a vector for pollen, spores, and mold.6

The return of the body entails not only the acknowledgment of its centrality to living but also a challenge to the whole of technological civilization, which has effectively fabricated and sustained an illusion of complete human autonomy and humans’ independence of other creatures with which we share the Earth. This challenge comes with an ethical injunction. Secondly, thus, the pandemic made it clear what we must do—what we should have done: [W]e must start afresh. To survive, we must return to all living things— including the biosphere—the space and energy they need. In its dank  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 6  Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 47(52) (Winter 2021): 58–62, on p. 59. 5

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underbelly, modernity has been an interminable war on life. And it is far from over. One of the primary modes of this war, leading straight to the impoverishment of the world and to the desiccation of entire swathes of the planet, is the subjection to the digital.7

From this perspective, the return to the body is a return to life, to the biological substance from which modern science as a whole has been dragging us away. Mbembe’s paper marks yet another call for revising our attitude to our biological surroundings, to Umwelt, as understood by Jakob von Uexküll. The loss of breath, choking, and suffocating—some of the most terrifying symptoms of the disease—had afflicted people before the virus appeared, but it was the virus that showed the absolute urgency of immediate action to “reclaim the lungs of our world with a view to forging new ground,” to acknowledge that “[h]umankind and biosphere are one. Alone, humanity has no future,” and to ponder: “Are we capable of rediscovering that each of us belongs to the same species, that we have an indivisible bond with all life? Perhaps that is the question—the very last—before we draw our last dying breath.”8 According to Mbembe, the key lesson we could learn from the pandemic would be to revise our science—or, more broadly, our knowledge—so as to abandon the abstract formulas and disembodiment and, instead, accept the biological essence of our lives and re-embed them in the rhythms of co-­ existence with other organisms. Expressed in the heat of the moment when there was no cure or vaccine yet, Mbembe’s ideas effectively imply the medical and, above all, social complexity of the situation we were facing. Beyond Mbembe’s argument, the role of science and scientific knowledge was quite ambivalent at the time. To analyze this issue we can usefully rely on Edmund Husserl’s conceptual apparatus in his study on the crisis of European sciences. In Husserl’s view, science was ever more irretrievably losing touch with everyday experiences of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), as a result of which what we encountered in science were abstract formulas rather than

 Mbembe, “Universal Right,” 60.  Mbembe, “Universal Right,” 62.

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our experiences, which were taken for granted by us.9 At the beginning of the pandemic, this was exactly how it was perceived in many countries, specifically, as ordained by these abstract formulas of modern science. This made it different from preceding epidemics, whose symptoms were directly visible to the naked eye, as we learn from, as a rule, very evocative literary and diaristic descriptions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, clear scientific evidence was available to assess the scale of the hazard and warrant the implementation of radical countermeasures. Those were introduced on the basis of that abstract science criticized by Husserl, but their consequences were felt in the lifeworld, and rather acutely too. Nevertheless, there was a conspicuous tension between the restrictions imposed by governments and the ways the pandemic manifested in most people’s everyday lives. From the viewpoint of the sociology of science, an additional problem was triggered by a rift between the regular standards of scientific discussion and the necessities involved in political and administrative decision-making. As observed by the authors of a UNESCO report, “whereas scientific knowledge is always provisional and accepts both epistemic and methodological uncertainties, policy-­ makers need to act, especially in times of crisis. Politicians prefer to be certain in their communication.”10 Given that the pandemic was caused by a virus whose mechanism was not entirely penetrable, as opposed to the obviousness of its morbidity and lethality, the implementation of behavioral constraints, even somewhat excessive ones, appeared to make sense as preventing its spread. Since a certain degree of flexibility in choosing which restrictions to apply was allowed, the pandemic regulations varied from country to country. With the scientific recommendations being ambiguous, these regulations basically rehearsed the guidelines heeded in the earlier epidemics. In this way, an “epistemic lacuna” arose

 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 10  Peter Gluckman and Binyam Sisay Mendisu, “What the Covid-19 Pandemic Reveals About the Evolving Landscape of Scientific Advice,” in UNESCO Science Report: The Race Against Time for Smarter Development, ed. Susan Schneegans, Tiffany Straza, and Jake Lewis (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2021), 3–8, on p. 6. 9

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between sophisticated science and relatively simple, commonsensical instructions in the sphere of daily behavior. The implementation of these recommendations proved an important test for democratic societies. In my view, the way that democracy functions was best rendered by the American pragmatist John Dewey, whose concepts are also one cornerstone of somaesthetics. To Dewey, democracy is an inquiry that aims to facilitate the social life of individuals. As he insists, “organization is never an end in itself. It is a means of promoting association of multiplying effective points of contact between persons, directing their intercourse into the modes of greatest fruitfulness.”11 This implies that Dewey endorses at least the weak version of the social ideal of democracy. This ideal can be understood as nothing other than an idea that directs or regulates the development of society and the individual. Whether individuals enjoy greater or lesser freedom in a given society depends on the historical conjuncture, but that does not mean that progress is impossible. The development of individuals’ all capacities through proper relationships with others is the measure of progress. Thus, democracy is a system that works in irremovable ethical tension, which can be graphically represented as a triangle of ideals (values), action (customs, practices of democracy), and institutions. Exploring and relating to any side of this triangle requires ethical sensitivity and a critical attitude to ideals, practices, and institutions. Ideals are a challenge to democracy as a promise which, even if impossible to fulfill, must be activated and re-activated in order to prevent the practice of democracy from dwindling into an everyday routine of minor institutional operations that are no longer translatable into a broader perspective. For its part, practice must generate a context of conscious commitment to democracy and defense of its principles against the anomie of legitimization and against totalitarianism, which emerges from this anomie, against the temptation to replace the democratic heterogeneity with the totalitarian unity of “the people.” The institutional layer of democracy must be constantly questioned in the sense that, in order to survive, democracy needs several coexisting and competing social and political projects. Hence, it is crucial and indispensable for democracies to be capable of promoting the work 11

 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1950), 160–1.

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of imagination and ingenuity in designing solutions to social problems. The pandemic was thus a challenge to democratic politics and, at the same time, a test to the effectiveness of democracy that can weather even the most adverse conditions. The pandemic had this role because it affected not only institutions, but also people’s everyday lives, and as such could not but redraw the configuration of the democratic triangle. Perhaps the most important change wrought by the pandemic was disembodying democracy and political life as such. In his article, Mbembe insists on the urgency of returning to the body, to corporeality conceived as co-existence with all living organisms. This exigency is undoubtedly what strikes us when surveying the effects of the pandemic as an emblem of the entirety of Western technological civilization. Nevertheless, this consciousness is dialectically linked to its opposite, that is, to the complete withdrawal from the corporeal, which was so painfully experienced in the early stages of the pandemic. It was at that time that societies of many countries indeed became genuine network societies. It suddenly transpired that we had long possessed the tools making it possible to disappear from real space but to operate fairly effectively in a number of spheres, socially, personally, and intimately, as well. In his book from 2004, Manuel Castells described the network society as a society whose social structure is made of networks powered by microelectronics-­ based information and communication technologies […]. A network is a set of interconnected nodes. A node is the point where the curve intersects itself. A network has no center, just nodes. Nodes may be of varying relevance for the network […] all nodes of a network are necessary for the network’s performance. When nodes become redundant or useless, networks tend to reconfigure themselves, deleting some nodes, and adding new ones. Nodes only exist and function as components of networks. The network is the unit, not the node.12

Apparently, it was only the pandemic that forced the emergence of a real network society in many countries. Most activities which we had not  Manuel Castells, “Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint,” in The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Manuel Castells (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004), 3–45, on p. 3. 12

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been able to imagine as taking place other than in the real world suddenly found themselves transferred into virtual reality. Political life, already substantially dependent on social media, began to flourish almost entirely in the spaces of the Internet. Of course, this begs a crucial question of whether, in the first place, such discarnate democracy can be regarded as complete democracy, equal to that we had known before the pandemic. This question is answered in part by the preceding chapters of this book, where I have emphasized the pivotal role of embodied interactions in constructing niches of emancipation, which have a key part in hatching new democratic projects. The inability to act in the real world ruled out a range of activities tightly knitted of late into the texture of democratic societies, such as demonstrations, performances, and happenings. In fact, the very transfiguring of the body in its multiple dimensions into a vehicle for emancipation, the principal component of these activities from the point of view of somaesthetics and somapower, was rendered a sheer impossibility. Likewise, the sourcing of corporeality for new ideas to augment the process of democratic deliberation was severely curtailed, whereas under regular conditions the body is a major reservoir of such enrichment, as pointed out by Amanda Machlin in her book on the role of the body in democracy: Bodily habits and instincts might provide corporeal barriers to fully transparent and rational discussion, stunting the possibilities of communicating with others. Yet bodies can provoke the formation of new alliances across previously impermeable boundaries and disrupt the conventions of the political realm. At the same time, deliberative forums offer new possibilities for the bodies of participants who are themselves transformed through the political interaction they affect.13

All these possibilities of discussion and participation were curbed by the pandemic restrictions for a time. To state what long-term consequences such a thorough disembodiment of political life would breed is rather unfeasible  Amanda Machlin, Bodies of Democracy: Modes of Embodied Politics (Bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022), 82.

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because—unfortunately for researchers and luckily for democratic societies—the containment did not last long enough to allow any conclusive appraisals. Nonetheless, some worrying trends were registered. Research on democracy under the pandemic has shown that its principles were blatantly breached in 88 countries.14 Increase in fake news was another trend causing concerns of similar magnitude. Of course, fake news had been there before, halting or hampering democratic debate, but the pandemic proved extremely fertile soil for its sprouting and sprawling.15 Fake news and conspiracy theories were spread from the very beginning of the pandemic on. At first, they referred to its origin and the risks it carried; then, the rationality of restrictions was questioned; and finally, there was an inundation of sundry concepts related to vaccines. It was no coincidence that, as early as in 2020, the WHO announced that the pandemic was accompanied by an infodemic, that is, an upsurge in false news about the COVID-19 virus.16 To what degree the blockage of bodily activity and contact opportunities in the real world was instrumental in all these detrimental developments is difficult to estimate straightforwardly. Amidst the plethora of social and psychological studies of the pandemic fallout, there are none, to my knowledge, that focus on the effect of somaesthetic practices, or rather of their lack, in that period. We can only glean some insights from indirect data, such as meta-analyses which have found that one-week-­ long or longer isolation is likely to trigger a range of negative outcomes, including depression, anxiety, stress-related disorders, and anger.17 Isolation above all entails a dearth of live, embodied social exchanges; this suggests that corporality is pivotal to sustaining regular functioning.  Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, “Democracy under Lockdown: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Global Struggle for Freedom,” Freedom House, October 2020, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/ default/files/2020-10/COVID-19_Special_Report_Final_.pdf (accessed 15 December, 2022). 15  Ayesha Anwar, Meryem Malik, Vaneeza Raees, and Anjum Anwar, “Role of Mass Media and Public Health Communications in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Cureus 12(9), September 2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.10453. 16  “Editorial,” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 20(8) (August 2020): 845, https://doi.org/10.1016/ S1473-3099(20)30565-X. 17  Jonathan Henssler et al., “Mental Health Effects of Infection Containment Strategies: Quarantine and Isolation—a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 271(2) (2021): 223–34, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-020-01196-x. 14

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During the pandemic, not only individuals but also entire societies fell under regimes of isolation. Mobility was radically restrained, both locally and internationally. This may explain some divergent tendencies observable in international and national epidemic politics that surfaced at the time, whose effects still continue to affect us. The point is that on the one hand the pandemic powered community-centered thinking, locally and globally alike. As another of its differences from a number of previous serious epidemic incidences, the pandemic spread throughout the world, driving the realization that particularistic attitudes and sentiments had no raison d’être in a world that was a closely woven whole for better and worse. On the other hand, it became obvious at the very beginning of the pandemic that despite its being acknowledged as a global event, there were disparate ways of coping with it, from drastic restrictions implemented, for example, by China to rather mild checks chosen, for instance, by Sweden. Separatist tendencies escalated when vaccines appeared. The rivalry to obtain vaccines ignited numerous conflicts and first and foremost exposed the ruthlessness of rich countries, which did not hesitate to take advantage of their material and political assets to take over the bulk of vaccines. Similarly, in domestic politics, it seemed that communal attitudes would prevail and, consequently, reinforce the belief that the free-market economic model should be abandoned to ensure equal opportunity for various population groups. In an article written at the onset of the pandemic, David Harvey argued that “[t]he spiral form of endless capital accumulation is collapsing inward from one part of the world to every other. The only thing that can save it is a government funded and inspired mass consumerism conjured out of nothing. This will require socializing the whole of the economy in the United States, for example, without calling it socialism.”18 The epidemic was expected to work the way that the world war once had, that is, to boost the feelings of solidarity and prompt the launching of mechanisms that would reduce social inequality. In the

18  David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,” Jacobin Magazine, March https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-­­ 20, 2020, disruptions (accessed 16 April 2023).

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pre-pandemic times, Thomas Piketty had already painted an evocative picture of such mechanisms: [Redistribution] consists […] in financing public services and replacement incomes that are more or less equal for everyone, especially in the areas of health, education, and pensions. In the latter case, the principle of equality often takes the form of a quasi-proportionality between replacement income and lifetime earnings. For education and health, there is real equality of access for everyone regardless of income (or parents’ income), at least in principle. Modern redistribution is built around a logic of rights and a principle of equal access to a certain number of goods deemed to be fundamental.19

However, in retrospect, we sense that the pandemic actually had the opposite effect and aggravated social inequality, rather than alleviating it. These intuitions have been corroborated by two major reports concerning, respectively, Europe and the U.S.20 Characteristic of the pandemic, working from home or remote online education, considerably contributed to increasing the gap between the rich and the poor. The rhetoric of equality and solidarity, which was ubiquitous in political statements and speeches, especially in the early phases of the pandemic, was overthrown by the principles of free-market capitalism, which found ways to take advantage of the challenging period and multiply profit without sharing it with the public. This cursory outline of the effects of the pandemic appears to bear out the observation that, rather than producing a new social quality, the pandemic accelerated or enhanced the previously existing tendencies. However, too little time has passed yet to conclusively pronounce whether these trends will continue to soar, or whether they will subside. What can be stated with a more than tolerable certainty, however, is that civilization factors that had contributed to the outbreak and spread of the pandemic  Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Belknap Press, 2014), 479. 20  Eurofound (2023), Economic and Social Inequalities in Europe in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg Inequality and Covid-19, Inequality.org, https://inequality.org/facts/inequality-and-covid-19/#racial-inequality-covid (accessed 29 May 2023). 19

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have not disappeared. The long-heralded return to “the normal” is thus largely illusory, both in an immediate and an indirect sense. It is immediately illusory because, as experts insist, the virus is still out there, and we are unable to foresee how it will evolve.21 In a long-term view, it is easily noticeable that the mechanisms that had powered the epidemic situation have by no means stopped operating. Sadly, Albert Camus’ celebrated closing passage of The Plague sounds germane today: And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.22

What makes the times we inhabit even more dramatic is that we are well aware that what we are dealing with is not an external enemy to be wary of and to hold off whose attack we must ready ourselves. The point is not really that the enemy is always around, but that it is of our own making and that now it follows all our action as its inseparable shadow, no matter whether we undertake it in good will or not.

3.2 What We Have Learned About the Body: The Lessons of the Pandemic In his prophetic novel The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov envisions a society that lives on the planet of Solaria in the outer space far away from the Earth. Like other similar outer worlds, this society is a fulfilment of a utopia of happy living. All its citizens are healthy, because that is what 21 22

 David Cox, “Interview with Immunologist Akiko Iwasaki,” The Guardian, May 27, 2023.  Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 308.

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they were genetically pre-programmed to be; they dwell in comfortable houses amid vast plantations and are served by a host of helpful robots. In his depiction of an ideal society, Asimov seems to emulate Tommaso Campanella’s utopian The City of the Sun (1602),23 as implied by the appellation “Solarians” shared by the residents of the two utopias. Both books also underscore the principles of hygienic living, which keep citizens in good health at the price of regulating their behavior. However, a murder has been committed in the ideal world of Asimov’s utopia, and the Solarians must ask the despised dwellers of the Earth for help in this matter. The investigation is conducted by the detective Elijah Baley, assisted by the robot Daniel Olivaw. The robot explains to his human partner the peculiar rules and habits of living on Solaria: “They live completely apart and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.” “Hermits?” “In a way, yes. In a way, no.” “What does that mean?” “Agent Gruer visited you yesterday by trimensional image. Solarians visit one another freely that way and in no other way.”24

Asimov’s modern utopia parts ways with its Italian Renaissance predecessor the moment it is revealed that another human being’s body can be a lethal hazard. The Solarians mobilize the totality of technology that they have at their disposal to avoid this risk and in doing so, behave in a strikingly different manner than their seventeenth-century forerunners, who indulged in outdoor games to spend as much time in each other’s company as possible. In a sense, the pandemic came as a grim actualization of Asimov’s anyway gloomy vision. With the way it caused the disembodying of human relations and, paradoxically enough, the disembodying of the body itself,  Francis Bacon and Tommaso Campanella, New Atlantis & The City of the Sun: Two Classic Utopias, (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2018). 24  Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun (New York and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1957), 52. 23

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the pandemic amplified beyond proportion a tendency that had already been visible before—of the material body being gradually diluted in virtual spaces, dispersed across social media, and becoming a sign rather than a material object. This sign could freely transmute and be transformed in a variety of virtual environments, catering to any fancy of the subject. This aspect was explored by the psychoanalyst Alessandra Lemma: Reality cannot be programmed in advance because the chaotic elements from the many systemic forces that shape our daily lives—not least the unconscious mind—work to produce the generative breakdown from which subjectivity emerges and which we call “life.” Virtual reality instead functions more like fantasy: as a kind of filter and focus presenting to the mind (and acting on the body) only those details essential for enhancing a specific experience.25

The pandemic made a fundamental change in this tendency. What had been an exploration of new opportunities and new dimensions of corporeality before the pandemic became, and abruptly too, a necessity, one additionally reinforced by legal regulations put in place in almost all countries. These developments effected a profound remaking of the ethical investment of bodily solidarity with others. In a text written at the beginning of the pandemic, Sergio Benvenuto succinctly captured this reversal of the ethical vector: “Today I display my love for the other by keeping her or him at a distance. This is the paradox that collapses all the lazy ideological frameworks […] of the left and right, not to mention of the populists.”26 The general insightfulness of Benvenuto’s observation aside, we cannot but doubt whether the repositioning of bodiliness in social life indeed triggered the dissolution of all political divisions. Rather, as shown above, it either shored up the line along which various political options clashed or effected a more general shift of the entire political spectrum.  Alessandra Lemma, The Digital Age on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Practice and New Media (New York: Routledge, 2017), 17. 26  Sergio Benvenuto, “Forget About Agamben,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), March 20, 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirus-­ andphilosophers/ (accessed 18 May 2023). 25

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Nevertheless, the ethical, or more precisely ethico-political, aspect made its way to the forefront of discussions that erupted with the outbreak of the pandemic. In the light of my argument in the preceding chapters, it is interesting to note that these debates were largely dominated by thinkers who in one way or another relied on the framework of biopolitics/biopower, treating it as the only viable social and political philosophy of bodiliness. This was, so to speak, a default position to adopt, without any disagreement, and with differences of opinion only commencing when it came to assessing in how far such or other regulations or, in more radical versions, the pandemic situation as a whole were a new iteration of an old issue—the control of the body by oppressive regimes of modernity. What was remarkably missing in these disputes was a perspective inspired by somaesthetics or somapower as its political extension, a position that could promote a radically different understanding of the body amid the pandemic. The overall debate was initiated by Giorgio Agamben’s “The Invention of the Epidemic,”27 an essay in which he resorted to his famous distinction between bare life and political life. In Agamben’s view, the pandemic was artificially crafted in order to even more stringently reduce people to bare life. People were stripped of any possibility to act as political beings, and the ostensible danger made it possible to dispense with any pretense concealing this fact. Agamben more forcefully restated his position in “Clarifications,” a text published some weeks later in reply, as it were, to critical responses to his previous paper. In “Clarifications,” Agamben drew on the radically critical vision of modernity known from his books to contend that the pandemic or, more precisely, the regulations introduced by governments were cumulative versions of all the formerly observable pernicious tendencies. Agamben raged that: There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought of declaring a state of emergency like today, one that forbids us even to move. Men have become so used to living in conditions of permanent crisis and emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their lives  Giorgio Agamben, “The Invention of the Epidemic,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), February 26, 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirusand-philosophers/ (accessed 18 May 2023). 27

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have been reduced to a purely biological condition, one that has lost not only any social and political dimension, but even any compassionate and emotional one. A society that lives in a permanent state of emergency cannot be a free one. We effectively live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “security reasons” and as a consequence has condemned itself to living in a permanent state of fear and insecurity.28

The passage evidently echoes the diagnosis of modernity encapsulated in three emphatic theses in Homo Sacer: 1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion). 2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios. 3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.29 Agamben deciphered the pandemic as an instance of a radical enslavement of the body in which it was subjugated to the rules of biological survival disguised as hygienic guidelines, an instance all the more extreme for its global scale. What exacerbated the matter, in his view, was that the imposition of the biological regime had been presented as a neutral medical recommendation. If all the threads are connected in this image of the epidemic as deliberately constructed or excessively assessed, it comes as no surprise that Agamben felt an imperative to denounce it as a perverse installation of totalitarian rule. Still, Agamben’s evaluation of the epidemic was the uppermost issue in direct polemics with his texts. The eminent French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy proposed in an essay titled “The Viral Exception” that the pandemic was not so much an aggregation of centuries-old tendencies of 28   Giorgio Agamben, “Clarifications,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), March 17, 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirus-and-­ philosophers/ (accessed 18 May 2023). 29  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 181.

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Western civilization, but rather an entirely new event that compelled governments to act: “We must be careful not to hit the wrong target: an entire civilization is in question, there is no doubt about it. There is a sort of viral exception—biological, computer-scientific, cultural—which is pandemic. Governments are nothing more than grim executioners and taking it out on them seems more like a diversionary maneuver than a political reflection.”30 On this take, the pandemics was not an extension of any previous trends that it could only speed up or boost. Rather, it was a singular, one-of-a-kind event, an assault on human civilization from outside, so to speak. As such, it had to be combated, because it put at risk not only the very foundations of that civilization but also the biological survival of humanity. Nancy’s position is interpretable as an unorthodox variety of biopolitics that could perhaps be labeled as defensive biopolitics, introducing rules that really served to protect humankind’s biological potential. Some special credibility is lent to such an interpretation by Nancy’s moving personal confession that Agamben had once advised him against having a heart transplantation, a surgery that ultimately gave Nancy many more years of rewardingly creative life. This is a very meaningful episode since it suggests that, blindly attached to his universalizing conception, Agamben refuses to acknowledge the obvious fact that some biological procedures may simply be necessary and that their benefits eclipse their perils. Roberto Esposito, another participant in this debate, penned an article titled “Cured to the Bitter End” as a polemic against both Nancy and Agamben. He accused the former of failing to appreciate or entirely ignoring the role of biopolitics, which had delineated the trajectory of power/society relations over the previous two centuries and, given that, to consider the “viral event” to be merely singular, discrete, and dissociated from the tendencies of modernity was an error of judgment. As to the latter discussant, Esposito denounced his interpretation of the pandemic as downright mistaken as a result of inscribing the event into the long-term trend in an entirely unqualified and unexamined way. What  Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Viral Exception,” in Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society, eds. Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky (Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 27. 30

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happened in Italy, according to Esposito, “has more the character of a breakdown of public authorities than that of a dramatic totalitarian grip.”31 In this way, a dispute over the pandemic transmuted into a debate on the nature of and limits to biopolitics as a way in which the body was treated or molded in modern societies. In this context, a captivating contribution was offered by the renowned French anthropologist Bruno Latour, whose essay “Is This a Dress Rehearsal” repudiated the restrictions imposed in the wake of the pandemic as inadequate and likened them to “a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture.”32 Those constraints, Latour insisted, obscured the most important thing at stake, that is, the climate crisis. Even if social mobilization occurred, it was unable to handle that far more serious threat. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, the pandemic potentially heralded a change in this matter since it gave people a chance—nay, even forced them—to think: “[B]ut finally, you never know; a time of Lent, whether secular or republican, can lead to spectacular conversions. For the first time in years, a billion people, stuck at home, find this forgotten luxury: time to reflect and thereby discern that which usually and unnecessarily agitates them in all directions. Let’s respect this long, painful, and unexpected fast.”33 As body activities were suspended, a moment of rumination was instituted, and that might redirect action. We would be saved not by governmental pandemic policies, but by their by-products—time and opportunity for reconsidering our relations with nature. This brief survey of philosophical positions on the pandemic (with later discussions not offering much novel insight, I believe) indicates that they were pervaded by thinking in terms of biopolitics, because even the thinkers who, like Nancy and Latour, did not endorse biopolitics adopted it as their point of reference. This should not come as a surprise because this mindset has long been prevalent, if not endemic, in conceptualizing  Roberto Esposito, “Cured to the Bitter End,” in Coronavirus, 28–9.  Bruno Latour, “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” Critical Inquiry, March 26, 2020, https://critinq. wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/ (accessed 10 May 2023). 33  Latour, “Dress Rehearsal.” 31 32

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the body in its relations with power. The pandemic superbly exemplified a conjuncture in which the radical control of the body is implemented, and bodies are forced to perform certain actions, as a result of which “docile bodies” are produced, to use Michel Foucault’s famous coinage. Consequently, the debate did not focus on how the body and bodily performance changed during the epidemic and as an effect of restrictions imposed by the authorities, but instead addressed the degree to which biopolitics could be used as a valid concept for explaining or interpreting the pandemic situation. This shift without a doubt bred a range of interesting observations about the pandemic, but the discussants primarily focused on capturing the meaning and significance of the behavioral regimes imposed by governments. The pandemic was thus construed as the state’s radical violence confirming all the dangers of biopolitics (Agamben), or as an isolated event that could afford an opportunity for displays of solidarity (Nancy), or as a biopolitical event that buttressed community but also implied that biopolitics was not always necessarily totalitarian (Esposito), or, finally as a symptom of a deeper climate crisis and an opportunity to ponder the perils it posed (Mbembe, Latour). In my view, somaesthetics offers another, and more complex, standpoint from which to study the body as confronted with the pandemic and the constraints introduced in relation to it. In an interview with Yanping Gao at the very beginning of the epidemic, Richard Shusterman, the founder of somaesthetics, explained how his project could be effectively applied under these circumstances and what somaesthetic implications stemmed from the pandemics: The most repeated instructions to mitigate the spread of the virus insist on three key points: social distancing, more frequent and more thorough washing of hands, and the wearing of face masks that cover the mouth and nose. All these demands involve suddenly and radically changing our deeply entrenched bodily habits, and this in turn calls for greater somaesthetic awareness and self-knowledge to ensure better somatic self-control. Enhanced body consciousness enables better monitoring of one’s distance from others and restraining our naturally felt impulses to shake hands or embrace those dear to us, as we (through habit) automatically tend to do. […] Individuals with greater mastery of body consciousness can better

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r­ecognize subtle symptoms of illness in themselves […]. What seems as asymptomatic condition may later reveal itself as symptomatic and spur the individual toward a sharper and more penetrating level of somaesthetic awareness.34

Shusterman clearly discerns an increase in somatic awareness as an aspect of corporality that eluded the philosophers cited above. Firstly, isolation to which people were doomed by the pandemic regulations could not but eventually make them focus on bodily activities, which otherwise tended to be overlooked or neglected. Secondly, combating the pandemic, particularly in its first stages, largely relied on the meticulous observance of certain guidelines on bodily habits, as highlighted by Shusterman. Of course, as shown by research, the instructions were not always strictly followed, but they indisputably contributed to reflective attitudes to corporeality. As claimed by John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, consciousness only arises when action is thwarted or impeded by one or another factor. It is at such moments that consciousness mechanisms are switched in to help correct action until it resumes its regular automatic patterns. This process was illustrated during the pandemic by the refocusing of attention spotted by Jenny Odell, who described attending to moss, something that had gone unnoticed before, in her Saving Time: “Time felt frozen then, but the moss kept growing, both inside and outside the apartment—and the pandemic had shrunk the scale of my attention. I walked around Oakland like a pedestrian conspiracy theorist, peering at things from odd angles.”35 Both those who accepted the regulations introduced during the pandemic and those who contested them had to rethink their ingrained habits and decide whether they wanted to retain or to relinquish them. As a result of this process, previously automatic activities were hoisted into consciousness, becoming foci of deliberation both technically (how they should be performed and/or modified) and ethically (how they could  Yanping Gao, “On the Path of Somaesthetics: An Interview with Richard Shusterman,” in Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art, ed. Jerold J. Abrams (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 261–78, on pp. 261–2. 35  Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Time Beyond the Clock (New York: Random House, 2023), xi-xii. 34

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impact other people). Thirdly, as also noted by Shusterman, we came to inspect our bodies, scrutinizing them in order to identify possible symptoms of the COVID-19 infection. To do this, one had to establish what was a norm in the functioning of one’s body in order to tell it from what could potentially be pathological. In this regard, Shusterman’s intuitions were, generally speaking, verified by empirical research carried out during the pandemic, which found that: [P]rotective factors include maintaining a daily routine, staying physically active, following a usual eating pattern and taking care of sleep hygiene. In summary, making no changes, where no changes are needed (e.g., due to the necessity to adapt to a change in environment) seems to be a protective factor by itself. Based on the results, risk factors for poorer mental health include giving up a daily routine, including neglecting meals, tidiness, hygiene as well as social relationships, changes in food intake, sleeping schedule and a decrease in physical activity and the onset of sexual dysfunctions.36

The somaesthetic lens yields thus an entirely different image of the body in the pandemic than the biopolitical one does. If the latter primarily attends to restraints imposed on the body through governmental regulations for the time of the pandemic, somaesthetics discerns an opportunity for increasing body consciousness that surfaced along with the pandemic. This difference is associated with a dissimilarity in the visions of the power/ body relations, and in extreme cases also with even deeper splits in the concept of the body as such and its social functioning. This disparity is especially pronounced if Agamben’s notions are compared with somaesthetics. The pivotal division of life into two separate forms—“zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group”37—which is axial to Agamben’s concept of social life,   Karolina  Fila-Witecka, Adrianna  Senczyszyn, Agata  Kołodziejczyk, Marta  Ciułkowicz, Julian Maciaszek, Błażej Misiak, Dorota Szczesniak, and Joanna Rymaszewska, “Lifestyle Changes Among Polish University Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18(18):  9571 (2021): 14, https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph18189571. 37  Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1. 36

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permanently threatening, as it is, to slide down into the biological, is overturned by somaesthetics. Obviously, the improvement of the body has a universal dimension to it and by all means concerns the body as a biological entity. However, the ways in which this somatic amelioration is accomplished are specific, individual, and contingent on distinctive arrangements of cultures and societies. Furthermore, practices geared to streamlining body functions ultimately also enhance its mental, and as a result spiritual, level, in this way braiding together bios and zoē. This fundamental difference, which, I believe, applies not only to Agamben’s views but to all varieties of biopower to some degree, makes its imprint on the assessment of the political and ethical relevance and influence of the pandemic. From Agamben’s position, it is downright injurious, as he believes that the imposed regulations reduced people to sheer biology, depriving them of both spirituality and the sense of solidarity. While the notions of other thinkers invoked above are less radical, they all share the same undertone. Specifically, they all think of the body as a passive object of manipulation performed by power from outside. What they dispute is solely to what extent that manipulation was indispensable for survival and how far it intervened. That damaging aspect of the pandemic is additionally associated with the transfer of activity into virtual reality, whereby action was emptied out of its bodily texture and thus, largely, of its emotional component as well. In his condemnation of online education, Agamben raged: What was evident to careful observers—namely, that the so-called pandemic would be used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies—is being duly realized […]. Part of the technological barbarism that we are currently living through is the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen.38

These highly charged assertions are, of course, consistent with the overall tenor of Agamben’s conception. University education, which  Giorgio Agamben, “Requiem for the Students,” trans. D.  Alan Dean (May 23, 2020), https://d-dean.medium.com/requiem-for-the-students-giorgio-agamben-866670c11642 (accessed 9 June 2023). 38

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stood a chance of being one of the few areas to hold off the dominance of almighty biopower, was subsumed by it as a result of “the so-called pandemic.” This again exposes Agamben’s total refusal to concede that the body could function as a vehicle for resistance and his failure to perceive its role for spiritual development. Above, I cited Shusterman’s insightful comments on the role that body consciousness could play during the epidemic. Passing to politics, we should illuminate the politico-ethical aspect of care for self and others. Dewey repeatedly stressed that any action was multidimensional, carrying ethical and aesthetic resonance. His observations are by default valid in relation to somaesthetics as a knowledge about perfecting the body, which is simultaneously ethical and aesthetic. Knowing, as we did, that amidst the pandemic any direct contact bore a risk not only of becoming infected ourselves but also of exposing others to the hazard of infection, we decided to have our “gaze permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen” entirely consciously, and this decision could even be construed as a sacrifice for the sake of our own and others’ wellbeing. This meaning was overlooked by Agamben, fixated on the thoroughly ideological understanding of the pandemic as a species of common flu and of governmental interventions as a poorly disguised attempt at instituting the regime of biological power and bare life. If driven by care for others, the withdrawal of the body from public space may reinforce people’s democratic engagement, provided that it represents a conscious rather than an enforced decision. Given this, the restrictions may not have affected political life as ruinously as it was often dreaded. Somaesthetics is a knowledge not only of how body should be used but also of how it should not be used lest it causes harm. The realization that change is necessary, that old habits must be abandoned—that nugatory and often neglected facet of the melioristic approach to corporeality—has a key part in the radical redrawing of attitudes to the body, which is a prerequisite for embracing somaesthetics as a somatic practice. There is undoubtedly an ethical aspect at stake here, as this is all about deciding to be better and devoting attention to this challenge. In this light, the relocation of civic involvement into virtual space would be both an ethical decision and a political one. Such a decision inevitably entailed the loss of all the power inherent in bodily activity and intimacy, the

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properties discussed in the preceding chapter. Democratic gatherings, demonstrations, and other forms of embodied politics were basically precluded, but this lack was compensated for by the feeling that the self-­ limitation was a conscious choice, one informed by care for self and others. The emotional bond with others and dedication to them, the two ethical sentiments essential to democratic ties, have survived, albeit in a negative form. Interestingly, bodiliness was also the soil on which the opposite standpoints thrived, espousing conspiracy theories. Studies carried out during the pandemic showed that the belief in conspiracy theories was fueled by a fear of vaccination as purportedly taking one’s control of one’s body away, while the opposite correlation was not noted.39 If my reasoning is sound, staring into the screen is not thoughtless behavior, but an act furnished with a range of ethical and political aspects; however, to grasp them takes shuffling off petrified modes of thought. Somaesthetics, I believe, provides us with concepts promoting a comprehensive conceptualization of the body and all its relationships even when the body is represented in virtual space, which was often the case during the pandemic. Lemma helpfully points out that the body does not vanish in virtual space; what happens is that its reference points are reconfigured: [V]irtual bodies have never been virtual if by that we mean nonmaterial. This is why the techno-fantasy of escaping the body in a bodiless cyberspace fails: we are constituted through a dynamic interaction between our biological bodies, their virtual representation and signification, our physical and social environments and the myriad conscious and unconscious processes that produce them.40

Drawing on psychoanalytical practice in her considerations, Lemma elucidates how experimentation with bodiliness in cyberspace may indeed further the discovery of identity. However, virtual space:

 Michael V.  Bronstein, Erich Kummerfeld, Angus MacDonald III, and Sophia Vinogradov, “Willingness to Vaccinate Against SARS-CoV-2: The Role of Reasoning Biases and Conspiracist Ideation,” Vaccine 40(02), (2021): 213–22. 40  Lemma, Digital Age, 17. 39

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requires the therapist to sensitively steer a difficult path between helping the patient to represent experience and understanding and accepting for a time the teleological imperative that runs counter to that, which may nevertheless be a necessary step towards representing sexuality and living comfortably in the sexual body. Such a step may be aided by the use of cyberspace to experiment with one’s experience of embodiment.41

Admittedly, somaesthetics employs a different set of concepts than psychoanalysis and approaches corporeality from a different vantage point. Nonetheless, Lemma’s observations indicate that the body in virtual space is by no means an illusion completely disjoined from materiality, and that it can complement the corporeal provided that those experimenting with the body in cyberspace are capable of returning to the material. This is premised on a range of conditions, listed in Lemma’s The Digital Age on the Couch. First of all, “[v]irtual bodies are always necessarily embedded in previrtual material, social relations and internalized relationships and as such cannot but incorporate social practices that categorize and standardize bodies. Technology is not a-social or a-cultural; at some level it is inevitably always also political.” Secondly, we need to be open to the possibility that virtual spaces might promote the development of an offline self by focusing on the enhancement of one’s cyberself or body. If so then we need to consider whether individuals will seek parity with themselves across domains or will they be content simply to compartmentalize each identity […] restricting it to the confines and context specificity of each “on-” or “off-”line world.42

Emphatically restating that somaesthetics is a knowledge of practices for improving the living, material body, we can be inspired by Lemma to appreciate the opportunities for the body to discover its potentials in virtual reality, including those instrumental in political involvement. Virtual reality may be where the body is primed for emancipatory action and thus where preparations for exercising somapower take place. The pandemic and the related regulations brought the complicated relations  Lemma, Digital Age, 36.  Lemma, Digital Age, 37.

41 42

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between the real body and its cyberspace avatars into spotlight. It is too early yet to definitively establish how much these developments have redirected the trajectory of somatic action and whether they have honed or blunted body consciousness. What we do know is that an array of complicated processes were set in motion, and that their effects are going to be felt for a long time.

3.3 Conclusion: There Was a Pandemic Even though the end of the pandemic was officially declared, upon which it became a thing of the past, it has by no means disappeared from our horizon. It still lingers as a danger despite the constantly perfected vaccines and drugs. We continue to cope with its direct fallout, such as the hindering of economic growth and the looming threat of an economic meltdown. I mention this in the first part of this chapter, along with the pandemic’s possible consequences for democratic politics. Nagging though these immediate effects are, long-term changes caused or catalyzed by the pandemic are perhaps far more important. These primarily concern the redefinition of expectations placed on the body and its relationship with society, including its political involvement. Pandemic is a historical event, but it is obvious to anybody that what happened in the past is never conclusively severed from the present and the future. This observation lies at the core of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of effective history, which is pithily encapsulated by Hans-Helmuth Gander: The individual is implicated in history through his biography, which takes shape respectively under the influence of historical events and developments. These latter are, in turn, reflected in one’s biography; they are inscribed in it in such a way that they engrave, as it were, one’s life. In this engraving, the forces of history produce a biography in its individual profile, which therefore can never be removed from the experience of reality, since experience is already history for the individual. Seen in this way, history is the medium in which we carry out our lives.43  Hans-Helmuth Gander, “Between Strangeness and Familiarity: Towards Gadamer’s Conception of Effective History,” Research in Phenomenology 34(1) (2004): 121–36, on p. 122. 43

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The pandemic made inroads into the lives of a multitude of people, weaving itself into the fabric of entire societies and changing their concept of the self, which gradually came to revolve around the body and physical health, either straightforwardly or by the negation of the weight of the pandemic crisis in anti-vaccine movements. The construction of a new, post-pandemic self inevitably entails remodeling temporal orientations as well. Given this, I believe that a particularly useful theoretical framework to draw on in this context is provided by the concept of “the ontology of expectations,” which I depict in detail in my Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland,44 proposing that “for social ontology the most important objects are expectations. They enable people to order the world according to a time arrow. People can expect the same situation to be repeated in the future, they can expect to return to a previous state of affairs or they can expect more or less radical changes in their societies.”45 With expectations having differing objects and points of reference, the future is their preferred locus in social collective consciousness: the “ontology of expectations” perspective hypothesizes that new expectations appear rather than that the old ones become extinct. Hence, we have the development of alternative futures stemming from the same past. These alternative futures represent a different vision of the social order in reference to behavior. They are implemented in the actions of the social institutions and they also create a number of objectives, social meanings, which make a map of a significant world of action.46

To pinpoint the long-term significance of the pandemic along these two axes—self-construction and temporal orientation of individuals—is obviously a steep challenge, given the messy tangle of conflicting tendencies we are facing. For this reason, I will only enumerate the vectors of forces that surfaced as the epidemic was unfolding.

 Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 45  Koczanowicz, Politics of Time, 68. 46  Koczanowicz, Politics of Time, 69. 44

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The place and role of science in society, in particular regarding the human body, formed one of the fields where these forces were at their most conspicuous. The pandemic and the measures mobilized to combat it were pulled into debates on the risks inscribed in scientific knowledge. Such discussions had been around at least since the 1960s, but there is no disputing that the epidemiological conjuncture reinforced the existing attitudes and imbued them with more dramatic meanings. As analyzed above, this happened on three levels. Let me briefly rehearse them. The pandemic can be construed as (a) the cumulation of instrumental and anti-humanistic science, or more broadly, technical civilization and a manifestation of risks that it poses to society; (b) as a cover for the pursuit of interests by governments, furnishing them with opportunities to effectively control citizens’ bodies, and by pharmaceutical corporations, exorbitantly profiting from useless, if not hurtful, vaccines; and (c) more optimistically, as evidence of the power of scientific knowledge, which eventually managed to contain the epidemic. Each of these meanings was etched in social consciousness and became part of the ontology of expectations, which is going to translate into enacting various scenarios for the future. Despite their glaring differences in deciphering the meanings of the pandemic, these three positions shared a focus on bodiliness. This cemented the already emerging politics of the body as one of the central axes of today’s political disputes. In confrontation with the pandemic, as I have argued, somatic amelioration makes its way to the center of attention and awareness, so as to be able to defend the body against harm or even annihilation. In this sense, from the perspective of somaesthetics and somapower, the body became, amid the pandemic, a site of liberation and emancipation from the entire situation caused by the spread of the epidemic danger. Again, concrete emancipatory strategies may be varied, but the general horizon and overall motivation are essentially the same. Therefore, there is reason to believe that the prolonged period of the withdrawal of the body form the public sphere and the relocation of its activity into enclosed rooms or places where social distance could be maintained helped appreciate and release the potential of bodiliness. This begs the question of whether that potential translated into an increased social engagement. No conclusive answer to this question can be given as divergent tendencies appeared in this respect. On the one hand the threat

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was global, but on the other the struggle against it took particularistic forms, as illustrated by vaccine nationalism. Corporeality, which should be a uniting factor, because both bodily fitness and bodily suffering are shared by all human beings, often was and continues to be harnessed as a mechanism for differentiating people and bolstering class, ethnic, and gender divisions. No wonder that conceptions are on the rise contending that it is biology—the capacity of the body—that will be the major engine driving social inequality. This is how Yuval Harari weighs in on the matter in his futuristic book Homo Deus: The third threat to liberalism is that some people will remain both indispensable and undecipherable, but they will constitute a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans. These superhumans will enjoy unheard-of abilities and unprecedented creativity, which will allow them to go on making many of the most important decisions in the world. They will perform crucial services for the system, while the system could not understand and manage them. However, most humans will not be upgraded, and they will consequently become an inferior caste, dominated by both computer algorithms and the new superhumans.47

The pandemic can be viewed as a prologue to this script for the future. The citizens of rich countries enjoyed much better protection against the disease and felt its effects less acutely than the inhabitants of less privileged parts of the globe. From this angle, the pandemic capped the long standing trends of longer life expectancy and better quality of life of wealthier social strata. These observations suggest that there was not one clearly delineated aspect or point where the pandemic radically recast the ontologies of social expectations. Rather, there were nodal junctures, in which the experience of the pandemic was rooted, but concrete expectations branched out in different, sometimes opposite, directions. One such node, a paramount one from the viewpoint of somaesthetics, was formed by body consciousness and the sense that it was imperative to perfect it so that it could become an outpost of resistance to perils menacing the body.  Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Oxford: Signal Books 2016), 308.

47

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2020a (February 26). “The Invention of the Epidemic.” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), https://www. journal-­psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirusand-­philosophers/. Access 18 May 2023. ———. 2020b (March 17). “Clarifications.” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), https://www.journal-­psychoanalysis.eu/ articles/coronavirus-­and-­philosophers/. Access 18 May 2023. ———. 2020c (May 23). “Requiem for the Students.” Translated by D. Alan Dean, https://d-­dean.medium.com/requiem-­for-­the-­students-­giorgio-­ agamben-­866670c11642. Access 9 June 2023. Anwar, Ayesha, Meryem Malik, Vaneeza Raees, and Anjum Anwar. 2020. “Role of Mass Media and Public Health Communications in the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Cureus 12 (9). https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.10453. Asimov, Isaac. 1957. The Naked Sun. New York and Toronto: Bantam Books. Bacon, Francis, and Tommaso Campanella. 2018. New Atlantis & The City of the Sun: Two Classic Utopias. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Bauman, Zygmunt, and Carlo Bordoni. 2014. State of Crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benvenuto, Sergio. 2020 (March 20). “Forget About Agamben.” European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Coronavirus and Philosophers), March 20, 2020, h t t p s : / / w w w. j o u r n a l -­p s yc h o a n a l y s i s . e u / a r t i c l e s / c o r o n a v i r u s -­ andphilosophers/. Access 18 May 2023. Bronstein, Michael V., Erich Kummerfeld, Angus MacDonald III, and Sophia Vinogradov. 2021. “Willingness to Vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2: The Role of Reasoning Biases and Conspiracist Ideation.” Vaccine 40 (02): 213–22. Castells, Manuel. 2004. “Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint.” In The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Manuel Castells, 3–45. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004. Camus, Albert. 1975. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New  York: Vintage Books. Cox, David. 2023. “Interview with Immunologist Akiko Iwasaki.” The Guardian, May 27.

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Dewey, John. 1950. Reconstruction in Philosophy. New  York: New American Library. Editorial. 2020. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 20(8): 845. https://doi. org/10.1016/S1473-­3099(20)30565-­X. Esposito, Roberto. “Cured to the Bitter End.” In Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society, edited by Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky, 28–9. Oxon: Routledge. Eurofound. 2023. Economic and Social Inequalities in Europe in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg Inequality and Covid-19, Inequality.org, https://inequality.org/ facts/inequality-­and-­covid-­19/#racial-­inequality-­covid. Access 29 May 2023. Fila-Witecka, Karolina, Adrianna Senczyszyn, Agata Kołodziejczyk, Marta Ciułkowicz, Julian Maciaszek, Błażej Misiak, Dorota Szczesniak, and Joanna Rymaszewska. 2021. “Lifestyle Changes Among Polish University Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18(18): 9571, https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph18189571. Gander, Hans-Helmuth. 2004. “Between Strangeness and Familiarity: Towards Gadamer’s Conception of Effective History.” Research in Phenomenology 34(1): 121–36. Gao, Yanping. 2022. “On the Path of Somaesthetics: An Interview with Richard Shusterman.” In Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art, ed. Jerold J.  Abrams, 261–78. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Gluckman, Peter, and Binyam Sisay Mendisu. 2021. “What the Covid-19 Pandemic Reveals About the Evolving Landscape of Scientific Advice.” In UNESCO Science Report: The Race against Time for Smarter Development, ed. Susan Schneegans, Tiffany Straza, and Jake Lewis, 3–8. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Harari, Yuval Noah. 2016. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Oxford: Signal Books. Harvey, David. 2020. “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19.” Jacobin Magazine. March 20, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-­ harvey-­coronavirus-­political-­economy-­disruptions. Access 16 April 2023. Henssler, Jonathan, et al. 2021. “Mental Health Effects of Infection Containment Strategies: Quarantine and Isolation—a Systematic Review and Meta-­ analysis.” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 271(2): 223–34, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-­020-­01196-­x.

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Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Koczanowicz, Leszek. 2008. Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-­ Communist Poland. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Latour, Bruno. 2020. “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” Critical Inquiry, March 26, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-­this-­a-­dress-­rehearsal/. Access 10 May 2023. Lemma, Alessandra. 2017. The Digital Age on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Practice and New Media. New York: Routledge. Machlin, Amanda. 2022. Bodies of Democracy: Modes of Embodied Politics. Bielefeld: transcript verlag. Mbembe, Achille. 2021. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Translated by Carolyn Shread. Critical Inquiry 47(52) (Winter): 58–62. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2021. “A Viral Exception.” In Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics and Society, edited by Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky, 27. Oxon: Routledge. Nolen, Stephanie. 2023. “W.H.O. Ends Global Health Emergency Designation for Covid,” New York Times, May 5, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/ health/covid-­who-­emergency-­end.html. Access 27 June 2023. Odell, Jenny. 2023. Saving Time: Discovering a Time Beyond the Clock. New York: Random House. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Belknap Press. Repucci, Sarah, and Amy Slipowitz. 2020. “Democracy under Lockdown: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Global Struggle for Freedom.” Freedom House, October 2020, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020-­10/ COVID-­19_Special_Report_Final_.pdf. Access 15 December, 2022. Sampler, Ian. 2023. “New Data Links Covid-19’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market.” Guardian, March 17, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-­1 9-­o rigins-­r accoon-­d ogs-­w uhan-­m arket-­d ata. Access 27 June 2023. Young, Alison. 2023. Pandora's Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk. Nashville: Center Street.

4 Conclusions

Abstract  Conclusions provide final reflections on the issues discussed in the book and some possible ways to develop them in the future. Keywords  Somapower • Somaesthetics • The political body Writing a book is like traversing unknown lands. Time and again, one sees new landscapes, meets people in passing or for a longer while, and is bound to solve problems that thwart the trip or even could prematurely put it to an end. To continue this analogy, conclusion is nothing else than an account of impressions from the journey and an invitation to another one. In the Introduction, I observed that, as evinced by recent discussions around AI, the idea of the human as a primarily thinking—but non-­ acting and disembodied—being is deeply entrenched in numerous systems of thought in various cultures. It surfaces, so to speak, automatically as tacit knowledge whenever new problems arise that call for quick solutions. Readers of my book will have already noted that my argumentation challenges such a vision of humans. In constructive terms, my reasoning © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Koczanowicz, The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1_4

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comes down to two fundamental points. Firstly, the body is an active agent of social relations, and as such it can be a vehicle for emancipation and liberation. Secondly, many of the emancipatory processes occur in everyday life, adding up to what I call the microphysics of emancipation. These processes unfold in special places, which I call niches of liberation or niches of emancipation. Regarding the former point, I draw on the seminal works of Richard Shusterman, who has developed somaesthetics with its concept of the active body that strives to perfect its potential and is capable of correcting the mistakes accumulated in life. While originating in American pragmatism, somaesthetics is also indebted to the thought of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, although Shusterman veers from them in underscoring the emancipatory capacities of the body rather than its subjection to social conditions and power. Because the improvement of somatic functioning is intimately interlaced with pragmatist meliorism, the interactive component is inscribed in the very foundations of the somaesthetic project. Since its inception, Shusterman’s model has been applied in a range of contexts, including those related to social life. Still, the specific goal that I pursued in this book was to show that individual self-improvement projects could morph into social projects of emancipation and liberation from oppressive conditions. To accomplish this, I needed to link somaesthetics to concepts of political philosophy. As a result of constructing this bridge, I developed the concept of somapower as a new notion in which the body’s activity, which somaesthetics emphatically foregrounds, is associated with configurations of social and political factors that enable the body to become a vehicle for emancipation and liberation. Such configurations are determined by two notions from social philosophy: the microphysics of emancipation and niches of emancipation (liberation). As both concepts are tied to everyday life, the general idea is that politics germinates in and from everyday life, and that ostensibly non-political phenomena may transfigure into strictly political agendas and actions. The COVID-19 pandemic, to which I devoted a separate chapter, is a special case of such interconnections and entanglements. Invoking the debate in which prominent philosophers engaged during the pandemic, I showcase the striking difference between biopower and somapower.

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While the former is predominantly about the control and regulation of the activity of the body, the latter explicates how, under such extreme circumstances, the body can capitalize on its own potential to continuously enhance its capacities. This book concludes a research project designed to establish fundamental concepts and the ways they can be used. Of course, this is not the last word, either on emancipation in everyday life or on the body as a vehicle for it. Nevertheless, I believe that it makes somaesthetic tools available for expanding our knowledge of the operating mechanisms of society and possibilities for bolstering democracy.

Index1

A

Abortion abortion law, 81 ban on, 2, 81 See also Black Monday/ Black Protest (Poland); Rights; Women’s strike (Poland) Action and communication, 26 creative, 26 pragmatist concept of, 26 social, 26, 64 Activism, 14, 26, 59 Activity and change, 25 human, x, 25, 26, 80 Marxist view of, 25 Adorno, Theodor W., 76, 77, 79 collective undercurrents, 77, 79

Agamben, Giorgio, 33, 106–108, 110, 112–114 bare life vs. political life, 106 state of emergency, 106, 107 Agonism, 7, 16 Ahmed, Sara, 62–65 Alienation, 32 Antagonism, 6–8, 11, 16 Antagonistic potential, 4, 6, 7 Arendt, Hannah, 10, 11, 14–16, 44 on politics, 11, 14, 16 on totalitarianism, 45 Aristotle, 8 Art, vi, vii, 25, 31, 47–50, 55, 73 and niches of emancipation, 55 Artificial intelligence (AI), v–vii, 125 Asimov, Isaac, 103, 104 Assembly, 74, 75 Authenticity, 27, 33, 54, 66

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Koczanowicz, The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1

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130 Index

Authoritarianism/authoritarian regime/authoritarian system, vi, x, xi, 17, 23, 37, 52, 57, 71 B

Baier, Annette, 60, 61 progress of sentiments, 61 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 17, 28 Benvenuto, Sergio, 105 Białoszewski, Miron, 76–79 Teatr Osobny (Theater Apart), 78 Biopolitics, 31, 33, 67, 74, 82, 106, 108–110 Biopower, x, 33–35, 106, 113, 114, 126 Biosphere, 94, 95 Black Lives Matter, 2 Black Monday/Black Protest (Poland), 81, 84 Bodiliness, ix, x, 105, 106, 115, 119 See also Body; Corporeality; Soma Body acting/active, ix, 37, 126 autonomy of, 38, 39, 59 biological, 115 as commodity, 33 control of, 2, 106, 110, 115 defense/protection of, 2, 75 and democracy, 2, 99 docile, viii, 33, 38, 72, 86, 110 and emancipation/freedom, x, 33, 39, 59–75, 82, 99, 126 and emotions, 62–64 in fascism, 67 female/women’s, 81 instrumentalization/ weaponization of, 38, 59

and oppression, ix, 39, 71, 74, 106 and pandemic, 92–120 passive, 85, 113 and pleasure, 31, 38 political, 29–39, 59–75 political use/s of, 59, 66 and society, 36, 39, 117 in Soviet totalitarianism, 67 and state, 2, 68 utopia of, 31–33 virtual, 105, 115, 116 Body consciousness, 35, 38, 110, 112, 114, 117, 120 See also Somatic awareness Body/mind dichotomy/distinction/ division, viii, ix, 2–6, 9, 10, 14, 16, 24, 28, 44, 72, 74, 105, 106, 112, 120 Body/somatic amelioration/ enhancement/improvement in pandemic, xi, 92–120 and social change, 27–28, 32–34, 113 in somaesthetics, x, 29–39, 65, 72, 73, 75, 85, 110, 112, 114, 120, 126 Boltanski, Luc, 26, 27, 33, 38, 48, 53, 54, 62, 64, 80 existential tests of social reality, 27 pragmatist sociology of critique, 26 Bordoni, Carlo, 93 Bourdieu, Pierre, viii, ix, 22, 23, 26, 126 habitus, ix, 22 reproduction of class divisions, ix, 22

 Index 

Bourgeoisie, see under Class Brezhnev, Leonid, 47 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 37 Butler, Judith, 74, 75, 75n56 performance of the body, 75 C

Campanella, Tommaso, 104 Camus, Albert, 103 Capitalism, 19, 21, 32, 50, 53–55, 102 free-market, 21, 102 protean, 53 technological, 19 Care of the/for self, 34, 114, 115 Castells, Manuel, 98 Catholic Church (in Poland), 46 Censorship, 52, 77 Certeau, Michel de, 24 strategies and tactics, 24 Change in consciousness, 58 cultural, 53 political, x, 32, 46, 58, 59 of self/self-transformation, 84 social, 19, 23, 26 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 68 Chiapello, Ève, 33, 53, 54 Chotomska, Wanda, 78 Civilization pandemic as emblem of, 98 technological, v, 94, 98 Class bourgeoisie, 21 divisions, ix, 22 upper, 21 working, 20, 21, 69

131

Climate crisis, 94, 109, 110 Club of the Crooked Circle, 49 Communication, 26, 36, 48, 52, 96, 98 Communism, 45, 46, 67 Community, 25, 57, 58, 65–67, 92, 110 Compromise, 3–5, 82, 83 Conflict, 4, 10, 12, 14, 16, 37, 101 Consensus, 6–8, 17 Conservatism, 33 Constitutional Tribunal (Poland), 2, 81, 83 Consumption, 24 Control, viii, 2, 6, 15, 24, 33, 44, 45, 49, 52, 54, 59, 67, 69, 85, 93, 106, 110, 115, 119, 127 Corporeality, viii–x, 2, 21, 30–33, 35–39, 43, 59, 75, 80, 83, 98, 99, 105, 111, 114, 116, 120 and emancipation, 59, 75 See also Bodiliness; Body; Soma COVID-19, 92, 93, 96, 100, 112 origin disputes, 93 See also Pandemic Critique artistic, 54 of capitalism, 54 of everyday life, 20, 22 political, 9, 20 radical, 29 social, 22, 23, 27, 54 Culture cancel culture, 52 counterculture, 53–55 cultural cocoon, vii and politics, 18 Czachorowski, Swen, 78

132 Index D

Democracy, vi, xi, 2–4, 6, 7, 9–11, 16–18, 26, 30, 33, 36, 43–60, 71, 97–100, 127 agonistic, 6 and body, 99 and dialogue, 4 Dewey on, 26, 97 liberal, xi, 2–4, 6, 7, 10, 17, 30, 33, 44, 52, 55–57, 59, 60, 71 pandemic as challenge to/ test of, 98 transition to, xi Demonstration/s, 2, 25, 30, 51, 56, 57, 64, 74–76, 81–84, 99, 115 See also Assembly; Gatherings; Black Monday/Black Protest (Poland); Performances; Protest/s; Women’s strike (Poland) Depoliticization, 6 Dewey, John, ix, 12–14, 16, 26, 35, 36, 64, 65, 97, 111, 114 on action, 12, 16, 111, 114 definition of society/public, 13 on democracy, 26, 97 private/public distinction, 14 Dialogue and democracy, 4 and everyday life, 17, 18 non-consensual, 8 and society, 18 and understanding, 17 See also Niche/s of emancipation/ liberation, and debate/ discussion Disembodiment/disembodied, vii, 95, 99, 125

Docile bodies, viii, 33, 38, 72, 86, 110 Dreyfus, Hubert, 73 E

Economy capitalist, 33, 54, 56 free-market, xi shortage, 48 Emancipation and body, x, 33, 64, 75, 80–85, 99, 126 and everyday life, xi, 2–39 Emotions and action, 64, 113 and body, 62–64 James-Lange theory of, 64, 65 and in/justice, 62, 63 manipulation of, 60 and masses, 60 and niches of emancipation, 63 in political theory, 60 and society, 58, 60–61, 63 Engels, Friedrich, 20, 21 Enlightenment, viii, 61, 93 Equality, 3, 4, 57, 102 Esposito, Roberto, 33, 108–110 Ethics, 24, 28, 37, 39, 46, 48, 51, 55–58, 69, 73, 76, 94, 97, 105, 113–115 and niches of emancipation, 57, 58 and pandemic, 113 Everyday life, x, xi, 1–39, 43–86, 126, 127 critique of, 20, 22 and dialogue, 17, 18

 Index 

and emancipation, 19, 23–25, 37, 127 and politics/the political, x, xi, 2–39 Exclusion, 5, 10, 11, 14, 107

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, vii, 45 Faust, vii Goldfarb, Jeffrey, 23–25, 29 kitchen table, 23, 25 Gramsci, Antonio, 26 Grossman, Vasily, 45 Gymnastics, 38, 68, 72

F

Fake news, 100 Family, 8, 32, 46–48 Fascism/fascist, 17, 66, 67 Feminism/women’s movement, 58, 81 Fizkultur, 69 Foucault, Michel, viii, 14–16, 23, 31, 33–35, 39, 46, 72, 73, 82, 84, 86, 109, 110, 126 aesthetics of existence, 34 conversion, 84, 85 microphysics of power, 23, 33, 38 panopticon, 72 technologies of the self, 33, 84 See also Biopolitics; Biopower; Docile bodies Freedom, ix, xi, 9, 10, 12, 16, 18, 19, 23, 28, 29, 38, 39, 46, 49, 50, 52, 57, 59, 66, 69–71, 82, 97, 107 of speech, 50, 52, 53 Freud, Sigmund, 32 G

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 117 Gander, Hans-Helmuth, 117 Gao, Yanping, 110 Gatherings, 75, 115 Ginzburg, Alik, 49n11

133

H

Habermas, Jürgen, 17, 56 on civil society, 56 Habitus, ix, 22 Harari, Yuval Noah, vi, 120 Harris, Tristan, vi Hartsock, Nancy, 58 Harvey, David, 101 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8, 69 Hegemony, xi, 7 Heller, Ágnes, 5, 10–13, 16, 18 the political, 10–12, 16 Hering, Ludwik, 78 Human nature, 5, 20 Hume, David, 60–62 Hungary, 8, 47 Husserl, Edmund, 95, 96 I

Ideology, xi, 23–25, 28, 29, 31, 37, 38, 46–50, 55, 57, 59, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71–74, 77, 85, 86 Infodemic, 100 Injustice, 27, 32, 53, 55, 62–64, 75, 76 Internet, 99

134 Index J

Joas, Hans, 26 creative action, 26

Lippmann, Walter, 13 Lyotard, Jean-François, 19 grand narratives/meta-narratives, 19, 25, 26

K

Kant, Immanuel, 60 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 30 king’s two bodies, 30 Khrushchev, Nikita, 47 Kirchner, Hanna, 78 Klemperer, Victor, 60 L

Language, vi, vii, 3, 60, 76, 77, 79, 82 Latour, Bruno, 109, 110 Le Bon, Gustave, 60 Lefebvre, Henri, 20, 22 Lemke, Thomas, 33 Lemma, Alessandra, 105, 115, 116 Lenin, Vladimir, 26 Levinas, Emmanuel, 66 Liberalism, 2, 4, 19, 38, 47, 120 Life abstract, 8 active, 17 bare, 106, 107, 114 bios, 107, 112, 113 concrete, 8 political, x, xi, 3, 8, 13, 17, 20, 80, 84, 98, 99, 106, 114 productive, 20 public, 14 social, xi, 4, 6, 8, 10, 17, 18, 22, 24, 52, 97, 105, 112, 126 zoē, 107, 112, 113 See also Everyday life

M

Machlin, Amanda, 99 Marcuse, Herbert, 31–33, 38, 53, 54 false needs, 53 utopia of the body, 31–33 Marx, Karl, viii, 20, 21, 80, 84 Marxism, 25, 46 Masses, 2, 26, 38, 44, 57, 60, 67, 81, 84, 101 Materialism, 20 Mbembe, Achille, 94, 95, 98, 110 Mead, George Herbert, ix, 26, 36, 111 theory of action, 26 Meliorism/meliorist, 35, 36, 126 Mickiewicz, Adam, 24 Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), 25 Microphysics of emancipation, x, xi, 2–39, 44, 51, 52, 70, 71, 126 Mind, vii–x, 26, 30, 35, 36, 76, 77, 105 Modernity, viii, 2–3, 14, 17, 19, 33, 54, 68, 72, 82, 85, 95, 106–108 Morality, 31, 34, 44 Moral subject/s, 34 Mouffe, Chantal, 6, 7, 16 agonistic democracy, 6 conflictual consensus, 7 the political/politics, 6, 7 Movements environmental, 55

 Index 

political, 12, 33, 51, 55–58, 86 social, 55, 59 Murawska, Ludmiła, 78

135

Ost, David, 49, 51 anti-politics, 51 P

N

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 107–110 viral exception, 107, 108 Nazi/Nazism, 44, 66 Necropolitics, 67 Negri, Antonio, 33 Nehamas, Alexander, 34 Neoliberalism, 33 Neumeyer, Joy, 67 Niche/s of emancipation/liberation, x, xi, 18–29, 43–76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 99, 126 and art, 55 and debate/discussion, 45 and discussion clubs, 47 and emotions, 63 and ethics, 57, 58 and existential tests, 28 and family/friendship, 46–48 in liberal democracy, 52, 56 in Poland, 46, 47, 49, 50 in totalitarian state, 50, 51 in the USSR, 45, 50 O

Odell, Jenny, 111 Ontology of expectations, 118, 119 Open Theater Festival (Wroclaw), 50 Order democratic, 9, 10 political, 4, 9, 10 social, x, 9, 10, 28, 79, 80, 86, 118

Pandemic and biopolitics, 109, 110 and body, 92–120 and civic involvement, 114 conspiracy theories, 93, 100, 115 and democracy, 99, 100 difference from previous epidemics, 93 and disembodiment, 95, 98, 99 and ethics, 105, 106, 113 and inequality, 102 and science, 95 and somaesthetics, 92, 100, 110, 112, 114, 119 vaccines, 92, 95, 100, 101, 117, 119, 120 See also COVID-19 Party/ies (political) Civic Platform (PO, Poland), 83 Communist party, 47, 52 Green Party (Germany), 55 Law and Justice (PiS, Poland), 76, 82, 83 Polish United Workers’ Party, 47 Pasternak, Boris, 45 Patriarchy, 32, 82 Performances, 36, 49, 50, 56, 64, 70, 74, 75, 78, 80, 98, 99, 110 Phenomenology, viii Piketty, Thomas, 102 Plato, vii Poland, 2, 23, 24, 29, 46, 47, 49–51, 76, 79, 81–83

136 Index

Political sphere, x, 2, 19, 37, 56, 58 Political, the, x, 2–19, 29–39, 55, 56, 58–75, 83, 86, 99, 113 Political vs. personal/private, 29, 58 Politics and culture, 18 democratic, 7, 16, 17, 26, 30, 57, 74, 98, 117 and/of dialogue, 17, 18 emancipatory, 43 and/of everyday life, x, xi, 2–39, 43, 45, 126 oppositional, 50 of protest, 80 See also Biopolitics Populism/populist movements, 7, 33 Potentiality, 79–81 Power, viii–x, 2, 6, 8–10, 14, 15, 17, 23, 24, 29, 33, 34, 38, 44, 50–53, 58, 67, 68, 74, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 93, 107, 108, 110, 112–114, 119, 126 See also Biopower Power relations, 7, 14–16 Pragmatism, x, 32, 35, 85 and action, 26 and body, 36 and meliorism, 36, 126 and society, 36 Private/public division, 10–12, 14, 56 Private sphere, 2, 56, 57, 62 Propaganda, 45 Protest/s, x, 56, 76, 80–85 Psychoanalysis, 32, 116 Public sphere, 11, 13, 18, 23, 28, 47, 56, 60, 62–64, 119

R

Rabinow, Paul, 34, 73 Raskin, Azra, vi Rationality, 8–10, 100 Resistance, 10, 30, 43–86, 114, 120 Ricoeur, Paul, 8–10, 16 political alienation, 8, 9 political paradox, 8, 9 the political/politics, 10 Riefenstahl, Leni, 66 Rights human rights, 61 individual rights, 57 reproductive rights, 2, 33 women’s rights, 57, 81, 84 Rorty, Richard, 60, 62, 64 sentimental education, 61 Rose, Nikolas, 34 S

Schlögel, Karl, 68, 69 Schmitt, Carl, 3–8, 10, 11, 14–16 depoliticization, 6 friend/enemy, 16 politics/the political, 3–6, 8, 11 Science Husserl’s critique of, 96 and pandemic, 95 and political decision-making, 96 Sexuality, 31, 32, 116 Shakespeare, William, 45, 75n56, 75n58 Shusterman, Richard, ix, x, xii, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 71, 72, 85, 110–112, 114, 126 Slezkine, Yuri, 45, 46 anti-millenarian humanism, 46

 Index 

Bolsheviks/Millenarists comparison, 45 Sluga, Hans, 14–16 political relations, 15, 16 Smith, Adam, 60–62 the man of system, 61 Sobolewski, Tadeusz, 79 Socialism, 2, 19, 25, 46, 47, 101 Social media, v, 81, 99, 105 Society, vi, ix, xi, 5–10, 13, 15, 17–22, 24, 28, 29, 31–33, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48–53, 55–58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 71, 76, 79, 82, 84, 86, 97–101, 103, 104, 107–109, 113, 117–119, 127 bourgeois, 56, 79 capitalist, 22, 50, 55, 69 civil, 51, 55–57 democratic, vi, xi, 7, 17, 32, 97, 99, 100 liberal, 7 network, 98 totalitarian, 5, 51, 56 Solidarity, 51, 75, 101, 102, 105, 110, 113 social movement/trade union, 51 Soma, 36, 71 See also Bodiliness; Body; Corporeality Somaesthetics, x, 29–39, 64, 65, 71–73, 75, 79, 80, 85–86, 92, 97, 99, 100, 106, 110–116, 119, 120, 126, 127 and bodily disciplines/practices, 35 and body consciousness, 112, 120 experiential, 72, 73 and meliorism, 126

137

and perception, 36 representational, 72, 73 Somapower, x, xi, 2–39, 59, 73–79, 83, 85, 86, 99, 106, 116, 119, 126 Somatic awareness, 36, 111 See also Body consciousness Sontag, Susan, 66 Stalinism/Stalinist, 45–47, 77, 78 State authoritarian, 17 communist, 46, 47, 51, 52, 79 democratic, 7, 9 Dewey on, 13 liberal, 6 socialist, 9, 68 Soviet, 6, 69 totalitarian, 6, 9, 50–52, 70, 71 Strong, Tracy, 3 Struggle/s political, 4, 6, 7, 29, 32, 38, 72, 75, 82 for power, 8, 58 Subjectivation, 34, 46 Subjectivity, 5, 84, 105 T

Tarkovsky, Andrei, 70 Thaw, 47–50 Totalitarianism/totalitarian regime/ totalitarian system, 38, 43–60, 65, 66, 71, 97 U

Uexküll, Jakob von, 95 Umwelt, 95

138 Index

Understanding, 5, 8, 17, 18, 23, 53, 63, 106, 114, 116 USSR/Soviet Union, 8, 45, 47, 50, 68 Utopia, 21, 31–33, 103, 104

Virtual reality and body, 116 and political engagement, 116 Voloshinov, Valentin, 28 W

V

Value/s, ix, 11–14, 16, 25, 31, 37, 54, 73, 75, 77, 97 Violence, 8–10, 21, 110

Westbrook, Robert, 13 Women’s strike (Poland), 76–85 World Health Organization (WHO), 92, 100