I Can’t Breathe

A review of Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Duke University Press, 2022. 

“I can’t breathe!” These were the last words uttered by Eric Garner, a Black resident of Staten Island who, on July 17, 2014, was put in a deadly chokehold by an NYPD officer for allegedly selling “loosies” or single cigarettes on the street. Garner suffered from asthma, a condition that, according to epidemiological data, disproportionately affects African Americans. Garner’s last words were also those of Elijah McClain and George Floyd, two other Black men killed by police just a few years later. “I can’t breathe” has become a rallying cry for our times and is used as an expression of the asphyxiating atmosphere in which activists declare that Black Lives Matter. The unability to breathe can be understood as both a metaphor and material reality of racism, which constrains not just life choices and opportunities, but the environmental conditions of life itself. It draws our attention to breathing as a political act: the capacity to breathe, or its preclusion, defines a new form of biopolitics in which some lives are deemed worthy of inhaling fresh air and some aren’t. Reclaiming ownership of the means of respiration, literally and figuratively, may delineate a new kind of respiratory politics that recognizes breathing as an unalienable right. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, an art critic and professor of environmental humanities, breathing is, more than ever, in the air. Of course, breathing is in the air. But it specifically is, now, in the Zeitgeist. It is a sign of the times that breathing’s intensity and its variations—submitting breathing subjects to chokehold or waterboarding, refraining from inhaling certain substances, filtering inhaled air through face masks, measuring one’s carbon dioxide emissions—now feature in our political imaginary as an expression of agency and control. For Jean-Thomas Tremblay, the crisis in breathing predates the climate urgency, the Covid-19 epidemic, or the BLM movement. He sees its emergence and intensification around the 1970s, and tracks its expression in marginal, underground, or minoritarian art productions that may have escaped the radar screen of art historians but that, more than mainstream creations or popular art, may help us to capture what is at stake in the current inability to breathe.

The crisis in breathing

According to Tremblay, “the intensified pollution, weaponization, and monetization of air and breath since the 1970s amount to a crisis in the reproduction of life.” Breathing orients life toward death. It accompanies us from the cradle to the grave or, to be precise, from our first intake of outside air at a maternity hospital to our last breath on our death bed. Breathing takes place in increasingly toxic environments. To breathe is to be vulnerable to airborne particles or poisonous gas, or to bad odors and fool air. Air carries the means of life and death, and each respiration reproduces the movement of life—inhaling and exhaling, in and out, in and out. Being out of breath, deferring to exhale, breathing in sync, being left panting or gaping for air: these variations constitute a popular nomenclature for expressing experiences of hostile environments and efforts to make life within them more livable. Being aware of one’s breath doesn’t protect us from airborne threats or breathing impediments: if anything, it makes the process of breathing harder by adding a layer of consciousness to what usually goes on without thinking. Coming back to the cultural history that forms the backbone of Breathing Aesthetics, the 1970s were characterized by the triple attempt to purify, weaponize, and marketize air. Pollution and air quality became increasingly debated in these years, which saw mounting scientific evidence of greenhouse gas accumulation and global temperature rise. Weaponization of air and breathing took the form of police forces using tear gas and other toxicants against demonstrators with increasing frequency. Although international protocols and agreements, from the Geneva Protocol of 1925 to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, have prohibited the use of toxic gas and airborne germs as a method of warfare, chemical weapons were used in all major conflicts, including the Vietnam War where the spraying of Agent Orange led to long-lasting health incapacitation. As for marketization, the 1970s saw the emergence of a “breathfulness industry” ascribing therapeutic value to conscious respiration. Reiki breathing, opening one’s chakra, and aligning with one’s inner self became all the rage, and the business of breathing extended to all ages and social categories.

Not everybody is equal in front of breathing: “we are all breathers, but none of the same kind.” It is the author’s guiding principle throughout Breathing Aesthetics that “respiration’s imbrication of vitality and morbidity is differently felt by differently situated people.” Control over the means of respiration is unevenly distributed. When breathing is in order, an invisible line is dividing the haves and the have nots, the fully capable and the respiratorily impaired. This is not an intuitive argument: nothing is more free than air, and everybody in good health can afford to breathe regardless of condition of wealth or social status. The distributive effects of breathing impediments are indeed a matter of debate. For some scholars, global warming or airborne pollution are the great equalizers as they affect the whole of humanity without consideration for political or class borders. The burning of coal in Beijing, China, affects cities as far as Tokyo, Seoul, or Hanoi, and the carbon dioxide emissions liberated by Chinese powerplants have consequences for the entire planet. But for Tremblay, “toxicity does discriminate, and it does know boundaries.” In the United States, respiratory hazards and their pathologies, from asthma to lung cancer, are disproportionately concentrated in areas populated by low-income minorities, which amounts to structural and environmental racism. The respiratory enmeshment of vitality and morbidity is particularly acute in situation where the taken-for-granted nature of breathing is compromised by health or environmental conditions. As the lack of mechanical ventilators in American hospitals demonstrated, the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis of breathing. Many of the symptoms associated with Covid-19 are respiratory, from cough to shortness of breath to loss of smell; complications such as pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome also imperil breathing. We live in an age in which respiration can be put at risk, and where the material conditions of breathing require sustained investment.

Race and respiration

In Tremblay’s analysis, breathlessness imposes itself as a locus of colonial violence, racial discrimination, patriarchal oppression, and ecological degradation. The United States owes its existence to the single largest and most significant land grab in human history. In addition to deliberate killings and wars, Native Americans died in massive numbers from infections endemic among Europeans. Much of this was associated with respiratory tract infections, including smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and influenza. This history of dispossession and debilitation continued well into the twentieth century: the nuclear tests that took place on US soil near Indian reservations or in evacuated atolls of the Pacific have contributed to abnormally high thyroid and lung cancer rates among Indigenous populations. Settler colonialism was also associated with the slave trade and persistent racial exploitation of African Americans. The history of Black asphyxiation began with the drowning of enslaved people thrown overboard by slave ship owners during the Middle Passage to the Americas. Even today, policies aimed at controlling public spaces and preventing urban riots are depriving African Americans of their breathing space and capacity to voice their concerns. The burden of asthma in the United States falls disproportionately on Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native people. But being Black or Latinx or Indigenous doesn’t cause asthma: the neighborhood does. Sociologists have shown that noxious and hazardous facilities are concentrated in minority and low-income communities. For some writers-activists, a war is being waged on the urban poor and the colored in America, and this war uses asphyxia and incapacitation to produce disabled bodies and lives cut short. Health disparities and environmental inequality call for environmental justice and redistribution of the means of respiration. Breathing and breathlessness also have a gendered dimension. There is growing evidence that a number of pulmonary diseases affect women differently and with a greater degree of severity than men. Childbirth labor involves respiratory techniques such as belly breathing and pushing for birth delivery. Part of the feminist movement’s ambition in the 1970s and 1980s was to “remove the man-made obstacles to breathing” and to claim the affinity between the feminine and the natural world while identifying breath as a conduit for intimacy between the two.

In Breathing Aesthetics, Tremblay addresses this politics of breathing tangentially. He defines a breathing aesthetics as a distinct mode of artistic creation and expression that takes breathing as its medium. Breathing is part of the aesthetic experience: according to Tremblay, breathing is “a mode of spectatorship in the same class as watching or listening.” Some works of art demand a certain type of breathing. They impose upon their public a certain kind of inspiring and expiring, controlling respiratory movements to produce a shared affect or breath. Common expressions reflect this affinity between respiration and the art experience A spectacle can be breathtaking, we may hold our breath at the end of a chapter, a story may leave us gaping for air, or we may fill our lungs in full appreciation of a beautiful scene. Critics have already commented upon literature’s engagement with breath: according to François-Bernard Michel, a French writer and pneumologist, Marcel Proust exhibited a literary sensibility to the weather because he suffered from asthma, and Raymond Queneau gave life to asthmatic characters because he was allergic to grass pollen. Cinema is the art form that shows the strongest connexion with the respiratory function. A movie can embark the public on a rollercoaster of laughing, crying, panting, and other respiratory emotions. Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle was about breathlessness and freedom to breathe as much as it is about challenging Hollywood to create a New Wave of cinema. Music also has a strong affinity with breath: wind instruments and brass are operated by blowing air through the mouthpiece and opening or closing holes to change the pitch. To conceive of music solely as a listening experience is to miss the point: hearing is passive, static, and detached from emotions; it hardly involves the body. Breathing, by contrast, brings the listener closer to the rhythm and harmonies played on stage. In the visual arts, some contemporary artists have taken air, smoke, and clouds as their primary material. Air sculptures are as unusual as they are ethereal, standing at the edge of materiality and drawing the public’s attention to lived and natural environments.

Minoritarian artworks and minority artists

It is Tremblay’s hypothesis that “since the 1970s, writers, filmmakers, and artists have experimented with breathing with extraordinary frequency.” Breathing Aesthetics presents itself as a series of attentive readings shedding light on the challenges of writing in the times of environmental crisis and social upheaval. The author devotes most of his attention to “minoritarian works created by marginalized figures who tend to contest the genre and media conventions traditionally valorized by artistic and academic institutions.” He uses the term “minoritarian” to refer “not to fixed positions but to an impulse, be it artistic or analytic, to contest the forces that make the world more breathable for some people than for others.” The artists and artworks curated in the book haven’t been chosen at random. Their engagement with breathing and breathlessness was a necessary condition, but another condition was their position as “minoritarian”, meaning here a circulation outside the commercial art circuit for the artworks and a belonging to ethnic or sexual minorities for the artists. The 1970s were a time when women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities hadn’t acquired or been granted the visibility they have in today’s art world. To be an artist and a woman, let alone a non-white woman, was seen as problematic. It is said that the last heated exchange between Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and her husband Carl Andre, prior to her defenestration (presented as an accident or a suicide), was about the lack of artistic recognition she was receiving as opposed to her husband’s success. Of the BDSM couple Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, art history mostly remembers the male performance artist who “nailed his penis to a plank” and whose disability condition (he was suffering from cystic fibrosis) indeed connected his art to breathing and breathlessness. Of Sheree Rose we know little, and her memoirs remain unpublished. Most of the authors surveyed in the book are women, although they tend to steer away from mainstream feminism and its insistence of a feminine “breath of life.” The minoritarian voices connected to Indigenous knowledge, Black feminism, or ecological awareness rely on respiratory rituals as tactics or strategies for living through the foreclosure of political presents and futures. Breathing together, or developing respiratory asynchrony, have inspired contingent models of social and political life that are contesting “the forces that make the world more breathable for some people than for others.”

Throughout the book, the author posits that ”respiration renders vitality and morbidity inseparable.” Individuals tend to notice breathing and air when those no longer fulfill their life-giving and life-sustaining functions: “becoming conscious of our breathing confronts us with our finitude.” Some people believe that there is a finite number of breaths that one is allowed to take during one’s life: each breath brings us closer to death, and to exhale is to die a little. The French call “la petite mort” the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or indeed with the encounter of great works of literature as described by Roland Barthes. A little death is also when something dies in you: lung cells die with every breath we take and cannot be regenerated. The entanglement between respiration and morbidity is magnified in the last breath that is supposed to separate life from death. Of course, things are not so simple: biological death has several definitions, from the cessation of brain activity to the irreversible stopping of heart and lung functions, and a person can be maintained under artificial respiration while being brain dead. Some TV series indeed play with this ambiguous passage by staging “last breath” moments that prove not to be final, causing bereaved families and the public to burst into involuntary laughter. According to Tremblay, “the fantasy that in the last breath the dying individual encounters finitude on their own terms fulfills a social function”: it introduces an unambiguous demarcation between life and death, helping survivors to part with the deceased and to go on with their lives. The last chapter of Breathing Aesthetics documents this rite of passage by analyzing two documentaries that take palliative care and the management of death in public hospitals at their main topic. Capturing the last breath poses many technical and philosophical issues: the last breath can only be named as such retroactively, and the persons involved have to give their informed consent to this breach of intimacy. Released before the advent of the Internet and social media, the two reality movies, Near Death (1989) and Dying at Grace (2003), anticipate a time when the last moments of beloved ones are recorded live on camera and the scene of death, with its last breath and stopping electrocardiogram beeping, become public events.

The politics of breathing

I have initially titled my book review “I can’t breathe,” the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. But here I stand and hesitate: should I keep this title? I used it as an easy moniker only to catch readers’ attention and to echo the book’s concern with the devaluation of Black lives in the United States today. But of course, I can breathe, and I don’t feel privileged about that one bit. This separates me from the author, who tends to consider his own whiteness as a privilege. Throughout Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay is only interested in inequality insofar as it intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability. The analytical tools that he mobilizes are “feminist, queer, and trans, for those are the categories, along with race and ethnicity, that expose the constitution and construction of bodies.” Note that critical theory, along Marxist or continental philosophy lines, is not mentioned in the author’s toolbox. Disparities of wealth and class distinctions are not addressed. The reason we (they) can’t breathe is to be found in identity politics, not class warfare or social inequalities. It is not a matter of rich people stealing fresh air from poor people’s lungs, but of some categories being denied their fair share of breathing. Slogans should therefore be used carefully in order to avoid illegitimate racial appropriations. Tremblay warns against “the denial of structural and environmental racism” by the anti-mask campaigners who appropriated the “I can’t breathe” slogan to protest against mask-wearing and other Covid-related restrictions. He himself confesses that he took part in the demonstrations denouncing police violence in Chicago, but that he kept silent when BLM militants were chanting “I can’t breathe” and “we can’t breathe.” He recognizes he felt breathless at the time but that “his breathlessness couldn’t be equated with the breathlessness of protesters asphyxiated by environmental racism, police violence, or microaggressions.” As a French national with no connexion whatsoever to the United States, I have even less skin in the game. But I would be more ready than Jean-Thomas Tremblay to use the denunciation of breathlessness as a rallying cry because I believe our breathing condition should bring us together and not take us apart along identitarian lines. If a politics of air redistribution is to be put in place, it should be based on a universal right to breathe and grant equal access to breathable air, regardless of skin color or other marks of identity definition. Of all the works of art surveyed in Breathing Aesthetics, the one I feel the closest with is the music video “Breathing” from British pop singer Kate Bush, although this is the one that the author deems most compromised by its whiteness and lack of minoritarian impulse.