All these wars on life begin by taking away breath. [1]*(*Achille Mbembe)

There are many ways in which breath has already become a figure of platform epistemology. From the broad monitoring of air quality across cities to personalised IoT devices that measure interior air quality to digitised smart spirometry devices, breath, like many other biological markers, will no doubt help restructure how we see ourselves in a platformised world. Of course, there are plenty of indications that the algorithms governing platforms not only reproduce but amplify structural forms of violence, for which they are entirely impervious; the temporality of the platform, fixated on the present, renders history an invisible category and sociological configurations a set of correlated data. What is perhaps more alarming, however, is not so much how breath transfigures itself into data, but rather how the drive to reorganise the world through digital infrastructures will inevitably threaten breath itself.

Mbembe’s recent essay, ‘The Universal Right to Breath’, is a testimony to the collective disavowal of life at the heart of the capitalist world. He sees this historical disposition as something both reflected in the mass death caused by the pandemic, and as a tendency that will only intensify itself in its wake. In the promises of a post-COVID world, the pandemic is already reanimating a longstanding colonial imaginary of domination, this time over the plunder of rare earth metals and the establishment of a new geopolitics of global computing infrastructures. For him, modernity has been a continuous and ‘interminable war on life’, whose contemporary scale of destitution now threatens life itself. The apartheid unfurling across the world is a kind of mirror image of the heightened wave of enclosures, extraction and destruction that will only deepen across regions of Africa and the Global South. The irony for Mbembe is that, driven by a renewed desire to digitally isolate ourselves from the world, the very response to a respiratory pandemic will eventually result in the extinguishing of the conditions in which we may breathe freely.

Mbembe’s text dialogues with the writings of Fanon and Césaire, both of whom saw breath as a site of colonial violence and a figure in excess of enclosure, of conquest. For Fanon, breath was at once a marker of epistemological occupation – ‘an observed, an occupied breathing’ that formed part of the ‘dependency complex’ that justified colonisation[2] – and the cause of revolt against it. ‘It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because “quite simply” it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe.’[3] Césaire, in his Cahier d’un rétour au pays natal, offered breath as a figure in his expounding of negritude, a mark that opens hopefully beyond the destitution of colonial conquest:

[...]
but yield, captivated, to the essence of all things
ignorant of surfaces but captivated by the motion of all things

indifferent to conquering, but playing the game of the world

truly the eldest sons of the world
porous to all the breathing of the world
fraternal locus for all the breathing of the world
drainless channel for all the water of the world
spark of the sacred fire of the world
flesh of the world’s flesh pulsating with the very motion of the world!

Tepid dawn of ancestral virtues[4]

In both readings, we see a kind of mirror image of our present world: Fanon’s words speaking to the brutality of state violence against the marginalised, rebellious bodies, the systematic suffocation of those who seek to rise up and thus the cause of an increasingly global movement of revolt; and Césaire’s that invite us to see breath as a planetary figure, to incite us to imagine our worlds otherwise. Mbembe’s text seems to sit somewhere between these two spaces, offering breath as a lens to see the intertwined histories that cut across the crises spurred on by the pandemic, and as an opening toward a radical new imaginary – a ‘giant rupture’ necessary to bring to an end these longstanding structures of violence.

In effect, breath provides the framework for an epistemology to come. It offers a figure around which a way of being-in-common can emerge from an oppressive condition of death and destruction common (though unequally experienced) to us all. In breath, we see the casualties of capitalism in which bodies and ecologies are laid to waste; yet we also see the reciprocal cycles through which we are all inextricably inseparable from the world we have learned only to destroy. Breath teaches us to see the world anew.

Under capitalism, breath became nearly invisible, witnessed only in its absence. The simplicity with which we have come to comprehend life is the requisite for its constant instrumentalisation and the basis for a much broader ‘dependency complex’ that continues to reaffirm capitalism as our most natural way of being. In the violence we reject with the utterance ‘I can’t breathe’, we might begin to unlearn this way of being. We might begin with breath as a way to see across epistemological divisions that have conditioned our common sense for centuries, opening beyond the narrow temporality of capital to grasp the multiple, generative temporalities of the planetary. An attention to breath immediately reveals modes of being in common that do not negate the scientific lens, but transform it into a world-making source of knowledge.