No abstract

Breathing is the activity which all forms of animated life share in common. The breath has been symbolised across cultures as the meaning of life itself. If breathing is imagined as life, gassing is the very opposite. Gassing is the intended (or unintended) means to prevent or obstruct breathing. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Nazi concentration camps are remembered as expressions of technological as much as metaphysical terror. The 2013 and 2017 Syrian chemical attacks show how gassing remains a ‘red line.’ This paper deals with the historical significance and complexity of air and breathing in law. Human dependency on the air has in early treaties been protected at times of war between ‘civilised’ nations but was exploited as an instrument against the breather during colonialism. Today, non-lethal-weapons, a more-than-technical term, are used extensively to discipline the biological body into political order. Engaging with the work of Foucault, Sloterdijk and others, I seek to make sense of the legal status of this contradictory political technology, which does not directly attack the body but rather conditions the atmospheric requirements for its animation. I argue for a move towards understanding law atmospherically as an extension of the body.

This article provides an analysis and discussion of the concept of emergence in the context of the materialist turn in the discipline of geography. Etymologically, the word emergence is said to describe that which ‘becomes visible after being concealed’ but is also described as an ‘unforeseen occurrence; a state of things unexpectedly arising, and demanding immediate attention’ ( Oxford English Dictionary). The concept is in this article analysed through the lens of two distinct traditions of thought. The first is commonly associated with relational ontologies of becoming. The second finds its ‘roots’ and is ‘grounded’ in a metaphysical analysis of the ontology of being. Divisions between these two schools of thought are characterized by conceptual differences over concepts of space and place, difference and sameness, process and constancy, land and sea, etc. These differences are not restricted to the conceptual level but also bear political relevance. The article makes this explicit by looking at the theme of emergence, which can be understood either as a relational process of change or as a force of stability and a quest for origins. The former suggests an understanding of materiality that is always in a state of becoming, while the latter infers an approach to materiality that is static and permanent. The article critiques both of these approaches: the relational one for its lack of place, the metaphysical one for its reification of place and its omission of relationality. The article finishes with a call for an elemental ontological approach to place. Rather than abandoning place (Being) for the sake of space (Becoming), the material turn should seek ways to broaden understandings of place.

No abstract

This commentary makes use of the affinity between the body and the element of air to come to what I call ‘a politics of the air’. The commentary uses Peter Adey’s discussion on the relationship between the air and geopolitics as a springboard to initiate a project, which wishes to reconsider the material components conventionally considered to constitute politics. The commentary first provides a general introduction expanding on Adey’s notion of chemical affects, before moving on to explore how the act of breathing forms the hidden link between the air and the body. The commentary thereby wishes to argue that it is through the act of breathing in which we can start envisaging a politics of a different substance.