The discovery of the body is certainly one of modernity’s most fascinating discoveries. This is clearly some feat, given that modernity can without a doubt be labelled as an era of discoveries, so much so that “discovery” deserves to be called its axis. Without rehearsing a long list of inventions and scientific concepts that have recast our world perceptions and altered our modes of being, it does not take much insight to realize how far our contemporary forms of life have veered from those prevalent at the threshold of modernity. Very few things are taken for granted and exempt from critical reflection today, including those considered absolutely obvious for centuries before the advent of modernity. Notably, critical interrogations focus on what makes up the imperceptible texture of human existence—everyday life. Being in constant flux, nay, in a veritable vortex, everydayness begins to crack, and the fissures reveal new, previously indiscernible perspectives and horizons, suggestive of the latent aspects of human existence. The body is indisputably one of those.
To say this may sound paradoxical, for the body is the foundation of our being: we come into this world embodied, we live embodied, we change in the rhythm of bodily transformations, and our lives come to an end when our bodies fail. Indeed, it is the transparency of the body that makes reflection on its meanings and significance so challenging, if not downright impossible. The mind and the soul have invited more attention from thinkers—infinitely more, in fact. Their interest was given a powerful boost by Plato’s elaborate idealist ontology. Having come in (occasionally perfect) sync with a range of religious systems, Platonic idealism became a matrix that organized Western thought. Christianity, as a prevalent force in both the polity and the collective imagination, ultimately sealed the inferiority of the body vis-à-vis the mind. While quite prominent and rather widespread in ancient Greek philosophy, the materialist mindset practically vanished with the ascendancy of the Christian religion.
Yet even if the body disappeared as an independent subject, a self-reliant agent, or an autonomous center of activity, it proved impossible to frame human beings as pure minds only communicating about ideas, a vision most radically pictured by George Berkeley. It proved impossible to erase bodiliness altogether, and, though marginalized and subordinate to the world of ideas, the body did resurface, and at the least expected points, to boot. It resurfaced first
Without attempting to examine the entire complex history of the discovery of the body as an independent acting subject (a venture anyway unfeasible here), let us only revisit Foucault’s observation that modernity can be viewed as an extension of the Christian approach to the body, where religious mechanisms of control are supplanted with scientific frameworks, which for their part dovetail with the political credo of the modern state, that is, making the citizens happy by yoking them to the machine of rationality. Control of the body is a key to the achievement of this goal, as power is exerted by regulating bodies rather than by influencing minds. Crucially, power does not just thwart some or other prohibited actions, but first of all molds them, which results in identities being constituted through disciplinary power over bodies. The monumental body of Foucault’s work is punctuated with concepts he coined to unveil and depict this process, with the “microphysics of power,” “docile bodies,” “biopower,” and “biopolitics” being his chief props in this pursuit. By applying them, we can accurately establish how bodies are pressured into adjustment to the internal dynamics of modernity. This happens across the spheres of life, and primarily in those that once seemed neutral and transparent vis-à-vis power relations. Foucault’s tools reveal that medicine, education, and interplays at work, in family, and in other personal relations harbor a potential of subjugation, which breeds desired changes in identities. All politics becomes biopolitics, and all power comprises a smaller or larger component of biopower.
Undoubtedly, Foucault shed a new light on the concealed meanings of modernity. This prompted a break with the traditional model of the dominant world of ideas, which shape up social life, including politics. The body as the substance of politics and the locus of political struggle has accrued a new significance. Besides, the Foucauldian concept of power as a ubiquitous force formative of personalities fueled robust research on historical and contemporary identity-forging institutions, such as education and medicine. These studies have urged the toppling of the subordination-and-control model in teacher-student and doctor-patient relations and illuminated the imperative
However, Foucault’s philosophy has failed to solve the problem of the body’s autonomous opposition to the limitations imposed on it by society and politics. This problem haunts the numerous variants of biopolitics endorsed in today’s philosophy. Despite their vast theoretical differences, all of them are preoccupied with identifying the various channels of social control of bodies and exposing the politics of modernity as founded on this basis.
Towards the end of his life, Foucault himself developed the concept of the “technologies of the self,” or the ways employed by “individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their 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” (1988, 17). To what degree this concept was a substantial corrective to Foucault’s prior notions is a rather elusive issue. Anyway, the technologies-of-the-self concept was never fleshed out enough to further the study of resistance politics effectively. Foucault paid more attention to the body’s active role in his concept of an aesthetics of existence. Making one’s life into a work of art is obviously predicated on the engagement of the body as a vehicle for this venture. Yet, like the technologies of the self, this is an individualist project of self-fashioning, which is pursued, so to speak, in a void, beyond social and cultural rules. Foucault quite emphatically articulated this idea in an interview with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, who observed that his concept of the aesthetics of existence was typically embraced by the residents of California: “[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” (1983, 236).
Thus, in Foucault’s framework, the body, when extricated from social relations, actively shapes itself, but when enmeshed in social relations, it transfigures into an object acted upon by power. This paradox is understandable in a sense, since the body as the self-fashioning subject is always individual, while the same body, if caught up in the network of social interdependences, becomes part of a larger whole as a building block of the intricate subjection-and-mastery system. This pattern is captured by Thomas Lemke, who notes in his book on biopolitics that “discipline is not a form of individualization that is applied to already existing individuals, but rather it presupposes a multiplicity” (2011, 37).
Michel Foucault’s seminal vision of the body as a docile, malleable site for inscribing social power reveals the crucial role somatics can play for political philosophy. It offers a way of understanding how complex hierarchies of power can be widely exercised and reproduced without any need to make them explicit in laws or to officially enforce them. Entire ideologies of domination can thus be covertly materialized and preserved by encoding them in somatic norms that, as bodily habits, typically get taken for granted and therefore escape critical consciousness
[…]. However, if oppressive power relations can impose onerous identities that get encoded and sustained in our bodies, these oppressive relations can themselves be challenged by alternative somatic practices. 2000, 270
The passage rightly insists that there can be alternative practices that resist and undermine those imposed by society.
[S]omapower refers to Foucault’s notion of biopower, the difference being that I underline the operative body engaged in action and capable of resisting external pressures. This concept vitally affirms that while the body is shaped by social relations of power, it can also shape these relations. In this sense, somapower is intimately intertwined with the concept of the microphysics of emancipation […]. The development and liberation of bodies from oppression produces a niche of freedom even if the external conjuncture is adverse to it. Such niches of freedom may vary widely, depending both on the strategies of somapower and on the possibilities afforded by the political circumstances and by the cultural rules in place. One thing is constant among this variety; specifically, somapower always means the resistance of the concrete against an abstract and oppressive ideology.
KOCZANOWICZ 2022, 72–3
Pivotal to this definition is challenging the concept of biopower, whatever its iteration. In line with somaesthetics, techniques and methods of somatic improvement are central to human existence, and, crucially, they need not be circumscribed to individual meliorist projects; instead, they may be part of broader social projects, some of which transmute into political movements after a while. If they are generally restricted to certain aspect of corporeality and do not aspire to effect any thorough social change, they are always oriented on transgressing socially set limits and attaining at least partial emancipation. This potential inheres in multiple bodily practices, but to discern it, we must abandon a global, bird-eye view of emancipation as a grand process and, instead, start to analyze it as a series of inconspicuous changes that unfold
Individual meliorist somatic projects are linked to a wider social context by the notion of the niche of liberation (emancipation). Such niches are places, real or imaginary, in which people become partly or fully free, regardless of being ensnared in an oppressive political regime. Niches of emancipation are forged in meetings of close friends, field trips, art galleries, demonstrations, rallies, and the like locations/events if only the individuals involved bond at least for a moment in shared experience. As a rule, niches of emancipation are not explicitly or deliberately political, but their very presence is in and of itself a challenge to power. While the actual possibilities of establishing and cultivating such niches vary, depending on how authoritarian that power is, there is always tension between them and the political authorities.
Such spaces of freedom can be constituted in a variety of ways and settings, but those emerging as offshoots of bodily amelioration are special indeed. Their special position stems from the fact that the body and its experiences, sensations, and emotions are invariably concrete and tangible. As such, the self-perfecting and self-liberating body is a challenge to any abstract ideology. Participation in a demonstration or a political rally is a unique experience capable of redirecting the future trajectory of one’s bodily functioning. As a matter of fact, ever more movements appear to focus on the defense of the body, and they seek to accomplish this goal through the body, by staging manifestations, marches, sit-ins, and other forms of protest with bodily involvement at their core. The Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. and the Women’s Strikes in Poland are vivid exemplifications of such mobilizations. The former is literally about defending the body against state violence, and the latter seeks to preserve women’s reproductive rights.
Some of the political movements that have rounded into shape in niches of emancipation remain single-cause initiatives dedicated to the pursuit of their particular demands. Others, however, evolve into full-fledged political movements with comprehensive social change on their agendas. This trajectory is epitomized by ecological parties that have grown out of environmental activism but, like the Green Party in Germany, entered the political center stage to vie for state power. Such developments make us vividly aware of the complex interrelations between everyday life and politics. As a rule, we have it amply explained to us how political decisions affect the lives of millions of
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People do politics in, through, and as bodies. All political activities have an inevitably corporeal character. Parliamentary discussions, party assemblies, street demonstrations, civil disobedience, etc. […] are all bodily actions. Political regimes maintain their power and domination through control of our bodies. They do so not only by explicit acts of violence and internment but also more insidiously by inculcating somatic norms that support obedience to the dominating political authorities and ideologies. Any successful challenge of oppression should thus involve somaesthetic diagnosis of the bodily habits and feelings that express and reinforce such domination so that they, along with the oppressive social conditions that generate them, can be overcome. However, standard political theory comprehends politics as a struggle of bodiless ideas or, at best, as an imposition of constraints on powerless bodies, as in biopolitics. Somaesthetics enables us to re-cast this perspective and to depict bodies as active agents of politics. Bodies are shaped by political decisions, but they are also capable of influencing political choices and becoming vehicles of resistance to oppressive regimes. Understood as an extension of somaesthetics in the political field, somapower helps us grasp this inherently antitotalitarian character of corporeal politics.
Although the volume is generally conceived as a coherent, albeit multi-perspectival, whole, I have opted for dividing it into two parts. The first part contains papers that foreground somaesthetic strategies of resistance to social and/or political oppression. Its opening essay, Anita Chari’s “For a Somaesthetics of Carceral Resistance: Dissociation, Sensation, and the Intercorporeal Field,”
Mark Tschaepe’s chapter titled “Misfit Mutiny: Somaesthetic Discomfort against the Abjection, Oppression, and Exclusion of Normativity” relies on psychological concepts and the notion of the somaesthetics of discomfort to interpret and comprehend the feelings of alienation and abjection, which propel people to act in defiance of norms. Somaesthetic discomfort may be a valuable diagnostic tool for identifying social spaces where social norms exclude certain groups of people and, consequently, make them feel humiliated and rejected. This grievously wrecks social cohesion and compromises social justice.
Chris Voparil’s contribution, “Somaesthetics and the Somatic Experience of White Privilege,” tackles the problem of exclusion from the opposite perspective as it explores the position of those who enjoy social privilege, because they are white. He convincingly argues that somaesthetics furthers the scrutiny of the practical dimensions of this privilege as those are most emphatically revealed in and through the body, its habits and its situatedness in social space. The somaesthetics approach is also an effective platform for a critique of privilege and identification of ways in which white modes of life can be radically transformed.
Two subsequent texts attend to the clash of the somaesthetic approach and the advancing contemporary technologies. In “Body Ecology and Digital Urbanism: Assimilation–Resistance–Hybridity,” Jakub Petri ponders the role of the body in digitalized urban space. The mechanisms of control and, likewise, of participation in such a space necessitate a reconsideration of the role of the body. The somaesthetic approach to corporeality may supply precious guidelines on how the body can develop and transform under the new circumstances.
Aleksandra Łukaszewicz’s chapter, “The Body as a Place of Resistance to the Pandemic Politics of Global Corporations: Recovering the Sensibility of the Body,” studies the capillary practices of power that result in the subordination of the body to the interests of political and/or economic power. Somaesthetics in general and somapower as its political form in particular provide tools that usefully reinforce opposition to such practices. Łukaszewicz’s argument is supported by an examination of the controversial and widely discussed role
The second part of the book comprises chapters that revolve around taste, with Alexander Kremer’s more general essay being an exception. One of classic notions in aesthetics, taste acquires a new resonance when considered through the somaesthetics lens. The papers in this part anchor taste in an inclusive context of bodily activity and consider its social relevance.
As the opening contribution of this part, Nicola Perullo’s “Cooking as Somaesthetic and Political Education” explains how “an education with and through food” can remodel today’s education system toward greater cohesion and communality. While drawing on his own original philosophical work on food and eating, Perullo also marshals somaesthetics as a tool for analyzing taste in action. The ideas he posits in the chapter are corroborated by a range of compelling examples that illustrate the social role of eating.
In Stefano Marino’s paper titled “Pragmatist Aesthetics, Ethics of Taste, and Feminism,” Shusterman idea of the “ethics of taste” lies at the core of reasoning and is addressed in conjunction with Shusterman’s recent publications, including his monumental Ars Erotica. Marino combines Shusterman’s thought with feminist insights and LGBTQ+ perspectives, insisting that such a merger can propel effective actions for challenging the stereotypes in place.
Collaboratively penned by Dorota Koczanowicz and Leszek Koczanowicz, the following chapter, “Somaesthetics and the Political Potential of Taste,” addresses the political relevance of food and eating. Shusterman’s notion of “somatic style” is used here to elucidate culinary preferences as intricate aggregates of social meanings embedded in somatic practices. With Poland in the transition from communism to democracy serving as a case study, the authors argue for the validity and salience of making sense of food and eating along these lines.
This part concludes with Alexander Kremer’s contribution “Biopower and Somapower: Suggesting a Theoretical Framework on a Heraclitan Basis,” in which the concept of Heraclitan contradiction is employed to show that Shusterman’s somaesthetics and Foucault’s biopolitics can be accommodated within one theoretical framework.
The volume is capped off with an “Afterword” authored by Richard Shusterman.
The concept outlined below is portrayed in detail in my book The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life: Niches of Liberation (Koczanowicz 2023).