SHUSTERMAN - Bodies in The Streets - The Somaesthetics of City Life

Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life
Studies in Somaesthetics
EMBODIED PERSPECTIVES IN PHILOSOPHY, THE ARTS AND THE
HUMAN SCIENCES
Edited by
Richard Shusterman (Florida Atlantic University, usa)
Editorial Board
Roger Ames (University of Hawaii, usa)

Else Marie Bukdahl (University of Aalborg, Denmark)
Pradeep Dhillon (University of Illinois, usa)
David Elliot (New York University, usa)
Peng Feng (Beijing University, China)
Mathias Girel (Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), France)
Kristina Höök (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)
Mark Johnson (University of Oregon, usa)
Leszek Koczanowicz (University of Social Sciences and Humanities,
Wroclaw Campus, Poland)
Hans-Peter Krüger (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Bryan Turner (The City University of New York, usa)
Eva Kit Wah Man (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong)
Krystyna Wilkoszewksa (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland)
volume 2
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sis

Bodies in the Streets:
The Somaesthetics of City Life
Edited by
Richard Shusterman
leiden | boston
Cover illustration by Natália Oliveira. Used with permission.
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Contents
List of Illustrations VII

Contributors IX
Introduction: Bodies in the Streets and the Somaesthetics

of City Life 1
Richard Shusterman
Part 1
The Soma, the City, and the Weather
1 Bodies in the Streets: The Soma, the City, and the Art of Living 13
Richard Shusterman
2 The Weather-Worlds of Urban Bodies 38

Mădălina Diaconu
3 White on Black: Snow in the City, Skiing in Copenhagen 60

Henrik Reeh
Part 2
Festival, Revolution, and Death
4 Body Politics: Revolt and City Celebration 89

Matthew Crippen
5 Bodies in the Streets of Eastern Europe: Rhetorical Space and the

Somaesthetics of Revolution 111
Noemi Marin
6 From Dancing to Dying in the Streets: Somaesthetics of the

Cuban Revolution in Memories of Underdevelopment and
Juan of the Dead 130
Marilyn G. Miller
vi Contents
Part 3
Performances of Resistance, Gender, and Crime
7 “Street” is Feminine in Italian: Feminine Bodies and

Street Spaces 153
Ilaria Serra
8 Bodies in Alliance and New Sites of Resistance: Performing the

Political in Neoliberal Public Spaces 177
Federica Castelli
9 East End Prostitution and the Fear of Contagion: On Body

Consciousness of the Ripper Case 195
Chung-jen Chen
10 Towards a Somaesthetic Conception of Culture in Iran: Somaesthetic

Performance as Cultural Praxis in Tehran 220
Alireza Fakhrkonandeh
Part 4
Bodies in the Streets of Literature and Art
11 “Terrae Incognitae”: The Somaesthetics of Thomas De Quincey’s

Psychogeography 249
Evy Varsamopoulou
12 The Empty Spaces You Run Into: The City as Character and
Background in William S. Burroughs’s Junky, Queer, and
Naked Lunch 271
Robert W. Jones II
13 The Somaesthetic Sublime: Varanasi in Modern and

Contemporary Indian Art 294
Pradeep A. Dhillon
Name Index 315

Subject Index 318
Illustrations
2.1 Raphael Tuck, Whitehall looking north. Late 1930s. Postcard photograph.
[by Leonard Bentley from Iden, East Sussex, UK (Whitehall) [CC BY-SA
2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia
Commons] 44
2.2 User (WT-shared) Uvacavmatt at wts wikivoyage, Street grub in Zhuhai
(Guangdong Province, China). 2006. Digital Photograph. [user: (WT-shared)
Uvacavmatt at wts wikivoyage] 44
3.1 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, I. 2003. Digital photograph 62
3.2 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, II. 2003. Digital photograph 66
3.3 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, III. 2003.Digital photograph 71
3.4 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, IV. 2003. Digital photograph 73
3.5 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, V. 2003. Digital photograph 76
3.6 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, VI. 2003. Digital photograph 81
6.1 Emblem of the Committees for the Defense of the Cuban
Revolution 131
6.2 Cover of issue no. 84 of the journal La calle 132
6.3 Publicity flyer for the 1968 film Memorias de Subdesarrollo 137
6.4 Publicity flyer for the 2011 film Juan of the Dead 140
7.1 Photo of article by Liliana Madeo in La Stampa, April 4, 1976. Archive of Lotta
Femminista (Feminist Struggle) for Wages for Housework – Padua – Donation
by Mariarosa Dalla Costa 155
7.2 Cover of La Domenica del Corriere, June 10, 1939 158
7.3 Page from Laura Picco’s La fata rovesciata. 1976. Archive of Lotta Femminista
(Feminist Struggle) for Wages for Housework Padua – Donation by Mariarosa
Dalla Costa 161
7.4 Page from Laura Picco’s La fata rovesciata. 1976. Archive of Lotta Femminista
(Feminist Struggle) for Wages for Housework, Padua – Donation by Mariarosa
Dalla Costa 162
7.5 Ruth Orkin, American Girl in Italy. 1952. Photograph 165
7.6 Ruth Orkin, Detail from American Girl in Italy. 1952. Photograph 165
7.7 Anonymous, Drum beating accompanies a women’s march in Mestre. 1976.
Photograph. (Archive Linda Caorlin, Venice) 169
7.8 Liliana Barchiesi, Feminist girotondo in Piazza Missori, Milan. 1978.
Photograph. Photo by Liliana Barchiesi. Permission granted by Archive Liliana
Barchiesi 171
7.9 Tano D’Amico, Women’s march in Bologna. 2000. Photograph. Photo by Tano
D’Amico. Permission granted by Tano D’Amico 173
viii Illustrations
7.10 Agnese De Donato. Il gesto femminista. 1974. Photograph. Photo by Agnese De

Donato. Permission granted by Archivio Fotografico Agnese De Donato 174
10.1 Rasool Kamali, Sample from Torn Letters of the Bodies: Anamorphics
of the Iranian Body through the Looking-Glass of History. 2014–2015.
Photomontage 237
Photomontage 237
Photomontage 237
Photomontage 237
13.1 Paresh Maity, Benares. 2007. Oil on canvas 307
Contributors
Federica Castelli
is a postdoctoral researcher in political philosophy at the University of Roma
Tre, where she is also supervisor and scientific coordinator for the Master De-
gree in “Studi e Politiche di Genere.” She edits the journals DWF, B@belonline,
and Studi Sartriani and is on the governing council of the Italian section for the
International Association of Women Philosophers. Her main publications are:
Corpi in Rivolta. Spazi urbani, conflitti e nuove forme della politica (2015, Milan:
Mimesis), Il pensiero politico di Nicole Loraux (2016, Rome: Iaph Italia), and, as
co-editor, Città. Politiche dello spazio urbano (2016, Rome: Iaph Italia).
Chung-jen Chen
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Litera-
tures at National Taiwan University. He was the recipient of the Award for In-
novative Research for Young Scholars (2015) and the Golden Tripod Award of
Taiwan (2014). Chen was the 2017–18 TUSA visiting scholar in the Department
of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) at Harvard University. His
forthcoming book, Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian
Literary Imagination (Routledge) focuses on the literary and cultural practice
of medical realism and the transformation of the production of contagion into
a moral economy of surveillance.
Matthew Crippen
is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University and
a researcher at Humboldt University’s Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Inte-
grating diverse traditions and disciplines to gain a better grasp of embodied
existence, his research revolves around value theory, taken broadly to include
aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Crippen has published in a number of specialist
and generalist journals in his fields of research, and has a forthcoming book
with Columbia University Press, titled Mind Ecologies: Body, Brain and Affective
Life. Outside the academy, he has worked as a musician and a gymnastics coach.
Pradeep Dhillon
is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Her
research straddles philosophy of language (in the analytic, continental, and
Asian traditions) and aesthetics, as they relate to global education. She has a
strong interest in Kantian value theory and its significance for human rights
education as well as global aesthetic education. Her most recent work is in the
x Contributors
areas of Kant’s theory of judgment. She is Editor for the Journal of Aesthetic
Education, she has served as the Chair of Education for the American Society
for Aesthetics.
Mădălina Diaconu
is a Dozentin for philosophy at the University of Vienna. She is editor-in-chief
of polylog: Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren and member of the
editorial boards of Studia Phaenomenologica and Contemporary Aesthetics.
She authored and (co)edited several books on the phenomenology of senses,
the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, sensory design,
and environmental philosophy, such as Phänomenologie der Sinne (2013), Sin-
nesraum Stadt. Eine multisensorische Anthropologie (2012), Sensorisches Labor
Wien. Urbane Haptik- und Geruchsforschung (2011), Senses and the City. An in-
terdisciplinary approach to urban sensescapes (2011).
is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Literary Theory
at the University of Southampton, UK. He has recently finished two books,
entitled Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe (Palgrave
2019) and Evental Ontology, Immanent Ethics and Affective Aesthetics in Howard
Barker’s Drama (under review). He has published numerous journal articles on
Howard Barker, somaesthetics, oil and literature, and medical humanities in
journals such as Symploke, Textual Practice, Comparative Drama and Cultural
Critique. He is the sole authorized translator of Barker’s works into Persian.
Robert W. Jones II
has a PhD. in English and is currently an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and
Communication at Palm Beach State College. His research interests span the
range of American Studies with a specific focus on the relationship of 20th-
century literature and the arts to fringe science. He has published work on the
American avant-garde, literary theory and criticism, science fiction, and specu-
lative fiction. He has completed one book (now under review) titled, The Only
Complete Man in the Industry: William S. Burroughs, Fringe Science, and the
Avant-garde.
Noemi Marin
is a Professor of Rhetorical Studies at Florida Atlantic University. The author
of After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times
(Peter Lang, 2007), she is co-editor of Rhetorics of 1989: Rhetorical Archaeologies
of Political Transitions (Routledge, 2015) and two volumes of Advances in the
Contributors xi
History of Rhetoric (2007, 2011). Dr. Marin’s research focuses on communist and
post-communist rhetoric, comprising over thirty-five book chapters and schol-
arly journal articles. She is Past President of the Romanian Studies Association
of America and Editor of Journal of Literacy and Technology.
Marilyn G. Miller
is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University, where
she is currently also a Sizeler Professor Jewish Studies. Author of the Rise and
Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America (University of
Texas Press, 2004), she edited Tango Lessons. Movement, Sound, Image, and
Text in Contemporary Practice and has published numerous articles on issues
of race, slavery, popular culture and emancipatory poetics in inter-American
contexts. She is at work on a book-length study titled Port of No Return: Camp
Algiers and New Orleans’ Role in the WWII Enemy Alien Internment Program,
forthcoming from LSU Press.
Henrik Reeh
holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and is an Associate Professor of Hu-
manistic Urban Studies and Modern Culture at the University of Copenhagen.
He is a Danish director of 4Cities – Euromaster in Urban Studies (4Cities.eu). A
Visiting Professor at Jan Gehl’s Center for Public Space Research, Copenhagen
School of Architecture. Among his books on urbanity, art in public space, and
cultural theory, Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern
Urban Culture was published by the MIT Press. Reeh is also a photographer.
Ilaria Serra
is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic
University. Her research ranges from Italian cinema and literature to the his-
tory of Italian immigration to the United States. She is author of The Value of
Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Autobiographies (Fordham University
Press, 2007) and The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the
United States between 1890 and 1924 (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009).
She is currently working on a book about the last two centuries of Italian his-
tory through songs.
Richard Shusterman
is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Director
of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University. His
major authored books in English include Thinking through the Body; Body
Consciousness; Surface and Depth; Performing Live; Practicing Philosophy; T.S.
xii Contributors
Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, Pragmatist Aesthetics (published in fifteen

languages), and The Adventures of the Man in Gold (an illustrated philosophical
tale based on his work in performance art).
Evy Varsamopoulou
is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Cyprus. Her areas of
research are in comparative literature, contemporary film, ecocriticism, and
continental philosophy. Her publications include The Poetics of the Künstler-
inroman and the Aesthetics of the Sublime (Ashgate, 2002; Routledge 2017), ar-
ticles in Theory, Culture & Society, ISLE, Cogent Humanities, and a chapter on El
laberinto del fauno in The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Literature
(2019).
Introduction
Bodies in the Streets and the Somaesthetics of

City Life
Richard Shusterman
Cities are largely defined by their complex network of busy streets and the
diverse multitudes of busy people that populate and animate those streets
through their physical presence and bodily actions. The human bodies and
movements we find in the streets often differ dramatically – the elegant flâ-
neur or strolling window-shopper versus the homeless beggars who make the
pavement their bed; the crowds who fill the streets in protest and the patrol-
ling law-enforcement officers who police them. As cities are shaped by human
bodies, so those bodies are reciprocally shaped by the spaces, rhythms, logics,
activities, and atmospheres of city life. What are the somaesthetic qualities
of urban living? What constitutes the city’s special advantages (such as better
cultural and medical facilities) and its challenges (such as the cramped quar-
ters and polluted air that many city dwellers must endure)? What are the so-
matic images of city life? What aesthetic and political roles do the city streets
fulfill? What paths or models of somaesthetic thinking can help us bring the
rich diversity of city life into a more rewarding harmony that remains dynami-
cally progressive and that is able to balance the inevitable economic, social
and cultural tensions that pervade urban societies rather than attempt to hide,
repress, or annihilate them under a superficial blanket of unity?
This volume of Studies in Somaesthetics will address such questions from
a variety of perspectives ranging from philosophy, urban theory, gender stud-
ies, political theory, and literary theory to visual art, criminology, and the in-
terdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. Our book takes its title from a similarly
named international conference held at Florida Atlantic University’s Center
for Body, Mind, and Culture in January 2017. Some of the chapters in this book
originated from papers presented there, but most of the chapters here col-
lected represent independent efforts to treat that general conference topic. In
reviewing these different texts to compose an introduction to this collection, I
realized how they reflect the international nature of the conference and of city
life in general. Although all cities are significantly shaped not only by national
and local cultures but also by regional topographies and climates, there is a
distinctive international quality to big cities. There are international airports,
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:10.1163/9789004411135_002

2 Shusterman
international institutions (banks, embassies, consulates, associations, schools,

and shops) and, of course, large international populations.
This book’s essays cover a range of big cities from Asia to Africa and the
Americas, but most of its discussions concentrate on European metropoles.
London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, and Copenhagen receive re-
peated mention, though so does America’s European-shaped city of New York.
There are obvious reasons for this European focus, but they nonetheless war-
rant a brief mention. First, although the great European cities are in some sense
a thing of the past, now dwarfed by the huge modern Asian megacities that
easily exceed twenty million inhabitants, the historically prominent E uropean
metropoles are still taken as the model for understanding urban culture. If this
is partly a product of Eurocentrism, this prejudice, however regrettable, seems
historically grounded and difficult to escape. Our very concept of the city is
rooted in the founding pillars of Western culture: the traditions and languages
of ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek city-state, or polis, shaped our notion
of urban life and government as well as giving us the synonym for big city –
“metropolis, ” while the term “city” itself is derived from a Latin word for citizen
in ancient Rome. Second, the cultural context and academic theoretical field
in which this book and its book series are situated is, historically, dominantly
European in character. Even American intellectual culture still bears the deep
imprint of its original European colonization. Reflecting the same historical
hegemony, our tradition of literary and philosophical analysis of urban life has
given special attention to certain cities of the West because of their cultural
prominence. Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and New York are clear
examples. Such cultural prominence is, of course, related to political and eco-
nomic prominence. If the city serves as the high temple of flourishing culture,
it can do so because it is equally a political and economic powerhouse. Many
of this book’s chapters engage the political dimension of cities and of the bod-
ies in their streets.
As East Asia, in recent decades, has made great gains in economic and po-
litical power, it has spurred the growth of megacities. Some of them have fas-
cinatingly vibrant and distinctive urban cultures: Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong
Kong are vivid examples. I regret that the complex cultures of these wonderful
cities, whose enchanting and bewildering streets I have often wandered but
never sufficiently known, are not represented in this collection, but I hope that
a later volume in our series (perhaps on East Asian somaesthetics) might in-
clude a study of these urban cultures. In any case, every project has and needs
its limits, and it is best to focus my remarks here on introducing the essays that
the book does contain and indicating very briefly what they present.
...
Introduction 3
In the book’s first chapter, “Bodies in the Streets: The Soma, the City and
the Art of Living,” I provide a theoretical framework for examining the so-
maesthetics of bodies in the streets of city life by analyzing some of the
key concepts that constitute this topic. After examining the different ambi-
guities nested in the notions of body and street, the chapter then explores
a series of striking analogies between the concepts of soma and city. These
analogies include dialectical issues of size, growth, organization, dynamism,
desiring ambition, autonomy and dependence, unity in variety, and freedom
and constraint. But the concepts of city and soma further share an analogous
ambivalence. If soma and city are objects of respect or admiration, they are
also targets of severe critique and loathing because of their limitations and
failings. My essay then explores the notion of “the crowd” (that mass of bodies
in the streets) which has been central to the key discussions of modern city
life in thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Engels,
Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. While recognizing how the crowds of the
street threaten one’s personal sense of individual uniqueness and exacerbate
feelings of alienation, this chapter contrastingly shows how these crowds also
provide crucial energies and materials for the individual to assert her specific
identity and enhance her aesthetic experience through creative somaesthetic
self-fashioning in the theater of social drama constituted by the city streets.
Great metropoles have a network of streets whose variety, vastness, and open-
ness promote abundant possibilities for freedom and rich atmospheres for cul-
tivation that are both aesthetic and political, although such atmospheres of
freedom face the constraints of countless urban regulations and authorities
who police the streets.
The atmosphere of city life is constrained not only by political regulations
but also by more natural environmental conditions; the same goes for the bod-
ies that navigate the city streets. Our book’s second chapter, “The Weather-
Worlds of Urban Bodies,” carefully examines the many ways that climate shapes
the aesthetics of urban life, both by inspiring architectural forms on the city’s
streets and by affecting the moods and movements of the bodies that navigate
them. Without falling into the fallacy of climatic determinism, Mădălina Dia-
conu demonstrates in impressive detail how, even in the carefully constructed
urban environment (designed to be protected from the problematic vagaries
of weather), atmospheric factors strongly influence our somaesthetic expe-
rience (sometimes even causing psychophysical ailments) and our behavior.
These diverse influencing factors include not only conditions of sunshine,
rain, wind, snow, and air quality or pollution, but also heat, humidity, season,
and length of the day. Moreover, the varied effects of atmospheric influence
range from mood, clothing selection, and choice of transport (bicycle, scooter,
or car) to the routes, rhythms, and postures of walking through the streets
4 Shusterman
(hurried or leisurely or bent under an umbrella) and even to weather-related

psychophysical ailments or allergies. Moreover, even a city’s socioeconomic
hierarchy is often coded in terms of comfort through good atmospheric condi-
tions or exposure to bad ones; privileged neighborhoods enjoy, for example,
the high ground with ample green areas and cleaner air while the poor reside
in cramped quarters with less light and more pollution. If technology (such
as air conditioning) can help give better atmospheric conditions to all, it also
harbors dangers of its own to the environment and to a homogenization of
atmospheres that can be aesthetically monotonous.
In chapter three, Henrik Reeh focuses on one famously aesthetic form of
weather that can both enchant and paralyze a city: the snow. His “White on
Black: Snow in the City, Skiing in Copenhagen” not only presents a vivid narra-
tive of deeply embodied, multisensory aesthetic experience of simultaneously
navigating and appreciating the snow-covered streets of his home city; it also
develops a scholarly commentary on the different ways that snow affects ur-
ban life, transforming our perception of and engagement with the city’s streets
and architecture in ways that enhance their aesthetic qualities. In doing so, he
elaborates in detail Walter Benjamin’s discussion of city snow in Berlin and
Moscow.
After this somaesthetic experience of a charming snow-covered city, the
book’s Part ii (“Body Politics, Revolution, and Death”) turns to more politi-
cal and problematic experiences of bodies in the streets. Its opening essay
(chapter four) begins by continuing the theme of how the powers of natural
elements can radically transform the somaesthetic experience of urban life.
However, rather than considering the vagaries of weather, Mathew Crippen’s
essay, based on his own experience, describes the planned though inevitably
chaotic somaesthetic effects of the politically directed Mandalay Water Festi-
val that wildly floods the city streets and drenches those who use them. This
chapter on “Body Politics: Revolt and City Celebration,” then turns to examine
the somaesthetic experiences he witnessed in the streets surrounding Cairo’s
Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring Protests of 2011 that led to the ouster of
Egypt’s President Mubarak, and it goes on to explain why those streets and
square were especially significant and appropriate for the revolt.
In chapter five, Noemi Marin develops the theme of revolution through the
action of bodies in the streets. After analyzing the somaesthetic repression and
rhetorical control deployed by the Romanian communist regime, she explains
the sudden spontaneous bodies-in-the-streets revolt that sparked the revolu-
tion of 1989 and its execution of the communist despot Nicolae C easescu who
had ruled Romania since 1965. Marin’s essay, “Bodies in the Streets of East-
ern Europe: Rhetorical Space and the Somaesthetics of Revolution,” further
Introduction 5
indicates how other totalitarian communist regimes in Eastern Europe like-

wise applied this strategy of coordinated multidimensional domination. By
controlling not only the rhetorical space of political discourse, but also the
physical space of public streets and squares, and the behavior and even dress
of bodies in those public spaces, these regimes denied effective dissent and
coerced conformity. The cultivation of enhanced somaesthetic skills and body
consciousness, she argues, could give citizens more “soma power” to challenge
these mechanisms of political oppression through somatic control that so long
enslaved the victims of state tyranny.
Marilyn Miller’s essay “From Dancing to Dying in the Streets: Somaesthet-
ics of the Cuban Revolution in Memories of Underdevelopment and Juan of the
Dead” (chapter six) continues the theme of communist regulation and surveil-
lance of bodies, streets, and public spaces by examining how Castro’s revolu-
tionary government repurposed Havana’s streets and neighborhoods to serve
the sociopolitical and cultural aims of its political regime. She demonstrates
this through the analysis of two Cuban films that in different ways reveal the
tensions between the revolutionary demands on the bodies of citizens (who are
called to a self-sacrificing commitment to the government’s aims) and, in sharp
contrast, the somaesthetic needs and desires of those bodies in the city of Ha-
vana, a place notorious for supplying abundant somatic (including erotic) plea-
sures. Death is a prominent presence in both these films (one of which invokes
the living dead of zombies), because death is the ultimate sacrifice that Cuba’s
revolutionary ideology readily celebrates as heroic if suffered to serve the coun-
try’s communist regime. “To die for the country is to live” claims a phrase from
the national anthem that is cited in one of the films, but both films raise the
question of whether the somaesthetic needs of life should instead have priority.
Part Three, “Performances of Resistance, Gender, and Crime,” takes the
book’s analysis of the politics of city streets and public places beyond the tradi-
tional issues of state controlled repression and into the more subtle, informal,
and personal oppression that occurs on city streets, even when those streets
are not ruled by despotic governments. There are very deeply entrenched tra-
ditional values, social prejudices, and discriminatory habits that sustain these
forms of subjugation. Patriarchy’s gender hierarchy and heteronormativity are
among the deepest and most pervasive forces that turn public places of free ac-
cess into frighteningly dangerous realms of unfreedom. The first two essays in
this section treat woman’s subjugation on the streets, focusing on Italy where
patriarchy has a long and powerful history, reinforced by religious tradition (as
it is in many other cultures).
Traditionally, woman’s place has been in the home and private sphere
(managing the house and caring for children), while the public space of the
6 Shusterman
streets was man’s domain, where decent women should not roam without a
man’s escort. Spatial confinement – whether in the home, the church, a closed
carriage, or gondola – is both a form of and symbol for restriction and control.
In chapter seven, Ilaria Serra shows how Italian feminism was therefore waged
largely as an outdoor movement in the streets that used its crowd of bodies
to reveal its power while also, at the same time, creating it. “’Street’ is Femi-
nine in Italian: Feminine Bodies and Street Spaces” is the title of her compel-
ling contribution. Through text and image she explains the harassment and
intimidation that Italian women suffered in public places while showing how
their feminist battle for free and safe access to the streets (both day and night)
has been somaesthetically waged by marches, parades, songs, and dance, thus
demonstrating how the soma can be simultaneously a source of aesthetic ex-
perience and political power.
Although likewise inspired by Italian feminist activism, Federica Castelli’s
essay (chapter eight) has a more general focus. Her “Bodies in Alliance and
New Sites of Resistance: Performing the Political in Neoliberal Public Space”
argues that neoliberal policies and ideologies of individualism have combined
with narrowly functionalist approaches to space in ways that increasingly iso-
late people from each other or connect them only in very limited, predefined
ways. This compartmentalization of people and space results in a deadening of
human relationships and the loss of public spirit in big city life. Marginalized
minority groups especially suffer from the insensitivity and narrow-minded
normativity of contemporary urban life. To combat these trends, she argues,
new forms of activism are mobilizing bodies of solidarity to occupy the city’s
public spaces and claim them as spots of political resistance and sites for the
formation of empowered collectives. One example she brings is Non una di
meno, a feminist and queer movement building an alliance among cisgender
and transgender women in order to combat gender violence.
Chapter nine follows by demonstrating the extreme viciousness of violence
women suffer on the streets through an examination of the notorious case of
Jack the Ripper, the mysterious London serial murderer whose victims were
all “women of the street.” These prostitutes were all killed on the streets of
Whitechapel in East London and in all but one case were so brutally butch-
ered that even their internal organs were removed or mutilated. Chung-jen
Chen’s “East End Prostitution and the Fear of Contagion: On Body Conscious-
ness of the Ripper Case,” probes the social and somaesthetic background for
these murders and for the continuing fascination they inspired. The streets of
London’s East End were seen as sinister centers of poverty, filth, and indecency,
steeped in crime, prostitution, and disease while the West End functioned as
the cultural, clean, and decent part of the city. Prostitutes, rather than the men
Introduction 7
they serviced, were blamed for the spread of syphilis that haunted Victorian
society. Pathologized as a major source of disease, these women were also de-
monized as an enemy of decent, healthy society. The brutal extraction of the
victims’ inner organs suggests this medical concern of exposing and control-
ling disease by killing to curb contagion. A woman’s social status as an East End
prostitute carried the presumption that her body was dangerously diseased
and contagious. The soma, then, is not simply a physical organism but also an
artifact of culture, shaped not only by habits of the social group or culture it
inhabits but also colored by that culture’s past and current somatic prejudices
or ideologies. Cities are likewise more than physical areas dense with count-
less buildings, streets, and people; they too are cultural artifacts shaped by and
sustaining certain ideologies.
In chapter ten, “Towards a Somaesthetic Conception of Culture in Iran: So-
maesthetic Performances as Cultural Praxis,” Alireza Fakhrkonandeh explores
the complex history and multiple levels of body-shaping and city-shaping ide-
ologies in contemporary Iran, taking the capital Tehran as his focus of analy-
sis. These ideologies extend from pre-Islamic Zoroastrian and Manichean
traditions to different stages of Islam and modernism and postmodernism. Al-
though Iran’s dominant ideologies have long rendered the body instrumental
to the prevailing powers of the country and their political and religious goals,
Fakhronkandeh argues for a new use of bodies to resist the depressing and
repressive cultural effects of the city’s regulation of behavior and surveillance
of the streets but also to combat the deadening commercialism of the visual
culture that pervades the city streets. To exemplify and explain this new use
of bodies as cultural praxis, he describes a multimedia somaesthetic work of
performance art performed along Tehran’s most beautiful boulevard and in-
volving a procession of actors carrying various somatic photomontages and
engaging in scripted dialogue and eventually dance. This somaesthetic per-
formance aimed to remind the pedestrian and vehicular observers passing
through the street that its spaces could harbor possibilities of free expression,
play, and solidarity that decades of repression and commercialism had erased
from memory.
The book’s fourth and final group of essays approaches urban somaesthet-
ics by examining how literary and visual artists have differently evoked the life
of city streets. We begin with the study of an English author who influenced
Poe and Baudelaire and who essentially inaugurated the genre of addiction
literature: Thomas De Quincey. In chapter eleven, “‘Terrae Incognitae’: The So-
maesthetics of Thomas De Quincey’s Psychogeography,” Evy Varsamopoulou
elaborates the somaesthetic dimensions of De Quincey’s famous Confessions
of an Opium Eater, probing the somatic feelings and sensory perceptions of
8 Shusterman
his addiction along with its agonies and delights as he wandered the London
streets, day and night. It was there he could find the opium to ease his pain and
hunger, as the drug was readily and cheaply available from apothecaries on
those streets. Integrating the insights of somaesthetics with Guy Debord’s situ-
ationist psychogeography of the city and Gaston Bachelard’s material theory of
imagination, Varsamopoulou describes how powerfully the streets – their laby-
rinthine topography, their atmospheres, and ambience – shaped De Quincey’s
life and character, his soma and psyche. Sharing those streets with runaways,
vagrants, prostitutes, and the poor who lacked the comfort and security of a
real home, De Quincey’s text demonstrates how the streets become the most
secure and comfortable home for the city’s large disenfranchised population,
because of the protective cover they provide through their vastness, crowded
anonymity, and openness to movement.
The challenges of urban life as experienced through the somaesthetic lens
of drug addiction continue to form the focus of chapter twelve, in which
Robert Jones studies the city as character and as background in three novels of
William Burroughs: Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch, books that treat the cities
of New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Jones shows how Burroughs uses
drugs as a somaesthetic intervention to help free the individual from the ex-
cessive regulatory domination of our modern, conformist technocratic society.
Drugs serve this emancipatory aim by disrupting this conventional normative
control of the body and its sensory perception. Explaining how this liberat-
ing strategy of somaesthetic disruption through drugs has roots in Burroughs’s
interest in body-related fringe sciences (such as the bioenergetics theory of
Wilhelm Reich) and in various non-pharmaceutical sensory and somatic inter-
ventions, this chapter also shows how Burroughs depicts the way an addicted
soma develops an intuitive feel or somatic perception for those streets of the
city where the junky can find drugs. There seems to be an energetic resonance
between the atmospheric moods of those streets and the volatile somatic ex-
periences and moods of addiction.
The book’s final essay weaves together many themes from earlier chapters
while focusing on the art of painting and an aesthetic concept not usually ap-
plied to the city but instead to nature. In “The Somaesthetic Sublime: Varanasi
in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art,” Pradeep Dhillon shows how a so-
maesthetic perspective, by highlighting the soma’s fearful vulnerability and
mortality but also its capacities for spiritual transcendence, can improve our
understanding of the sublime. This, she argues, holds not only for Burke’s
conception of the sublime (whose somatic dimension I emphasized in Think-
ing through the Body), but also for Kant’s theory of the sublime and even for
the postmodern approach to this concept. Dhillon exemplifies her argument
Introduction 9
through a sensitive reflection on the sacred city of Varanasi (also known as

Benares and Kashi) and more particularly through an analysis of how three
important contemporary Indian artists have expressed the urban sublime
through their rendering of its bodies in the streets.
As a supreme site for Hindu pilgrimage, lying on the holy river Ganges, Va-
ranasi serves as a ritual bridge between this world of death and the ultimate
shore of spiritual transcendence and moksha, the release from the enslaving
cycle of death and rebirth. Its streets therefore bustle with the movement of
colorful crowds of diverse bodies. They include not only living somas from
the diverse regions of India and the wider world of pilgrims seeking salvation
but also dead and decaying bodies carried through the streets of Varanasi, all
headed to the holy Ganges river for purposes of sanctification and moksha.
There are also, of course, the many bodies who come to witness this spectacle
of pilgrimage or to profit commercially from it by providing ritual implements.
Reminding us how the somaesthetics of city life also includes rituals of death,
this final chapter’s discussion suggests the existence of other varieties of ur-
ban pathways that we might subsume under the notion of streets because they
provide important routes of passage and gathering. The famous ghats of Va-
ranasi are long series of steps that lead from the regular city streets down to
the river and where people pass and gather to perform rituals of bathing and
cremation.
Many cities have important wharfs, piers, or quays where crowds often stroll
or gather to pursue the somaesthetic pleasures of life on the waterfront: of riv-
ers, lakes, or seas. Some quays, like several along the Seine in Paris, are vibrant
streets with pedestrian and vehicular traffic along with varieties of commercial
establishments and residences. Mountainous or hilly cities often have streets
that (like ghats) are made of steps and offer their own distinctive somaesthet-
ic experiences of climbing. Hong Kong’s Duddell Street and San Francisco’s
Lyon Street steps are two famous examples. Hong Kong’s Central area boasts
a network of escalator pathways and moving walkways lined with shops, ca-
fes, bars, and restaurants, a network that functions just like pedestrian streets
in providing both passage and the entertainments of strolling, dining, shop-
ping, and people-watching. Our book has no analysis of the distinctive som-
aesthetics of these varieties of streets or street-like passages (not to mention
the canals that serve like streets in cities like Venice), though I trust it is al-
ready rich enough to reward readers with an instructive glimpse of the som-
aesthetics of city life in a variety of important cities, and to encourage further
research in this area. One volume will not suffice to do full justice to this fasci-
nating topic, but I hope this book provides a propitious orientational start and
stimulus.
10 Shusterman
I conclude these introductory remarks by thanking some institutions and

a number of individuals who made this book possible. First, I remain, as al-
ways, deeply grateful to the Schmidt Family Foundation that funds my chair in
the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University and the Center for Body, Mind,
and Culture that held the conference from which this book began. I appreci-
ate the encouraging support that the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and
Letters (particularly through its Dean Michael Horswell) provides for the Cen-
ter’s activities and also acknowledge the assistance of my associate director at
the Center, Professor Ken Holloway, who helps me plan and organize the Cen-
ter’s activities. I thank the contributing authors and the anonymous reviewers
whose comments were helpful in selecting the papers and improving them
through suggested revisions. My research assistant Rachel Harrison provided
skilled and careful copyediting to improve the book’s textual clarity and style.
Christopher Shepler and Emily Utz helped with indexing.
Part 1
The Soma, the City, and the Weather
∵
Chapter 1
Bodies in the Streets: The Soma, the City, and

the Art of Living
Richard Shusterman
1 Ambiguities and Ambivalence
The phrase “Bodies in the Streets” evokes a wealth of vividly contrasting im-
ages. It suggests happily animated crowds bustling with aims of shopping
and pleasure-seeking, stylish flâneurs strolling through fashionable avenues
or curious alleyways, customers people-watching in sidewalk cafes, or the
brightly spirited pageant of a parade. But the phrase equally suggests angry
mobs marching in protest, rioting looters, dead or wounded bodies strewn in
the streets as a result of civil strife, criminal shootouts, terrorist attacks, or in-
deed the patrolling bodies of police or security forces assigned to prevent such
carnage from happening yet nonetheless contributing to the atmosphere of
urban street violence. We should likewise not forget those bodies of the streets
that are all too sadly neglected in marginalized suffering and who wear street
nomenclature as a badge of shame: the prostitutes known as streetwalkers and
the homeless we rudely designate as street people.
The suggestive richness of the notion of bodies in the streets derives in part
from the ambiguity of the term “body, ” which can refer to both living and dead
bodies, human bodies and animal bodies, and even inanimate material objects
that are bodies in the basic general sense of physical bodies. These material
objects include the various vehicles, buildings, and signage that often occupy
the city streets more fully and imperiously than human bodies do. The notion
of “streets” contributes its own enriching ambiguity and vagueness. There are
all kinds of streets: broad boulevards and tree-lined avenues, expressways, ring
roads, parkways, commercial and residential streets, neighborhood lanes and
alleys. Streets have the ambiguity of means and ends. Sometimes we use the
street as a mere instrumental pathway to get to our desired destination, but
sometimes a street is the destination or end in itself, if, for example, we want to
go window-shopping on Fifth Avenue or cruising down South Street. Moreover,
the “street” ambiguously can refer simply to the area specifically designated for
vehicular traffic (hence we warn pedestrians not to walk in the street), but its
meaning can also include the sidewalk or pavement explicitly designed and

14 Shusterman
designated for pedestrian use.1 These pavements also exist without parallel ve-
hicular traffic, not only in the city’s pedestrian streets but also in its squares
and piazzas that provide a place for people to gather and rest, offering a break
from the tiring linearity of streets with their incessant flow of motion.
The German and French terms for the sidewalk of a street, on which stores,
schools, banks, residences, and other urban buildings typically place their en-
trances, suggest further meanings. The German Bürgersteig is a compound of
the word for “citizen” (Bürger) and Steig, which originally denoted a mountain
footpath too narrow for vehicle passage and which derives from the verb stei-
gen, meaning “to rise or ascend.” The term thus marks the citizens’ elevation
from the vehicular road but also symbolizes the elevated urbanity of city life,
its distance from the dust and mud and lower-level culture of country ways
(“ways” being a term that connotes both paths and manners). The history of
the French term for sidewalk, trottoir, also connotes the idea of elevation in
the sense of putting those who walk on it more on view, as if put on a stage.
In the nineteenth century “le grand trottoir” was apparently used to suggest
the classical theatre repertoire while “le petit trottoir” designated more popular
“dramas and vaudevilles.” These etymological connotations introduce an im-
portant idea for my conception of urban life: the city streets provide a theatre
for dramatic action, a stage with multiple scenes for spectacles of performance
in the art of living, an art necessarily performed with the soma (the sentient
purposive body) and most typically performed in scenes involving other so-
matic selves or bodies in the streets.
If somaesthetics has introduced the term “soma” to distinguish the living,
sentient, purposive human body from the lifeless bodies of corpses and all
sorts of inanimate objects that are bodies in the general physical sense, this
does not preclude the term from having its own rich ambiguity. Embracing
both the mental and the physical, the soma is both subject and object. It is
the bodily, sensory subjectivity through which we perceive things, including
the soma itself as a bodily object in the world. It thus straddles both sides of the
German phenomenological distinction between Leib (felt bodily subjectiv-
ity) and Körper (physical body as object in the world). If Helmut Plessner de-
scribed the self as being a Leib while having its body as object (Leibsein and
Körperhaben), then somaesthetics takes its task as understanding and cultivat-
ing the soma as both perceiving subject and expressive object, as being both
1 We should not forget the place of bike or jogging lanes on the streets of many cities, nor
should we neglect to mention the passageways of arcades that extend from streets and,
though primarily designed for shopping (and recognized as the forerunners of malls), also
serve as pedestrian thoroughfares that sometimes even connect streets to each other.
The Soma, the City, and the Art of Living 15
what it is and ineluctably has.2 Somaesthetics, then, can be defined as the criti-
cal study and meliorative cultivation of the body as the site not only of experi-
enced subjectivity and sensory appreciation (aesthesis) that guides our action
and performance but also of our creative self-fashioning through the ways we
use, groom, and adorn our physical bodies to express our values and stylize
ourselves. To realize its aims of improving somatic experience and expression,
somaesthetics advocates integrating theory and practice.
Besides its complexity as both subject and object in the world, the soma
embraces other ambiguities. It exemplifies the ambiguity of human existence
as both shared species-being and individual difference. Philosophers have em-
phasized rationality and language as the distinguishing essence of humankind.
But human embodiment seems just as universal and essential a condition of
humanity. Try to imagine a human being, and you cannot help but call up the
image of the human bodily form. But though our bodies unite us as humans,
they also divide us (through their physical structure, functional practice, and
sociocultural interpretation) into different genders, races, ethnicities, classes,
and even further into the peculiar individuals that we are. We may all use legs
to walk or hands to grasp, but each person has a different gait and fingerprint.
Our experience and behavior are far less genetically hardwired than in other
animals.3 The soma reveals that human nature is always more than merely
natural but instead deeply shaped by culture.
2 For a brief analysis of the Leib/Körper distinction in German phenomenology and its
relationship to somaesthetics, see Richard Shusterman, “Soma and Psyche,” Journal of Specu-
lative Philosophy 24, no. 3 (2010): 205–223. For a discussion of Plessner’s views from the som-
aesthetic perspective, see Richard Shusterman, “Body Consciousness and the Excentric Self:
Between Plessner and Somaesthetics,” Pragmatism Today 9, no. 1 (2018): 10–20. For a more
detailed analysis of Plessner’s views on Leibsein and Körperhaben, see Hans-Peter Krüger,
“Das Spiel zwischen Leibsein und Körperhaben: Helmuth Plessners Philosophische Anthro-
pologie,” Deutsche Zeitschrifgt für Philosophie 48, no. 2 (2000): 289–318.
3 There are anatomical reasons for this greater role of individual experience. The pyramidal
tracts, which connect the cerebral cortex to the spinal cord and are essential for all voluntary
movement (including that of vocalization), are not fully formed and fixed at birth but contin-
ue to develop during infancy through the movement a baby is made to perform. This means
the precise makeup of an individual’s nervous system (her preferred repertoire of neural
pathways) is partly a product of her individual experience and cultural conditioning. Evi-
dence for this includes the so-called “Babinski reflex” or plantar response – the toes in infants
dorsiflex and fan with stroking of the sole, similar to the response of adults with damage to
the motor cortex. For more details, see J.G. Millichap, “Corticospinal Tract in Newborns,” Pedi-
atric Neurology Briefs, 4:2 (1990), 14–15. https://www.pediatricneurologybriefs.com/articles/
10.15844/pedneurbriefs-4-2-8/ and J. van Gijn, “The Babinski Reflex,” Postgraduate Medical
Journal 71:841 (1995) 645–648. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2398330/.
16 Shusterman
Large cosmopolitan cities with their racially and ethnically mixed popu-
lations show how the commonality and difference of our bodies are deeply
laden with social meaning. We appeal to our shared somatic form, experience,
needs, and suffering to encourage urban solidarity and understanding, but the
soma (through its skin and hair color, facial features and also its gestural be-
havior) is conversely the prime tool for uncharitable profiling and discrimina-
tory behavior. Very often certain quarters of the city have a distinctive somatic
character that can reveal to us that we have crossed an invisible border into an
altogether different ethnic neighborhood, without any need to consult a map
or guidebook.
The soma expresses our ambivalent condition between power and frailty,
dignity and brutishness, knowledge and ignorance. We are proud of the soma’s
erect posture, attractive form, and performative skills (including language and
the use of tools), but we condemn it for our lapses into base and bestial behav-
ior, which we link to the needs and frailties of the flesh we share with common
beasts. Somatic abilities set the limits of what we should expect from ourselves
and others, thus determining the range of our ethical obligations and aspira-
tions. If paralyzed, we have no duty to attempt the rescue of a drowning child.
The soma grounds our ethical life in a very basic way. Ethics implies choice,
which in turn implies freedom to choose and act on that choice. We cannot
act without bodily means, and the action of the soma, I believe, provides the
experiential basis of our concepts of agency and freedom. What could offer a
more immediate sense of freedom than the freedom to move our bodies, not
merely in locomotion but in opening our eyes and mouth or regulating our
breathing? The freedom to move is perhaps the root of all our more abstract
notions of freedom, but the soma, true to its essential ambiguity, also clearly
symbolizes our unfreedom: the bodily bulk, needs, and failures that weigh us
down and limit our performance, the relentless degeneration of aging and
death.4
Epistemologically, the soma is likewise ambiguous and ambivalent, both
an indispensable source of perception and an insurmountable limit to it. To
see the world, we must see from it some point of view that sets the mean-
ing of left and right, up and down, forward and backward, inside and outside,
4 Besides grounding our social norms and moral values, the body is the essential medium or
tool through which they are transmitted, inscribed, and preserved in society. Ethical codes
are mere abstractions until they are given life through incorporation into bodily disposi-
tions and action. Moreover, by being inscribed in our bodies, social norms and ethical values
can sustain their power without any need to make them explicit and enforced by laws; they
are implicitly observed and enforced through our bodily habits, including habits of feeling
(which have bodily roots).
and eventually shapes also the metaphorical extensions of these notions in

our conceptual thought. The soma supplies that primordial point of view
through its location in both the spatiotemporal field and the field of social in-
teraction. But every point of view has its limitations, and so does that provided
by the body, whose sensory teleceptors all have limits of sensory range and
focus.
Finally, the soma is identified as a single, systematic unity that however con-
tains a multiplicity of very different elements (including diverse organs) that
have their own needs, ailments, and subsystems that frequently trouble the
functioning unity of the somatic self as a whole. This complexity is also shared
by the city, whose dynamic unity contains a diversity of neighborhoods, orga-
nizations, populations, activities, and interests that are often in tension and
threaten to destabilize the city’s unity. The familiar notion of the body politic
highlights the analogy between the soma and the city, as its roots are in the
Greek notion of city, the polis or city-state, constituted by a body of citizens.
This root is preserved in the word “metropolis,” our common term for a large
city. The word “city” (from the French cité) originally comes from the Latin ci-
vitatem (sometimes in late Latin citatem) referring to a community of citizens,
and the meaning of the term, along with its form, evolved in English from the
citizen inhabitants to the place they inhabited.5
2 Analogies of Soma and City
Elaborating the analogy of soma and city could provide a useful background
for exploring the somaesthetics of city life. As human nature is obviously em-
bodied, so some philosophers have claimed that city life belongs to human
nature. Aristotle famously asserted that man is a political or city animal (zoon
politikon) whose natural inclinations lead him to city life. From the most ba-
sic social needs for sexual relations and the order of ruler and ruled, humans
develop family households. From these households villages develop, which
then combine to form a polis in order to satisfy the more complex and refined
needs of the good life for human beings. Cities are natural in the sense that
they are the natural end or perfection of human development in its quest for
the good life. “The complete community, formed from several villages, is a city-
state, which at once attains the limit of self-sufficiency, roughly speaking. It
5 See Walter Skeat, ed., An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1888), 112.
18 Shusterman
comes to be for the sake of life, and exists for the sake of the good life” (Aris-
totle, Politics 1252b27-30).6 Without the city, Aristotle argues, humans cannot
achieve adequate self-sufficiency for the good life, because the city as a whole
enables the flourishing of its parts in the same way that the proper function-
ing of the body’s parts depend on the soma’s system as a whole. In this way,
the city is logically prior to effective family and personal life in the city, even
if it historically developed from family units and villages. “The polis is by na-
ture clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of ne-
cessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there
will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a
stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that” (Politics
1253b18).
Cities share the soma’s dialectic of size or growth. A body must grow to a
certain size to achieve its mature capacities of self-reliance and best realize its
potential for the good life, but it will damage this potential if it grows too much
and becomes obese. Likewise, a city requires a population large enough to en-
sure its ability to provide the resources for the good life of its citizens, but this
ability will be impaired if the city’s population grows too large, as the various
disorders and discomforts arising from overcrowding and poverty engender
suffering. If Aristotle makes this point with respect to the Greek polis,7 hip-hop
legend Grandmaster Flash powerfully portrays it in his raps on life in New York
City, which often proudly claims to be the world’s finest.8
6 For Aristotle’s Politics I provide page references using Bekker numbers and cite, with oc-
casional slight stylistic variations, from the translation of H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1944), which is also available through the Perseus Digital Library
at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058. For a
detailed study of Aristotle’s idea of man as a political animal beyond its discussion in his
Politics, see R.G. Mulgan, “Aristotle’s Doctrine That Man is a Political Animal,” Hermes 102, no.
3 (1974): 438–445.
7 Aristotle claims that a city “consisting of too few people will not be self-sufficing, which is
an essential quality” for the city’s “purpose of living the good life,” while a city “consisting of
too many, though self-sufficing in the mere necessaries,” will be hard to know and govern
fairly, and “its over-swollen multitude” will render it difficult to provide enough resources
for enough people to live the good life (Politics 1326b2-8). The same issue of limits concerns
the size of land. “In extent and magnitude the land ought to be of a size that will enable the
inhabitants to live a life of liberal and at the same time temperate leisure,” but still small
enough to be “able to be taken in at one view, and that means being…easy for military de-
fense” (Politics, 1326b28-34; 1327a2-4).
8 The following quotes from Grandmaster Flash are respectively from the lyrics of his “New
York New York” and “The Message.”
New York New York, big city of dreams

And everything in New York ain’t always what it seems.
You might get fooled if you come from out of town
But I’m down by law and I know my way around.
Too much, too many people, too much (aha-ha)
Too much, too many people, too much, Raaah!
A castle in the sky, one mile high,
Built to shelter the rich and greedy.
Rows of eyes, disguised as windows
Looking down on the poor and the needy.
Miles of people, marching up the avenue
Doin’ what they gotta do, just to get by.
I’m living in the land of plenty and many
But I’m damn sure poor and I don’t know why.
Too much, too many people, too much
Too much, too many people, too much!
The Grandmaster elsewhere highlights the effects of overcrowding in the mis-

ery of ghetto life, where the city, rather than being the site of elevated civic
urbanity, degenerates into the asocial savagery of the jungle:
It’s like a jungle sometimes

It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.
Broken glass everywhere,
People pissin’ on the stairs, you know they just don’t care
I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice.
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat.
The inherent density of city life is why I have argued that spaces of absence
from the crowded city streets (crowded with buildings as well as people) are
an important aesthetic principle of urban design: parks, squares, piazzas, gar-
dens, and playgrounds.9 Unfortunately, however, the pleasurable relief of these
cultivated free green spaces is often reserved for the wealthy neighborhoods.
9 Richard Shusterman, “The Urban Aesthetics of Absence: Pragmatist Reflections in Berlin,”

New Literary History 28, no. 4 (1997): 739–755, revised for updates in Performing Live: Aesthetic
Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), Ch. 5.
20 Shusterman
We see, then, that the city, like the soma, is the site of deep ambivalence.
Philosophers like Plato10 and Aristotle laud it as a superior form of life and the
only place where humans can fully realize their personal, ethical, and social po-
tential, while philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche
vilify the city as a realm of ethical corruption, impersonal indifference, greed,
pride, and crime. Rousseau describes the “big city [as] full of scheming, idle
people without religion or principle… where morals and honor are nothing be-
cause each, easily hiding his conduct from the public eye, shows himself only
by his reputation and is esteemed only for his riches.”11 Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
is informed that in “the great city …you have nothing to seek and everything to
lose …Here all great emotions decay: here only little, dry emotions may rattle …
Does this city not reek of the fumes of slaughtered spirit?…All lusts and vices
are at home here…: spit upon the great city that is the great rubbish pile where
all the scum froths together …[and] where everything rotten, disreputable,
lustful, gloomy, overripe, ulcerous, conspirational festers together.”12
The city, like the soma, is a site of desire, a desire to transcend the minimal
conditions of mere survival and to achieve greater power, fuller satisfactions,
and a better, richer life. What defines a city is not mere size but social and or-
ganizational complexity as well as cultural and political ambition. We see this
ambition from the very first city recorded in the Bible: “let us build us a city
and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name,”
said the people of Babel, at a time when all the world still spoke one language.
But “the Lord came down to see the city and the tower,” and fearing its citizens’
ambition confounded their language into many tongues so that they could
not understand each other and then “scattered them abroad” so that they “left
off [building] the city” (Genesis 11:4-8). From ancient times the city has been
associated with ambitions of grandeur, especially those of the rulers of great
cities who sought to magnify their glory and secure reputational immortality
through the monumental majesty they developed in the cities they ruled and
regarded as extensions of themselves.
The histories of the city and kingship are intricately related. If the city’s
organization encouraged the centralization of power that kingship provided,
10 In Plato’s Phaedrus (230d), Socrates explains that he doesn’t “go away from the city out over
the border…[or even] go outside the walls at all” because “the country places and the trees
won’t teach [him] anything, and the people in the city do.” For Plato quotations through-
out this chapter I refer to the Stephanus page number and here cite the translation of Har-
old Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), available through the Perseus
Digital Library at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.%20Phaedrus.
11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre,” in Politics and Art, trans.
Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 58.
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin,
1966), 195–196.
then kings used their authority to develop and strengthen their cities to aug-
ment their own power and dominion. As Lewis Mumford notes, because in
ancient times cities were regarded as founded through the privilege of kings
and gods and served as symbols of their power, the city became the site not
only of heightened culture but of heightened violence, directed both internally
and externally. City rulers enforced their ruling privilege and the reigning so-
cioeconomic hierarchy through armed forces and punishment. Moreover, rival
kings fought for power by conquering other cities, so massive walls became the
architectural form to define the city’s limits while also constituting the city as
a fortress and serving as a symbol of city pride, splendor, and power. By com-
bining “the maximum amount of protections with the greatest incentives to
aggression,” the city has functioned “through most of its history as a container
of organized violence and transmitter of war.”13
If the city promised civil peace within its walls, such hopes faced the per-
sistent threat of internal oppression by city rulers and external violence and
even destruction at the hands of rival cities, because, as Plato notes in the Laws
(Book 1: 626a) “in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other,”
even if such warfare is not explicitly “proclaimed by heralds” or pursued by
physical combat but waged through other forms of power struggle.14 Unfor-
tunately, these struggles often degenerated into physical warfare, and human
history is strewn with battles involving the violent conquest and destruction
of cities, such that bodies in the streets frequently meant dead bodies result-
ing from war. If people came to cities to enjoy the good life, they too often met
death there instead. In fact, although cities are typically prized as the liveli-
est place to enjoy living, their origins instead lie with the dead. The city’s first
bodies were corpses, since cities originated as ceremonial cemeteries or burial
shrines where nomadic groups would return to honor their ancestors, show-
ing how the living soma commands respect even after its death, while death
in some sense defines the soma as its inevitable end and limit. These urban
origins in ceremonial cities of the dead reveal how the city always served as
a desired place to visit and to meet even for people who did not dwell there.
As Mumford aptly describes this urban history, “the magnet comes before the
container, and this ability to attract non-residents for intercourse and spiri-
tual stimulation, no less than trade, remains one of the essential criteria of
the city.”15
13 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, reveal its Transformations, and its Pros-
pects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 46.
14 I cite here from Benjamin Jowett’s translation, which can be found at http://classics.mit
.edu/Plato/laws.1.i.html.
15 Mumford, The City in History, 9–10.
22 Shusterman
As the human soma learns to elevate itself from the earth to master an
erect position yet still relies on the ground for support, so the city, despite its
contemporary contrast with the farm, nonetheless has its roots in agriculture
and ultimately depends on it. As mastery of the cultivation of crops promoted
fixed settlements which eventually grew into cities, so Aristotle and others rec-
ognized the need for adequate land to assure the city’s self-sufficiency to feed
its citizens. As cities grew in population, they needed to control more land,
which often led to wars of conquest. Even today, when cities are too dense in
terms of people, cars, and buildings to allow any farming, they still ultimately
rely on agricultural land and labor to supply the food they need, and so they
must ensure the smooth flow of such supply by controlling its routes of import.
This suggests another key characteristic of the city that has an analogy with
the soma. Even if physically defined and encircled by its walls, the city’s life
and power always extend beyond them, just as the soma’s life, influence, and
freedom of action is not confined to the borders defined by its skin. As Georg
Simmel argues, “It is not only the immediate size of the area and number of
persons which, because of the universal historical correlation between the en-
largement of the circle and the personal inner and outer freedom, has made
the metropolis the locale of freedom. It is rather in transcending this visible
expanse that any given city becomes the seat of cosmopolitanism.” The city’s
economic and intellectual activities extend and predominate “over its hinter-
land…The sphere of life of the small town is, in the main, self-contained and
autarchic… The most significant characteristic of the metropolis is this func-
tional extension beyond its physical boundaries.”16 The soma’s activity likewise
transcends its physical limits. A transactional entity, the soma not only ingests
air, food, and drink from the outside environment but it reshapes that environ-
ment through its actions and tools. However, the soma’s ways of life, indeed
its very life, remain deeply dependent on the natural environment. People live
differently (and even look different) in very dissimilar environmental regions
and under contrasting meteorological skies. Some environments and weather
conditions are too severe for the human soma to thrive or even survive.
Although the city is a site of comparative freedom, it is, like the soma, the
site of constraints and environmental dependencies. Unlike the open fields of
the unpatrolled countryside, the city’s streets are often congested with crowds
of people or cars and further burdened and policed with legal regulations and
prohibitions that impede the freedoms of movement and action. Cities, like so-
mas, are also subject to their environmental conditions, including the weather.
16 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed.
and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 418–419; hereafter abbreviated
MM.
Sunny or rainy skies very differently shape urban moods and movements. Snow
can radically alter a city’s life and activities, essentially shutting down much
of it, just as an intense heat spell can partly paralyze a city not accustomed
to it. (I have seen it melt the muscular bustle of Berlin). Some environments
or climates cannot properly sustain cities, while certain severe environmental
incidents (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis)
can essentially devastate them.
Like the soma, the city is organized into different parts with different fea-
tures and functions. As some body parts are more public and significant while
others are more private or subordinate, so we find city centers richly developed
with impressive public buildings and important streets, while other city neigh-
borhoods are more marginal, residential, and focused on private life. If surface
body parts are normally visible while others (such as inner organs, tissue, ves-
sels, and skeleton) are not, so the city has its clearly visible surface and its inner
areas that are invisible from the street. Consider its networks of underground
spaces that include not only sewers, shelters, caves, and electric lines, but
also its pathways of underground transportation. Just as the soma devotes
more attention to caring for, cleaning, and grooming its more important and
more visible parts, so does the city devote more resources to the upkeep and
cleaning of its more attractive, more important, and more visible districts,
while often letting marginal, less visible, and less attractive areas w allow in
squalor and disrepair. This is because the city, like the soma, tries to put its
best face proudly forward while concealing its ugliness. If the soma is served
by an intricate, composite system of passageways (arteries, veins, capillaries,
intestines, lymph nodes and vessels, and neural pathways) so the city is served
by a complex network of streets, underground or elevated walkways, railways
and tramways. Already in ancient times, Aristotle favored a varied complexity
of city streets rather than straight-line grid uniformity for both aesthetic and
military reasons. He warned “not to lay out the whole city in straight streets,
but only certain parts and districts, for in this way it will combine security with
beauty,” since a labyrinth of streets “is difficult for foreign troops to enter and
to find their way about… when attacking” (Politics 1330b).
Like the soma, cities exemplify a dialectic of commonality and individual
difference. In one sense, big cities are all alike in sharing certain key features:
high population density, high rise buildings, bustling activity, multiple districts
or neighborhoods, an area with countless streets too vast and too difficult to
survey in a panoptic view, complex transportation networks, city school sys-
tems, universities, hospitals, airports, police, parks, professional sports teams,
museums, commercial centers, and (alas) persistent traffic jams. On the other
hand, each city has its own particular feel. The Austrian novelist Robert M usil
makes this point with respect to his beloved city of Vienna. “Like all big cites, it
24 Shusterman
consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions

of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved
ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord
and dislocation of all opposing rhythms.”17 Yet Vienna, like other cities, had its
own peculiar rhythmic style and noise, so that “a man returning after years of
absence would have known, with his eyes shut, that he was in that ancient cap-
ital and imperial city, Vienna. Cities,” Musil concludes, “can be recognized by
their pace just as people can by their walk. Opening his eyes, he would recog-
nize it all again, by the way the general movement pulsed through the streets,
far sooner than he would discover it from any characteristic detail.”
Georg Simmel’s analysis of city life in “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
(1903) introduces another twist in the dialectic of urban commonality and
individuality. “The deepest problems of modern life,” he argues, “derive from
the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his
existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of
external culture, and of the technics of life” (MM 409).18 The intense pressures
of impersonal existence come from the assembly line of factory labor and the
bureaucracy of large government and commercial offices that constitute a vast
“social-technological mechanism,” but these pressures are also the result of
the enormous number of unfamiliar people one finds on the city’s streets. The
urban dweller reacts to this prodigious mass of social pressure and throng of
strangers that threaten to nullify his sense of personal authority and power
by cultivating instead “a highly personal subjectivity” (MM 413). For Simmel,
“This results in the individual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and par-
ticularization, in order to preserve his most personal core. He has to exaggerate
this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself.” The bearer
of human value “is no longer in ‘the general human being’ in every individual,
but rather [the individual’s] qualitative uniqueness” (MM 422–423).
3 The Crowd and the Individual on the Street
By the time Simmel wrote his essay, the crowd of bodies in the streets had long
become a distinctive experience of city life and a prominent theme of urban
17 The quotations in this paragraph are from Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans.
E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (London: Picador, 1979), 3–4.
18 I modify the English translation by substituting “technics” instead of “technique” to ren-
der the German term “Technik” which could also be rendered as “technology” in this con-
text, while “technique” could suggest a more personal method or style. For the original
German text, see Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Georg Simmel
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 116–131; the word appears on p. 116.
literature, notably in Poe and Baudelaire. Composed of bodies and sharing the
body’s ambivalence, the city crowd was an object of both fascination and fear-
ful aversion, a site of teeming human collectivity but also of impersonal, aso-
cial solitude. The narrator of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” observes from his
café window the crowd’s “tumultuous sea of human heads [that] filled [him]…
with a delicious novelty of emotion” and initially sees the crowd in terms of
“masses” in “aggregate relations” rather than as individuals. But eventually he
is so struck by the look of one individual in the crowd that he leaves his café
to follow that mesmerizing member of the multitude, an old man wandering
ceaselessly, indeed manically, from one evening all the way to the next, through
London’s vast network of streets. This enthralling experience evokes in the
“fascinated” narrator-observer a range of ideas from “merriment” to “malice, …
blood-thirstyness, …excessive terror, [and]…supreme despair” and convinces
him that this crowd creature (who never seemed to notice being followed) was
“the type and the genius of deep crime.”19
Friedrich Engels marveled at London’s greatness but found that the crowded
“turmoil of the streets has something repulsive” because of its lack of real, hu-
man social relations. People “crowd by one another as though they had noth-
ing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is
the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay
the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honor another
with so much as a glance.” For Engels, “The brutal indifference, the unfeeling
isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offen-
sive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space.”
And even if “this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the
fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly
barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city.”20
Although the city crowd is clearly constituted by human bodies, we gener-
ally designate it by the singular form (“crowd” rather than “crowds”), and we
often regard it as an aggregate whole rather than scrutinizing its individual
members. Could we not then speak of the crowd as a collective, summative
body or super-soma? Isn’t it like the soma in maintaining its singular iden-
tity not only through its multiplicity of members but also through changes of
size and composite parts? A crowd can grow or dwindle in its members and
change its behavior while still maintaining its identity as that crowd, just like
19 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, ed.
Thomas Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 507, 511.
20 Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, trans. Florence Kelley
Wischnewetzky (London: Allen and Unwin, 1943), 24, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/
17306/17306-h/17306-h.htm.
26 Shusterman
a human soma maintains its identity through changes of size, appearance,

and component cells. Engels’ critique, however, suggests a reason for rejecting
this analogy. Whereas the soma’s diversity of elements is effectively integrated
into a highly unified, purposive, functioning organism, the crowd, in his ac-
count, lacks any such harmonizing, unifying communal purpose because all
its component members are locked into the isolation of their distinctive pri-
vate interests. But Engels, I believe, is wrong to deny that crowds ever share a
commonality of purpose. The individuals who constitute the crowds of shop-
pers on the city’s High Street or who form the crowds pouring into the streets
that house the theatre, museum, or sports stadium obviously share a common
interest and purpose, and so do the people who form the crowd of political
activists or protesters who use the streets to stage their demonstrations.
What people in city crowds more typically fail to share, according to S immel,
is affective solidarity or fellow feeling. Distinguishing the metropolitan men-
tality as more intellectual and less affective than that of people in a small town
or village, Simmel explains this through two reasons. First, the greater com-
plexity, variety, bustle, and intensity of stimulation in city life requires a more
vigilant consciousness, more focused attention, and more deliberative plan-
ning and calculation. It demands “a heightened awareness and predominance
of intelligence in metropolitan man,” who, to manage the pressures of urban
life, “reacts with his head instead of his heart,” with calculating intelligence
rather than spontaneous feeling (MM 410). Although this weakens affective
bonds, it is a “necessity brought about by the aggregation of so many people
with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and ac-
tivities into a highly complex organism.” Otherwise, Simmel warns, “the whole
structure would break down into an inextricable chaos” (MM 412–413). Sec-
ond, the immense size and diversity of the city (in area, population, and range
of interests) that empowers the individual by weakening the limiting force of
traditional social bonds conversely constrains one’s ability to feel for one’s fel-
low city dwellers. The wider circle of urban life embraces too many different
kinds of people in too many different, changing relationships for the forging
of strong affective bonds with fellow residents to be psychologically healthy or
even possible. Hence a mental attitude, which Simmel describes as “reciprocal
reserve and indifference,” emerges that helps to free the urbanite from social
obligations of neighborly concern that centripetally “hem in” the narrower
circle of “small-town” life. This reserved, uncaring attitude is “never felt more
strongly” than in the individual’s “independence [and lonely isolation]…in the
thickest crowd of the big city…because the bodily proximity and narrowness
of space make the mental distance only the more visible” and psychologically
needed (MM418).
This ability to distance oneself intellectually from the very crowd that one
is part of and helps constitute can also find an analogy in the human soma.
One of our crucial capacities is the soma’s power of self-observation, its ability
to distinguish itself as the perceiving subjectivity that perceives itself as also
an object in the world. We use our perceiving eyes to notice a bump on our
leg, and we use our perceiving fingers to feel the bump to determine its size,
tenderness, or soreness. In other words, the soma mentally separates itself as
subject (Leibsein) to observe its bodily parts (Körperhaben) through a capac-
ity that Plessner describes as ex-centric positionality. The soma as subjective
Leibsein adopts a point of view as if from outside the very body that it has but
also is. We can see this differentiating, ex-centric point of view with respect
to the individual and the crowd in Poe’s observing narrator of “The Man of
the Crowd,” who seems so entirely absorbed in the external observer position
(first by watching the crowd from his café window and then by following the
particularly fascinating old man as he roams through the city’s vast labyrinth
of streets and their respective crowds) that he never seems to realize that by
closely following the old man’s wanderings in the crowd, he, the observing nar-
rator, has necessarily become part of the moving crowd itself.
Other theorists of the crowd, like Baudelaire, have explicitly celebrated the
special mental capacity of some individuals to relish being part of the crowd
while also enjoying the ability to remain psychologically outside it. In his prose
poem “Crowds,” Baudelaire claims that “enjoying a crowd is an art” that de-
mands “the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the pas-
sion for roaming. Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by
the active and fertile poet,” who is able to imaginatively identify himself as be-
ing with or in the crowd or as a singular observer outside it.21 “The man who is
unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd,”
while the poet can do both and “enjoys the incomparable privilege of being
able to be himself or someone else, as he chooses.” Observing the crowd by
immersion in it, “the solitary and thoughtful stroller [flâneur] finds a singular
intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself
in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a
box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived
of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows
that chance offers.”
It is not only the poet but any imaginative artist in the modern art of urban
living who can taste these joys. In his famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life,”
21 Charles Baudelaire, “Crowds,” in Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1947), 20, for all the quotations of this paragraph.
28 Shusterman
Baudelaire invokes Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” (which he in fact trans-
lated from the English) as the key to understanding the distinctive attitude of
eager curiosity and sensitive, welcoming imagination that enables one to drink
deeply of the intoxicating fascinations and aesthetic joys of engaging with the
city crowds.22 For the eponymous painter of modern life (modeled on the art-
ist Constantin Guys), “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and
water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the
crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy
to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of move-
ment, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite” (PM 9). His happiness on
the crowded street is “to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere
at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain
hidden from the world… The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices
in his incognito,” and as “the lover of universal life [he] enters into the crowd
as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy” (ibid.). However,
in joining the crowd and finding his place in its center, Baudelaire’s flâneur
does not sacrifice his independent, external perspective as a sovereign specta-
tor; nor does he surrender his personal identity, which he instead maintains
and enjoys as his own secret possession by remaining incognito. Like “a mirror
as vast as the crowd itself” but “gifted with consciousness” that is creatively
“responding to each one of its movements,” “he is an ‘I’ with an insatiable thirst
for the ‘non-I’”; and this sets him roaming through the crowded streets, “hur-
rying, searching…this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly
journeying” to observe the richness of “the river of life” that “the great city”
provides (PM 10, 12).
Walter Benjamin, the Jewish literary theorist born and raised in Berlin, fur-
ther explores the notion of crowds by highlighting the differences between
Poe’s gloomier, terror-tinted depiction of the city “masses” and Baudelaire’s
bright vision of the urban crowd “in all its splendor and majesty [with]… the
eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities” (PM 10).
Benjamin is more careful than Baudelaire to distinguish the flâneur from the
man of the crowd. Resisting the “manic behavior” of the metropolitan masses
hurrying to satisfy their needs, the flâneur distances himself from the crowd by
his lack of practical purpose or urgency. He demands his “leisure” and “elbow
room” so as not to be jostled or overwhelmed by the crowd. But in contrast to
aristocrats and country yokels, the flâneur could also enjoy “the temptation
22 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other
Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 1–41, hereafter ab-
breviated PM.
to lose himself” in the crowd, to savor a delicious moment of self-abandon, a

moment of freedom from the pressures of maintaining a distinctive selfhood,
a qualitative uniqueness.23 Linked to the crowd, yet somehow apart from it,
the flâneur, Benjamin argues, is like the streets in Baudelaire’s poetry whose el-
egance derives from suggesting the crowd but not describing it and thus keep-
ing the scene free for the lyrical expression of dramatic street encounters and
experiences.
4 Intoxication and Alienation from the City Streets
Benjamin describes the flâneur as essentially “out of place,” a creature at home

neither in the bustling crowd nor “in an atmosphere of complete leisure” (SM
172–173). Exiled in Paris as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Benjamin’s own ac-
count of roaming through the crowded city streets vaguely suggests another
aspect of urban experience: the presence of strangers or foreigners together
with their feelings of alienation, of being “out of place.” Many individuals who
crowd the streets of giant cities are people who feel they lack a proper home or
who are missing their homeland. This felt absence, this sense of displacement,
keeps them moving through the city streets, foregoing the lure of entry to the
stores, restaurants and other attractions that would provide rest from their
walking wandering; this sense of strangeness and lack of goal pushes them
ever further through the endless network of urban avenues and alleys. Consid-
er Benjamin’s description of restless, ceaseless, compulsive roaming through
unknown streets that express the loss of the warmth of a familiar home.
An intoxication comes over the person who walks long and aimlessly
through the streets. With each step, the walk takes on greater momen-
tum; ever weaker grow the temptations of shops, of bistros, of smiling
women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, of
a distant mass of foliage, of a street name. Then comes hunger. Our man
wants nothing to do with the myriad possibilities offered to sate his ap-
petite. Like an ascetic animal, he flits through unknown districts – until,
utterly exhausted, he stumbles into his room, which receives him coldly
and wears a strange air.24
23 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt
and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 166–167; hereafter SM.
24 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 417. The phrase “wears a strange air” is the
30 Shusterman
Big cities have long served as homes for the homeless, not simply for those
lacking proper dwellings but more distinctively for those deprived of their
homelands. With the massive flood of migrant refugees and the increasingly
globalized work force, this foreign component of the city crowd has greatly
grown. Cities and their streets are both a magnet and a refuge for strangers. A
foreigner in a big city, though out of place, feels less so because of all the other
strangers living there. For those fearful or sensitive about being alien, walking
through the streets may be the surest public pastime. Enjoying the freedom of
self-sufficient outdoor motion (and as long as his appearance does not arouse
suspicion), the foreign flâneur can avoid the embarrassment of being “outed”
as an alien if he keeps moving through the streets in the right rhythm. But to
address the seductions of the stores, bistros, and women means exposing one’s
foreignness – through one’s accent at the very least. To linger too long at a shop
window or street corner would invite suspicions of loitering and risk police
encounters with their demand for identity papers validating one’s legality in
the city. One could regard Benjamin’s ascetically driven rover of the streets as a
modern urban analogue of the wandering Jew, compelled to roam in diasporic
cities, having been exiled from his homeland and dwelling in places that re-
main strange and devoid of home-like warmth.
More than an entertaining pastime or refuge, the city streets can provide a
cultural education for the crowd that, as a human collective, holds the prom-
ise of political transformation from an amorphous mass toward an effective
public sphere. “Streets,” claims Benjamin, “are the dwelling place of the col-
lective. The collective is an eternally restless and eternally moving being that,
in between the facades of buildings, undergoes (erlebt), experiences (erfärht),
learns, contrives as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own
four walls.” The cultural texts one finds in the streets provide its educational
resources. “For this collective, the shiny enameled shop signs are a wall deco-
ration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of
a bourgeois; walls marked “Défense d’afficher” are its writing desk, newspaper
stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture,
and café terraces the balcony from which it looks down on its household.”25
The large presence of foreigners circulating in the city streets provides
the metropolis with more possibilities for varied somaesthetic experience
translators’ rendering of the German “befremdet,” which could equally suggest an “alien-
ating” strangeness. For the German text, see Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 525.
25 See Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 533, for the quotations of this paragraph. I modify the
English translation found in The Arcades Project, 423. If Benjamin were writing today, per-
haps he would add that streets now (sadly, all too often) also serve as the execution rooms
of the unwanted and unwelcome.
and an enriched aesthetic education in cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity.

Unfortunately, some citizens regard the introduction of such diversity as unwel-
comely transforming the city’s (or nation’s) prior aesthetic “feel” and thus call-
ing for solutions to this discomfort that are politically problematic. G
hettos are
a traditional response to this fear, as are expulsions and xenophobic violence.
Wittgenstein notes this troubling aspect of the somaesthetic sense of the polis
and of the body-politic analogy, evoking its links to antisemitism and genocide.
Within the history of the peoples of Europe …the Jews… are experienced
as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on
the same level as normal life [and no one wants to speak of a disease as
if it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones)].
We may say: people can only regard this tumor as a natural part of the
body if their whole feeling for the body changes (or if the whole national
feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up
with it. You can expect an individual man to display this sort of toler-
ance, or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a
nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that makes it
a nation. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain
his former aesthetic feeling for the body [aesthetische Gefühl für seinen
Körper] and also to make the tumor welcome.26
Cities, as Musil remarked, have their distinctive aesthetic identities or particu-

lar qualitative “feels” that lovers of those cities cherish and do not want to see
changed in any way. On the other hand, change and diversity are an essential
part of the dynamism of development and innovation that defines city life and
distinguishes it from the familiar steadiness and slow pace of village or country
life. Like the body, the city needs to balance change with constancy, harmonize
stability with movement and growth, in a manner that is not rigidly mechani-
cal or prescribed by strict conformity to predetermined rules but instead sen-
sitively flexible and adaptive.
5 Drama, the Art of Living, and Somaesthetic Self-Fashioning
Such notions of bodily balance and harmony, of dynamic unity with vari-
ety that is continuously open and creative, certainly suggest the aesthetic
26 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen. I cite from the bilingual edition of this
work, translated by Peter Winch and entitled Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980),
20–21. The italics, parentheses, and brackets are in the original.
32 Shusterman
d omain. This should remind us that one of the city’s key values, functions, and
challenges is the providing of aesthetic experience, not only for its citizens but
also for the many visitors drawn to the city by its power as both a commercial
and cultural magnet. Besides the fact that its museums, concert halls, galler-
ies, and libraries provide much greater collections of art than what one finds
in the town or country village, the city itself constitutes an impressive “the-
ater of social action” and serves as “an esthetic symbol of collective unity.”27 If
Benjamin likens the city streets to a home, Lewis Mumford instead highlights
their role as theatre. Their “physical frame” not only serves life’s “commonplace
domestic and economic activities” but also provides “a consciously dramatic
setting for the more significant actions and the more sublimated urges of a
human culture. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates theater and is the
theater.” Its streets, Mumford claims, are where our “more purposive activi-
ties are formulated and worked out, through conflicting and co-operating per-
sonalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations,” creating more
compellingly fertile and aesthetic “social drama” than one finds in a town or
village through the city’s greater concentration of people, energies, and cul-
tural resources, just as a well-designed “stage-set…intensifies and underlines
the gestures of the actors and the action of the play.”28
The city’s crowds and streets powerfully provide this theatre for social
drama where people find rich resources for somaesthetically expressing and
stylizing themselves as distinctive, creative characters, as unique individuals
consciously engaged in the art of living. Crowds help create this theatre for so-
cial drama and self-expression in at least four ways. First, the crowd constitutes
a real audience for this theatre of daily life, an audience whose watching and
witnessing helps stimulate the individual’s creative self-fashioning. Second,
the crowd as bustling bodily throng has a certain energy and dynamism that
can help energize and inspire the individual’s creative efforts. Third, the crowd
serves as a background context against which the actions of certain individu-
als (the particular social drama’s prime characters) can stand out more vividly
and dramatically as the foreground. The distinctiveness of one’s creative self-
stylization becomes more evident and striking by contrast with the conformity
of the background crowd. Fourth, when we stop regarding the crowd only as an
aggregate mass and instead consider the individuals that constitute it, we can
see that through the quantity and diversity of those individuals, the crowd pro-
vides a wealth of differently styled characters and hence abundant resources
to draw on for one’s own creative self-fashioning.
27 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1938), 480.
28 Ibid.
How do the streets themselves contribute to this somaesthetic social drama

where individuals develop and manifest their work of self-stylization in inter-
active engagement with others? One might specify three modes: as physical
space, as structured social space, and as narrative space. Physically, whether
through their convergence into public squares, their large boulevards for pa-
rades and marches, or their tangle of dark alleys for secret encounters, the
city’s streets provide not only the topographical medium through which peo-
ple move to address their needs of self-care and self-expression, but also the
arena where they can meet, gather, and present their somatic selves to others.
Moreover, the very vastness and complexity of its network of streets (together
with its dense clusters of towering skyscrapers) provides a quality of the sub-
lime or awe-inspiring to urban space. This network of space is socially struc-
tured: there are chic, upscale avenues and tacky, slummy backstreets; there are
pavements designed for social lingering and gathering but others reserved for
rapid pedestrian passage. In the crowds of people on the streets, there are cer-
tain individuals who stand out from the common mass as distinctively noble
in their manner of appearance and movement, thus inviting a special social
recognition or admiring fascination. Finally, because the city’s streets are the
scene of continuous kinesis by ever new groups of people, because their com-
plex network allows for countlessly different routes of roaming where one can
encounter diverse scenes and persons, they also provide an open narrative
space that enables all kinds of encounters, engagements, and possibilities.
We can see all these dramatic functions of the city streets in Baudelaire’s
famous sonnet, “À une passante,” on which Benjamin rightly comments that,
although “the crowd is nowhere named in either word or phrase” in the poem,
“the whole happening hinges on it, just as the progress of a sailboat depends
on the wind” (SM 168).29
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
29 “À une passante” appears in the section Tableaux Parisiens of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal
(Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 270. There is a translation of the poem on SM 169 that
I slightly modify in the ensuing discussion, and the quotes from Benjamin’s analysis are
also from SM 269.
34 Shusterman
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair … puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
Though never mentioned, the crowd is felt in the first line’s “deafening street…
screaming all around me,” and it provides the wearisome background from
which the passing woman stands out in somaesthetic splendor and nobility,
thus enthralling the male poet-narrator who encounters her in passing. More-
over, as Benjamin notes, it is “this very crowd [that] brings to the city dweller
the figure that fascinates” (SM 169). “Tall, slender, in deep mourning, majestic
grief,” this “woman made her way, with fastidious hand raising and swaying
the festoon and hem” of her skirt, “agile and noble, with her statue-like legs.”
Momentarily riveted by this somaesthetic elegance, the narrator’s own desir-
ing soma is “contorted like a madman,” as he eagerly drinks in the beauty of
her eyes, “the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.” But this
“lightning flash” of desiring eye-contact is only an ephemeral spark that fades
into dark “night,” as the two characters feel compelled (whether by habit, so-
cial pressure, or pressing personal needs) to continue their separate paths
through the city streets. This “fleeting beauty whose glance suddenly gave [the
poet-narrator] new birth” is but “une passante,” a passerby on a street, one of
countless pedestrians on countless streets in the expansive maze of the city’s
pathways. The passing wave of the very crowd that brought her now carries her
away from the smitten poet, who, pained by her departure, wonders if he will
ever see her again as she moves through other streets. “Shall I see you again
only in eternity? Elsewhere, far from here. Too late! Maybe never. For I know
not where you flee, you know not where I go. O you whom I would have loved,
O you who knew it!”
Benjamin sadly describes this ephemeral meeting as revealing “the stig-
mata which life in a metropolis inflicts upon love,” how urban living degrades
love’s quality and essence into the “shock” of a thrilling momentary sensation
(Erlebnis) rather than a lasting cumulative experience (Erfahrung).30 This
30 Benjamin emphasizes “the shock factor” in Baudelaire and connects it with the transitory,
sensationally lived experience of Erlebnis in contrast to the cumulative, enduring, coher-
ent experience of Erfahrung (SM 163). For a brief discussion of this distinction in Benjamin
b ewitching meeting of eyes on the street, Benjamin argues, is not really love “at
first sight, but at last sight,” indicating “a farewell forever” and thus a “catastro-
phe” (SM 169). But the lines strike me as more ambiguous, as expressive also of
the positive possibilities of passage through the city streets. Like the openness
of streets, a second meeting with the enchanting lady is left an open possibility,
as we see through the question mark and the “peut-être” (“Maybe”). The same
flux of passage on the streets through which she came and departed can bring
her back again. “Elsewhere, far away” from their initial point of meeting could
nonetheless remain within the city’s ample ambit. The “peut-être” marks the
productive space of possibility, just as the poem’s narrative suggests the open-
ness of choice and room for action. Baudelaire’s poetic narrator chooses not to
follow the lady after she passes; perhaps he had other preferences. The streets
present a captivating variety of different people, products, and ways of life that
at once enrich and confuse city life. We want the variety of urban richness, but
we cannot enjoy all of it permanently and deeply. Some of it we prefer to enjoy
merely in our imagination, as a dreamy “peut-être.” Baudelaire surely knows
that big cities offer an overwhelming surplus of occupations and seductions;
there are just too many lovely eyes that we meet on the street to follow them all
home. His poet was also in movement, perhaps towards a publishing appoint-
ment or a political rally, perhaps to a romantic rendezvous with another blaz-
ing gaze, or even home to the steady warmth of more familiar eyes impatiently
waiting his return.
Benjamin’s notion of “the streets [as] the dwelling place of the collective”31
in which the city’s many classes, cultures, and ethnicities move and mix sug-
gests the promise of a dynamic, hybrid social group that can be politically
potent but attractively open and comparatively free. Its constitution can be
flexibly voluntary, since the same streets can be used to walk away, not just to
come together. A collective or crowd in the street need not deny free individual
expression but can, as we argued earlier, even stimulate and nurture it. But
despite such liberty, a collective can nonetheless manifest its commitment and
its power by occupying the streets with its throng of communicating, dynamic,
and sentient somas. Such crowds are more lively and energizing than the mere
virtual presence of texts and images shared through digital networks. Bodies in
the streets still matter, aesthetically and politically.
and the fear that he (and others) felt about the loss of the cherished wholeness and power
of aesthetic experience as Erfahrung in contemporary times, see Richard Shusterman,
“The End of Aesthetic Experience,” in Performing Live, Ch. 1.
31 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 423.
36 Shusterman
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Chapter 2
The Weather-Worlds of Urban Bodies

Mădălina Diaconu
Human settlements root down in the earth and tower up in the sky, and
I would even argue that cities, like people, are even made from earth and sky.
No human life could exist without a physical atmosphere, and for a long time
dwelling was unthinkable in unpropitious climates. Already Aristotle empha-
sized the importance of the geographical position and of winds for the health
of the polis.1 Later on, bioclimatology distinguished between healthy, irritating
and debilitating climates. When the Romans wanted to find out one’s place
of birth, they asked about the sky one was born under (“sub quo caelo natus
est”), and the conviction that the origin (between sky and earth) molds one’s
character is still widespread. The particular “slice” of sky that envelops the city2
shapes one’s habits, and the somatic biography includes the weather experi-
ence; heat and cold endurance or nostalgic memories of the snow of our child-
hood pertain to a climatic memory of the body, which usually remains latent,
but comes to the light whenever the soma is confronted with critical weather
conditions. Cities themselves derive a part of their identity from their relation
to the weather: Venice would be different without scirocco, Innsbruck without
föhn and Salzburg without rain.
While for a long time urban studies concentrated on the psychology and
ethos of urbanity, from Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Robert Parks, and
Louis Wirth to Jane Jacobs and Marc Augé, more recently the focus has shifted
to urban “sensescapes” and to the practices through which, intentionally or
not, urban spaces are experienced, appropriated, modified and produced. This
emphasis on sensory experience requires the contribution of the phenome-
nology of embodiment (Leiblichkeit), of sensory anthropology, of theories of
atmosphere and of everyday aesthetics in its comprehensive meaning of aes-
thetics (from Gr. aisthesis, “sensation”). However, the multisensory experience
of weather, particularly in urban environments, continues (with few notable
1 Aristotle, Politik (Hamburg: Meiner, 1981), 1330b, 260.

2 Cf. the etymology of “climate,” from the Greek klima “slope, zone,” and klinein “to slope.” Both
slice and slope imply here the angle made with the sun.

The Weather-Worlds of Urban Bodies 39
exceptions3) to be left to natural scientists, who translate physical atmospheres

in measurable parameters.
As a matter of fact, individuals cannot experience the climate (which is
strictly speaking a scientific abstraction, based on average values of tempera-
ture, air humidity, precipitations and wind during an interval of approximately
30 years), but only transient weather conditions and situational meteorological
events. At present, there is scientific evidence (adduced later in this chapter)
that atmospheric factors influence in a positive or negative way and in various
degrees our human well-being, behavior and performance. Whether protected
indoors from the weather or exposed to it while walking, cycling, sunbathing,
or painting en plein air, city dwellers are living bodies who belong to nature
and interact with the weather more than we like to admit. In this respect, som-
aesthetics is a promising approach for giving an account of this universal form
of experience, since in the last instance “reflective awareness of our somas can
never stop at the skin; we cannot feel the body alone, apart from its environ-
mental context.”4
1 Meteorological Aesthetics and Urban Somaesthetics
According to Richard Shusterman, somaesthetics is “concerned with the criti-

cal study and meliorative cultivation of how we experience and use the liv-
ing body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative
self-fashioning.”5 The ambivalence of soma as both having and being a body, a
material Körper in the world and a living, sentient Leib, an intentional subject
who constitutes the world and a material object in the world, links somaes-
thetics with phenomenology. However, in contrast to traditional phenomenol-
ogy, somaesthetics emphasizes the situated character of bodily knowledge,
along with the social embeddedness of experience and the practical function
of reflective self-cultivation and correction of bad habits. The soma is always
shaped by its various physical and human environments, but it is able to learn
and adapt itself to the environment. Regarding the weather, the contextuality
3 For example, Yuriko Saito, “The Aesthetics of Weather,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed.
Andrew Smith and Jonathan M. Light (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 156–176,
and Arnold Berleant, “Celestial Aesthetics,” in Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transfor-
mation of the Human World (Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2010), 137–153.
4 Richard Shusterman, “Soma, Self, and Society: Somaesthetics as Pragmatist Meliorism,”
Metaphilosophy 42, no. 3 (April 2011): 323.
5 Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1.
40 Diaconu
of experience implies more than merely dictating to the material body how to
protect itself from an inclement weather. The soma is a medium of perception
as well, and the reactions to the weather reach deep under one’s skin into one’s
moodscapes and can even cause psychophysiological ailments such as pain
complaint, migraine, deficit of concentration, blood pressure disorder, etc. Be-
sides, reactions to the weather are to some extent culturally encoded: dressing
and undressing, the aesthetic value of sun exposure, and so on. Whether or not
we talk about the somatic effects of the weather, all these reactions obey more
or less implicit rules. Habits are shaped by climate, culture, historical epoch,
social structure, as well as age and gender. All these layers influence the expe-
rience, discourse and theory of the weather. To take an example, sweating is
natural, but the experience of a sweating techno-crowd in a club in Berlin and
its mention in an academic publication6 become sociocultural phenomena.
Surprisingly enough, such experiences have mostly passed unnoticed so far
both in phenomenology and in the developing field of somaesthetics, which
has focused “on skills rather than (or, at least, more than) experiences,”7 a focus
which explains also its emphasis on performing practices in arts and everyday
life. My own attempts to open the way for a systematic meteorological aesthet-
ics that would be both grounded in a phenomenological understanding of the
body and would include aspects of a social aesthetics8 overlap with key points
of somaesthetics and can find support therein. This meteorological aesthetics
shares with somaesthetics not only the question of what criteria determine if
a weather event may be considered aesthetic, but also the problem of assign-
ing a soma also to “higher” non-human species, like Shusterman does.9 More-
over, if somaesthetics opposes the superficial obsession with one’s body image
in the eyes of others and instead recuperates self-awareness and somatic
6 Richard Shusterman, Performing Live (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 97.
7 Thomas Leddy, “Shusterman’s Thinking through the Body and Everyday Aesthetics,” Contem-
porary Pragmatism 12 (2015): 85.
8 Madalina Diaconu, “Grasping the Wind? The Aesthetic Participation, between Cognition and
Immersion,” Contemporary Aesthetics 11 (2013),
https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=681; “Longing for
the Clouds – Does Beautiful Weather Have To Be Fine?,” Contemporary Aesthetics 13 (2015),
https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=719; “De caelo urbis.
Zur Bedeutung von Klima und Wetter für das Stadtleben,” Forum Stadt 43, no. 4, “Philosophie
der Stadt,” ed. Jürgen Hasse (2016): 393–407; “Singing (in Several Voices) in the (Same) Rain:
Cultural Symbols and Cognition in the Aesthetics of Weather,” in Aesthetics Today: Contem-
porary Approaches to the Aesthetics of Nature and of Arts, ed. Stefan Majetschak and Anja
Weiberg (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 51–67.
9 Richard Shusterman, “Soma und Psyche,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59, no. 4 (August
2011): 551.
reflection, then sensitivity to weather is also not essentially social-oriented;

when weather negatively affects us, it evidently throws us back into ourselves
and compels us to pay attention to our body. The body consciousness induced
by the weather, beginning with the “feelings of body temperature,”10 implies
a co-evolution with weather conditions: the soma is attuned to atmospheric
fluxes.
Somaesthetics aims at sharpening perceptive self-consciousness in order
to cultivate and meliorate one’s skills, practices and well-being. In the case of
weather, the question arises if this would imply intensifying weather-sensitivity
or rather resorting to therapies that strengthen the immune defense system
and eventually “guide us toward better-use” of ourselves.11 Regarding weather-
practices, one may imagine that the day will come when the “guided walks”
inspired by Lucius Burckhardt’s promenadology will explore also the micro-
climates of a city. Moreover, architects and urban planners would have to con-
sider the synaesthetic implications of the sense of temperature. For example,
sensations of warmth and cold are linked to acoustics (a loud echo within a
building increases the feeling of cold) and to materials (timber and bricks are
warm while white marble and cement are cold), not to mention also the color
and size of spaces. Finally, entire cities may produce quasi-thermic impres-
sions, as when Shusterman compares Jerusalem with a “strange, cold room”12
or the feelings of wide open spaces exposed to sea winds (that I could almost
feel in Berlin despite its landlocked location) or, on the contrary, the sensation
of stickiness in a suffocating Gemeinschaft.13
2 History, Society and Climate
In recent years, natural catastrophes and the public debate on climate change
have compelled urban planners to think about strategies that would help cit-
ies to cope with the effects of climate change, especially floods.14 Before this
return to weather and climate issues, the topic of the relation between city life
and climate was relegated to climatologists and biometeorologists, while aes-
theticians dismissed it as simply a parergon of city life. Philosophers c autiously
10 Richard Shusterman, “Somatic Style,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 2
(Spring 2011): 154.
11 Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 6.
12 Ibid., 108.
13 Cf. ibid., 110.
14 See the special issue “Stadt Klima Wandel” of Dérive: Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung 48 (July
2012).
42 Diaconu
avoided falling back into the old tradition of climatic determinism.15 Apart
from isolated offshoots of climatic determinism with political implications
(e.g. Willy Hellpach and Watsuji Tetsuro in the 1930s), the last century opted
for moderate answers regarding the relationship between climate and social
life. Physical atmospheres determine neither the political system, nor the leg-
islation, nor historical events, but they do favor or inhibit upheavals, wars and
migration waves, including social tensions in the cities. Last, but not least, it is
a commonplace that the cultural agenda of a city and sport events are tightly
linked to the cycle of seasons. In short, the correlation between the climate/
weather and city life falls into one of the following three categories:16
1. Correspondence. Urban bodies are under the weather. Somas do not

only interact with the elements, but they also belong to the world
and are themselves nature. Extreme weather conditions still affect
the urban infrastructure, the individuals’ psychophysical conditions
and their social interactions. Physical atmospheres frame and dif-
fusely pervade urbanity: they do not only make life as such possible,
but for millennia they have also influenced decisions regarding the
founding of a city and conditioned the historic development of cit-
ies, since their economic growth and decay depended on the agri-
cultural fertility of the surroundings or natural catastrophes. Even at
present, climates leave their imprints on patterns of life, consump-
tion, mobility, and leisure, and natural rhythms still condition the
rhythms of urban life.
2. Autonomy and internal differentiation. The topology of any large
city includes specific microclimates, many of which diverge from
the natural climate. This climatic heterotopia brings evidence for a
degree of autonomy of the human lifeworld from nature and repeats
the unity in diversity of the city: Even if the same air circulates
through the city, contemporary metropoles consist to a large extent
of artificial climatic islands. Also, the city is from a meteorological
perspective a sort of plural chronotopia in which different seasons
coexist: autumn in the streets, winter in industrial freezers, hot sum-
mer throughout the year in greenhouses and an eternal cool spring
in office buildings.
3. Combustion point. Increasingly global urbanization combined with
the ideals of lifestyle that prevail in developed countries and the
15 For a historical survey, see Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination (London: Reaktion
Books, 2005).
16 Diaconu, De caelo urbis, 394.
growing world population together threaten to place the atmo-

sphere of Earth “under the human.” The outbreak of the anthropo-
cene poses challenges for architects and urban planners, and the
spreading awareness of climate change has begun to modify some
urbanites’ patterns of living, consuming, thinking and feeling. The
fear of climate change makes us sweat differently on hot summer
days and enjoy the fresh snow differently than before; the sensa-
tions may well remain the same, yet the somatic reflection becomes
infused with moral considerations.
On each of these levels an urban somaesthetics would have to interact with

social, environmental and everyday aesthetics, with environmental psychol-
ogy, medicine, the history of technology, architecture and urban studies. In
particular, the third level transcends the earlier interest of somaesthetics in
a postmodern individual self-cultivation and raises ad liminem the question
of a cosmic somaesthetics, with or independently of the speculations about
the Gaia. The following considerations are confined to the first and second
aforementioned dimensions, which are empirically verifiable and accessible
through first-person analyses based on everyday experience.
3 Climate and Social Practices
The double profile of the soma – as physical object and subject of experience,
as vulnerable living body and intentional agent – is confirmed in relation to
the weather. In general, climate and weather are given conditions that humans
react to both as a species and as individuals. In addition to humans’ biologi-
cal adaptation in the longue durée to their natural environments, civilization
reduces our dependence on the weather, the present state of the human body
benefitting from both. Such shields of civilization against the weather include
patterns of housing, consumption, mobility, leisure, along with specific corpo-
real practices and body extensions or prosthetic devices (clothing, footwear,
umbrellas, etc.).
It suffices to take a look at streetscape photography in order to reconstruct
the weather condition of the moment. A postcard of London in the 1930s (see
Illustration 2.1) shows passersby in suits, with overcoats and umbrellas in their
hands, covered cabs on the streets, and fog in the background. These details al-
low for an approximate “weather report,” which obviously has to consider also
the cultural dressing codes of the time. Another picture (see Illustration 2.2)
was taken in 2006 in Zhuhai, a city in Southern China; the weather must have
been pleasant, since the people are shown eating outside under sun umbrellas
44 Diaconu
Illustration 2.1 A Raphael Tuck postcard from the late 1930s showing Whitehall looking
north.
Illustration 2.2 Street grub in Zhuhai (Guangdong Province, China), 2006.

and wearing short-sleeved T-shirts and sandals. Other details in other images –
water puddles on the pavement, sunglasses or hats and fur coats, flying pa-
pers, stooping pedestrians or smog masks – enable the spectator not only to
stroll like a disembodied eye through unknown cities, but also to decipher
the weather, the season, maybe even the time of day captured by the picture,
and the air quality. Images of relaxed bodies enjoying the weather or strug-
gling against it disclose their double climatic memory: The soma knows how
to protect itself from unfriendly weather and has learned to use the aids of
civilization, like proper clothing or an umbrella held against the wind. Pos-
tures and the direction of the gaze reveal an implicit corporeal knowing, ges-
tures bespeak its collective, cultural and historical knowledge. The individual
is somewhat invisibly backed by all those who invented and transmitted this
heritage over generations and even cultures. According to Jürgen Hasse, even
the typical stances and “styles” of standing and moving, which belong to the
embodied repertories of behavior, are part of a learning of how to cope with
the world, even if they were not learned in a cognitive or formal way, but “in-
tuitively via body communication.”17 Some habits may have been appropriated
in specific professional milieus, like in Hasse’s example of dockworkers who
stand or walk on the jetty in a particular way in order to block off the cold. Still,
the professional experience provides only the circumstance for enacting such
an attitude, given its necessity and usefulness at a certain moment. As a matter
of fact, such habits are universally human, that is to say pre-cultural and pre-
social, and they involve our corporeal communication with the natural envi-
ronment. One feels the cold (fühlen) and therefore feels cold or is affected by
the cold (sich fühlen), a situation that confirms the ambiguous object-subject
status of the body and its implications for our actions. I give orders as a subject
to “my” body as an object to adopt a certain stance in order that my body and
thus I feel comfortable.
Postures and styles of movement represent only a primitive way of block-
ing off some unfriendly weather when out in the open. Humans share with
some animals another shield: housing. The climate influences choices regard-
ing construction materials, the inclination of the roof, the size of the windows,
heating systems, and housing structure, in particular those spaces that make
the transition between indoors and outdoors, like terraces (sheltered or not),
ambulatories, verandas (open or closed), balconies, etc. According to Walter
Benjamin, the first sheltered passages in Paris in the 19th century served to pro-
tect passers-by (i.e. potential shoppers or clients) from unexpected heavy rains
17 Jürgen Hasse, Die Aura des Einfachen. Mikrologien räumlichen Erlebens, Bd. 1 (Munich:
Alber, 2017), 201; my translation.
46 Diaconu
and the mud on the street; this explanation emphasizes the influence of both
weather and socioeconomic factors on architecture.18 In other cases, it suffices
for thermic comfort to use traditional or sophisticated devices, such as shut-
ters, sunshades or even cooling mist devices in summer and heating systems
in winter for terraces of cafés. The urban weather experience is modulated by
technology and absorbed through enculturation up to a point that makes all
this appear “natural.” Somaesthetic reflection could help reveal these cultural
layers.
Climate and weather also explain to a large extent the choice of means
of transportation and in particular whether they are closed or open; that is,
whether or not they protect against the weather and create artificial microcli-
mates. Bicycles, Vespas, and convertibles allow a closer interaction between
bodies in the streets and the surrounding medium. Here again perception is in-
dissolubly linked to affect; think of a light breeze in the midsummer, when the
heat becomes unbearable in the city, or of riding a bike on a “fine day.” If the
weather is the most democratic medium of life, with all citizens sharing
the same weather conditions for centuries (and in some places this is still the
case), then the degree of exposure to the weather nonetheless expressed so-
cial hierarchies. For example, protectively closed means of transportation (like
carriages or sedan chairs) were reserved for the elites. In contemporary cities,
the hierarchies of traffic (organized according to degree of weather exposure)
are to some extent counterbalanced by traffic rules that give priority to pedes-
trians. Finally, another pattern of living that closely follows the weather is the
consumption of beverages and street food: hot in winter, cool in summer. The
tacit memory of the body invoked by Merleau-Ponty reappears with respect to
the weather behavior: If I deliberately take my umbrella when the sky is cloudy
and the weather broadcast announces rain, my soma that is “me” feels like eat-
ing ice-cream or drinking glühwein depending on the season, no matter if my
volitional “I” allows it or not.
The weather, the season and the astronomical length of the day condi-
tion not only patterns of nutrition, but also of leisure in terms of activities
performed indoors or outdoors, mainly in parks and gardens (whose sensory
qualities vary with nature’s rhythms and the weather conditions). Urban stud-
ies and modern art, including cinema, usually concentrate on specific symbols
of city life, such as streetscapes, cafés, theaters and clubs, neighborhoods and
red-light districts. Given its democratic interest in the average multisensory
experience of the city, somaesthetics might privilege other places: parks and
the city waterfront, open-air or indoor swimming pools, the streets between
18 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Bd. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 83.
skyscrapers with their wind-tunnel effect, bridges and entrances to subway

stations where two “weather fronts” (masses of air of different temperature)
collide, pub gardens, greenhouses and ice rinks, spas, etc. All these places have
a different temperature, air circulation and air humidity and build altogether
a specific “climatescape” that can inspire artistic or scientific cartographical
projects regarding a microclimatic atlas of the city. From this perspective, it
is less important if some deviations from the natural weather are intended or
not, if they result from human practices (like restaurant kitchens or dry clean-
ers) or if their microclimates have natural causes (e.g. green areas). Moving
through the city does not simply mean to move on the ground or across the
earth, but rather through the environment19 and to traverse the air masses in
the city – that is, to navigate each day between microclimatic islands.
Besides, the weather condition affects various urban sensescapes: the smell-
scape varies according to temperature, the wind direction and the air humid-
ity; the sound of the rain interferes with the roar of the traffic; the falling snow
leaves the impression of a peaceful silence. Streets are not only multilayered
surfaces to move on, but also tunnels between buildings. The bodies in the
streets are thus immersed in the atmospheric environment, and the weather
experience is far richer than the sight of a sunny or cloudy day and richer even
than one’s tactile sensations in general (temperature, moisture, the “touch” of
the wind). Finally, city life is “under the weather” also with respect to the local-
ization of the focal points of public life. Bodies may gather in coffeehouses or
in open piazzas; they may make commerce under arcades or in sheltered mar-
kets; they may practice sport in fitness centers or prefer jogging in parks, etc.
Whether most physical social encounters occur indoors or outdoors depends
again on the climate, season and the weather. In spite of its emphasis of the
individual experience, somaesthetics should consider that one’s well-being re-
lies on social interactions as well and that “social climate” interacts with the
physical climate, as the double meaning of atmosphere as a physical and psy-
chological phenomenon to which people are attuned indicates. The body of
research on atmospheric experience has been continuously growing during
the past decades, particularly in the theory of architecture and urban stud-
ies.20 However, the deliberate production of atmospheric effects in the open
19 Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing, knowing,” The
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: “Making knowledge” (2010): S121–S139.
20 Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre
(Munich: Fink, 2001); Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (Farn-
ham: Ashgate, 2010); The International Ambiances Network. On the perception of atmo-
spheric theories in post-critical architecture see also Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics
48 Diaconu
cannot succeed without taking into account the very physical, i.e. natural,
atmosphere a city is geographically embedded in. For example, the best archi-
tectural project will never be able to give a plaza al fresco the same importance
in Northern countries as in Spanish or Italian cities. A mild climate stimulates
social encounters outdoors and inspires various social practices such as prom-
enading, attending open-air festivals, or chatting in the shade on the terrace of
a café, not to mention children playing outside. During a trip to Norway, the
mountainous landscape reminded Benjamin of Rome, yet the city remained “a
Nordic one” and hardly provided any places to linger outside, not even in the
small gardens in front of the houses.21 The vitality of the outdoor life is condi-
tioned by weather and season: the life of places, like that of people, obeys such
rhythms.
4 Urban Rhythms and Body Time
Commonly, the weather has been used as a symbol of inescapable transience,

which even made philosophers coin the expression “cosmic weather” for the
radical contingency and meaninglessness of life.22 For Benjamin, too, the
weather is exemplary for the ephemerality of life, like an “index of the state of
this world.”23 The dynamics of the weather can be transferred also to the inde-
fatigable motion of urban life. Throughout history, cities resemble a sky that
relentlessly encounters countless generations of residents and survives them
all like a sort of background. On the one hand, a deserted city is no real city, but
only its shadow, like Syria’s 700 “Dead Cities” or “Forgotten Cities.” On the other
hand, no city can be reduced to the sum of its actual inhabitants, and every city
with a certain history is “haunted” periodically by the memory of its revolu-
tions and victims. No city ever remains the same, just like the sky itself, as Italo
Calvino remarked about one of his fictitious “invisible cities.”24 At the same
and Architecture: A Critical Option,” in Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 231–232.
21 Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße. Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe 8 (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2009), 124.
22 This metaphor of Chauncey Wright’s is quoted by William James and then taken up again
by Vincent Colapietro, “The Weather World of Human Experience,” The Journal of Specu-
lative Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2015): 25–40.
23 Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, 67; my translation.
24 Italo Calvino, Die unsichtbaren Städte (Munich: Hanser, 1977), 162.
time, urban life has its own regularities, and Henri Lefebvre’s project of rhythm
analysis emphasized how physical-cosmic, physiological and social aspects in-
terlock to produce an “interaction between the repetitive and the rhythmic.”25
In this approach, the somaesthetic dimension becomes once more crucial, the
living body being regarded as the locus where specific natural-physiological
and socio-cultural rhythms interact.26 No matter how far modern civiliza-
tion has reached in disconnecting humans from natural rhythms (think of
the nightlife of the city or the flowering calendar of greenhouses), the school
holidays still follow seasonal cycles, and the working hours in most professions
correspond to day and night rhythms and occasionally even to the daily curves
of temperature (e.g. siesta). If contemporary trends are moving toward the goal
of flexible working programs that are adapted to the individual’s biorhythms,
we do not yet find regulations relating to meteosensitivity (apart from some
exceptional cases). This is probably because of the great variability of individ-
uals’ sensitivity to weather and the current limitations of our knowledge of
biometereology.
The individual strategies of adapting to the weather (sleeping longer, air-
conditioned offices, casual dressing style, siesta) diversify even more the poly-
rhythmicity of modern cities. Metropoles become a sort of baroque collective
soma, the rhythms of which can be logged and objectified, as already in 1929 by
Dziga Vertov in the documentary The Man with the Camera. From the perspec-
tive of a social aesthetics, each season spawns specific practices and “rituals,”
like assaulting the gelaterias or deserting the city in the summer for the Som-
merfrische. The summer in the city has even inspired popular songs that con-
trast the day life with the night life, the “hot town” with the “cool town” as two
“different worlds”: By day, streets are populated by “people looking half dead,”
sweating and “walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.”27 In the
late evening and the night there are different dress codes than there are for the
day, and the almost somnambulistic walking of lonely, misanthropic strangers
exposed to the day heat transforms itself in the evening into an dance with a
lovely partner as the symbolic prelude for the sexual dance. Climatic rhythms
and weather pervade social practices and human interactions, penetrating
into the most intimate fields of the soma.
25 Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier, “The Rhythmanalytical Project,” Rethinking Marx-
ism 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 7.
26 Cf. ibid., 11.
27 Joe Cocker, “Summer in the City.”
50 Diaconu
5 Moving around, Walking and Running
The flâneur was the hero of urban studies during the last few decades, but
most analyses neglected, in Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s footsteps, the fact that
strolling is an embodied experience and focused instead on the visual spectacle
of the street, on cultural, socio-economic and racial aspects and even on the
flâneur’s gender. Moreover, bodies in the streets may be visually impaired, may
sit in a wheelchair, may hurry to work or have to move up and down, on stairs
and in elevators, through a three-dimensional city.28 If, according to Shuster-
man, somaesthetics should emphasize not only body-conscious design, but
also “les petites pathologies,” that is, “the common ailments of ordinary, basi-
cally well-functioning people,”29 then it should pay attention also to people
who move around not always in the best physical condition or at the optimum
age. No matter how typical strolling may be in modern city life, pedestrian pat-
terns of movement are subject to unusual changes under specific weather con-
ditions. For example, walking converts into a dance not only in hot summer
nights, when bodies awake from lethargy, but also when the pedestrian slips on
ice or tries to avoid rain puddles or being spattered by passing cars. When the
weather conditions change the properties of the ground, walking and driving
can become adventurous. It is not necessary here to invoke the symbolism of
dancing in the rain – whether as an expression of love, like in the American
film Singing in the Rain or as an expression of cosmic fertility like in Bollywood
cinema.30 The pedestrian surprised by sudden rain involuntarily adapts her
rhythm of walking to the rhythm of the falling rain and even flees to a refuge
at a speed that reflects the intensity of the rain. When the weather produces
arrhythmia in the collective “soma” of the city life, perturbing the rhythms
of the traffic and causing all sort of desynchronizations, the perception of
time and space itself changes. Not only do bodies look different (less smart
and rigid) and interact differently (physical proximity is no taboo anymore
when it comes to sharing a tiny shelter), but also the topology of the space is
reinterpreted in the light of the exposure to the weather. The intentional “I”
revaluates the environment in terms of adequacy and recalculates routes of
walking. The “open” imposes its own order, and the everyday rules of urbanity
recede into the background. The imperative of efficiency is subordinated to
28 Madalina Diaconu, “Hautstadt. Eine Dermatologie des urbanen Raums” and “Der blinde
Flaneur,” in Sinnesraum Stadt. Eine multisensorische Anthropologie (Berlin: Lit, 2012),
99–139.
29 Shusterman, “Soma, Self, and Society,” 324.
30 Diaconu, “Singing (in Several Voices) in the (Same) Rain.”
somatic convenience; the pyramid of priorities is reordered, and the body in

the background31 comes to the fore, claiming its rights. The clock of social time
follows the incorruptible physical time; the most impatient citizen is com-
pelled to relearn waiting and even to indulge oneself in meditation. Any incon-
venient weather reminds the urbanite of her inescapable belonging to nature
and rewrites the experience of space, time, movement, and the social other.
From a frame or décor, the weather becomes for a short time the scriptwriter
of the play of urban life.32 The improvisations of the weather call for equally
spontaneous, flexible and creative answers from the somatic actors.
Pedestrians and bike riders are always exposed to the weather. As David Le
Breton writes, “To walk is to confront the heat, the cold, the wind, the rain; the
city presents the skin with a tactility that changes according to the moments
of the day and the seasons, but also according to the individual’s physical con-
dition: tired, feverish, enlivened by the sun or a shower.”33 One special case of
pedestrian locomotion is running. In its various forms (of jogging or sprint-
ing), running is considered the most accessible of sports, and its popularity
is typical for contemporary city culture in the West. These reasons make it a
good topic for analyzing the correlation between atmospheric condition and
somaesthetics. Usually, research focuses on topics of the kinematic descrip-
tion of running as an alternation between stance and swing, on good running
techniques and their consequences regarding performance and injury risks, on
running’s benefits for health and on nutrition recommendations.
The biochemistry of running is however relevant for the somaesthetics of
weather because running is accompanied by heat production and the exchange
of thermic energy with the environment. From a scientific perspective, most
chemical energy liberated during running is heat: “the direction of heat ex-
change between the body and the environment depends on skin temperature
and climatic conditions,” and the “evaporation of sweat is […] the only avail-
able avenue of heat loss.”34 Moreover, the rate of heat production depends on
the metabolic rate and the running distance. Hyperthermia and dehydration
cause major problems to runners, including heat exhaustion, heatstroke and
collapse “most often on hot days, but even at moderate (23°C) environmental
31 Richard Shusterman, “The Body as Background,” in Knowing without Thinking: Mind, Ac-
tion, Cognition, and the Phenomenon of the Background, ed. Zdravko Radman (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 206–223.
32 Diaconu, “De caelo urbis,” 400.
33 David Le Breton, Eloge de la marche (Paris: Métailié, 2000), 142; editor’s translation.
34 Ronald J. Maughan, “Physiology and biochemistry of middle distance and long distance
running,” in Handbook of Sports Medicine and Science, Running, ed. John A. Hawley
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 24.
52 Diaconu
temperatures.”35 High levels of temperature and humidity are most dangerous

for severe hyperthermia, while a low ambient temperature turns out to be op-
timal (albeit always in combination with other factors, such as exercise dura-
tion, running speed, wind velocity, clothing and the individual’s physiological
conditions). Such research that is focused on improving running performance
is relevant not only for the performative dimension of somaesthetics but also
more generally as it emphasizes how somas, as material bodies, have a measur-
able temperature whose excesses affect body consciousness and well-being.36
On one hand, the body is thus regarded as a running machine that has to be
properly maintained, which explains why rules of nutrition are called “fueling
or loading strategies.”37 On the other hand, the same running machine has to
be guaranteed a “gastrointestinal comfort,”38 which implies a sentient, living
body. Weather is important also for nutrition, as “fluid intake” is essential es-
pecially when competitions take place in hot conditions.39 As the sweat rate
increases in hot and humid conditions, so its functioning is improved through
previous heat acclimatization. If somatic knowledge of running is a combina-
tion of “science and practice to assist runners to be healthy, train effectively
and compete optimally,”40 then its focus is more on the somaesthetics of per-
formance than on representational somaesthetics. Studies of the biochemistry
of movement show that the living body is in itself a sort of “weather-world.”
One can regulate one’s own body temperature by deliberate performative acts
of physical exercise, and mild exercise optimizes the “stability” of the biologi-
cal system, including the immune system.41
6 Inner weather-worlds
Sport has the reputation of bringing benefits not only for one’s physical condi-
tion, but also for emotional stability and mental health. Somaesthetics corre-
spondingly should consider people who are physically and psychosomatically
oversensitive to weather, a phenomenon known in German as Wetterfühligkeit,
35 Ibid.
36 Insufficient hydration in hot and humid weather causes not only thermoregulatory and
cardiovascular strain, but increases also the feelings of effort.
37 Louise M. Burke, “Nutrition for runners,” in Handbook of Sports Medicine and Science, 63.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 70.
41 Timothy D. Noakes, “Medical considerations for runners,” in Handbook of Sports Medicine
and Science, 75.
Wetterempfindlichkeit, Meteoropathie and Meteorotropismus. For such individ-

uals, weather causes ailments irrespective of their being outdoors or indoors;
not even the air-conditioning can hinder the weather’s intrusion into their so-
mas. This correspondence between the outer and the inner “weather-worlds”
has been remarked on already in antiquity, both in the West (Hippocrates) and
in the East (Mesopotamia, China), but it became the subject of modern scien-
tific investigation only in the 20th century, with the essential contribution of
Carl Dorno in Davos.42 Contemporary biometeorology distinguishes between
Wetterfühligkeit and Wetterempfindlichkeit: in the first case the weather causes
subjective disturbances (fatigue, bad temper, general lack of motivation and
lethargy, dizziness, depressive state, irascibility, forgetfulness), while the sec-
ond term implies the weather’s intensification of physical symptoms that were
caused by accidents, surgery, and disease (both acute and chronic). Research
reveals that stable fine weather that is typical for the beginning of summer is
likely to be best for health. This finding may well interest somaesthetics too,
because of the correlation between the common understanding of a “beautiful
day”43 and the phenomenology of the living body. Of course, weather sensitiv-
ity is not confined to city life, which is typically more shielded from the weath-
er. However, meteoropathy is generally attributed to a way of life that reduces
the amount of time spent outdoors and thus weakens the immune system and
the natural thermoregulation and endurance of the body.
Well-being and health can be influenced by five sets of weather parame-
ters: thermic (temperature, wind and humidity), actinic (light and radiation),
chemical (air quality), neurotropic (as an effect of weather changes) and, final-
ly, electric (in terms of the electric and electromagnetic properties of the air).44
To be more specific, individuals are affected by low pressure areas, weather
change and colliding weather fronts, by cold and cold surge, as well as by strong
heat, heatwaves, closeness, storm, föhn, fog, inversion, and air pollution.45 Let
me take again the example of thermoregulation, which (along with the sense
of temperature) has not formed a significant focus of phenomenological de-
scriptions. From a biological perspective, the p henomenon of thermoregu-
lation refers to the maintenance of a stable temperature of a living body by
42 Angela Schuh, Biowetter. Wie das Wetter unsere Gesundheit beeinflusst (Munich: C.H. Beck,
2007), 10.
43 In extenso on the aesthetic interpretation of “beautiful weather,” see Diaconu, “Longing
for the Clouds.”
44 Alexander Keul, “Wetter, Klima, Klimatisierung,” in Wohlbefinden in der Stadt. Umwelt-
und gesundheitspsychologische Perspektiven, ed. Alexander Keul (Weinheim: Beltz pvu,
1995), 155–171.
45 Schuh, Biowetter, 15.
54 Diaconu
balancing the overheating of the body with its cooling. A natural mechanism
to cool the living body is to sweat, again a topic that was de facto taboo in
philosophy due to the cultural codes of Western modernity. Thermoregulation
and sweat are measurable, but they designate also qualitative experiences in
which self-perception and affect are inextricably linked. On one hand, sweat-
ing produces relief, because its evaporation cools the overheated body; on the
other hand, social and cultural codes make one feel ashamed and guilty when
this body mechanism becomes visible to others and is not intended (in con-
trast to its role in the sauna). We know how codes of civility evolved over his-
tory46 and cause particularly intense emotions in the upper and middle classes
of city dwellers. When the evaporation of sweat (and consequent cooling of
the body) becomes difficult, as in hot, humid climates, individuals compensate
in various ways such as adapting their clothing, modes of location, and body
posture.
Whereas strong heat affects the blood pressure, the heart and the vascu-
lar system, strong cold, especially if accompanied by humidity, causes pains
of the locomotor system. As atmospheric pressure can influence blood pres-
sure, so air pollution affects the respiratory system and aggravates allergies.
Some studies show that electromagnetic radiation (called also “atmospherics”
or “spherics”) hinders brain activity. In short, all these weather factors affect
one’s health, well-being, power of concentration, and capabilities in general.
Moreover, seasonal weather rhythms may cause dysfunctions. Common ex-
pressions like winter blues or “Frühjahrsmüdigkeit” confirm the prevalence of
meteoropathy, even only as Wetterfühligkeit. It is generally assumed that in-
dividuals who overreact to the weather pay much more attention to their so-
matic perceptions than the rest; in fact, the statistics regarding the frequency
of meteoropathy47 are based precisely on the patients’ self-assessment and
thus on their body consciousness. Unfortunately, medical research in this area
has only coded questionnaire information from these individuals, without pro-
viding descriptions of their experience. The collection and the philosophical
analysis of such experiential reports would be a future task for somaesthetics
and the phenomenology of body. Interestingly, medical recommendations for
46 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Un-
tersuchungen, Bd. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997).
47 According to researchers, about 50 percent of the population of Germany is oversensitive
to the weather, and approximately 25 percent of Germans feel imminent weather change
anywhere from a few hours up to three days in advance. Ten percent of the German popu-
lation is even “wetterempfindlich” and needs specific medical treatment (cf. Schuh, Bio-
wetter, 56, 62).
a lleviating the effects of Wetterfühligkeit include moderate physical exercises

and activities in the open air in order to train one’s stamina and thermoregu-
lation, along with techniques of relaxation and an orderly daily program of
activity that would be adapted to the chronobiologic rhythms.48 Although
biologically anchored, such weather effects are also conditioned by the social
interaction of city life. For example, statistics confirm the higher risk of traffic
accidents in conditions of high temperatures, föhn, or before and during strong
weather changes (and not only because of restricted visibility). Moreover, ex-
cessive heat raises the level of aggressiveness, even to the point of prompting
absurd crimes, like in Camus’ novel The Stranger. Even the suicide rate varies
with the weather and the season, and reaches its peak during high tempera-
tures and in the early summer, irrespective of the latitude. Exclusively rational
explanations fall short for such situations.
7 Social Hierarchy, Politics and Technology
In general, the way citizens’ bodies interact with urban structure and city life
goes far beyond biological needs. It reaches deeper levels of embeddedness in
situational atmospheres. Urban bodies, like bodies of higher animal species in
general, still react in various degrees to weather conditions, and not even the
best isolated climatic capsules can completely suppress this dependency. The
physical atmosphere both unites and divides the citizenry. On the one hand,
we all share the same medium of life; air and light belong to us in common.
Democratic politics should guarantee as far as possible the free access of all
citizens to these resources of corporeal well-being and health. On the other
hand, our affordances for reacting to the weather are definitely conditioned by
social status in stratified communities like cities. Environmental factors even
influence real estate prices, and the varying levels of climatic comfort in differ-
ent residential districts reflect relations of power. Whether bodies live in green
districts or in compact, built areas and whether they have access to gardens,
parks, and ponds, or have to live on the last floor of prefabricated buildings,
all reflect and tend to reproduce socioeconomic inequalities and sometimes
even ethnic or racial discrimination. The “droit à la ville” claimed by Lefebvre49
should include the right to climatic comfort. If the weather is in itself “demo-
cratic,” the politics of urban space will still have to consider specific climatic
aspects when it comes to protecting citizens from weather excesses through
48 Ibid., 90 and passim.

49 Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville. Espace et politique (Paris: Anthropos, 1974).
56 Diaconu
work, architectural, or financial regulations or by maintaining the existing

green belts of some cities with the aid of construction bans. Whether at their
homes, at offices, or in the streets, somas are not only affected subjects, but
also agents of political decisions.
One may object, however, that the universal remedy for this inequality is
simply technological. In the 19th century, when trust in science reached its
peak, people in the West dreamt of defeating, reshaping, and replacing natural
weather with artificial climates. Since then technology has not only improved
historically familiar climatic heterotopias like spas, conservatories, and green-
houses, but also allowed for the emergence of new climatic capsules, such as
the enormous indoor ski parks in Arab countries. The invention of air condi-
tioning in 1902 in New York has so far had the farthest-reaching implications
for urban life in the past century.50 Air conditioning made possible not only a
better conservation of food, but also better indoor air quality, first in indus-
trial sites and places of assembly, like theatres, cinemas, concert halls, and
shopping malls, – all typically urban institutions – and then (starting with the
economically privileged) in private spaces. The spreading of air conditioning
in the private sector after World War ii was not only democratic, but became
an important factor of civilization and urbanization worldwide. For example,
entire urban settlements could be established in physical environments where
the natural climate had made it impossible before, like South Florida, the “Sun-
belt” 51 and Singapore.52 This revolutionary technology enabled countries with
tropical climates and the nations of the global South in general to cope with
the development of the industrialized world. On a more general level, artificial
climates became instruments of justice in international relations.
Unfortunately for somaesthetic diversity, however, air conditioning, along
with the internationalist style of modern architecture, simultaneously in-
creased the homogenization of natural places. The biometeorologists’ rec-
ommendation to use clothing that makes one feel “slightly cool” (known in
the literature as a “cool body shell”)53 seems most suitable precisely for air-
conditioned spaces. Once again it turns out that somaesthetics is closely
linked to social aesthetics in urban matters. Modern technology transformed
cities worldwide into archipelagos of air-conditioned islands, transforming
movement through the city from the earlier flâneur’s strolling into the transfer
50 Cf. Diaconu, De caelo urbis, 404.

51 Gail Cooper, Air Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–
1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
52 Cherian George, Singapore, the Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort
and Control (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000).
53 “Kühle Körperschale” (Schuh, Biowetter, 115).
of bodies from one air-conditioned space into another. Bodies in the streets
that are directly exposed to weather are more and more becoming the excep-
tion in some cities, while urban life and downtown strolling are increasingly
relocated within air-conditioned shopping malls – an alarming phenomenon
which makes some fear the end of urbanity. Whereas meteoropathy is strictly
individual, air-conditioning technology homogenizes indoor climates and
contributes to the emergence of a monolithic global city culture and corre-
spondingly standardized global urban somas. While meteoropathy illustrates
the fragility of the natural body and its involuntary correspondence with the
elements, air conditioning is paradigmatic for climatic voluntarism and the
formation of a cultural, normalized body ever more removed from the chang-
ing natural weather forces that alter its feelings and behavior. One may even
speculate that the control of the city’s climate goes hand in hand with the con-
trol of its citizens and that this liberation of bodies from the climate has a
counterpart in subjecting our somas to standardization motivated by the im-
peratives of total efficiency and smooth functionalism of seamlessly similar
feelings. This obviously differs from the interest of somaesthetics in individual
body awareness and the melioration of habits by cultivating an appreciation
of differences in somatic feelings. A somaesthetic approach to the weather
experience should include not only descriptions of experiences and recom-
mendations for individual improvement, but should also take into account
biopolitics or, alternatively, somapolitics.54 Moreover, it should prevent its
underlying philosophical pragmatism from being perverted into a narrowly
utilitarian ethos, a technocratic ideology, and a rigid moralism of maximal
functionality. Confronted with the ambivalence of this technological develop-
ment, somaesthetics would have to support the right of the bodies to take to
the streets and defend their “privilege” to function imperfectly, be affected by
weather changes, and to enjoy sunny skies, but also to enjoy stormy weather
when bodies in the street can dance in the rain.
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Chapter 3
White on Black: Snow in the City, Skiing in

Copenhagen
Henrik Reeh
1 To Know or Not to Know the City
When does it make sense to say that one “knows the city?” One will soon be
able to find one’s way and establish some kind of spatial survey, but it requires
more to feel informed about social structures and cultural habits. This de-
mands experience and social praxis that go far beyond matters of topography.
Urban knowledge involves so much more than spatial recognition that the very
ambition of genuinely knowing the city is sometimes considered a utopia, a
guiding star in the sky of academia and planning alike, but a star that will shine
forever without being fully reached.
It may be less risky to say when one can be sure of not knowing the city, be it
a particular one or the city as a more general phenomenon. Such an approach
finds a point of departure in Walter Benjamin, who (in 1927) claimed: “no one
knows the city who has not known it in snow.”1 Knowing a city covered by
snow seems to be a condition which should be fulfilled – a step, at least, in the
right direction for those who, like Benjamin, associate knowledge of the city
with sensory experience. But the sentence quoted is sufficiently general to be
applicable to other cities where snow is either an irregular event or a frequent
meteorological feature.
In either case, the transformation of precipitation from raindrops into
snowflakes, from transparent liquid into white crystals adds a particular di-
mension to life in the city and thereby brings about new facets of city knowl-
edge. The crystalline whiteness of snow is a decisive quality insofar as it makes
the city appear not as black-and-white but rather as white-on-black. Due to the
accumulation of snow, there will soon be practical issues to address in order
to ensure the safety of urban movements, on feet or on wheels. In fact, private
and public actors are legally obliged to transform a skin of slippery snow and
1 Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–
1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 44.

White on Black: Snow in the City, Skiing in Copenhagen 61
ice into surfaces on which boots and tyres will have a safe grip. In situations
involving thick layers of snow, it becomes relevant to question one’s way of lo-
comotion. Be it for joyful play or practical movement, lasting snow offers itself
as a support of skis, sleds and sleighs. Yet these means of transportation remain
exceptions in a cityscape dominated by pedestrians and vehicles of all sorts.
Accordingly, the idea would rarely occur to adopt the medium of skis (let alone
sleighs or ice skates) as an alternative way of moving about in a modern city.
As pointed out by Marshall McLuhan, “skis preceded wheels.”2 Skis depend on
a sliding and abrasive technology (supported by poles prolonging the arms of
the human body), which make them capable of moving safely on snow. And
even slow skiing is faster than ordinary walking.
In the coastal climate of Denmark (situated between Germany to the South
and Norway-Sweden to the North, the North Sea to the West and the Baltic
to the East), snow and skiing are increasingly exceptional. The idea of winter
periods with snow and frost every year is long gone. Therefore it is such an
overwhelming experience when huge masses of snow, after weeks with nega-
tive temparatures, suddenly fall and radically transform both countryside and
cityscapes for a couple of days, before the weather finally switches to tempera-
tures above the freezing point. On such an occasion, so much snow is falling
upon Copenhagen, the Danish capital, that it is possible, for the first time in
my adult life, to go skiing in the streets – not only in the parks or in the subur-
ban woods, but in the city intra muros.
I spontaneously make the experiment late at night and get a completely
altered experience of this city, that I know well (too well?) from my everyday
movements across and in it. Upon returning home after my urban skiing ex-
periment, I feel a mental necessity of trying to translate these nightly hours
of skiing in the streets into written words. On the following day, the process of
writing progressively evolves into an equally insistent idea, that of mimetically
walking the same itinerary. This time I am not equipped with skis (it is no lon-
ger possible to ski since the snow starts to melt and, more seriously, the snow
has been eliminated by municipal engines and employees all day). Instead, I
bring a newly acquired digital camera – my first one. Will it be possible, by way
of photography, to study and capture the urban snowscape twenty-four hours
after skiing in this strange somaesthetic environment?
There would be much to say about cities and snow. Quite a bit has already
been written by Walter Benjamin, who writes about snow from a visit to
Moscow but also from his childhood memories of Berlin, where snow seems
2 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1965 [1964]), 181.
62 Reeh
to be both indoors and outdoors, intimate and collective, and suggestive of an

altogether intriguing experience. The following pages are divided into six short
chapters. After a photograph of urban snow, encountered during my night ski-
ing experience but captured twenty-four hours later, each chapter presents, in
italics, the notes which resulted from my skiing observations in the city.3 The
second part of each chapter brings quotes on snow by other authors, especially
Benjamin, to form a montage on which I comment, thus creating a dialog on
urban snow and skiing as a somaesthetic environment.
2 State of Exception
A dream comes true. Snow is pouring out of the skies, and it piles up as a thick
layer in the streets. The sledges have come out and taken over the city wall park,
Illustration 3.1 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, i. 2003

Digital photograph
3 A Danish version of those notes was published as Henrik Reeh, “Sne,” in Forskønnelsens Kort
over København & Omegn 2010: 125 års jubilæumspublikation, Foreningen til Hovedstadens
Forskønnelse 1885–2010, ed. Simon Harboe and Helle Rafn (Copenhagen: Forlaget Victor B.
Andersens Maskinfabrik, 2010), 32–35, with fourteen photographs by the author.
which is full of yelling children and helpful parents, until long after dinner time.
The street sweepers have given up, and the television news repeats police warn-
ings, that urge people to avoid all unnecessary driving. In the meantime, seen in
the glare of street lights, the snow is falling even more wildly. Cars and bicycles are
out of action. Now it is time to find one’s cross-country skis, and to see where they
will take you. The simple idea of skiing through the inner city excites the body,
tired at the end of the Christmas holidays. Go outside; go out into the night, out in
the wind, out through swarms of snowflakes.
Skis are rarely useful in this city, but tonight they are just fine. Halfway between
a means of transportation and a human prosthesis, skis are now fixed to a citizen –
me; a citizen who is dressed up in his winter coat on top of a Norwegian sweater;
a citizen who is wearing woolen pants, and a scarf, and on his head, a cap with
ear muffs, held back in the wind by yet another scarf. Classic leather ski boots and
cable fastenings attach this cushioned body to a pair of skis. Moreover, the skier
carries bamboo ski poles which help him to maintain a vertical position, and to
move forward. By now, the night belongs to the city, to the skis and to this strange
body en route.
…
One doesn’t have to be out-of-doors in order to realize the profound changes
brought about by the sudden masses of snow in the city. Visual appearances
suffice and make indoor people notice snow, and sometimes they even note
it in writing. This is what happens to Roland Barthes, French writer and se-
miologist, in his intimate notes from the time following his mother’s death.
Meticulously dated, they are published as a posthumous Journal de deuil: Diary
of Mourning. On February 12, 1978 Barthes writes: “Snow, a real snowstorm over
Paris; strange. I tell myself, and suffer for it: she will never again be here to see
it, or for me to describe it for her.”4 Impressed by the great amount of snow in-
vading the city, he suffers because he would have loved to share this experience
of snow – visually, verbally and sentimentally – with his mother. For Barthes,
the snow covering Paris inspires a particular atmosphere, not limited to the
streets, but pervading life indoors and even one’s inner feelings. As if by magic,
the modified cityscape outside generates new meanings inside, bringing a con-
vergence of external and internal life. Four days later, Barthes records another
day of snow: “This morning, more snow, and lieder broadcast on the radio.
How sad! – I think of the mornings when I was sick and didn’t go to school, and
4 Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 93.
64 Reeh
when I had the joy of staying with her.”5 Curiosity and fascination inspired by
the snow give birth to intimate thoughts. Reinforced by romantic music on the
radio, the winter snow comes to signify melancholy, and it nourishes nostalgia
of a communal life with the mother during childhood and, until quite recently,
in their shared Paris apartment. In sum, the city covered by snow favors an
interior romanticism.
Abundant snow presents no physical threat to people inside modern apart-
ments. However, snow is a sensory challenge: a visual attraction but also a
mental distraction. Just as snow takes Barthes back to his childhood, snowfall
in the city becomes a powerful theme in Walter Benjamin’s memories from his
metropolitan upbringing:
While reading, I would cover my ears. Hadn’t I already listened to stories

in silence like this? Not those told by my father, of course. But sometimes
in winter, when I stood by the window in the warm little room, the snow-
storm outside told me stories no less mutely.6
After reading in a seated position, the child stands up, leaves the book and
its typographic units and, instead, concentrates on the swirling snowflakes
in the blizzard outside. The snowflakes add up to a mute yet immediate lan-
guage which is all time and process, sensation and imagination. The dynam-
ics of snow allows for an ornamental reflection to unfold and to escape fixed
meanings:7
What it told, to be sure, I could never quite grasp, for always something
new and unremittingly dense was breaking through the familiar. Hardly
had I allied myself, as intimately as possible, to one band of snowflakes,
than I realized they had been obliged to yield me up to another, which
had suddenly entered their midst.8
A semiotic metamorphosis takes place thanks to the snow and its plurality of
movements that the child attempts to follow optically from behind the win-
dow pane. It is as if a communion unfolds between the chaotic currents of
5 Ibid., 94.
6 Walter Benjamin, “Boys’ Books,” in Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland, in Se-
lected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 356.
7 On ornamental self-reflection, see Henrik Reeh, Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kra-
cauer and Modern Urban Culture (Cambridge: The mit Press, 1994).
8 Walter Benjamin, “Boys’ Books,” 356.
snow and the innumerable letters and stories in the books. Snow and graphics
merge in a twin appeal, both visual and sensory, to the interiority of the met-
ropolitan child:
But now the moment had come to follow, in the flurry of letters, the sto-
ries that had eluded me at the window. The distant lands I encountered
in these stories played familiarly among themselves, like the snowflakes.
And because distance when it snows, leads no longer out into the world
but rather within, so Baghdad and Babylon, Acre and Alaska, Tromsö and
Transvaal were places within me.9
An imaginary cosmopolitanism seems to be at play in the sensory and semi-

otic interiority of the urban child. It is as if snow prefigures a new human lan-
guage which overcomes the dispersion and alienation of languages after Babel.
Does snow carry a utopian potential? Is snow to be experienced as a pure and
intense language, associated with the “reine Sprache” – pure language – that
Benjamin conceived of in his early philosophy of language?10 The young reader
puts his boys’ books aside and gives in to the incessantly mobile snowflakes in
the outdoor blizzard. Still, the child never considers the possibility of leaving
the parental apartment for a moment, in order to explore the bodily and spa-
tial potentials of snowy streets.
3 The Physics of Snow
To skiers, the city is accessible only if there is a sufficient layer of snow. On this late
evening, there is snow everywhere; on sidewalks, on bicycle paths, in covered pas-
sageways uniting street gates and courtyards. On the other hand, snow is a ma-
terial which comes in different forms: from thin layers to drifts, from untouched
surfaces to heavily walked or swept masses. In a movement which occasionally
resembles walking, the urban skier comes across various sorts of snow, which are
not all optimal. Indeed, the city offers a kind of resistance, which has to do less
with hills or traffic, than with the strange physics and topology of snowflakes.The
snow is nearly untouched in many courtyards, opening behind the urban façades.
The layers of snow get deeper the more one advances into these semi-private
spaces. Their existence might have been obvious but, so far, these places remained
9 Ibid.
10 See Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” in
Gesammelte Schriften, ii (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 140–156.
66 Reeh
Illustration 3.2 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, ii. 2003

Digital photograph
unexplored. In the night hours with a whirlpool of snow, there is no reason to be

anxious of meeting people’s defensive gazes or their aggressive reactions; every-
body is indoors. There is not a single trace of cars in these inner courtyards which,
on this night, look like genuine stagesets. The way back into the street is simply to
follow one’s own tracks which now serve as a piste.
On most sidewalks which haven’t yet been cleaned, the movement of the skis is
smooth. The snow surface may be uneven, but it is solid. Even without having been
greased, the skis progress rapidly; sometimes they move so fast that the points of
the ski poles seem to break. Time and again, they remain fixed between cobble-
stones or next to sidewalk slabs, hidden under a softening layer of snow. The bi-
cycle paths are less friendly – especially those which have been treated by street
sweapers. Rotating brooms cannot eliminate all of the snow but, meanwhile, they
mix it into a homogeneous, soapy matter, which feels like salt and annoyingly
slows down the speed of the skier.
The snow in certain streets, where only a few cars have been driving, is far bet-
ter suited for urban skiing. Here the skier may occupy the field between the traces
of car tyres and enjoy the car tracks that offer a ski run, until one hears a taxi
approaching from the back. However, as soon as the street sweepers add salt or
gravel, there is nothing the skier can do. In such cases, one has to slip along the
walls of houses, searching for areas of untouched snow that will prevent the fiber-
glass skis from getting scratched. Throughout the night, more and more urban
surfaces fall prey to the brooms. The skier has but a brief time for completing this
inner-urban voyage of discovery.
…
Covering the ground as well as a heterogeneity of roofs and cars, trees and
bushes, snow takes on new qualities in the minds of those people who defy
common sense and quit their position indoors at the window. They are sur-
rounded by the intense, continuous fall of snowflakes as well as by the white
layers already settling. In both cases, the body is mobilized in other ways than
distanced contemplation, because distance to the snow is minimal as one’s
cheeks and feet touch and feel it; and one must relate to it instead in a tactile
way, hoping not to feel cold nor to fall. Snow challenges the eyes as well as the
feet, vision as well as walking. Seeing and tactile feelings of movement and
balance become closely related in the snow-covered city, because one must be
particularly attentive as walking is more difficult, especially when snow turns
to ice. As Benjamin remarks, “At first there is nothing to be seen but snow, the
dirty snow that has already installed itself, and the clean snow slowly moving
up behind. The instant you arrive, the childhood stage begins. On the thick
sheet ice of the streets, walking has to be relearned.”11
Although this city – Moscow – has sidewalks (an invention of the nine-
teenth century), when they are covered with snow and ice they become strik-
ingly narrow. Benjamin notes how ice “forms so thickly along the edges of the
houses that a portion of the sidewalk remains unusable. Nor is there any clear
demarcation between sidewalk and road, because the snow and ice even out
the various levels of the street.”12 Navigating, on a snowy night, such slippery
indeterminate streets that challenge one’s somatic and sensory habits creates
an exciting and unusal somaesthetic experience of city life.13
11 Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” 44. At first, walking in Moscow nearly excludes seeing, not
because of snow but because of the icy sidewalks that require absolute attention. Benja-
min notes in his diary, “During my first few days I am above all struck by the difficulty of
getting used to walking on the sheet ice of the streets. I have to watch my step so carefully
that I cannot look around very much.” See “Moscow Diary,” October 35 (Winter, 1985): 17.
12 Ibid., 17–18.
13 Part of the somaesthetic excitement comes from the fact that we need to pay much more
attention to our proprioceptive feelings of balance and kinaesthesia and how we move
and position our body parts, because we cannot simply rely on our background habits
68 Reeh
In his early urban writings of the 1920s, Walter Benjamin emphasised the
role of bodily energy as a source of “Rausch” – intoxication. Instead of stem-
ming from alcohol or hashish, the intoxication of urban perception results
from physical exercise by way of walking. Continuous walking warms up the
body and establishes a rhythm which comes to govern the bodily movement
of walking. As Benjamin puts it: “An intoxication comes over the man who
walks long and aimlessly through the streets. With each step, the walk takes
on greater momentum; […] ever more irresistible the temptations of the next
streetcorner, of a distant square in the fog, of the back of a woman walking
before him.”14 Increasingly automatic, the rhythm of walking affects both the
act of seeing and the very features that the urban walker – a flâneur – actually
perceives in passing.
Would a similar process take place if civilized walking on two feet are re-
placed by a process of skiing, involving not only legs attached to horizonal
boards, but also ski poles activated by hands and arms? Could it involve the
same degree of automaticity, freeing the skiier to concentrate on his surround-
ings? Unlike skiing on traditional paths in hilly landscapes, skiing in flat cit-
ies is not exhausting and far less demanding than jogging. The skis generally
promote a sliding movement, accelerated by the snow-covered ground which
would seem to prolong and even amplify the the dynamics of flânerie. As in
cycling, the skier advances without ever losing contact with the ground. On the
other hand, urban skiing is closer to walking than to cycling in that it allows
more immediate and nuanced changes of speed and orientation.
The dynamic relationship between the snowy ground and the bodily
rhythm is seductive and happens to make the skier adopt new itineraries; thus
he enters spaces which are overlooked in ordinary life.15 Courtyards are one
of muscle memory in walking. For a discussion of muscle memory, its advantages and
limitations, see Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Psychopathologies of Everyday
Life,” in Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2012), 91–111.
14 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 880. The German original,
“Pariser Passagen ii,” fragment <e°, 1>, is from Walter Benjamin, “Das Passagen-Werk,” in
Gesammelte Schriften, v.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), 1053.
15 In this essay I utilize the rich ambiguity of the term “overlooked” that I explore in Henrik
Reeh, “Four Ways of Overlooking Copenhagen in Steen Eiler Rasmussen,” in The Urban
Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation, ed. Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz
(New York /London: Routledge, 2001), 252–276. This study outlines four different modes
of overlooking. Within the urban realm, planning and police surveillance are intimately
linked to overlooking in the sense of either (1) surveying or (2) controlling. On the other
example, constituting worlds of their own with local qualities that contrast
with the linearity of modern streets. Benjamin writes:
If you pass through any of the large gateways – they often have wrought-
iron gratings, but I never encountered one that was locked – you find
yourself at the threshold of a spacious settlement whose layout is often so
broad and so expansive that it seems as if space cost nothing in this city.
A farm or a village opens out before you. The ground is uneven, children
ride around in sleighs, shovel snow; sheds for wood, tools, or coal fill the
corners, there are trees here and there, primitive wooden stairs or addi-
tions give the sides or backs of houses, which look quite urban from the
front, the appearance of Russian farm houses. The street thus takes on
the dimension of the landscape.16
The mention of children playing in the snow is not arbitrary for urban aesthet-
ics. The great nineteenth-century urban theorist Camillo Sitte singles out the
aesthetically revelatory connections of urban snow and human movement. In
his view, the spatial patterns of children playing indicate to urban designers
exactly where to position urban artworks:
children at play follow unhindered their own artistic instincts […] One
notices something similar with regard to children’s placing of their
monuments. The parallel is to be seen in their favorite winter pastime of
building snowmen. These snowmen stand on the same spots where, un-
der other circumstances …, monuments or fountains might be expected
to be located. How did this placement come about? Very simply. Imag-
ine the open square of a small market town in the country, covered with
deep snow and crisscrossed by several roads and paths that, shaped by
the traffic, form the natural lines of communication. Between them are
left irregularly distributed patches untouched by traffic; on these stand
hand, the verb “to overlook” also has room for another kind of meaning that implies (3)
ignoring, i.e. not noticing and not paying attention to elements of urban reality. As an
urban writer and practitioner, professor Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1898–1990) practices all
of these viewpoints; he even goes beyond the visual focus when he explores auditory or
tactile dimensions in urban life. A fourth and final mode of overlooking, (4) looking-too-
much, may indeed make one conscious of the other sensory practices such as hearing,
touching, and smelling.
16 Benjamin, “Moscow Diary,” 67.
70 Reeh
our snowmen, because the necessary clean snow was to be found only
there.17
Whether in squares or in courtyards, children’s expressive energies uncon-

sciously reactualize the organic logic of space which dates from an era when
human scale and equivalent practices were still dominant in urban design. Ac-
cording to Sitte, this is no longer the case in metropolitan squares which have
been turned into voids by modern traffic.
Courtyards exist in many forms, but all of them accomodate snow. In Ben-
jamin’s Berlin, courtyards are often backyards, where things are hidden or cast
away, where signs of physical and underprivileged life prevail. Nonetheless,
they belong, with the snow, to his sentimental landscape of urban childhood.
I have talked of the courtyards. Even Christmas was fundamentally a fes-

tival of the courtyards. There it began, with the barrel organs, which con-
tinued the week before the festival with chorales, and there it ended with
the Christmas trees, which, bereft of feet, leaned in the snow or glistened
in the rain. But Christmas came, and all at once, before the eyes of the
bourgeois child, it divided his city into two mighty camps.18
The presence of snow invites the skier to move into courtyards that are un-
known, spatially as well as socially. Without the continuity of level and color
that snow provides, the skier would hardly encounter these neglected pres-
ences of the city.
Snow-covered cities are rare, even when snow actually falls. The unevenness
of snow coverage and depth makes the material of snow differ significantly
from earth and stone whose surfaces are much more continuous. Skiing or rid-
ing a sleigh, one soon realizes how a relatively homogeneous layer of snow is
a conditio sine qua non for effective movement and perception. Just as sailing
depends on sufficient depths of water, so skiing and sledging rely on levels and
paths of snow where sliding movements are possible. Even in cities reputed
for the general presence of snow during the wintertime, there is not always
the necessary minimum layer that would make all streets accessible to sleigh
17 Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, in George R. Collins and Chris-
tiane C. Collins, Camillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning, with a Translation of the
1889 Austrian Edition of his City Planning According to Artistic Principles (New York: Rizzoli,
1986), 159–160.
18 Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),
634.
riding. In such cases, new itineraries must be invented – with changing views
of city spaces as a reward. Benjamin writes:
The two of us took a sleigh […]. There was not enough snow on Tverskaia
to allow the sleigh to proceed with any speed. Progress improved on the
side streets: the driver took a route I was unfamiliar with, we passed by a
bathhouse and saw a marvelous out-of-the-way corner of Moscow.19
Once again, as in the case of seductive, snowy courtyards, it is the positive pres-
ence of snow which takes the visitor off the beaten track. Dressed up in white,
this city guides attentive urbanites towards elements of the overlooked city
that the homogeneous spaces and average practices of larger streets would of-
ten hide.
4 New Spaces and Forms
Illustration 3.3 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, iii. 2003

Digital photograph

72 Reeh
The itinerary through the inner city is not much different from that of everyday
movements ( for appointments, work, or shopping). But the ways in which one
moves as a skier are remarkably other. Especially, the bodily effort heats up one’s
attention, so that well-known spaces acquire new looks and new inspections in the
dark. Despite the darkness, the snow absorbs and amplifies any illumination. The
city lights up, becomes brighter than usual, and sometimes even luminous. New
spaces and atmospheres are generated.
The crystals add up to layers, or to genuine snow drifts. These formations have
fine contours, but they are not obeying the horizontal or vertical logic of built
space. Instead, the snow settles obliquely, in cushions or curly forms, with a frag-
ile skin or with a resistant membrane on top. The robust architecture of the city is
now dressed up in an eiderdown. The snow layers may be thick or thin, depending
on the fact whether brooms or traffic already passed over them. Special environ-
ments such as deep courtyards seem to protect their own snowy biotopes. How did
so much snow get in here? Did it blow together, or did it just keep accumulating,
while it soon drifted away in other places?
The snow masses along walls or between cars generate the most fragile forma-
tions one can think of. Steps peek out, or they hide under the snow that also settles
in front of doors at street level. Snow even climbs up the black footing along the
yellow walls of Nyboder, the old residential area of the Navy. Snow fills in, snow
rounds off, snow breaks up the right angles.
The duvets and cushions of snow – which may also look like caps and hats –
cover the cars in the street. Streamlined automobile exteriors are transformed by
harmonizing or swelling forms that soon make it hard to guess the basic form of
the vehicle. The metal of its body disappears under airy and crisp surfaces. And if
the wind intervenes, long, stretched forms are generated that appear nearly coun-
ternatural; this is indeed a kind of nature that depends on frosty weather.
…
Snow and frost are natural phenomena, but when they occur in a city, they im-
mediately acquire an urban-cultural dimension. For Benjamin, “Space literally
changes according to whether it is hot or cold. People live on the street as if in a
frosty chamber of mirrors; each pause to think [jedes Einhalten und Besinnen]
is unbelievably difficult.”20 Instead of preventing the presence of bodies in the
streets, the winter coexists with city life. This implies a mobility amongst those
who know how to walk and to stand upright on snow and ice. However, the
upright motion demands so much energy that the objects along the way are
appropriated visually in a mobile and fluid fashion. This fluidity of the gaze –
20 Benjamin, “Moscow,” 44.

shared by the skier and the cyclist – doesn’t prevent observations from being
both visually precise and verbally accurate. From Moscow Benjamin remarks:
“The snow that night had the sparkle of stars. (On another occasion, I saw
snow crystals on her coat such as probably never occur in Germany.)”21 Sur-
rounded by winter darkness, the snow illuminates urban spatiality as a whole
and transforms dark and narrow features into lighter and larger ones. This
transformation would not be possible without the twin presence of snow as a
simultaneously physical force and socio-cultural environment.
5 Humans in the Night
Quite a few women move around on their own, in this snowy night. The first one
eats fresh snow from the sidewalk of a large street exiting the city center. Another
woman crosses at a red light, and as she sees me skiing, she remarks that this is
indeed a good idea tonight. Smiling in front of a department store on her way
towards a remote destination, a third woman even declares that skiing is the most
Illustration 3.4 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, iv. 2003

Digital photograph

74 Reeh
reasonable thing she has seen all night. A fourth woman, wearing a mink fur coat
and a huge fur hat, keeps walking back and forth in the streets behind the New
Harbour [Nyhavn], saying nothing. A fifth woman, apparenly of African origin,
fights her way against the snow before disappearing into a side street; and there
are still more female walkers outside this evening. All of them direct their gaze
forward and perhaps notice the skier, who glances discreetly back.
On main streets approaching the city center, human bodies walk in the middle
of the street. On a bridge, across a cityscape of railway tracks, a man is walking
his bicycle and not his dog. Discovering the skis, he exclaims that this must be a
far more efficient means of transportation. The weather is extreme, and it favors
verbal exchange between human beings who share a destiny by being outdoors
in the extreme weather of the snowy night. Whereas women are walkers, the men
on the street typically are busy digging out cars or removing the snow from their
roofs, hoods, doors and windows. The drivers in the streets are mostly men; they
are the ones typically operating the street cleaning equipment: trucks with sweep-
ers, brooms, gravel or filled with evacuated snow. A new world of labor becomes
visible in this state of urban exception. It is only at the Bo-Bi Bar in the medieval
part of the city, next to a major literary publisher, that people unite around beers
and lamplight. Elsewhere, one sees isolated individuals out in this particular
night of intense and continued snowfall.
…
A certain intimacy occurs at night when the city is taken over by a blizzard
that transforms the asphalt-covered surfaces and familiar buildings into the
snowscapes depicted in the italicized sections of this essay. Sharing the same
extreme meteorological condition on an extraordinary night creates a special
shared experience that promotes solidarity. But how do people in the city of
generalized snow look to a visiting observer who – like Benjamim in Moscow –
moves about by daylight?
Benjamin’s notes how “skaters and skiers are encountered throughout the
city” of snow.22 But such observations remain marginal in his notebooks, in
which the social repurcussions of snow, ice and low temparatures are more sys-
tematically listed. Fundamentally, outdoor life reflects a state of poverty that is
unjust and inhuman but that attracts his attention: “Shortly before Christmas,
two children sat day after day in the snow against the wall of the Museum of
the Revolution, covered with a scrap of material and whimpering.”23 Imposed
outdoor life is reality to people of diverse ages, for whom begging or vending

23 Ibid., 28.
on the street is a daily necessity. “The people simply have their wares lying in
the snow.”24 In this context snow is an active ingredient in street life, visually
as well as socially. Apart from providing the economic basis for individual sur-
vival, commerce on streets and sidewalks gives birth to a new environment.
Using snow-coated public space as a stage for street vending, these bodies in
the street promote urban culture to create a reality that goes beyond crude
nature and human misery. A dynamic city comes to the fore in commercial
displays which, in Benjamin’s travel diary, are depicted as still lifes on a white
background: “On the street in the snow lie maps of the ssr, piled up there by
street vendors who offer them for sale.”25 These commercial commodities ex-
press the cultural dynamism of the city, which is why Benjamin can compare
the winter street culture of Moscow to that of Naples in the summer. “Every-
thing, shoe polish, picture books, stationery, pastries and breads, even towels,
is sold out in the open on the street, as if the minus twenty-five degree Moscow
winter were in fact a Neapolitan summer.”26
Meteorological conditions can be less important than one imagines in de-
termining the range of cultural and human vitality in urban life. Life in snowy
Moscow seems to operate along the same lines as the urban spaces of Naples,
an archetype of romantic city life, where the permeability, if not absence, of
physical and social limits between indoors and outdoors, add a striking urban-
ity to the city.27
Both cities – the city of snow and the city of sun – distinguish themselves
from the visitor’s home town and its indoor retail habits. On a backdrop of
snow and poverty, street life blossoms in Moscow where temporary positions
and human improvisation make commodities, vendors and potential cus-
tomers appear as actors in an urban spectacle. These multiple configurations
of bodies and objects fascinate the observer who cannot but list the variety
of urban life evolving around the systematic presence of snow: “Long rows of
sleighs haul snow away. Single horsemen. Silent swarms of ravens have settled
in the snow. The eye is infinitely busier than the ear. The colors do their utmost
against the white.”28
Benjamin’s emphasis on the activity of the eye should not be taken as the ex-
pression of ocularcentrism. On the contrary, Benjamin is attentive to the subtle
fact the snow implies more than a visual change; the crystalline expansion of
snow entails a distinct transformation of urban acoustics: “The snow lay deep
24 Ibid., 25.
25 Benjamin, “Moscow Diary,” 50–51.
26 Ibid., 36.
27 Asja Lacis and Walter Benjamin, “Neapel,” in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, iv,
307–316.
76 Reeh
and when silence suddenly fell, one could almost have believed oneself in a
village in midwinter, deep in the hinterlands of Russia.”29 The acoustic change
caused by snow raises the question of whether one is still in a metropolis. Just
as carpets, curtains and books reduce the echo in a living room, so the arrival
of snow in a city limits the entire level of noise, as one will soon realize when
listening to one’s own footsteps on a snowy sidewalk. Even the everyday prac-
tices of an urban crowd become less noisy: “The immense bustle in the streets
takes place softly. That is because of the snow.”30
While issues of social equality and human survival become particularly
acute, the general somaesthetic environment is profoundly altered in situa-
tions when heavy snowfall transforms urban reality.
6 A Project of Photography
The sight of the city is breathtaking. I catch myself wishing to photograph these
encounters between urban forms and masses of snow. The whiteness and the
Illustration 3.5 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, v. 2003

Digital photograph

worlds of altered forms deserve it. Yet this project is an irresponsible one; I would
never expose the camera lens to the beating snow. Even my glasses get wet, when
the snow flakes hit my face. In addition, this magic urban experience may be hos-
tile to photography; the skier’s sensation of the environment is so intimately tied
to the act of skiing that simply looking through the lens would be an assault on
the entire experience.
To be sure, the history of photography testifies to a close relationship between
city, snow and pictures. Just think of the many photographs involving snow that
modern photographers ( from Isis to André Kertész) have taken in major cities
such as Paris and New York. Yet their pictures generally represent snow that lies
still on the ground, and hardly ever seizes the chaotically moving crowds of snow-
flakes floating in the air.
Twenty-four hours after the tremendous blizzard, however, the snow does lie
still in Copenhagen. In this very moment of writing, cars are struggling to get
out through the snow drifts of half a meter of snow surrounding them. The street
shrieks with spinning wheels on the icy surfaces. A street tractor rumbles by in the
peaceful night.
The city is on its way back to normalcy. Those places which, dressed in the lu-
minosity of nightly snow, displayed elements of an overlooked city, will soon be
gone – and so will the snow. There is no excuse anymore: I must repeat my skiing
itinerary, street by street, step by step. The skis will remain at home, while I’ll walk
the city in my ordinary winter boots.
This time, I will bring my camera. Who knows whether photographs of the
overlooked city will be able to translate just a little of the magic which animated
my skiing experience yesterday night.
…
Snow invites us to see or, rather, incites us to start watching. In return, one’s
gaze is affected, if not attacked by snow, be it snowflakes whirling through the
air or snow lying still on more or less horizontal surfaces. Whiteness of many
nuances and countless crystals pile up before collapsing, either through hu-
man intervention or the melting process that reduces the interstitial air inflat-
ing this world of snow crystals.
Snow may lose its structural expansion and elasticity, but it will generally
remain white (until the city dirt sets in) and continue its transformation of the
appearance of things. Snow adds new white layers that eliminate some of the
colors from the visible world. Nonetheless, the white invasion into the visual
realm strenghtens the contrast vis à vis those colored objects that retain their
color and thus stand out as representatives of the urban artifice and sophisti-
cation one finds in city streets.
78 Reeh
Green is the supreme luxury of the Moscow winter. But it shines from
the shop in the Petrowka not half as beautifully as the paper bunches of
artificial carnations, roses, lilies on the street. […] Most intimately of all,
snow and flowers are united in candy icing; there at last the marzipan
flora seems to have fulfilled entirely Moscow’s winter dream: to bloom
out of the whiteness.31
Does this densification of colors in urban space run parallel to the impact of
snow on photographic film, especially color film? Being prepared to measure
light as reflected by a gray surface, a classic light meter would overreact to a
snowy surface in such a way that the colors of objects end up appearing darker
on the photograph than as perceived by the human eye.
Colors are anything but autonomous when an overwhelming white environ-
ment becomes the basis on which the objects are seen. In this way, daylight
snow makes us attentive to color as an intriguing phenomenon. Colors in snow
are quite different from colors as we know them from visual environments ani-
mated by the intensity of light which originates from the sun high in the sky.
This sun, shining at noon in the summer of the South, is the normal position
against which Benjamin qualifies the specificity of colors in a snowy and less
intense winter light of the North.32 “But whereas everything there takes sides
in the pitched play of light and shadow, here the uniform brightness of the
snowfield dominates and the composure of colors is cooler against it. Later,
when the light gradually began to wane, the field seemed to take on an even
greater expanse.”33 Winter snow seems to diminish colors, but it unfolds its
own luminous realm. This is still valid when daylight disappears and gives way
to the stars, the moon, and to civilization’s own light sources. At night, crystal-
line whiteness adds a surprising visibility to the city; snow reflects surround-
ing luminosity, however weak the latter may be, and amplifies it thanks to the
whitish surface of snow itself.
Snow reflects light, but when light is limited and influenced by darker com-
ponents, it has repercussions on the snowy environment itself: “The warm,
cosy colors of its facade shine onto the snow,”34 Benjamin comments on an
31 Ibid., 34.
32 An account of the particular conception of space and colors prevailing in the Nordic
countries is given by Christian Norberg-Schulz in Nightlands. The North represents a lu-
minosity of midnight and thus stands for a heterogeneous space in which colors seem
to reflect the quality of objects themselves. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Nightlands: Nordic
Building (Cambridge: The mit Press, 1996 [1993]).
34 Ibid., 25.
urban cathedral whose façade is reflected in the exterior snowscape, just as

the interior illumination of church altars still affects the urban surroundings
and maintains a particular atmosphere in premodern wooden neighborhoods:
“the glow that now shines only sporadically from the altars onto the snow has
been well preserved in the neighborhood made up of small wooden booths.”35
In this way, snow and darkness form an alliance which ensures a heteroge-
neous luminosity in the midst of the metropolis. To the gaze of somebody who
is walking, at night, in a dark urban park, the cloud ceiling covering the city
soon makes the walking paths visible. Given the reflections pervading such
an ordinary city darkness, one may imagine the multiplied effect of a continu-
ous coat of snow. Even nocturnal landscapes in the countryside light up when
snow, having settled on the ground, reflects the shining stars and the moon.
Absorbing light, snow also reflects it back with a new intensity. In the city as
well, snow enhances the visibility of urban space: “Light sources of the Mos-
cow streets[,] … the snow reflecting the lighting so brilliantly that almost all
the streets are brightly illuminated.”36
This aspect of illumination explains why it is such a stimulating experience
to walk at night in a snow-covered city. All of a sudden, one realizes the degree
to which artificial lighting affects the colored appearance of snow. In fact, the
particular gas – neon, natrium etc. – at play in a source of street lighting makes
the snow stand forth with a distinct tint. Such color variations are not simply
due to the fact that snow in the streets is progressively mixed with salt or with
dirt from the city; they are caused by the different artificial lighting emanating
from public or private lamps:
The scarcity of living quarters here creates a strange effect: unlike in oth-
er cities, here the streets in the evening are lined with large and small
houses with almost every window lit up. If the glow cast by these win-
dows were not so uneven, you might imagine you were looking at an il-
lumination. There is another thing I’ve noticed these past few days: it is
not merely the snow that might possibly make you nostalgic for Moscow,
but also the sky.37
Since the color of the illuminated windows depends on the sources of light
but also on the colors of the room, furniture, etc., the outdoor color of snow
will never be a pure crystal white. But this interaction between indoor lights
35 Ibid., 23.
36 Ibid., 46.
37 Ibid., 104.
80 Reeh
and the outside snowscapes amply compensates with its own fascination for
someone moving through the city streets at night.
In the wintertime, one lives in a city where the white coat on the ground
and the urbanized sky stage a dialog between meteorological-natural powers
on the one side, and urban-cultural ones on the other. These powers converge
in the visual reflections of a mysteriously luminous snow. Just as photography
confronts us with expressions of the optical unconscious,38 snow makes us
wish to photograph its metamorphosis of the city. And the subdued light at
night, which used to prevent decent photographs, is among the seductive vi-
sual aspects of snow in the city.
The technical and artistic development throughout the twentieth century
prepares a photographic wrestling with masses of snow in the dark.39 How-
ever, it is the arrival of digital photography in the early twenty-first century
which really makes night photography possible – without any use of flash and
artificial lighting. Photography signals an extension of the visible that this il-
lustrated text on urban snow at night confirms. The sensitivity of a digital cam-
era chip goes far beyond the limits of classic analog films. In the analog days,
the exposure of sensitive 400 asa films (such as the black-and-white Kodak
TriX Pan) was sometimes “pushed” to 800 asa or even 1600 asa, necessitat-
ing a special and rather aggressive processing of the film roll. In comparison,
the sensitivity of contempary digital cameras has been raised to thousands of
asa – with no graininess or other loss of technical quality as a consequence.
The urban darkness may therefore be explored and, in turn, enter the field of
photographic elaboration. By now, analog photography’s prints and tactile in-
timacy, scarcity, and physical duration (in photo albums, for example) belong
to a remote or retro-world.
The appreciative awareness of snow is certainly shared by non-photogra-
phers, sometimes sedimented in images of personal or collective memory. In
Walter Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs of a Christmas celebration at his grand-
mother’s house, the memory of snow becomes a signifier in an exceptional feel-
ing of happiness: “When we then stepped out into the twilight, […] the snow
lying pristine on ledges and fences, more dully on the pavement, […] – then
was the city wholly immersed in itself, like a sack that sagged, heavy with me
and my happiness.”40 At dusk, light and darkness meet at the very moment
38 Walter Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ii, 371.
39 Brassaï’s Paris de nuit (1933) made nocturnal life the object of photography. Yet his book
contains no images of nightly snow. Brassaï, Paris by Night (New York: Pantheon Books,
1987).
40 Walter Benjamin, “Blumeshof 12,” in “Berlin Childhood,” 372.
when the narrator passes from an illuminated interior out into the darkening
city. This transition, however, is a gradual one, also thanks to the snow which
is staged in two different forms: one is light and untouched, while the other is
dark and trampled down. After all, snow is differentiated. A sensory impres-
sion and a symbolic form alike, snow signalizes the urban basis of happiness
(“Glück”). This happiness inhabits the image of the city; a city of snow. Tired yet
tranquil, heavy but not suppressed, the urban individual depends on snow’s
mediation to the city as a somaesthetic environment.
7 At Home Again
Just as to yesterday’s evening skier, the city still lights up before the flâneur with
his digital camera, who follows exactly the same itinerary as the day before. In
reality, the city is pretty dark after midnight, but it appears surprisingly luminous
in the digital photographs when they pop up on the small screen of the camera
back.
Illustration 3.6 Henrik Reeh, Fragile snow, vi. 2003

Digital photograph
82 Reeh
As expected, the overlooked city is already less accessible now than in the bliz-
zard of last night, when snow prevented many gates from closing. Heading for the
Royal Square of Amalienborg yesterday night, there was free access to gateways
taking the skier deep into courtyards with backside views on the royal palaces.
Tonight, everything is peace and quiet, and the gates are closed and locked.
Intense sweeping has been going on during the past twenty-four hours. On the
other hand, snow may still be photographed. Certain places in the medieval cen-
ter are nearly untouched. But even where the snow has been walked in or moved
around, it displays a realm of forms that one is able to photograph without any
kind of flash.
What kind of urban representation will result from these photographs of ru-
ined snow? Anxiously, I decide to let the photographs into the computer, and to
give them a chance as genuine images. In the urban night, I hear how the snow is
already melting in the streets outside.
…
Cross-country skiing is an unusual experience in the modern metropolis. Even
in situations of heavy snowfall, people barely go skiing in the central districts
but explore terrains outside the city. Yet skiing should count in a somaesthet-
ic approach to the city. Even in cities, downhill skiing is sometimes possible,
thanks to the construction of artificial ski slopes. Dry slopes now exist as urban
monuments.41 But the urban skiing portrayed in the italicized report of this es-
say differs from downhill skiing by its interest in navigating and exploring the
city’s streets and courtyards rather than in engaging in recreational sports.42
Nonetheless it involves somatic skill and effort, whose feelings can also be ap-
preciated as part of the overall somaesthetic experience.
Cross-country skiing in the city, like the flâneur’s city roaming, is completed
by the return to home. Benjamin describes the flâneur as being “utterly ex-
hausted, [when] he stumbles into his room, which receives him coldly and
41 “Copenhill” is the name of an outdoor dry slope in Copenhagen with 9,000 square meters
of pistes for downhill skiing surrounded by a 3,000-square-meter park. Designed by big
and sla, it is constructed on the roof of an 85-meter-tall refuse disposal plant, which
remains visible from the symbolic center of the city.
42 When architect Renzo Piano received the Sonning Prize in 2009, the Danish minister of
education at the time, Bertel Haarder, went skiing from his home in Østerbro to the ban-
quet at the National Gallery in the so-called Østre Anlæg park, located on the remains of
the ancient Copenhagen ramparts. In fact, the slopes in front of the National Gallery are
the traditional center for sledging in Copenhagen.
wears a strange air.”43 The German sentence Benjamin uses is syntactically

somewhat ambiguous, and could suggest that the flâneur could be the one
who feels strange and cold (“entfremdet, kalt”) perhaps from exhaustion.44 For
the skier, a dialog is possible between the frosty outdoor environment and the
relaxing indoor stays, for instance in a Moscow variant of the cafés and restau-
rants that one finds at ski resorts. Consider Benjamin’s Moscow remark, whose
final sentence introduced my essay: “The intoxicating warmth that overcomes
the guest on entering these taverns, on drinking the hot tea and enjoying the
sharp zakuska, is Moscow’s most secret winter lust. Therefore, no one knows
the city who has not known it in snow.”45 Like the flâneur’s walk through the
Paris streets, the winter lust of the Moscow urban walker is described in terms
of “Rausch,” of intoxication. More precisely, it is a “Wärmerausch,” an intoxica-
tion by way of heat, which provides an indoor counterpoint to the icy snows-
capes governing the streets. Snow and related human motion permeate the
city but also promote unexpected places where compensatory expressions of
urban culture come to the fore.
Snow comes in many forms when falling from the sky or when settling on
the ground. Just as there are ski waxes for different snow temperatures, snow
itself exists in various states, the two main groups being frosty and melting
snow. Melting snow is present in cities where civilizational technologies cause
higher temparatures than the weather as an exclusively natural phenome-
non. Nonetheless, snow remains snow, for Benjamin, as long as it maintains
a certain degree of whiteness: “It was snowing in the morning and continued
to do so off and on throughout the day. Later, a bit of thaw set in. I understand
how Asja used to miss the snow in Berlin, how the naked asphalt got to her.”46
Snow need not be as white as it is in promotional photographs from ski resorts.
In cities when it covers the black asphalt of the streets, doesn’t the snow some-
times make us feel lighter inside? In therapeutical terms, the view of snow will
often prove more curative and beneficial than those screen-like lamps which
are currently promoted as a means to prevent depressive winter moods.
In cities, snow is a cultural feature that in turn transforms urban culture.
City life is not the same, if snow doesn’t fall or when it melts or is hauled away.
43 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 880.

44 Benjamin’s Arcades Project has two versions of the sentence quoted here. The second one
goes as follows: “bis er in tiefster Erschöpfung auf seinem Zimmer, das ihn befremdet, kalt
zu sich einläßt, zusammensinkt.” See Walter Benjamin, “Das Passagen-Werk,” in Gesam-
melte Schriften, v.1, 525 [M 1, 3]. In this later version, “entfremdet” has been replaced by
“befremdet.”
84 Reeh
Devoid of snow, the city, for Benjamin, seems to be missing something essen-
tial. On returning from Moscow to Berlin, he remarks “There is no dirt, but no
snow either.”47
In most cities today, snow is no longer a basic condition of winter life. Yet
even as an occasional yet recurring phenomenon, snow transforms the urban
experience, reviving earlier habits and rituals from times with snowier weath-
er, recalling personal and shared memories. Its multisensory effects can pro-
duce new somaesthetic experiences, inspire new reflection, and even invite
us to navigate the city streets in new ways, as did the sudden snowfall in Co-
penhagen that occasioned this essay. Shouldn’t such invitations be welcomed?
Bibliography
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Wang, 2010.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften, i–vii. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
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Benjamin, Walter. “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen.” In
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Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. “Moscow Diary.” October 35 (Winter, 1985): 9–135.
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The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. “Moscow.” Translated by Edmund Jephcott. In Selected Writings: Vol-
ume 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith,
22–46. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
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Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jen-
nings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
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Lacis, Asja, and Walter Benjamin. “Neapel.” In Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften,
iv, 307–316. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-
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Press, 1996.
Reeh, Henrik. Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Cul-
ture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994.
Reeh, Henrik. “Four Ways of Overlooking Copenhagen in Steen Eiler Rasmussen.” In
The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation, edited by Peter Madsen
and Richard Plunz, 252–276. New York/London: Routledge, 2001.
Reeh, Henrik. “Sne.” In Forskønnelsens Kort over København & Omegn 2010: 125 års ju-
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Simon Harboe and Helle Rafn, 32–35. Copenhagen: Forlaget Victor B. Andersens
Maskinfabrik, 2010.
Shusterman, Richard. “Somaesthetics and the Psychopathologies of Everyday Life.” In
Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics, 91–111. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
Sitte, Camillo. City Planning According to Artistic Principles. In Camillo Sitte: The Birth of
Modern City Planning, with a translation of the 1889 Austrian edition of his City Plan-
ning According to Artistic Principles, by George R. Collins and Christiane C. Collins,
129–332. New York: Rizzoli, 1986.
Part 2
Festival, Revolution, and Death
∵
Chapter 4
Body Politics: Revolt and City Celebration

Matthew Crippen
1 Introduction
This chapter endeavors to articulate somaesthetic forms of expression occur-

ring irrespective of knowledge of the philosophical movement. To this end, it
focuses on Mandalay’s Water Festival and Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring,
which stand as illustrations. These events do so, first, because they exemplify
bodily and therewith experiential coordination around urban structures; sec-
ond, because they are instances of somatic refashioning, for example, through
creative conversion of injuries into celebratory badges of dissent; and, third,
because they organize around cultural and political concerns, giving them
emotional and hence visceral dimensions. Directed almost therapeutically
towards life-improvement – whether implicitly or explicitly – these celebra-
tions and protests also have meliorative aspects that mark the somaesthetic
movement.
Somaesthetics is notable for drawing upon a diversity of approaches. These
range from pragmatism to existential phenomenology to Eastern meditative
practices to ancient Greek philosophy to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work,1 which
in fact approximates the aforesaid American and continental schools in its
later phases.2 A thread common to these traditions is that all offer embodied
accounts of human experience. Somaesthetics shares this view, which is more
than just the trite claim that the body is necessary for experience; it is to main-
tain that the body – in combination with things it encounters – constitutes
experience. This happens in even relatively simple encounters, as when our
fingers coordinate around a bottle, with the structure of our hand and the
1 See Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal,” Journal of Aesthetics and

Art Criticism 57, no. 3 (1999): 299–313; Richard Shusterman, “Back to the Future: Aesthetics
Today,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 23, no. 43 (2012): 104–124.
2 Nicholas Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgen-
stein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1981); Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthet-
ics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. Ch. 4; Shaun Gallagher, “Philosophi-
cal Antecedents of Situated Cognition,” in The Cambridge Companion of Situated Cognition,
ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35–52.

90 Crippen
e ntity grasped shaping what we can do and hence what we experience.3 A sec-
ond distinguishing feature of the movement is its emphasis on everyday aes-
thetics. In this, it builds on forerunners, especially John Dewey. Only whereas
Dewey highlights aesthetics as an outcome of everyday somatic engagements,
somaesthetics emphasizes the body as an everyday expressive medium. A third
characteristic of somaesthetics is its life-improving trajectory. This is of course
common to philosophy from ancient times onwards. However, somaesthetics
stands out by drawing on practices such as yoga, Zen and athletic disciplines
to advocate hands-on somatic interventions, albeit not in opposition to mental
ones since the body is a constituting structure of mind.
All of this is emphasized in Mandalay’s Water Festival and Cairo’s Arab
Spring, which can be conceived as varieties of living somaesthetic practices. In
addition to this, these events highlight the largely shared nature of experience.
Consonant with this, Richard Shusterman’s model of somaesthetics challenges
essentially private, internal conceptions of experience as wrongheaded turns
in modern Western thinking. Unfortunately, meditative disciplines encour-
aging self-focus on breath, listening to one’s inner voice and other forms of
introspection, some of which Shusterman draws on, open his work to misin-
terpretations along the lines just mentioned. Pragmatic and phenomenologi-
cal notions of experience as “culture” or “world” offer a corrective.4 Though it
sounds odd, we in fact use these terms interchangeably, as when talking about
parenting culture or the world or experience of parenthood. Since cultures and
worlds are here spheres of handling in which bodily capacities, habits and sen-
sitivities synchronize around practical dealings, these conceptions simultane-
ously point to the somatic character of experience. This, in turn, captures the
celebrations and revolts in Mandalay and Cairo, including their political and
social dimensions. It does – and this is the central point I want to defend –
because these events take hold as a kind of creative somatic dance in which
activities and therewith experiences synchronize around surroundings, while
3 See Matthew Crippen, “Body Phenomenology, Somaesthetics and Nietzschean Themes in

Medieval Art,” Pragmatism Today 5, no. 2 (2014): 40–45; Matthew Crippen, “Embodied Cog-
nition and Perception: Dewey, Science and Skepticism,” Contemporary Pragmatism 14, no. 1
(2017): 121–134.
4 See John Dewey, “Syllabus: Types of Philosophical Thought” [c. 1922–1923], in The Middle
Works, 1899–1924, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1983), 352–395; John Dewey, “Unfinished Introduction” [c. 1951], in The Later Works, 1925–1953,
vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 361–364;
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927], trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
[1945], trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962).
Body Politics: Revolt and City Celebration 91
also pushing into them, leading to bodily and cultural-physical meliorative

refashioning.
2 Evolving Concepts of Experience
The view that experience is essentially private follows from the notion that
it is formed out of internal representations. This outlook has become com-
monplace in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, even if it is considered
edgy in everyday life and movies such as The Matrix and Inception. Against this,
somaesthetic thinkers, pragmatists, and phenomenologists have all worked to
highlight public forms of embodied experience. In doing so, some have re-
turned to the ancient idea that having experience means being experienced or
skilled.5 This claim has etymological basis, for the Greek word experiri “means
try, to put to the test.”6 Empeiros means “experienced or practiced in an activ-
ity, grounded in peira, trial or attempt,”7 and consequently inculcated out of
habitual routines distilled from the past. This agrees obviously with concep-
tions advanced in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics.8 It resonates
also with Plato if the emphasis on intelligent skill is subtracted.9 Since skills are
gained in social contexts, these ancient notions simultaneously imply a public
concept of experience. Reinforcing this is the fact that there are few references
to inner experience, for example, in Homer’s epics, where the ability even to
outwardly convey emotions while not feeling them is treated as an exceptional
phenomenon.10
5 See John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 1920); John Dewey,
Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1925); Martin Heidegger, “The Statement of
Protagoras” [1940], trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in vol. 4 of Nietzsche, vols. 3 and 4, ed. David
Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 91–95; also see Shusterman, “A Disciplinary Pro-
posal,” 302; Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body,” 7–9.
6 Joseph Lennon, “The Notion of Experience,” Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 23,
no. 3 (1960): 315–343.
7 John Dewey, Philosophy and Education in Their Historic Relations [c. 1910–1911], tran-
scribed by Elsie Ripley Clapp, ed. J.J. Chambliss (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 133.
8 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W.D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKe-
on (New York: Random House, 1941), 981a7–9; Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, trans. G.R.G.
Mure, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 99b35–100a8.
9 Plato, Gorgias, trans. W.D. Woodhead, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Ham-
ilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 463b–465b;
Plato, Laws, trans. A.E. Taylor, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, 720a.
10 Hubert Dreyfus, “Existential Phenomenology and the Brave New World of the Matrix,”
The Harvard Review of Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2003): 18–31.
92 Crippen
To the extent that experience is accordingly not hidden in the head and
instead embedded and embodied, it is public, so that Shusterman urges that
“body, mind, and culture are deeply codependent.”11 Shusterman and others
such as Dewey accordingly object to exclusive emphasis on inner, private ex-
perience, along with the isolated individualism that goes with it. There is, to be
sure, a fruitful side to this view, namely, that individuals – as opposed to the
state, aristocratic powerbrokers or God – have greater jurisdiction over them-
selves. Dewey appreciates this, writing that the “modern discovery of inner ex-
perience, of a realm of purely personal events that are always at the individual’s
command” and there “inexpensively for refuge” is a “liberating discovery.”12 It is
so because it “implies a new worth and sense of dignity in human individual-
ity,” this “in contrast to the ancient scheme of experience, which held individu-
als tightly within a given order subordinated to its structure and patterns.”13 For
reasons discussed, however, Dewey thinks the position overplayed. Elaborating
on the shift from pre-modern to modern views, he notes that from the stand-
point of the latter, experience developed into that which greets the senses.
It thereby became perception of the new and ceased to be sedimented habits
binding us to the past.14 Grasped as sensory impressions, moreover, these more
recent concepts oriented experience as a phenomenon occurring within an
internal mental theater, leading to “the subjectivistic, solipsistic and egotistic
strain in modern thought.”15 This was opposed to the ancient idea of experi-
ence as a product of publicly shared customs and skills.
Though not a majority position, another shift began to take hold in the
late Modern period, with some deemphasizing inner experience. A number
of scholars did so by arguing that a great deal of human life is pre-reflective,
which is to say, just at or below the limits of consciousness. Pragmatists, psy-
choanalysts and existential phenomenologists were early defenders of this po-
sition.16 Variations of the view also have traction in contemporary psychology.17
11 Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body,” 2.

12 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 172.
13 Ibid., 172–173.
14 See Dewey, Philosophy and Education, 133.
15 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 173.
16 For example, William James, “Are We Automata?” Mind 4, no. 13 (1879): 1–22; Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, revised edition [1887], trans. Walter Kauffman (New York:
Vintage Books, 1974); Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” [1915], trans. James Strachey
and Anna Freud, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 159–215; Heidegger,
Being and Time, esp. §12–24; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, throughout.
17 Luís M. Augusto, “Unconscious Knowledge: A Survey,” Advanced Cognitive Psychology 6,
no. 1 (2010): 116–141.
But while standard contemporary psychological interpretations tend to credit

pre-reflective or unconscious activity to vast neural recesses, and although this
supplies a partial account, additional explanations lie in the extent to which
non-neural bodily and worldly structures enable cognition and perception.
Dewey, once again, was an early proponent of this view, arguing that per-
ception is sensorimotor organization in the world and hence not an event oc-
curring exclusively in our heads.18 Thus, for example, tactile perception of a
bottle is not just sensory excitation. Instead, it is the way our hand adjusts to
roundness and the manner in which our fingers glide smoothly over a surface
that does not bite flesh. The point is given empirical backing and extended by
work on sensory substitution devices where head-mounted cameras deliver
stimulation to the skin or tongue, and people actively exploring their sur-
roundings rapidly acquire an analogue of vision.19 This is not just an argument
about perceptual experience, however. Cognition is also embodied. Thus in
the case of smartphones, most “know” the keyboard in use and not reflection,
and could not draw a diagram of its layout from memory.20 A non-human case
in point is the remarkable multi-generational, group migrations of monarch
butterflies, which occur partly through the funneling effect of mountains, and
thus through interactions between bodies and environments.21
These views, insofar as they are embodied, connect closely to the idea of
experience as cultural. An initial point to note is that group coordination is the
norm throughout the biological realm. Migrating birds interlock to match ve-
locity, maintain proximity and avoid collision.22 They also coordinate flapping
to either maximize upwash capture or minimize downwash effects.23 Dung
beetles similarly coordinate, interacting with gravitational forces, friction and
one another to roll dung into balls very rapidly over significant distances.24 In
some cases, integration is encompassing, with trees communicating through
18 John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc in Psychology,” Psychological Review 3, no. 4 (1896): 357–370.
19 Paul Bach-y-Rita and Stephen W. Kercel, “Sensory Substitution and Augmentation: Incor-
porating Humans-in-the-Loop,” Intellectica 2, no. 12 (2002): 287–297.
20 Matthew Crippen, “Intuitive Cities: Pre-Reflective, Aesthetic and Political Aspects of Ur-
ban Design,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 3, no. 2 (2016): 125–145.
21 Matthew Crippen, “Dewey, Enactivism and Greek Thought,” in Pragmatism and Embodied
Cognitive Science: From Bodily Interaction to Symbolic Articulation, ed. Roman Madzia and
Matthias Jung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 233–249.
22 Craig Reynolds, “Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model,” Computer
Graphics 21, no. 4 (1987): 25–34.
23 Steven J. Portugal et al., “Upwash Exploitation and Downwash Avoidance by Flap Phasing
in Ibis Formation Flight,” Nature 505, no. 7483 (2014): 399–402.
24 Matthew Crippen, “Group Cognition, Developmental Psychology and Aesthetics,” Prag-
matism Today 8, no. 1 (2017): 185–197.
94 Crippen
chemical and auditory signals and behaving almost as single organisms by

nourishing one another.25 Something comparable occurs with bacteria, re-
garded by some as a genetic and functional super-organism.26 On a less grand
but equally compelling scale, multiple organisms join to form the Portuguese
man o’ war to the point that it appears as a single jellyfish-like creature.
Critical to all this is that in working together, organisms do not just build
themselves. They build living spaces, whether in the case of networked tun-
nels, hills and food caravans constructed by ants or the cities erected by human
beings. In the case of humans, we start as dependent creatures and remain so
throughout life, a condition that only changes in degree. Our coming together,
joining and coordinating in groups, moreover, is a form of world-building, not
just in biological ways, but also in cultural manners. John Steinbeck (1939) ex-
presses this beautifully in an almost Heideggerian passage about the mass mi-
grations of the Great Depression:
In the daylight they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark
caught them, they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water….
[T]hey huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives,
their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country. Thus it
might be that one family camped near a spring, and another camped for
the spring and for company, and a third because two families had pio-
neered the place and found it good…
In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became
one family, the children were the children of all. […] In the evening, sit-
ting about the fires, the twenty were one. They grew to be units of the
camps, units of the evenings and the nights. A guitar unwrapped from
a blanket and tuned – and the songs, which were all of the people, were
sung in the nights. Men sang the words, and women hummed the tunes.
Every night a world created, complete with furniture – friends made
and enemies established… Every night relationships that make a world,
established.27
While emphasizing shared hopes and emotional concerns as organizing prin-

ciples, Steinbeck also stresses that worlds need a “certain physical pattern.” In
his example, this might include “water, a river bank, a stream, a spring, or even
25 Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Berkeley: Greystone
Books, 2016).
26 Sorin Sonea and Maurice Panisset, A New Bacteriology (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1983).
27 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 264–265.
a faucet unguarded,” along with “enough flat land to pitch the tents, a little
brush or wood to build the fires.”28 Cities require more, of course, though wa-
ter, space for shelter and fuel are basic amenities that have gotten many off the
ground.
Instances of world-building can be more immediate, but the basic pattern
remains the same. Thus, for example, a weekend-world of revelry may organize
around a concern for wine and sociality. While this typically involves verbal
coordination, it also entails intricate synchronizations of bodies around one
another and things. This, in turn, connects weekend revelry to overtly physical
coordinations in the vein of the earlier discussed synchronization of hand and
bottle that realizes smoothness, roundness and other properties. The nighttime
world of the migrants follows suit insofar as it gathers around shared concerns
for water, companionship, tent space and hopes for a better life. The agricul-
tural, industrial and commercial worlds, not to mention the physical space, of
wine-producing communities might likewise cohere around concerns for that
commodity. This illustrates some of what Heidegger conveys when he remarks
that “the Old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a
gathering to deliberate on … a contested matter.” As such, “the Old German
words thing and dinc become the names for an affair or matter of pertinence.”
They accordingly “denote anything that in any way bears upon men, concerns
them.”29 In this passage, Heidegger emphasizes contested matters as subjects
for debate. He stresses that this is also captured in the Latin expression res
publica because the first element of the compound can be translated as entity,
thing or affair, with the second part pointing to public, political or cultural
concerns. At the same time, most public discourses also occur through the
non-verbal language of bodies coordinating around each other and environ-
mental contours, for example, chairs and the layout of a room. Heidegger thus
adds: “The thing things world,”30 a point emphatically emphasized by the ways
that the worlds of the migrants, revelers and wine-producing communities all
gather around particular concerns.
The foregoing accordingly emphasizes the codependence of lived space,
concerns, experience and culture. Wine is a crafted item, for example, a physi-
cal and cultural product. It is simultaneously made what it is by the ways in
which it stands as an object of concern or importance in our worlds. It might be
a commodity in the world and experience of the shopkeeper; in the reveler’s, a
28 Ibid., 266–267.
29 Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” [1949], In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 172, 174.
30 Ibid., 178.
96 Crippen
social lubricant; and for the chemist, a mix of compounds.31 The concerns that
make wine what it is for us accordingly depend on cultural and physical worlds
and vice versa. This is to broaden Shusterman’s claim about the codependence
of body, mind and culture, and is one of the central points that I will argue
Mandalay’s Water Festival and Cairo’s Arab Spring demonstrate.
3 Somatic Organization in Mandalay
Taken together and applied to Mandalay, the account so far offered suggests
that the city’s Water Festival not only synchronizes around physical space,
but also organizes around codependent cultural concerns. The relevance of
cultural concerns simultaneously points to the political and social situation
of the country. A former British colony, Myanmar has in recent times been
one of the more isolationist and iron-fisted regimes. The situation is evolving,
however, with slackening media censorship, opening tourism and the country
experiencing its first multi-party election in decades in 2010.32 Despite these
developments, Myanmar is not a bastion of free expression, and while more
egregious violations exist, broadcasters avoid televising Mandalay’s Water Fes-
tival. They instead focus on tamer events in Yangon and Nay Pyi Taw, a secretly
built city and the new capital since the mid-2000s.33 The military, moreover,
retains much control.34 Predominately Buddhist, religious xenophobia is also
rampant against minority Christians, Hindus and especially Muslims. Even the
politician Aung San Suu Kyi – former darling of the West and Nobel laureate –
stands accused of neglecting abuses against Muslims and purging them from
her party.35 Such abuses are longstanding, though they have only received
widespread attention with the recent spate of genocidal activity against Mus-
lims, particularly the Rohingya.36
31 William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” Mind 4, no. 15 (1879): 317–346.

32 Nehginpao Kipgen, Myanmar: A Political History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2016), esp. Ch. 5.
33 Dulyapak Preecharushh, “Myanmar’s New Capital City of Naypyidaw,” in Engineering
Earth, ed. Stanley D. Brunn (Berlin: Springer, 2010), 1021–1044.
34 Kipgen, throughout.
35 For an account of abuses against religious minorities, see Francis Wade, Myanmar’s En-
emy Within (London: Zed Books, 2017).
36 Often regarded as among the least violently disposed religions, Buddhist scriptures are
more pacifistic than other major world religions, so the idea of Buddhist monks rampag-
ing and inciting violence in Myanmar seems incongruous. A partial explanation is that all
citizens of this religion are strongly encouraged to give a year to monkhood in childhood
and again in adulthood. In effect, therefore, many are draftees, as opposed to educated
While Myanmar boasts ancient civilization, Mandalay – comprised of

roughly a million people and nestled in the middle of the country along the
Irrawaddy River – is relatively young. A past capital, it arose in circumstances
similar to the current one, namely, at the behest of the ruler in 1857. Construc-
tion of Mandalay Palace commenced the same year, and it forms a centerpiece
that is enormous relative to the city.37 Square in shape, four walls encase it,
each measuring about 2 km, followed concentrically by moats and wide streets,
with webs of narrower lanes spreading beyond the palace throughout the city.
With its ample moats, this functional and sentimental heart of the city offers
ready sources of water. The latter is essential to the festival, which involves
mass dousings, carried out in playful fun and ritualistic cleansing for the Bud-
dhist New Year.38
The word “catharsis” captures much of what occurs during the festival. The
word comes from the Greek kathairein for “cleanse,” and, in addition to ritual-
istic cleansing, the playful pandemonium seems a creative catharsis against a
historically repressive regime that normally restricts even public assembly.39
During the roughly weeklong celebrations, people splash others in streets, on
passing motorcycles, through open windows of trains and vehicles (and also
from them). Though the Water Festival is celebrated nationally, Mandalay car-
ries the festivities to an extreme that would be illegal in most jurisdictions,
especially around the palace. Here, so much water is launched from pumps in
canals that the flooding in some areas mimics a natural disaster. Though no
serious damage is done because the water drains at night, it gets deep enough
during the day that cars stall and children are able to swim naked in some por-
tions of the streets and drainage trenches leading to canals.
devotees. This lack of enthusiasm is combined with a population that has recently gone
from having limited to widespread internet access, with little experience sifting reliable
news from junk. Facebook has also become a primary source of information, with hate
speech propagated there taken as fact. Though religious tensions were lower when popu-
lations were united against military oppressors, Wade (cited above) argues that today’s
problems are partial artifacts of past British rule, which introduced an ethnic taxonomy
for administrative purposes. This hardened once-fluid boundaries between different
populations, and some groups that were previously accepted as indigenous are now per-
secuted as outsiders.
37 For the early history of Mandalay and the palace, see V.C. Scott O’Connor, Mandalay, and
Other Cities of the Past in Burma (New York: Appleton and Company, 1908), esp. Ch. 1.
38 See Maung Htin Aung, Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2009),
Ch. 3; Hsin-Chun Tasaw Lu, “Festivalizing Thingyan, Negotiating Ethnicity: Burmese
Chinese Migrants in Taiwan,” Journal of Burma Studies 12, no. 1 (2008): 29–62.
39 See Kipgen, esp. Ch. 5; also see “Burma: Events of 2017,” Human Rights Watch, https://
www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/burma.
98 Crippen
Mandalay’s Water Festival is esteemed as the nation’s wildest, and a decisive

factor is the city’s structure. The palace, with its water-filled moats, is centrally
located and encompasses a significant portion of the city. The celebration ra-
diates throughout the city, with people soaking others from buckets, bottles
and pumps drawing from the many canals and ponds in Mandalay or some-
times from water mains. That said, the chief force gathers and synchronizes
around the palace, paralleling the way hands coordinate around entities, and
Steinbeck’s migrants coordinate around faucets, tent space and other people.
During the Water Festival, less global bodily coordinations occur as well, be-
cause walking on flooded versus dry ground, for example, mobilizes different
gaits, or because variations between gentle trickles, quick splashes, torrents
from hoses or nothing at all generate different postures and body motions, and
hence different experiences.
This account may appear to overstress physical structure and underem-
phasize culture, but the two are intertwined. Indeed, Steinbeck’s earlier Great
Depression example frames world-building as culture-generation, while si-
multaneously laying weight on requisite physical patterns. In his example, this
includes things such as firewood, water and flat space for tents. Though af-
fairs are not so schematic, one can imagine Mandalay’s Water Festival taking
similar form. Perhaps one group came for the water in the moat and because
it had been a good gathering place at some point in the past; maybe in follow-
ing years others joined for like reasons, and also seeking company. Merchants
may have increasingly erected booths, and others set up stages for cultural per-
formances. A world may have accordingly gathered, with its own patterns of
bodily activity and hence experience.
All of this augments earlier claims about the interdependence of body,
mind and culture. Of the body, William James (1905) writes:
The world experienced … comes at all times with our body as its center,
center of vision, center of action, center of interest. … So far as “thoughts”
and “feelings” can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of
the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to
change those of the rest of the world. The body is the storm center, the
origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-
train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view.40
Although these remarks may seem to contradict Steinbeck’s and Heidegger’s

observations about activity and therewith experience gathering around things,
40 William James, “The Experience of Activity,” Psychological Review 12, no. 1 (1905): 9.
both of their accounts hearken back to the human bodily center, even if im-
plicitly. They do because things such as firewood, flat space for tents and water
are not identifiable as such outside the sphere of human concerns or interests,
of which the body is the center. Moreover, insofar as concerns are emotional,
they tend towards the visceral and in this sense bodily, more so because they
originate in somatic motivations such as thirst and thermoregulation.
In light of this, concerns in Mandalay and the rest of Myanmar warrant
more attention. Some concerns specifically echo Steinbeck’s example, as with
the desires for water, space, and company that characterize the celebrations.
The last of these may be accentuated by shared hardships faced in Myanmar,
also mirroring Steinbeck’s account, and by the ambiguous feelings that locals
have toward Mandalay Palace stemming from the forced labor used to restore
the site within living collective memory. Military authorities, moreover, in-
scribe their power by posting signs at exterior points reading: “Only when the
army is strong will the nation be strong” or “The tatmadaw [army] and the
people cooperate and crush all those harming the union.” This arguably adds
to collective frustration, perhaps exacerbated because only military and gov-
ernment officials enjoy entry during the festival. Hence, while it is embedded
in the city’s heart, the palace is cut off and distant. As in religious gatherings,
however, the water and canals consecrating the festival bridge some of the dis-
tance, pulling the palace and the city into each other’s neighborhoods. Its role
in the Water Festival accordingly shares similarities with gods in religious cere-
monies, which we never see face-to-face and seem both remote and proximate.
Another obvious desire – in fact related to creative cathartic impulses of the
Water Festival – is simply that of having fun. Some of this is part and parcel
of daily life. Thanaka, a pale-yellow paste made from ground bark and said to
protect against the sun, shows up in creative patterns across faces, and a blood-
red mixture of paan – made of betel leaf, areca nut, slaked lime and sometimes
tobacco – stains many teeth. However, this is not particular to the festival, but
the norm throughout the year. Other occurrences are particular, with most of
the country, including public transport and many shops, closing for the multi-
day celebration. People appear to enjoy the anonymity of crowds, dressing in
everyday ways but sometimes wearing Guy Fawkes masks, which are associ-
ated with revolt. This seems part of a larger urge to misbehave and lose control
in a kind of Dionysian rapture, albeit as a way of ameliorating oppressive con-
ditions and thereby seizing some control.
This losing of control takes many forms, some innocent, some less so. First
and foremost, it includes dousing others and getting drenched, with children
taking especial relish as they soak passing motorcycles, pedestrians, people
through train windows, and others. This behavior inverts normal a uthority
100 Crippen
structures since children target adults. Adults also participate by soaking

others or playfully closing metal slots over glassless train windows to block wa-
ter barrages. The mass pandemonium contains another inversion of authority
and acting out insofar as the regime normally restricts mass assembly. These
inversions also encompass conventional misbehaviors such as public drinking
and sharing bottles with random strangers, sometimes between vehicles and
pedestrians and vice versa. At the more extreme end, theft occurs, with at-
tempts on tourists not uncommon in densely packed areas around the palace.
Travel literature claims that theft is rare in Myanmar, citing penalties involving
hard labor. In Mandalay it appears to be confined to the palace area during
the festival, presumably because crowds afford safety and opportunity, but the
thievery is also keeping with moral inversions characterizing the celebration.
So these are how some basic concerns unfold and how the Water Festival
at the palace organizes them. Interestingly, the palace also answers concerns
of government officials by confining the festivities’ main force to a definite
location, with songs, dances and other cultural displays seemingly restricted
to official stages surrounding the palace area, which is cleared after certain
times of night. It is as if government officials see a need to let people act out a
little and vent emotions, while simultaneously not wanting frustrations to boil
over. In line with this, corporate entities construct large elevated stands along
the canal, presumably with government consent. Here, attractive, fashionably
dressed youth mechanically bob to blaring dance music, spraying people with
restrained trickles, in contrast to the firehose-like rushes delivered at informal
pumping stations.
From the standpoint of maintaining control, the release-valve afforded by
the festival may be important because people in Myanmar – while habitu-
ated to political oppression – are not especially accustomed to regulation on
the level of everyday life, which is informal and in this sense arguably freer
than in the West. Such informality is common in other impoverished regions –
including Egypt – because the poor often depend on it for everyday necessi-
ties and governments lack the wherewithal to suppress it. Yet it varies between
countries, with Myanmar on the high extreme. For example, food venders greet
trains rolling into stations, with some engaged in activities impermissible in
the West. These include walking with kettles of samosas boiling in oil, heated
by coals in the base, assuredly without formal license. Venders also travel on
trains, preparing and selling food, leaving carriages and returning later to re-
trieve dishes. Passengers can sleep or sit on the floor of trains or under seats if
they can fit. They can dangle feet from openings, puffing cigars despite copious
“No Smoking” signs, and police on the train are unperturbed. Separate from the
military, unarmed and informal too, police often remove uniforms to evade the
heat once trains are in motion. None of this is a problem. Random motorcycles
often pull up, offering rides for negotiated prices. Three or four people and chil-
dren can pile on, and no one finds it problematic. This everyday informality is
a pre-condition of the wildness of Myanmar’s celebrations and arguably of the
government allowing them within limits as a public release.
The informality of the celebration and of the culture supply many possi-
bilities for aesthetic experience, and not just because of all the fun, though
it helps. The strolling, ducking, splashing and dousing integrate into rhythms
of doing and undergoing. The creative acting out, the unexpected events, the
twists and turns, combined with physical and emotional strain and the relief
that follows, add tension and repose. All of this binds incidents that would
otherwise remain loosely connected, while making individual moments mani-
fest more sharply. The aesthetic coherence of experience is enhanced if there
is a pivotal moment – even an ugly one such as a theft – that reorients and
holds everything together the way a climax does for a play. Under these condi-
tions, the events of an hour, day, or the better part of a week may integrate like
a narrative, forming an aesthetic whole or what Dewey calls “an experience.”41
An overarching cultural factor summing up most of what has been said is
the celebration’s origins in religious ceremonies consecrated with water. Ety-
mologically, the word “religion” connotes a kind of binding together, and the
palace and moats are loci around which things bind. This recollects Heidegger’s
later work, which speaks about jugs and wine chalices gathering people and
worlds, while also emphasizing shared religious and consecrating aspects.42
This suggests a more complicated, cultural version of basic sensorimotor co-
ordinations, thus reinforcing somaesthetic, pragmatic and phenomenological
stress on the interdependence of body, mind and culture. Only in this case,
activity and experience organize around the palace and moats. In some ways,
the palace simultaneously constrains celebrations, a point also captured by
the idea of binding. After all, the Water Festival involves being constrained or
bound by what bodies and available environments allow and disallow. Limits,
in turn, supply a kind of world grammar that makes coherent experience,43
along with aesthetic form, possible. At the same time, the Water Festival in-
volves being controlled by the regime. Yet this is arguably what motivates some
of the creative acting out, so that the festival is simultaneously a venue for
41 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1934), esp. Ch. 3.
42 Heidegger, “The Thing,” 163–180; Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” [1951],
in Poetry, Language, Thought, 143–159.
43 See Matthew Crippen, “William James on Belief: Turning Darwinism against Empiricistic
Skepticism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 46, no. 3 (2010): 477–502.
102 Crippen
losing control and an avenue for seizing it back from an oppressive regime. In-
triguingly, therefore, this Buddhist festival can be seen as the inverse of a good
many Buddhist meditative practices insofar as it entails losing self-mastery.
This loss of mastery, however, introduces a modicum of life-bettering control,
thereby realigning it with meliorative practices of the religion, doing so, more-
over, in richly somatic ways.
4 Somatic Dimensions of Cairo’s Protests
Enacted against oppressive conditions and Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian

government, the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square adds to the account so far of-
fered. It does so by exemplifying artistic, somatic self-refashioning. In some
cases, refashioning is minor, as with demonstrators’ use of face paint. In others,
it is more radical, as with people creatively reworking injuries into badges of
dissent. Shusterman calls such practices “representational somaesthetics,” and
the category includes everything from surface adjustments achieved through
makeup, cosmetic surgery, bodybuilding, hairstyling and dieting to external
exhibitions of power and skill.44 Representational displays are not inevitably
expressions of vanity, but instead can converge with “experiential somaes-
thetics,” here encompassing practices such as athletics and yoga that make
“us feel better in both senses of that ambiguous phrase: to make the quality
of our somatic experience more satisfying and also to make it more acutely
perceptive.”45 For such reasons, representational and experiential somaesthet-
ics overlap with a third category. This is performative somaesthetics, focused on
“building strength, health, or skill,” and including activities such as athletics.46
Egypt’s Arab Spring began on January 25, 2011 as a demonstration against po-
lice brutality, but it broadened into a mandate expressed in the slogan: “bread,
freedom, social justice, and human dignity.”47 The specific date was chosen be-
cause it marked Police Day, a holiday ironically commemorating the death or
injury of police officers who stood against British occupiers. Deplorable eco-
nomic conditions had been percolating in Egypt for decades, and a number of
44 See Shusterman, “A Disciplinary Proposal,” 299–313; “Thinking through the Body: A Plea
for Somaesthetics,” 1–21.
45 Ibid., 15.
46 Ibid., 16.
47 Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio, “The Unbearable Lightness of Authoritarianism: Les-
sons from the Arab Uprisings,” Mediterranean Politics 16, no. 2 (2011): 321–227; Marlies
Glasius and Geoffrey Pleyers, “The Global Moment of 2011: Democracy, Social Justice and
Dignity,” Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 547–567.
specific incidents ignited the revolutionary powder keg. One of these included
the beating of Khaled Siad, a man in his 20s murdered by police in public view
while begging for mercy, the unprovoked attack repeating what had become
commonplace. The heart-wrenching images of his mangled face that circulat-
ed on protest pages with phrases such as Kullena Khaled Siad – meaning “We
are all Khaled Siad” – might be regarded as a somaesthetic display for world-
bettering purposes and cathartic release.48
Though protests combusted throughout Egypt, Tahrir was the sentimental
and functional heart, and as it happened my initial encounter with that space
occurred on my first day in Cairo proper. It began with a stroll along the Nile,
with the tips of the Giza Pyramids poking above the northern horizon. Before
going to Tahrir, a colleague took me to Maadi, which appeared normal except
for tanks and soldiers and the lack of heavy bustle characteristic of Cairo. We
next poked our heads up from a metro station in Garden City, assessing safety.
From there we wandered on foot to Tahrir. Approaching from a side-street, we
saw burnt cars and other wreckage that scarred the way, and tension increased
as we neared some barricades. No violence marred this day, and a carnival-like
atmosphere met us upon entering the square, accompanied by relief and mild
elation. At the same time, unease about potential violence and surveillance
remained, heightening the awareness of bodily vulnerability.
The organization of people in the square was remarkable. They themselves
handled security, patting people down at makeshift checkpoints and examin-
ing ID, presumably in efforts to repel plainclothes security. Inside the square,
protesters had built a little world, complete with food, water, tea and tents
pitched for those refusing to leave. An audio system blared music and chants.
Along the perimeter, a woman – middle or upper class to all appearances –
stood atop a pedestal for utility equipment, weeping and clutching a news-
paper with photos of dead protesters. More toward the center, a man dressed
in business attire was immersed in conversation, with a small Egyptian flag
in the shape of a crest hanging from his neck. His face and head were heavily
bandaged and his arm in a sling. Though clearly for medical purposes, the man
seemed to proudly display his dressings as insignias of dissent.
Throughout the square, people waved flags and paraded placards, often
perched on light poles, one of which had an effigy of Mubarak hanging from
48 For a history of Egypt’s Arab Spring, see Ashraf Khalil, Liberation Square: Inside the Egyp-
tian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012); Matthew
Crippen, “Egypt and the Middle East: Democracy, Anti-Democracy and Pragmatic Faith,”
Saint Louis University Public Law Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 281–302; Jack Shenker, The Egyp-
tians: A Radical Story (New York: The New Press, 2016).
104 Crippen
a noose in an artistic display. Most of the placards were haphazard shreds of

cardboard, with Arabic captions such as “Don’t let your revolution be stolen”
or “The people’s rights will not be lost regardless of delays” or “I don’t think
Mubarak has a TV,” this time in English. One man crouched above a battered
green electrical box, partly hidden behind a ragged tower made from pieces
of cardboard. He appeared poor, an impression affirmed by the uneducated
Arabic scrawled across his construction, cursing the government. To drive the
point home, he added an outward facing shoe – viscerally insulting in the Mid-
dle Eastern world – to his makeshift work of protest art. Welcoming pats on
backs were given, and paper Egyptian flags handed out, an emblem interpret-
ed at the time as a banner of dissent. On the edge of the square was a torched
police van, overflowing with trash. Much of it was bagged, so protesters living
in Tahrir presumably had converted the van to a makeshift dumpster, while si-
multaneously expressing distain for police. Soldiers and a tank were stationed
just outside the square, the latter strikingly covered with graffiti.
This brief description is distilled from emails sent during the 18-day span
that became known as the January Revolution, which was before I heard about
somaesthetics. Nonetheless, it captures the representational, experiential, and
performative aspects of the discipline. Instances of representational somaes-
thetics are obvious, whether by the man proudly displaying his injuries or peo-
ple painting flags on their faces. In addition to altering outward appearances,
these actions exhibited strength. Embodied, artistic, performative aspects like-
wise manifested in the weeping woman stalwartly clutching photographs of
the dead, or with the man posing like a statue, holding together his corrugated
edifice. One can speculate that these somatic performances supplied cathartic
release for those engaged in them and were accordingly experiential as well.
Cathartic and hence meliorative experiential dimensions of these bodily-
artistic displays were also there insofar as they were part of the collective hope
and optimism of that period, even if it turned out to be short-lived and naive.
The grief that came with this time and its aftermath, moreover, was an affirm-
ing reminder of the compassion that most carry, along with the human will for
bettering life circumstances.
The role of the flag in the protests is worthy of more attention. As opposed to
Western protest practices of defacing flags, Egyptians co-opted theirs – already
a sign of unity – as a coordinating symbol of dissent against ruling authorities.
This joint display of dissent kept with the living, collective cultural-historic
experience of Egyptians and indeed the square, which hosted celebrations af-
ter the 1952 Egyptian Revolution that toppled King Farouk and ejected British
occupiers. In the decades that followed, the square sporadically became a pro-
test space, with the most prominent demonstrations occurring in J anuary and
F ebruary of 2011 and reoccurrences afterwards up until the summer of 2013.

With their shared past, Liberation Square and the Liberation Flag – Tahrir
being Arabic for “liberation” – received their official names just after the 1952
Revolution.49 The Egyptian flag’s design was a variation of the broader pan-
Arab pattern. Many Middle Eastern flags follow this blueprint, introduced by
the British diplomat Mark Sykes as a revolt symbol against the Ottoman rul-
ers.50 This is ironic since it later was the banner under which Arabs ejected
Western powers.
The historic status of the flag – which mirrors that of the square – was argu-
ably part of what led it to become a central symbol of dissent, although flags
without revolutionary histories were central in Arab Spring protests elsewhere.
In all cases, however, flags shared a role, namely, coordinating existing national
unity to cement public exhibitions of solidarity. Egyptian organizers unequivo-
cally saw things this way, asking protesters to display flags and avoid signs of
specific religious or party allegiance.51 Painted on faces, incorporated into plac-
ards and clothing, handed out in the square and waved by the masses there,
flags saturated the square during the protests that toppled Mubarak. In one
dramatic display, men stood once again like sculptures in a representational-
performative-experiential exhibition, holding flags propelled upwards from air
rushing from subway vents, silhouetted against an angry-looking grey sky.
Perhaps the most striking exemplification of representational-performative-
experiential somaesthetics, however, was that of Ahmed Mohamed Ali, a for-
mer dentist, better known as Ahmed Harara. “Harara” is Arabic for “heat,” and
the appellation was given because of his eagerness in heated situations. During
a January 2011 clash on a bridge leading to Tahrir, a shotgun blast left Harara
temporally comatose and destroyed the vision in his right eye. In November of
the same year, he lost his left eye from a second gunshot, again near Tahrir.
Undeterred, Harara turned these injuries into protest art. At times, he has worn
a prosthetic eye, inscribed with the Arabic word ‫حرية‬, pronounced horiya and
meaning “freedom.” He is also known for his roughly worked metal eye p atches,
etched with the dates on which he was shot, ‫ يناير‬٢٨ and ‫ نوفمرب‬١٩ or January 28
A a
and November 19. These surface representations show strength, but they also
do more. In the context of interviews and public appearances, they become
forms of performance art. Being consequences of fervent commitment to the
49 Lloyd C. Gardner, The Road to Tahrir Square: Egypt and the United States from the Rise of
Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak (New York: New Press, 2011), Ch. 1.
50 Elie Podeh, The Politics of National Celebrations in the Arab Middle East (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011), Ch. 2.
51 Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
106 Crippen
revolutionary cause and expressing an almost Nietzschean way of cheerfully

dealing with its painful consequences, these representations of individual and
collective resolve are also experiential in Shusterman’s sense.
Though I already described my own experience in Tahrir during the uprising,
which was also aesthetic and bodily in Dewey and Shusterman’s senses, a criti-
cal point is worth adding: I am uncertain whether I stood within the bound-
aries of the square. Indeed, what most encountered in the news and hence
regarded as Tahrir was not the physical space of Tahrir, which has a diameter
of less than 100 meters. It was instead Tahrir plus the surrounding area that was
filled with protesters, and the fact that people defined that larger revolution-
ary space as Tahrir connects the Tahrir experience to that of Mandalay’s Water
Festival. Steinbeck notes that a physical pattern is needed for world-building,
and this was true for Tahrir in 2011, just as it is during Mandalay’s yearly water
celebrations. The protest space centered around Tahrir Square and included
the congested roads surrounding it, all of it hemmed in by buildings, many of
which are representations of state. One of these is the Mogamma, famous as
a maze of government bureaucracy. The Egyptian Museum also overlooks the
square, as did the ruling party’s headquarters until it was burned in 2011 and
demolished in 2015. At the functional heart of the city, Tahrir also abuts Sadat
Station, a nexus in the metro system. The square is likewise a hub for major
streets and Qasr El Nil Bridge, a prominent landmark linking downtown Cairo
to Zamalek Island, one of the most affluent areas in the city. While the physical
pattern was requisite, the 2011 uprising was a cultural event, defined largely by
bodies in streets and Tahrir. But more than this, pre-existing cultural factors
made Tahrir a central place of concern. Among these was the fact that the 1952
Egyptian Revolution that finally ended British rule and toppled King Farouk
was celebrated in the square and marked the time it was given its name. This
led to the erection of representations of state around it, and these made it a
good place to express dissent against rulers. Because it was a national symbol
of liberation, leaders were likely all the more motivated to clear it to maintain
spurious ownership over the ideologies it represents. But it was also a symbol
of rebellion, so protesters were likely all the more motivated to revolt and hold
the space to protect these same ideologies.
Thus while the centrality and physical space afforded are part of what led
people to gather there, this protest – like most others – was not just about hold-
ing space. Though capturing Tahrir was unquestionably important and added
momentum in 2011, the battle was – and continues to be – preeminently about
values and attempts to own and re-shape them. Tahrir Square accordingly is
not and was not defined by its official boundaries, but by mutually constitut-
ing interactions between people, physical space and culture. This points again
to Steinbeck’s and Heidegger’s notions of world-building. By virtue of pointing

to world-building, Tahrir – like Mandalay’s Water Festival – also highlights the
codependence of somaesthetic experience, politics, and culture in city life.52
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Chapter 5
Bodies in the Streets of Eastern Europe: Rhetorical

Space and the Somaesthetics of Revolution
Noemi Marin
A multitude of perspectives and scholarly works cover the year 1989 and East-
ern European political, social, and economic changes to post-communism,
along with half a century of communist practices and their immense global
impact. Every decade anniversary of the fall of communism, new in-depth
academic research attests to the legacy of its political history. Rhetorical stud-
ies remain one realm of (American) scholarship that falls short of examining
communist discourse and rhetorical concepts that legitimize such ideology
in people’s public participation in discourse.1 Addressing the scholarly gap of
studies on totalitarian and authoritarian discursive practices performed under
communist rule, a correlated critical investigation that explores Romanian po-
litical change in 1989 under rhetorical and somaesthetic re-presentations of
“bodies in the streets” provides an expansive analytical framework for Eastern
European public sites for social change.2
Romania of 1989 and its political transition from communist dictatorship
to post-communism demonstrates how rhetorical narratives created by “bod-
ies in the streets” transform themselves from communist uniformed bodies
into post-communist multilayered publics.3 The present study focuses on how
citizens of communist Romania change from an oppressed and almost static
1 In the last two decades, the works on communist rhetoric in the American context cover a
very limited number of Cold War studies, along with an even smaller amount of scholarship
on Eastern Europe and China.
2 In this study, the “bodies in the streets” phrase focuses on the rhetorical concept of the
“people” that I introduced in Noemi Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse and Ceausescu’s Loss of
Words: Memorializing Rhetoric in 1989 Romania,” in The End and the Beginning: The Revolu-
tions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan Cristian
Iacob (New York/Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 437–461. It seems useful
to align this concept with Richard Shusterman’s perspective on the politics of s omaesthetic
pragmatism. See Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
3 This rhetorical interrogation of what constitutes “the people” as nation versus what consti-
tutes “publics” as participants continues to stir debate among scholars exploring these di-
mensions in current rhetorical studies.

112 Marin
mass of (communist) people to gain public voice and political “soma power” to
shake off the oppressive regime. Utilizing a rhetorical framework to examine
Romanian communist transition to post-totalitarian life, this exploration pro-
poses a convergent analysis of rhetorical and somaesthetic action as a political
practice.4
Thus, following the Romanian political transition historically, this investi-
gation presents how “bodies in the streets” move (pun intended) from bod-
ies (read, communist citizens) subject to rigid, totalitarian political norms of
participation in the public sphere to ones that carry public voice and engaged
participation into a post-communist society. Accordingly, the study situates
“bodies in the streets” as Romanian citizens who in December 1989 experience
discursive dimensions that define communist and post-communist political,
rhetorical, and somaesthetic transformative practices as public participants in
a rhetorical space5 freed from totalitarian oppression.
1 Uni-FORM-ing the “People”: A Communist Endeavor
When speaking of communist practices, uni-FORM-ing the “people” is a well-

known, amply developed communist state strategy (aligned within Soviet-bloc
regulations and norms) to legitimize “bodies/masses/people”6 under State
(read, Communist) control; literally and practically uni-form-ing the nation to
create a uni-Form-ed, collective voice.7 By late 1980s, under Nicolae Ceausescu’s
4 On somaesthetics and politics, see Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Politics: In-
corporating Pragmatist Aesthetics for Social Action,” in Beauty, Responsibility and Power,
ed. Leszek Koczanowicz and Katarzyna Lizka (New York: Rodopi, 2014), 5–18.
5 See Noemi Marin, “Rhetorical Crossings of 1989: Communist Space, Arguments by Defini-
tion, and Discourse of National Identity Twenty-Five Years Later,” Rhetorics of “1989” and Af-
ter: Rhetorical Archaeologies of Political Transition, Advances in the History of Rhetoric 18, sup.
1 (2015): S167–S186.
6 The reference to “bodies” in this study designates “citizens of the State.”
7 Uni-Form-Ing is my own term and construed to highlight the intent of the Communist Party
to create a unified, uniform body of its people. While the social and political uniformiza-
tion of citizenship is inherent to the mission of communist propagandist public actions, my
choice of this term provides a visual and rhetorical interpretation of the communist require-
ment for all citizens to align only with normative Party-line representations of themselves as
Romanian people. Thus, under Ceausescu’s regime, no personal voice, no personally stylized
control over the body, and no personal control over political actions are allowed. The his-
torically accurate account of life under Ceausescu is part of the official Presidential Report,
approved by the Romanian government in 2006, according to which the communist dicta-
torship is declared ‘criminal.’ See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Dorin Dobrincu and Cristian Vasile,
eds. Raport Final: Comisia Presidential pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste in Romania [Final
Bodies in the Streets of Eastern Europe 113
totalitarian regime in Romania, this social and political leveling practice takes
precedence over all others, a harsh reality for its citizens, with life-threatening
implications unless following Communist Party liners.8 Communist history
studies emphasize uniformization as a fundamental practice of political domi-
nance throughout all communist countries.
In order to unfold the overall argument of the study, two caveats need to
be addressed first. Specifically, one needs to recognize that Romania is not the
only communist country that falls under militarized standards and regulations
for civilians and civil life in the public sphere. The role of transforming the
masses into a standardized public is, as mentioned, an inherent function of
communist propaganda throughout former Soviet bloc. However, during the
same historical period, the late 1980s, the “streets” of Czechoslovakia, Poland or
Hungary (Eastern and Central Europe), for example, depict a different political
narrative that legitimizes citizenry in the public sphere by problematizing the
argument of communist practices somewhat differently.9 The second caveat
is that it is not the purpose of this study to present official policies and strict
requirements created under Ceausescu’s totalitarian rule to conform its popu-
lations, whether in professional, official (read, political), or even personal con-
texts.10 Rather, this examination proposes to contextualize political narratives
created by the “bodies in the streets” when transitioning from the communist
public space to the post-communist political space, in order to demonstrate
the convergence of interdisciplinary studies on rhetorical practices and som-
aesthetic pragmatism on civic and political action.
Under Ceausescu, Romanian life is monochromatic. The Leader and his
Communist Party officials work non-stop on uni-Form-ing Romanian people.
Report: Presidential Commission on the Analysis of Communist Dictatorship in Romania]

(Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007).
8 Some of the best political, social, ethnographic, and rhetorical studies on Ceausescu’s 1989
include Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of R omanian
Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fanta-
sies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998); Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Re-
production in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Noemi
Marin, After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-communist Times (New
York: Peter Lang, 2007); Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive
of Romania’s Secret Police (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014).
9 See the rhetorical analysis of the ways communist regimes define “the people” in Marin,
“Totalitarian Discourse and Ceausescu’s Loss of Words.”
10 One of the most important historical documents covering the entire communist period in
Romania is the 700-page official document voted by the Romanian Government in 2006
as a governmental declaration of the crimes of this regime. This Final Report declared the
communist regime in Romania “criminal” and “illegitimate.”
114 Marin
The people have to be similar, according to the Romanian Communist Party

rules, conforming as bodies, as masses of determined manipulated action
(called “participation”) within all public and political spaces. The political
locus, whether rural or urban, includes uniformed bodies, dressed in similar
ways (on the basis of similar supplies of clothing), eating rationed foods de-
cided by the Communist ruler, and acting along communist norms throughout
the streets and in the buildings, parks, private homes, and official edifices.11
The monochromatic bodies and places in Communist Romania carry only
the officially approved Party-line seal for civic action.12 Not only people and
buildings, but also streets and public spaces all carry communist conformity
as a political identifier of communist identity. Robert D. Kaplan, a well-known
American journalist writing on his travels through Romania for over three de-
cades, recalls his experiences in Bucharest at that time:
The silence of the streets was devastating (my emphasis) … The city had
been reduced to a vast echo. There were few cars, and everyone was
dressed in the same (my emphasis) shapeless coats and furry hats that
evoked internal exile somewhere on the eastern steppe. People clutched
cheap jute bags in expectation of stale bread. I looked at their faces, ner-
vous, shy, clumsy, calculating, heartrending, as if they were struggling to
master the next catastrophe. Those clammy complexions seemed as if
they had never seen the sunlight. This was the beginning of a decade that
would be among the worst in Romanian history (my emphasis) … A distin-
guished British historian would later write that in the 1980s Romanian
had been ‘reduced … to an animal state, concerned only with the prob-
lems of day-to-day survival.’13
In Ceausescu’s Romania, by 1989, along with standardized monuments and liv-

ing quarters in cities and rural areas approved only in accordance with com-
munist norms in operation at the time, all citizens as bodies constitute also
an active target for political standardization. The uni-Form-ization of Romania
had become by then a legal policy for the entire country. In her gender studies
11 Standardization is inherent to communist practices of political action, including com-

munist China and North Korea. See Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons.
12 Most post-communist countries continue to exhibit visual traces of the communist past.
Note that Romanian communist norms for the physical appearance of streets as well as of
people’s appearances, artifacts and overall physical presence share extensive similarities
with norms presented throughout the former Eastern Soviet bloc.
13 Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey through
Romania and Beyond (New York: Random House, 2016), 5.
research on Ceausescu’s regime, Gail Kligman addresses Romanian policies on

uniformity, investigating how communist policies of reproduction worked to
create a uniform state control of women bodies.14 In 1989, adding to such prac-
tices of uni-Form-ing the Romanian population, Communist Party rulers issue
street regulations for its citizens: a curfew at night, monitored lines for food
in order to buy monthly (rationed) supplies for the families, and many more
regulations, all designed to control the Romanian people and its presence in
the public spaces of the totalitarian regime.15
2 Romanian Bodies for Ceausescu: Bodies in Communist Action!
Kaplan presents an eye-witness view on “the extent of the nightmare [the com-
munist regime in Romania], to which an air of unreality frequently hung.”16
On one occasion I even saw the tyrant (Ceausescu) close-up at a Com-

munist Party congress. He had stridden up to the podium, and the four
thousand Party members in attendance rose to their feet, chanting loudly
“Cea-u-ses-cu, Cea-u-ses-cu…” The tyrant, his chin jutting forth watches
impassively for a full three minutes with his wife, Elena, beside him. Then
he slightly raised his arm in a gesture vaguely reminiscent of a Hitler sa-
lute, the sight of which immediately silenced the great hall. Standing di-
rectly below a giant picture of himself, he began a speech interrupted
five times: each time by several minutes of hand-clapping and chants of
“Cea-u-ses-cu, Cea-u-ses-cu…” until he silenced them. He spoke for a full
ninety minutes on socialist economics. After a break, he would speak for
a further ninety minutes on socialist theory and ideology. The faces in the
audience looked terrified throughout (my emphasis). Nobody dared stop
clapping and chanting until he raised his arm.17
14 Kligman’s book describes the politics of reproduction, including the abortion decree is-
sued in 1977 that delineates the Romanian communist norms for abortion versus fertility
policies and sexual norms imposed for reproduction in accordance with Ceausescu’s vi-
sion on demographics for the Romanian future. Her study provides a historical approach
to examine how people’s sexual lives were monitored in communist Romania and how
women were objectified as (mere) bodies under official supervision and control.
15 From a rhetorical studies perspective, both classical concepts of polis and demos deserve
further study in the communist context, along with the role of citizenry. A distinct use of
polis in communist doctrines appears in Georg Lukacs, The Process of Democratization,
trans. Susanne Berhardt and Norman Levine (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).
16 Kaplan, In Europe’s Shadow, 9.
17 Ibid.
116 Marin
The streets of Romania in 1989 depict the terror of the totalitarian regime.
In recent years, internationally acclaimed New Wave Romanian filmmakers
like Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Andrei Ujica and Radu Jude capture in their
documentaries and feature films the gloomy, monochromatic visual discourse
that defined the streets of Ceausescu’s Romania.18 Ceausescu’s official political
speeches delivered for hours on end (literally); Romanian people mandated to
attend and proclaim adherence to the Leader’s words and vision; Romanians
amassed to populate discursive and public spaces with bodies, bodies that had
no political or civic voice of their own: all “bodies in the (Romanian) streets”
depicting a sharp contrast between political totalitarian speeches and the re-
alities of his regime.
By the end of December 1989, surrounded by falling walls of Eastern
European communism, Ceausescu continues more than before to speak about
totalitarian Romania as a locus for freedom, success, prosperity, and peace for
its citizens. All this, while narratives of existence (both private and public) of
the bodies in the streets claim a completely different living reality.19 As public
participants in the streets of Romania, the people lived a dull, uniformed, and
literally dark existence20 while at the same time they remain mandated to fill
by hundreds of thousands official public spaces, armed (pun intended) with
slogans, pictures of the Leader, banners, along with chants praising Ceauses-
cu’s achievements and everlasting successes.21
18 Cristian Mungiu, director of the Romanian film “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days” was awarded
the Palme D’Or at the 2007 Cannes International Film Festival. The film presents a story
based on Ceausescu’s politics of reproduction and on the official laws over women’s bod-
ies in late 1980s Romania.
19 For a detailed analysis of Ceausescu’s speeches and the official rhetoric of communist
Romania., see Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse and Ceausescu’s Loss of Words,” and Noemi
Marin, “Ceausescu’s Rhetorical Legacy: Totalitarian Discourse and its Impact on Commu-
nist Romania,” in Twenty Years After: Central and Eastern European Communist Regimes as
a Shared Legacy- An Anthology, ed. Vojtech Ripka (Prague: The Czech Republic Institute
for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes Press, 2010), 1–11. See also Cezar Ornatowski and
Noemi Marin, “Collocutio: Transformational Speeches,” Advances in the History of Rheto-
ric 11–12, no. 1 (2008): 231–236.
20 In 1989, Ceausescu’s regime issued additional oppressive decrees that limited lighting in
the streets as well as the use of electricity in private homes. The traffic/gas/ food restric-
tions were legalized under state measures to limit consumption for private homes and for
families, forcing the entire population to undergo a state program of rationing in order for
Romania as a nation to economize and pay its international debts. These legal policies are
extensively described in Tismaneanu et al, Final Report.
21 Noemi Marin, “The Other Side(s) of History: The Return of Rhetoric,” Advances in the His-
tory of Rhetoric 9, no. 1 (2006): 209–225.
My third morning in Bucharest, fifty thousand people marched down the

boulevards General Magheru and Nicolae Balcescu – named for the radi-
cal luminaries of the 1848 revolutions – shouting “Ceausescu, Pace, Ceaus-
escu, Pace” (“Ceausescu, Peace, Ceausescu, Peace”). The tyrant was hailed
as the mythic leader of all world peace and disarmament movements.
Massive photos of him and his wife, adorned with ribbons, and festooned
with blue, yellow, and red Romanian flags were noisily carried aloft. …
Occasionally an order was barked and people ran faster into place. …
And yet the thunderous roar only seemed to intensify the silence I felt
everywhere. Silence was the regnant sound of repression (my emphasis)22
Richard Shusterman highlights in “Somaesthetics and Politics” the theoretical

dimensions that inform the control of bodies for political purposes.
Our bodies, moreover, provide an essential medium or tool through

which social norms and political power are transmitted, inscribed, and
preserved in society. Ethical codes, social and political institutions, and
even laws are mere abstractions until they are given life through incor-
poration into bodily dispositions and actions. As Michel Foucault and
Pierre Bourdieu have argued, entire ideologies of domination can be co-
vertly materialized and preserved by encoding them in somatic norms
that, as bodily habits, get typically taken for granted and so escape critical
consciousness…. Any successful challenge to oppression should thus in-
volve somaesthetic diagnosis of the bodily habits and feelings expressing
that domination so that they, along with the oppressive social conditions
which generate them, can be overcome.23
Shusterman further explains that
important contemporary social theorists, such as Michel Foucault, Pierre

Bourdieu, and the gender theorists inspired by their work, have increas-
ingly urged that seemingly private body matters have a significant social
dimension, both being shaped by social factors (including social mark-
ings of class and gender) and contributing to the preservation of the soci-
ety that shapes our somatic subjectivities. Somaesthetics joins these views,
but also adopts another argument linking the personal and the political
(my emphasis). This is the ancient Confucian argument for the critical
22 Kaplan, In Europe’s Shadow, 16–17.

23 Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Politics,” 9.
118 Marin
importance of personal action in the political. The idea is that all good
government requires good self-government, and that political action
should start with that dimension.24
Thus, how does Ceausescu’s regime impact “bodies in the streets” as narratives
of political dominance and/or freedom? Can Romanian citizens habituated
with lack of soma power turn into active dynamic soma-citizens who start
refusing to be treated as passive objects under communist dictatorship? Can
they rhetorically gain a public voice?
3 Waves of Protests in December 1989: Romania’s Bodies

in the Streets
On December 1989, Eastern and Central Europe change for good! The Berlin
Wall falls in November of that year, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary are
taken aback by people fighting off the communist regime and its oppressive
politics, and all Eastern Europe, including its peoples, its countries, and its
politics, seem to be changing forever.25 Inspired to hope for the fall of the com-
munist bloc, in Romania’s western city of Timisoara people turn to the streets
against Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime.26 Ironically, while the protests in West
Romania continue, on December 21, 1989, Ceausescu schedules a public meet-
ing in Bucharest in order to control the masses and fight anti-communist en-
emies27 that are gaining power in Eastern Europe.28 That day, the totalitarian
leader is set to deliver yet another of his (in)famous speeches on the victories
of Romania communism in Bucharest. The historic footage of Ceausescu’s dis-
course (interrupted after only eight minutes), available these days on social
media, documents one of the most extraordinary moments of revolutionary
24 Ibid., 5–6.
25 There is an extensive body of literature on 1989 and the history of Eastern and Central
European Revolutions of 1989. Most of this scholarship pertains to political science, so-
ciology, and history; there is much less in rhetorical studies and very little in terms of
somaesthetics research. For rhetorical studies on 1989, see the entire collection co-edited
by Cezar M. Ornatowski and Noemi Marin, Rhetorics of ‘1989’ and After: Rhetorical Archae-
ologies of Political Transition, Advances in the History of Rhetoric 18, sup.1 (2015).
26 Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York:
Free Press, 1992).
27 Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse and Ceausescu’s Loss of Words.”
28 See the historic footage posted on Ceausescu’s last discourse in December 1989: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWIbCtz_Xwk.
action of the last part of the twentieth century.29 That day, while the actual vic-
tims of political protest are ignored by the official Romanian news channels,
Ceausescu’s political meeting in downtown Bucharest is televised by Commu-
nist Party decree, showing Romanians amassed to acclaim their totalitarian
leader.30
Speaking from the Romanian Communist Party Headquarters, Ceausescu
addresses the Romanian people to appease the masses, using yet again one of
his main ideological themes: the fight against capitalist imperialism as the “en-
emy of the people.” With foes from the West identified, Ceausescu condemns
yet again life outside of Romania, glorifying his (own) communist program,
and (as part of it) the subjugated, unfree lives of its citizens. That day, eight
minutes into the speech, Romanians who were forced to watch the leader’s
televised speech witness an amazing transformation of political power, when
communist bodies, physically present at the speech, become free citizens,
when active, sentient, purposively embodied citizens disrupt the tyrannical
leader’s speech and overthrow a totalitarian communist despot. The fact that
Ceausescu wanted all his public appearances, speeches included, televised to
propagate his vision makes this unique historic moment even more important
from the perspective of narratives of the streets. All TV crews participating in
the coverage of the event watch the change of political action occurring only
after eight minutes from the beginning of the speech. Afraid of political op-
pression, the TV crew members do not dare to turn their live transmissions off,
rather they keep the cameras rolling, providing a live transmission to all and
on all of the country’s television channels (there were only two). On camera,
in public, the Romanian revolution starts with the revolt of the bodies in the
streets, literally!
Analyzed in depth by Marin31 in her rhetorical study focusing on the two
days that mark Romania’s most dramatic and bloody political transition to
democratic life, here is how Ceausescu starts his speech:
My appeal is to all citizens of our country without any difference in na-

tionality, to come together and prove they fully understand the critical
29 See the video posted on Ceausescu’s last discourse in December 1989: https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=wWIbCtz_Xwk.
30 The Romanian Revolution of 1989, as indicated in Tismaneanu et al., Final Report, was the
bloodiest political episode of Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship, with over one thou-
sand victims killed in December by the Communist Party military and police forces.
31 Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse,” 172.
120 Marin
situation which had been created by the terrorist actions in Timisoara32

and to act in full unity and solidarity, defending socialism, doing every-
thing in their power to never allow such states of affairs to ever occur
again!33
In almost no time, the Romanian people in his outdoor audience, these bod-
ies in the street(s) gathered by the tens of thousands by Party officials under
high political pressure, start moving.34 While Ceausescu is uttering his totali-
tarian tirade, people start physically pushing against the thick lines of order
created by official Party-liners, advancing towards Communist Party official
spaces, getting closer and closer towards Ceausescu and the rest of the Com-
munist Party leaders, protesting, giving voice, louder and louder, to new oppo-
sitional chants and slogans! The official communist chants, like “Long Live the
Communist Party,” give way to moving oppositional roars and chants, for the
first time out loud, against Romanian leaders: “Death to the Communist Party,”
“Down with the Communist Party”!35 Those mandated to be in attendance are
literally and physically taking over the official bodies in the streets (military,
police, and law enforcement officers), shaking their own bodies free of over
forty years of deeply rooted Romanian communist reality, stepping into the
space of freedom!36
“Romanians refused to follow their leader’s behest … For once, people
abandoned their fear and interrupted the dictator’s oratory” writes Vladimir
Tismaneanu.37 Continuing the waves of protests in the streets of Bucharest,
bodies shake off, literally, emotionally, and politically the “yoke” of commu-
nism: a powerful historic moment of de-colonization, of liberation from totali-
tarian oppression.38 Tismaneanu retells the story:
32 The “terrorist actions in Timisoara” referenced in the speech represent the December
street actions of protest that initiated the Romanian revolution of 1989.
33 For the full speech translated from Romanian, see Noemi Marin, trans., “Address by Com-
rade Nicolae Ceausescu,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 7, no. 1 (2004): 297–303.
34 Romania under Ceausescu has been (politically and historically) declared a totalitarian
state. See Tismaneanu et al., Final Report.
35 The official chants for the Romanian leader were recorded and played on speakers
throughout the public space of the meeting, a practice commonly utilized during that
period.
36 See the video posted on Ceausescu’s last discourse in December 1989: https://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=wWIbCtz_Xwk.
37 Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 213.
38 The issues of colonization/ de-colonization as political practices of communism are dis-
cussed in Bogdan Stefanescu, Postcommunism, Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity
(Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2013).
“Television revealed his (Ceausescu’s) stupefaction and confusion …

Intended to support Ceausescu’s rule, the meeting turned into an anti-
Ceausescu demonstration. Gathered in University Square in Bucharest
some demonstrators erected a barricade and continued their protest dur-
ing the night of December 21. The same night, protesting students were
massacred in the University Square. In spite of bloody repressing, the next
day, December 22, 1989, large crowds blocked the streets of B
ucharest and
assaulted the Central Committee Building … The same day, December 22,
the Ceausescus were arrested.”39
In terms of the concepts presented in Shusterman’s somaesthetics, the scene

described above (Romania, Bucharest, December 21, 1989) exemplifies practi-
cal and performative somaesthetic “doing” as political action.40 Shusterman
states that:
“Concerned not with saying but with ‘doing,’ this practical dimension is
the most neglected by academic body philosophers, whose commitment
to the discursive logos typically ends in textualizing the body. For practi-
cal somaesthetics, the less said the better, if this means the more work
actually done. But unfortunately, it usually means that actual body work
simply gets left altogether out of philosophical practice.”41
Adding to rhetorical and visual perspectives in place, several somaesthetic ob-

servations are called for when describing the above-mentioned political mo-
ment of regime-change in Romania, in particular regarding the movement of
the masses as seen on Romanian television and on the relationship of bodies
in action as embodiment of the revolution in a televised action. First, speaking
of the movement of the masses both in physical reality and on the television
screen offers a unique approach to the soma power of the citizens of R omania.
As the TV cameras continued to present the live events in the Romanian cap-
ital, the TV viewers witnessed the wave of protests undulating the physical
participants at the meeting. With Ceausescu interrupted and chaos on the
official platform, cameras focused on the voices, movements, and increasing
shift in slogans turning the locus of political oppression into political revolt.
Romanians watched a site where bodies in movement occupy the screen and
39 Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 213.

40 Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal,” The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 57, no. 3 (1999): 299–313.
41 Ibid., 307.
122 Marin
with it, showing a reality never before presented in real time on Romanian
television.42 In addition, the soma politics of protest witnessed on national
television in Romania on December 21, 1989 become a key point for somaes-
thetic and rhetorical convergence as a pragmatic intervention that carries real
life consequences. On TV screens, Romanians watched how citizens’ bodies
in the street, in protest, changed Romanians’ lives forever! In those decisive
moments, a new rhetorical and political space was created that expelled the
communist regime and created space for a post-communist era.43
4 The Street(s) of Communist Romania: Rhetorical Space and Its

Political Function
In this study, I define “the street” as rhetorical space, inherent to the public
sphere, a critical dimension for “understanding the discursive strategies of
access and control at work in the Romanian public sphere at a time when
revolutionary changes are modifying governance, politics, and civic rights all
around.”44 In totalitarian regimes such as Romania, rhetorical space under-
lines all strategic moves of discourse to control access and censor language
and information, to monitor private and public life under such regimes. And
once such a strategic move becomes a successful practice, as totalitarian space
covering totalitarian rhetoric, what happens when a revolutionary discourse
breaks into its realm? By treating “the street” as a discursive space, the study
aligns this rhetorical dimension with Shusterman’s perspective that “oratory
(my emphasis) skills are also somaesthetic skills.”45
As mentioned earlier, the Romanian “streets” of December 1989 transform
political narratives, as they embody and create new, anti-communist civic and
rhetorical space, fundamentally transforming the political life of the coun-
try. The convergence between rhetoric and somaesthetic action occurs when
the communist space occupied with bodies from the streets become a public
42 Most likely, many studies of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York City
depict the realities of televised and physical sites converging as experienced by those wit-
nessing the tragedy unfold.
43 See, for example, Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob, eds., The End and the Be-
ginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History, and Cezar M. Ornatowski
and Noemi Marin, eds., Rhetorics of “1989” and After: Rhetorical Archaeologies of Political
Transition, Advances in the History of Rhetoric 18, sup. 1 (2015).
44 Noemi Marin, “Rhetorical Crossings,” S170–171.
space for soma power, for turning these bodies into purpose-driven soma citi-
zens intervening to eliminate Romanian totalitarian regime and step literally
into new streets, those of the new political realm of post-communist reality.
Dissent and anti-communist discourse bring other dimensions that substanti-
ate the need for engaging relationships between rhetoric and somaesthetics
when studying communist public space. When looking at rhetorical space un-
der communist regimes of the twentieth century, we find no communist state
allows or allots any physical, public, or discursive space for dissent.46 For all
communist regimes, dissidents and anti-communist people embody “the en-
emy of the people” requiring to become hidden (read, eliminated) from any
public access, voice, or participation within society. Hence, history of these
regimes shows that dissidents or public intellectuals like Havel, Konrad,
Solzenitsyn, and so many other Eastern and Central European writers and po-
litical activists paid with imprisonment, torture, or political punishments for
their freedom of speech (and for the places and public space to exercise it).47
In totalitarian Romania, the discourse of resistance, the samizdat, could never
inhabit (officially) the “streets.” Rather, Romanians held their narratives of dis-
sent and anti-communist voices within private homes, religious sites, or prison
cells, never outside. For, within Ceausescu’s official rhetorical space, otherness
(as opposition) does not exist. Voices of dissent are silenced, people are forced
to utter only communist propaganda in public, there is no vocabulary left for
opposition, and official praise arguments are the only ones accepted as part of
the rigid Romanian political landscape of communist uniformity.48
By December 1989, the Romanian people had no choice but to hide from
public sites. Ironically, while the streets of totalitarian Romania are filled by
hundreds of thousands of people ordered to show up and honor their politi-
cal leader, the same people are completely left out from the streets as rhetori-
cal space, with their public voices confiscated. The streets become a gloomy,
46 Russia and the Soviet Union carry their own dramatic history on dissidence during the
Stalin and Brezhnev regimes, for example, and similar reference can be made to China.
See Frank Dikotter’s extensive studies that illuminate similar practices of closing all pub-
lic space for non-official political discourse in The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History,
1962–1976 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
47 See Noemi Marin, After the Fall.
48 Compared to the rest of Eastern and Central Europe under communism, Romanian total-
itarian practices under Ceausescu’s regime featured some of the most extensive punitive
consequences for citizens. As a result, in 1989 there were very few dissidents in Romania.
See Tismaneanu et al., Final Report.
124 Marin
poverty-stricken locus where public discourse is only for its officials, not its
citizens.49
What happens, then, when the political, cultural, and social life of a coun-
try changes entirely to leave room for a decolonized and heterogeneous polis?
History tells us that all transition from (any) authoritarian or totalitarian re-
gimes takes time. How do Romanian streets open up discursive and civic loci
immediately after the demise of the communist regime, in the early hours of
December 22, 1989?
5 From Uni- to Pluri-: Post-Communist Romanian Streets and Bodies
When addressing the political transition of Eastern Europe, decolonization

as a conceptual framework brings about a detailed examination of post-
communism as a narrative of post-coloniality.50 An increasing number of East-
ern and Central European scholars propose to investigate communist regimes
in relation to the perspective of traumatic coloniality. Stefanescu provides a
critical-cultural exploration on the convergence of colonialism and commu-
nism, stating that they “share a sufficient number of structural attributes for
them to be treated as varieties of traumatic coloniality, since they both consist
of victimized cultures whose identities have been violated by a foreign [here, in
this article, a Communist Party] oppressor and are now struggling to recover.”51
Calling for cooperation between researchers from both post-colonial and post-
communist studies, Stefanescu adds that a key objective needs to be
the reconstruction of a disfigured cultural identity …. Whether identity is

subcategorized racial, national, gender, class or otherwise. In both cases,
researchers do more than just meditate on the causes, circumstances,
and mechanisms by which identity is maimed and recovered, Indeed,
by exposing the way in which a putative “natural” or “free” development
of the cultural self was oppressively altered, postcolonial and postcom-
munist critics alike aim to redress and facilitate the process of identity
formation.52
49 See Marin, After the Fall, and Marin, “Totalitarian Discourse.”

50 I prefer to use Stefanescu’s notion of coloniality (as explained below) and post-coloniality
rather than post-colonialism as a conceptual framework for my argument. See S tefanescu,
Postcommunism, Postcolonialism.
51 Ibid., 148.
52 Ibid., 91.
Stefanescu argues for the convergence between post-communism and post-

colonialism on grounds of “coloniality” as a generic term for the paradigm of
collective subordination that covers the broadest spectrum of subtypes and
historical variations eradicating voice for a collective national identity accrued
under subordinate practices. Coloniality represents “any historical situation in
which a political and/or economic power displays a consistent colonial policy
and practice of colonization.”53 It is “the actual process and practice of initiat-
ing and maintaining colonial domination (with all the acts/actions, discourses,
institutional and infrastructural mechanisms, strategies, etc. applied by colo-
nizers to subordinate their victims).”54
There is one premise legitimizing the rapprochement between post-
communism and post-colonialism that most scholars tend to agree on, namely
the cultural trauma55 such political regimes create, whether it be traumas
caused by life under totalitarian rule in Romania, or cultural trauma fol-
lowing post-Soviet liberation of the Balkan states, or the traumas that keep
Mitteleuropa, as Milan Kundera defines it, still struggling for territory, legitima-
tion, or freedom.56 No one can deny the cultural trauma created by commu-
nism as more and more historical evidence reveals atrocities that mutilated
entire groups of people in the countries it dominated. Given that coloniality in
the official practices of the Romanian communist regime justified the control
of the people in the streets, de-colonization of official public places involves
the notion of vacuity (or the empty public spaces).57 Public communist sites,
previously occupied in accordance with Communist Party policies, must be
repopulated with citizens and democratic ideals, filling in better ways the
emptied rhetorical (discursive, participatory) spaces left behind by totalitar-
ian political discourse. If so, what happens when “bodies in the streets” open
up new discursive geographies for democratization?
Only recently, after three decades of post-communist realities, more and
more scholarship focuses on public spaces of communist history as they be-
come more popular (pun intended) loci inhabited by the post-communist
53 Ibid., 68.
54 Ibid., 69.
55 The concept of “postcoloniality” is legitimized in Stefanescu’s work on the basis of cul-
tural trauma as defined by Piotr Sztompka. See Piotr Sztompka, “Cultural Trauma: The
Other Face of Social Change,” European Journal of Social Theory 3, no. 4 (2000): 449–466.
56 Mitteleuropa, the famous notion proposed by F. Naumann in 1915, is brought to the atten-
tion of international publics in Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York
Review of Books, April 26, 1984.
57 See Stefanescu, Postcommunism, Postcolonialism, 112.
126 Marin
polis.58 Somaesthetics and rhetorical studies can provide converging inter-

disciplinary approaches to examine such discursive and somaesthetic loci of
political action. The events of totalitarian Romania in December 1989 engage
both rhetorical and somaesthetic dimensions as powerful dynamics that first
empty the streets of the past and then open novel public spaces for discours-
es of freedom.59 I contend that the rhetorical space created by emptying the
Romanian official political arena in December 1989 should be examined from a
somaesthetic perspective. For, it is in the ‘doing’ (acting/engaging/embodying
the revolution) that Romanian bodies in and of the streets perform politically,
culturally, and somaesthetically, reconstituting the nation as a “political pop-
ulous” in ways never seen or experienced for half a century of communist
regime.
In post-communist Romania, new street realities surface and long-hidden
spectacles of the public spaces reappear along with novel changes in the
streets. Homeless groups, drug-addicts, orphans without foster homes, pros-
titutes, activists and civic actors, all engage with these public spaces asserting
their presence and voice.60 Having the right to inhabit the streets, all sorts of
bodies manifest the new multi-chromatic landscape of Romania’s polis: haves
and have-nots, beggars, members of nationalist movements expressing resurg-
ing folkloric nostalgia. Faithfully depicting such phenomena, cinematogra-
phers represented by Romanian New Film Wave explore (more than ever) the
forms of street life during the political transition and its complex, dramatic,
and traumatic spectacles.61 Thus, politically, post-1989 Romania and its new
bodies in the streets create loci for public participation within the process
of performative unrest that remains an important function of “doing.” Post-
communist rhetorical space invites political arguments on the streets as rep-
resentative narratives of national identity. It is within such political play of
space as a discursive site that public arguments regarding homelessness and
58 In the last several years, the conferences of the Association for Slavic, East European and
Eurasian Studies have included more and more presentations on communist monumen-
tal art and on national parks that continue to preserve communist relics or statues of
former leaders.
59 Former Romanian President Ion Iliescu (1992–1994, 1994–1998) was the first post-com-
munist president. On December 22, 1989, Ion Iliescu was the political representative pre-
senting the National Front Declaration to the Romanian people. See Noemi Marin, trans.,
“Communiqué to the Country Issued by the Council of the National Salvation Front,”
(The People’s Sparkle, Dec. 23, 1989, Romania) Advances in the History of Rhetoric 7 (2004):
305–312.
60 In Romania, prostitution is legal, but not regulated.
61 See, for example, the award-winning feature films Graduation (directed by Cristian Mun-
giu) and Sierranevada (directed by Cristi Puiu).
other questions of legitimation and social action take place. It is in the streets
that protests and peaceful demonstrations occur and constitute rhetorical ar-
guments that sustain and promote national identity discourse.
How does post-communism engage with new images of “the streets” neces-
sary to repopulate people’s public memory? A common strategy adopted by
all states throughout Eastern Europe is the remapping of cities, by renaming
public spaces (streets, squares, parks) with new or pre-communist names (to
restore the public memory of a glorified past). After three decades, this remap-
ping of streets in terms of political and civic action reveals a powerful rhetoric
of national identity, expressing how each of these countries resolves the ten-
sions between its communist and post-communist history. In Romania, the
aesthetics of urban landscape and the political play of “bodies in the streets”
and their related rhetorical spaces remain insufficiently studied. This essay
calls for further exploration of the role of soma power and soma politics along
with studies of political discourse in the streets of post-communist societies.
6 coda: Invitation into the Politics of Post-Communist Streets
In the past few years, the current Romanian government has been proposing
laws and regulations that can be construed by most (including by R omania’s
own President Iohannis) as anti-democratic.62 Such legislation proposes
to change legal penalties related to corruption, favoring political elites and
elected officials and pardoning non-democratic political practices endorsed
by them. Politically, Romanians now go to the streets as embodied resistance
sites, creating anti-government movements that defend anti-corruption laws,
so necessary in Eastern Europe nowadays. Thus, bodies in the streets of post-
communist Romania are alive and well! During this new wave of protests,
Romanian social media has turned its digital space into a new site for political
and discursive resistance, a “virtual street” extension for the ‘doing’ of civic
actions. Future research should consider also the somaesthetic and rhetorical
62 In the recent speech delivered by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in the summer of
2018, he accused the governing leaders (the Social-Democrat Party and Alliance of Liber-
als and Democrats) of political abuses and non-democratic legal proposals (see https://
www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/politica/klaus-iohannis-discurs-consiliul-national-al-pnl
-974793). The streets of Bucharest in August 2018 were again filled with protesters, and
the protest of August 10, 2018 was one of the most violent meetings between political and
civic voices of the country. See Radio Free Europe postings at https://www.europalibera
.org/a/29427779.html.
128 Marin
strategies and effects of the digitized representations of bodies in the streets

(in Eastern E
urope as well as elsewhere). This could deepen our understand-
ing of the powerful narratives of freedom that the people of the streets create
throughout the world.
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Chapter 6
From Dancing to Dying in the Streets:

Somaesthetics of the Cuban Revolution
in Memories of Underdevelopment and Juan
of the Dead
Marilyn G. Miller
1 The Cuban Body and the Body Politic
Since January 1959, when news broadcasts chronicled Fidel Castro’s trium-
phant entry into the capital city of Havana after the westward push from the
Sierra Maestra mountains, film has offered a visual commentary of the Cuban
Revolution from the perspective of the capital city’s streets. Early newsreels fea-
tured jubilant throngs hailing the young bearded revolutionaries as they made
their way into the center of the city and the center of power. In the streets,
Cubans celebrated the overthrow of the previous government, condemned
U.S. political and economic control in the island, and toppled marquees and
monuments that represented that control. The Castro brothers, Ernesto “Che”
Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and other young leaders brought government to
the ground level, first by recruiting revolutionary adherents in the villages and
towns of the Cuban provinces, and then by convening the urban masses in
streets, squares and other public sites in Havana.
Neighborhoods and domestic spaces were repurposed as public venues
for sociopolitical and cultural production under the new government. Soon
after the revolutionary triumph, Cuba’s citizens were uniformly organized
into cdrs, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, established in each
neighborhood to institute government policy and surveillance at the most ba-
sic level of the street (see Illustration 6.1).1
In 1959, a journal with the title La calle (The Street) was founded as the or-
gan of the cdrs. As the image from one cover of La calle shows, the hands of
1 The importance of the cdrs to revolutionary infrastructure is documented in cdr: 10 años de

trabajo, published a decade after their formation. No single individual is credited as author.

From Dancing to Dying in the Streets 131
Illustration 6.1 Emblem of the Committees for the Defense of the Cuban Revolution.
citizens of different ages, races, and professions were envisioned working to-
gether like cogs in the wheel to progressively implement revolutionary policies
and reforms (see Illustration 6.2).
While it has been commonplace to consider the storied, if dilapidated,
streets of Havana as “actors” in their own right in documentary and feature
films from and about Cuba, here we approach these public spaces from a new
angle, from the intersection of the deployment of Cuban revolutionary rheto-
ric and lived experience of bodies in community. Havana’s avenues and thor-
oughfares provide international access, through their representation in film, to
the ways Cubans have come to terms with the needs and desires of the body in
the face of revolutionary demands on that body.2 In this essay, I consider how
2 The incursion of revolutionary rhetoric in the experiences of the body had a significant effect
on the somaesthetic pleasures of movie-viewing itself. Havana had one of the most highly
developed cinema-watching infrastructures in the world prior to the Revolution, but the hab-
it of consuming cinema for pure entertainment changed radically after 1959, when the genre
132 Miller
Illustration 6.2 Cover of issue no. 84 of the journal La calle.
was newly defined in terms of artistic-political expression and cultural exceptionality (See
Miharu Miyasaka, “Dinámica cultural y ansiedad nacional en la zombificación de la Habana.
Diálogo con Alejandro Brugués, director del filme Juan de los Muertos,” in Terra Zombi. El
fenómeno transnaconal de los muertos vivientes, ed. Rosana Díaz-Zambrano [San Juan y Santo
Domingo: Isla Negra, 2015], 218). The film Juan of the Dead questions this revolutionary model
of filmmaking and cinema-going in many ways, implicitly questioning both the ethical de-
mand and practical viability of swearing total allegiance to the Cuban cultural production
machinery. By supplementing the funding he received from the Cuban state with economic
backing from Spain, Brugués highlighted the problematic topic of the coproduction, an ever
more common transnational practice that many in Cuba see as a concession to necessary for-
eign economic capital in order to develop authentic symbolic capital in the national context
(Miyasaka, “Dinámica cultural,” 230).
two films, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 Memorias de Subdesarrollo (Memories

of Underdevelopment), and Alejandro Brugués’s 2011 Juán de los muertos (Juan
of the Dead), question this contentious relationship between the physical
body and the revolutionary state. While Memories portrays the first decade of
the Revolution, Juan of the Dead is set in the aftermath of its most severe crisis,
the so-called Special Period of the 1990s. Each film, then, provides a revealing
vantage point from which to view the gains and losses of the revolutionary
project as they relate directly to the body and the body politic.
Though critics have paid relatively little attention to somaesthetic concerns
in their analysis of Cuba after 1959, several philosophical models, especially
the Marxist tenets that informed the Revolution, have without doubt shaped
individual and collective experience on the island during the last six decades.
Cuba enjoys a reputation as a locale in which aesthetic perception and bodily
experiences – especially those associated with pleasure and the erotic – have
long been closely connected.3 Arguably, Fidel Castro and his fellow revolu-
tionaries appeared on the political stage at a moment in which “recreational”
activities such as drinking, swimming, sex, sunbathing, dancing, yachting,
clubbing, gambling and joyriding had achieved a legendary status in the island,
earning Cuba and especially Havana a reputation as North America’s Carib-
bean, anything-goes playground. But not everyone had equal access to those
pleasures. The 26th of July Movement founded by the Castros responded to
3 In a landmark study published in 1940 that drew from the fields of literature, aesthetics,
economics, and sociology, the ethnographer Fernando Ortiz explained the Cuban character
and culture by comparing and contrasting two prized products cultivated and consumed in
Cuba for the body’s pleasure: tobacco and sugar. Tobacco was dark, masculine, and tied to
relaxation while sugar was white, feminine, and a stimulant; sugar was a foreign product in-
troduced by Europeans and then produced on a massive scale by enslaved laborers and low-
wage workers, while tobacco was an indigenous plant cultivated by small landholders using
skilled labor. Ortiz’s baroque history of tobacco and its central role in Cuba from pre-European
times to the 20th century shifted the focus from the capitalist exploitation of sugar, long as-
sociated with the labor of the enslaved, to the artisanal and mythic-religious preparation and
consumption of the island’s most famous indigenous product. The English-language version
of Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint includes illustrations from 19th century tobacco wrappers with
messages such as “De los gustos sin pecar, el mejor es el fumar” (Of the pleasures that are no
sin, smoking is the best). This link between Cuban tobacco and aesthetic concerns is evident
in the practice of employing lectores in the cigar factories. Elevated on a platform above the
workers, these public readers read texts from a variety of genres, including poetry, out loud to
the workers as they expertly handcrafted the island’s famed puros. In an essay on the human
factors of Cubanness published the same year, Ortiz enlisted another metaphor associated
with the pleasures of the body to describe the Cuban character, that of the ajiaco, a complex
stew that boasted a dense, quintessentially local flavor, achieved by simmering together di-
verse meats, indigenous root vegetables and assorted seasonings. (Ortiz, 2008).
134 Miller
this scene of excess and inequality in two ways. First, it promised to transform
this “hedonist” playground for rich outsiders into a level playing field in which
Cuban citizens of all racial classifications had access (at least in theory) to the
sites of political power and to the sites of pleasure and diversion. The barbu-
dos declared the island a territory for all Cubans to possess and enjoy, rather
than a tiered terrain owned and operated primarily by outsiders. At first, these
changes brought welcome relief in the form of more accessible housing, lower
rents, and more affordable basic goods. But soon the supply lines for these
goods were compromised or severed, and the new government had to address
growing shortages.
In 1963, the revolutionary government affirmed its commitment to growing
concerns of shortages by instituting the libreta, or food ration card, which pro-
vided all Cuban families with basic nutrition on a monthly basis.4 Rather than
a handout, the libreta symbolized the reciprocal relationship Cuba’s leaders
sought to institute with the populace, in which all physical, intellectual, and
political efforts were to contribute to revolutionary aims and projects.
The Castro government’s approach to the body politic – what we might
label its “politics of somaesthetics” – was to ask Cubans to dedicate their physi-
cal bodies to the service of national security, agricultural production, educa-
tion for all, and other domestic and international efforts in unprecedented
ways. Broad sectors of the citizenry, including adolescents, participated in a
range of campaigns and initiatives that required unprecedented sacrifices of
time, energy, and the abandonment of ordinary comforts: military service, sug-
ar cane cutting and other agricultural tasks, literacy campaigns that obliged
newly equipped teachers to travel to and through remote and difficult terrains
far from their hometowns to reach illiterate populations. As some Cubans criti-
cal of economic policy in the island have pointed out, “free” goods and services
such as universal health care, universal education, and food rations were tied
to this sacrificial dedication of one’s physical, mental, and social faculties to
the goals of the state. Personal desires or needs that were in conflict with the
state’s aims and means of provision were to be suppressed.
While Cuba’s massive efforts to enlist its citizens’ bodies in collective proj-
ects such as those noted above enjoyed substantial success and bolstered iden-
tification with a common set of missions in the early revolutionary period, it is
4 Economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago has studied the long-term effects of the implementation
of food rationing and other governmental programs, concluding that while the majority of
economic indicators worsened under the Revolution between 1959 and 2008, the majority
of social indicators improved. See “Balance Económico-Social de 50 Años de Revolución en
Cuba,” América Latina Hoy 52 (2009): 41–61.
arguable that they also prepared the citizenry for an even greater physical sac-
rifice that would follow, that of enduring protracted hunger itself. The govern-
ment coined the term “Special Period in Times of Peace” to rhetorically frame
the most intense moment of crisis, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in 1989 resulted in the loss of support and supplies from Cuba’s chief commu-
nist ally and principal trade partner. The primary effect of this implosion for
most Cubans was marked food scarcity through the decade of the 1990s, as the
government progressively reduced the amount and variety of rations offered in
the libreta.5 As Cuba was not at war, these extreme conditions could not be de-
scribed as “wartime privations,” but only as hardships to be endured during the
“special” Post-Soviet period, when the halt in the flow of goods from Eastern
Europe profoundly exacerbated shortages caused by the United States’ ongo-
ing trade embargo against the revolutionary government of Cuba, instituted in
October of 1960 and further expanded in 1962.6
The Special Period (there is sustained debate as to whether and if this
period has ended, notwithstanding official rhetoric) represents not the begin-
ning but the apex of somaesthetic sacrifice in revolutionary Cuba; it is symbol-
ized by a libreta that no longer provides sufficient nourishment to cover basic
nutritional needs. The obligation to withstand food shortages was part of an
obvious but sometimes overlooked duty of the citizen in the new regime: to
remain, to keep his or her body in the island, to not abandon the homeland
and the revolutionary project, whatever the belly suggested. Although Cubans
who chose to flee such hardships were notoriously labeled gusanos or worms,
and suffered public humiliation within their communities in the form of state-
supported actos de reprobio or collective acts of repudiation, thousands under-
took dangerous and/or costly journeys to escape the geographic confines of
the nation, even as they sought to maintain their loyalty to an essential Cuban-
ness or cubanidad.
As this brief history makes clear, the Cuban Revolution sought to redefine
“the meliorative cultivation of the experience and use of one’s body as a site
of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning,” to cite one of
5 In a blog posting on Cuballama.com from October of 2018, Flavia Viamontes notes that de-
spite the reduction in the variety and quantity of foodstuffs distributed through the libreta,
Cubans are still worried by plans to abolish it. “¿Qué compran hoy los cubanos con la libreta
de abastecimiento?” Cuballama.com, October 31, 2018.
6 For several perspectives on the embargo, see Carlos Alzugaray Treto, De la fruta madura a la
Ley Helms-Burton: auge, decadencia y fracaso de la política imperialista de Estados Unidos ha-
cia Cuba (Panama: Editorial Universitaria eupan, 1997); Pedro Prada, Island under Siege: the
U.S. Blockade of Cuba (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1995); Jaime Suchlicki, The U.S. Embargo of
Cuba (Miami: Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, 2000).
136 Miller
Richard Shusterman’s definitions of somaesthetics.7 Over and over, revolution-

ary leaders urged citizens to enlist their bodies in a variety of national efforts
(including survival itself) in sacrificial and heroic ways. It seems, however, that
even Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson who have applauded the Cuban mod-
el have passed over this new relationship between the individual body and the
body politic that the Cuban Revolution implemented. “The presumption seems
to be that somatic attention is inherently private and fiercely individualistic,
that the body is somehow essentially hidden from social perception the way
that Descartes thought the body is somehow hidden from mental perception
while thought is transparent to the mind,” explains Shusterman.8 By consider-
ing the individual body-body politic relationship in Memories of Underdevel-
opment and Juan of the Dead, especially as evidenced in the portrayal of each
type of body in Havana’s streets, we can witness how Cubans at two differ-
ent historical moments contend with revolutionary demands on the body and
question historical materialism as a viable model for defining and determining
somaesthetic experience.
2 Somaesthetics of Underdevelopment
Films depicting quotidian experience in Cuba after 1959 frequently reference

the unique relationship between the individual human body and the body pol-
itic outlined above, highlighting the imbrication of somaesthetics in political
rhetoric in the island. Each of the films studied here features the physical body
as a vehicle for accepting or rejecting political engagement, and as a terrain in
which to exercise or relinquish personal control of the self. The 1968 master-
piece Memories of Underdevelopment (see Illustration 6.3), by the late Cuban
filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, takes us back to the first decade of the new
revolutionary government.
The disenchanted bourgeois protagonist Sergio stays behind in Havana
while his wife and family leave for Miami following the Bay of Pigs confronta-
tion between the United States and Cuba in 1961. At the beginning of the film,
which is based on a 1965 novel by Edmundo Desnoes, a superimposed text
explains the massive exodus of Cubans as Sergio kisses his mother goodbye
at the airport. Then a text gradually appears on the screen as it is written on
7 Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Politics: Incorporating Pragmatist Aesthetics for So-
cial Action,” in Beauty, Responsibility, and Power: Ethical and Political Consequences of Pragma-
tist Aesthetics, eds. Leszek Koczanowicz and Katarzyna Liszka (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 5.
8 Ibid.
Illustration 6.3 Publicity flyer for the 1968 film Memorias de Subdesarrollo.
a typewriter – ostensibly by Sergio – that says, “Todos los que me querían se

fueron” (All those who loved me have left). From the opening scenes, the film
thus effectively mixes documentary and fictional styles, “truth” and fiction.9
9 The opening sequence can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqSDOoa

QbwE. Accessed Aug. 8, 2017.
138 Miller
From a telescope on his apartment balcony, Sergio watches as life passes

by several floors below him, a voyeur more interested in public than in private
scenes. From this privileged position, the protagonist looks down on his fellow
Cubans both literally and figuratively. Like the director himself, Sergio uses a
lens to provide objective distance and hone in on the new reality around him.
Thus, Sergio’s telescope and the director’s camera have a dual function: they
both magnify the figures and activity on the street, and they serve as a buffer
between the observer and the lived experience on display there.
In the narrative spoken off-camera, Sergio first comments that nothing has
changed, that everything seems the same following the revolutionary changes
of the early 1960s. But the camera provides contradictory evidence of this as-
sertion as it pans to two different monuments, the Bronze Titan and the monu-
ment to the uss Maine. The Bronze Titan is a representation of the beloved
19th century mulatto general Antonio Maceo, who helped Cuba win its long-
sought independence from Spain. But from its focus on this referent, the tele-
scope/camera then swivels to capture the nearby monument dedicated to the
victims of an explosion on the uss Maine, the ship the United States sent to
the Bay of Havana during the Spanish-American war. Emboldened by spuri-
ous news reports in the U.S. press that claimed the explosion was the result of
Spanish aggression, North Americans rallied behind the slogan, “Remember
the Maine, Down with Spain,” ultimately usurping control not just of Cuba’s
independence struggle, but also of the Cuban republican government that re-
placed the Spanish colonial administration when the Spanish-American War
ended. In 1961, Cubans took to the streets and brought down the eagle that
crowned the monument to the uss Maine, symbolizing their toppling of U.S.
power in the island. In Memories, all we see, then, are the empty supports of
the eagle. The camera juxtaposes the opposing supports of the Bronze Titan
and the monument to the Maine, the latter emptied of its primary signifier.
Sergio then asks, “Where is the dove of peace that Picasso was supposed to
send?” Some foundational symbols such as the Bronze Titan remain firmly
lodged in the revolutionary landscape, but within a context of other signifiers
that have been left empty, with no suitable replacement in sight.
Sergio’s observations and his meanderings in the city streets demonstrate
the new relationship between the personal experiences of the body and the
political commitment that the Cuban Revolution inaugurated. The director of
Memories of Underdevelopment implicitly questions the viability of this new
relationship between body and state through the reflections and actions of
Sergio and other characters. Indeed, both this film and Juan of the Dead, dis-
cussed below, critique revolutionary discourse and policy as insufficient to the
task of creating the New Man proposed by Ernesto Che Guevara, that model
citizen who relinquishes personal claims to individual bodily pleasures in or-

der to better serve the needs of his fellow citizens. As Gustavo Geirola com-
ments, Che’s “journey against the sins of capitalism enforces the sacrifice of
the body, the renunciation of pleasures, and the promotion of Death.”10 Thus,
though Cuban schoolchildren are taught to emulate this sacrifice, chanting
“Seremos como el Che” (We will be like Che), these films suggest that such de-
mands exact too high a price, even that of death itself.
In the first few minutes of Memories, Sergio walks the streets of Havana and
rides in his friend Pablo’s convertible along the Malecón, the grand seawall that
symbolically separates the northern coast of Cuba from the southernmost part
of Florida, and by extension, the United States. In stark contrast to the por-
trayal of the island as a paradise or playground, Sergio finds post-revolutionary
Havana sordid and embarrassing, calling it a “Tegucigalpas of the Caribbean.”
Memories of Underdevelopment combines this fictional narrative with actual
footage of the trials that followed the revolutionary takeover, in which the
abuses and torture of Cuban bodies during the regime of Fulgencio Batista
were chronicled and other bodies were executed.11 Havana, and Cuba by exten-
sion, are reframed as sites of bodily harm and death pre- and post-Revolution,
rather than the centers of pleasure and recreation fomented in pre-revolution-
ary tourist brochures.
Perhaps as a metaphor of death’s presence, Sergio finds a dead bird in the
cage on his balcony, and as he drops the tiny cadaver over the railing onto
the street below, he recites verses from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Canción deses-
perada” (“A song of despair”). His actions suggest that the jubilation Cubans
had expressed in the streets on January of 1959 was soon replaced (if not ac-
companied) by alienation, ambivalence, or even despair. Sergio shares the
streets with a populace that he finds lacking in refined aesthetic sensibilities.
Although he remains in Cuba physically, his body language speaks of doubt,
disaffection, and estrangement. He asks himself, “What good is it to protest, if
I’m going to die like everyone else? This island is a trap. We’re very small, we’re
much too poor. The price of dignity is very high.” Sergio is not averse to the
10 George Haggerty, ed., Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland,
2000), 420.
11 Ernesto “Che” Guevara defended the killing of members of Batista’s forces and other an-
tirevolutionaries in his 1964 address to the United Nations, in which he said, “¿Fusila-
mientos? Sí. Hemos fusilado, fusilamos, y seguiremos fusilando mientras sea necesario.
Nuestra lucha es una lucha a muerte.” (Shootings? Yes. We have shot people, we are shoot-
ing people, and we will continue to shoot them as long as it is necessary. Our struggle is
a struggle unto death.) See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC8fW1xu0Ks, accessed
Aug. 8, 2017.
140 Miller
revolutionary project, but he does not participate in it to the degree the state
asks of him. He is not a gusano, a worm who has abandoned the island and its
new political aims, but neither is he a revolutionary who devotes himself body
and soul to the new regime.
3 Enter the Zombies
Nearly a half-century later, the Argentine-born director Alejandro Brugués re-

turns to the scene of the Cuban crisis of identity within the Revolution with
the 2011 film Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead, see Illustration 6.4), a satire
that infuses the zombie genre with the irreverent humor characteristic of Cu-
ban choteo.12
The film’s English name is an obvious salute to such antecedents as the
1978 Dawn of the Dead and 2004 Shawn of the Dead, but the film should be
viewed as more than an opportunistic foray into a market enamored of zombie
paraphernalia. The promotional materials for the English version of the film
Illustration 6.4 Publicity flyer for the 2011 film Juan of the Dead.
12 At the invitation of Fernando Ortiz, Jorge Mañach gave a talk in 1925 titled “La crisis de
la alta cultura en Cuba” (The crisis of high culture in Cuba) and subtitled it “Indagación
del choteo” (Investigation of choteo). In the book version of that talk, Mañach wrote,
“No great philosophical system has been developed at 76 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees
Celsius), which is our median temperature.” Long before the Cuban Revolution, then, Ma-
ñach had suggested that Cuba’s tropical geography made sustained philosophical inquiry
impossible. For a contemporary analysis of choteo, see Félix Valdés García, “El Caribe:
integración, identidad y ‘choteo,’” Utopía y praxis latinoamericana: revista internacional
de filosofía iberoamericana y teoría social 9, no. 27 (2004): 49–60.
f eature the protagonist flanked by the national symbols of the Cuban flag and
the Capitol building (itself a replica of the U.S. Capitol), his mouth agape, his
body and clothing bloodstained, and the film title imposed in white over a pool
of blood. A blood “spatter” under his scythe-holding arm roughly replicates the
geographical counters of the island of Cuba itself.
Filmed mostly in or on the streets, houses and rooftops of Havana, this
zombie comedy offers a mordant statement on the vicissitudes of living and
dying in the aging revolutionary regime. The film is set amidst the lingering
privations that mark the aftermath of the Special Period. The title character
Juan peers at the streets below from a rooftop telescope in an obvious homage
to Memories of Underdevelopment.13 He tells his sidekick Lázaro to rally their
motley crew of friends to discuss ways to solve the pressing problems of food
and alcohol shortages that still plague them. Where do they choose to meet? At
the site of their local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, of course.14
The neighbors gathered for the cdr meeting tiredly sing the national anthem,
one line of which prophetically proclaims, “To die for the country is to live.”
Then they react in horror as Mario, the president of the cdr, suddenly bursts
from the door and attacks a neighbor vampire-style. The group disperses, and
the camera switches to a newscaster who blames the zombie attacks on groups
of dissidents financed by the U.S. government. Always eager to find new ways
to feed the needs that the libreta does not, Juan and his pals decide to form a
zombie-busters business that will service both Cubans and foreigners.
Why would Brugués turn to zombies in this parable of contemporary Cuban
life? In the volume Filosofía zombi (Zombie Philosophy), Jorge Fernández Gon-
zalo describes the zombie as a cultural artifact, a mythic tool for producing a
specific effect of meaning.15 Reanimated bodies possessed or controlled by an
external master, zombies are living dead beings in thrall to another, incapable
of making ethically acceptable decisions. As Alan West-Durán has noted, the
word zombi supposedly derives from the Kikongo words nzumbi or nzambi,
which refer to spirits or God.
In Vodou, the idea of the zombie is rooted in slavery since the concept of
controlling a person’s soul (ti bon ange) so that they can be under your
power is a perfect analogy of the relationship between master and slave.
13 As Alan West-Durán has noted, Brugués also “quotes from” Life is to Whistle, Guantana-
mera and Vampiros en La Habana. See “All that’s ideology melts into flesh,” Cuba Counter-
points, August 1, 2016, https://cubacounterpoints.com/archives/3205.
14 The film can be viewed in its entirety on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/70113331 (Accessed 22
August, 2017).
15 Jorge Fernández Gonzalo, Filosofía zombi. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011).
142 Miller
As many have pointed out, Haitians do not fear zombies (they are harm-
less, and not the flesh-eating creatures created by Western cinema), they
fear becoming one, since it is a horrific reminder of what it meant to be
a slave.16
The zombie state suggests mindlessness instead of mindfulness, a grotesque in-

stead of a pleasing aesthetic, extreme violence instead of somatic self-control.
Within the historical and regional context West-Durán provides, it is also tied
to the legacy of slavery, and thus, the loss of personal autonomy.
While Juan of the Dead is the first zombie film made in Cuba, and prob-
ably the first zombie movie made in a socialist country,17 it does not escape
these historical contexts of Afro-Caribbean religious rites on the one hand, and
the banalization and/or appropriation of those rites in Hollywood film on the
other. For example, the 1932 film White Zombie, considered the first feature
film of the genre, is set in Haiti and criticizes slavery and colonial exploitation.
The subservient relationship between the zombie and his master is used in
White Zombie and in other films to symbolize the dominion and exploitation
of one country by another.18 White Zombie was made during the latter part of
the United States’ occupation of Haiti from 1913–1934, under the pretense of
establishing a democratic government there.19
If, then, zombies are associated with the evils of capitalism, colonialism,
and slavery, why use them to portray Cuba fifty years after the rise of commu-
nism? Isn’t the scenario of degraded capital in White Zombie distant from the
realities of Cuba a half century after the transition to a Marxist government?
If the tendency in the zombie film genre is toward social critique of racism
and class struggle, exploitation of some men by others, and of the alienation
that occurs in consumerist society, what is Brugués doing making such a film
in Cuba? West-Durán20 suggests a passage by Karl Marx from The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as an aid to understanding the tension between
the revolutionary impulse and the proximity of death in the film:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under cir-
cumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
16 West-Durán, “All that’s ideology.”

17 Ibid.
18 Maribel Cedeño Rojas, “Acopalipsis revolucionario en Juan de los muertos de Alejandro
Brugués,” in Terra Zombi, 278.
19 Ibid.
20 “All that’s ideology.”
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the

brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolution-
izing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before,
precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up
the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle
slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history
in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.21
Marx shows how revolutionary activity produces anxiety, as the participants

“anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service” and borrow
language(s) to frame new ideas. Marx’s references here to the past, to disguise,
and to borrowed language all point to the paradoxical coexistence of the novel
and the secondhand in revolutionary efforts. Juan of the Dead is above all a
parody; Angel A. Rivera even classifies it as a “science fiction” film.22 But by em-
ploying gore and excess in a new way in Cuban film, Brugués calls attention to
the Cuban citizenry’s exhaustion when faced with the now mundane discourse
of revolutionary shortages and necessary sacrifices in the face of prolonged
shortages. In his analysis of the film, Rivera cites Simon Clark’s essay on the
undead martyr figure, a citation that seems relevant to the Cuban case: “The
presence of zombies become inversely proportional to civilization’s ability to
enforce its repressive regime. The more we see humans violating civilized law,
the more the zombies close in and destroy the social order.”23 At the very least,
it must be pointed out that Juan of the Dead presents its zombies as victims,
not just monsters; Juan and his buddies must defend themselves, while they
also react to the overall threat of zombification within the population at large.
Building on a citation of Eduardo Galeano that speaks of the dangers of “la
cultura del desvinculo” (the culture of disconnectedness), film critic Ann Ma-
rie Stock has suggested that Juan of the Dead is a call to resist the disconnect
between present and past, heart and head, and especially between members
of a community.24 While zombies might produce disgust and fear, they also
21 The full text of Marx’s essay, along with prefaces to several editions, can be accessed here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf.
22 Angel A. Rivera, “Ciencia Ficción y los desechos de la historia. El hombre (de) nuevo, el zom-
bi y Juan de los muertos de Alejandro Brugués,” Voces del Caribe 8, no. 1 (Otoño 2016): 313.
23 Simon Clark, “The Undead Martyr: Sex, Death, and Revolution in George Romero’s Zom-
bie Films,” in Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead, ed. Richard
Greene and K. Silem Mohammad (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 201, cited in Rivera, 317.
24 Ann Marie Stock, “Resisting ‘Disconnectedness’ en Larga Distancia y Juan de los muertos,”
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 37, no. 1 (Otoño 2012): 49–50.
144 Miller
frequently are represented as subservient beings who merit our compassion

and aid. Perhaps less important than the zombies themselves, then, are the
protagonists who fight to save their neighbors from falling prey to the zombies
(and zombification), however opportunistic their motives.25 As the director
explained,
The idea is to play with zombie films and with how we Cubans are and
what our reaction is in a crisis. In times of crisis we always do the same.
First, act as if nothing was going on. Then, establish a business in which
we can make a little money. And finally, try to leave the country, however
we can.26
In this assessment, Brugués portrays revolutionary progress and the projects

that sustain it as insufficient rewards for the bodily sacrifices that have been re-
quired of Cubans since 1959. He seemingly chooses zombies not only because
he enjoys the genre or wants to appropriate its success with broad audiences,
but also because to be a zombie is to be numb to self, others, and the world.27
Set alongside the more aristocratic figure of the gothic vampire, the zombie
thus symbolizes a democratization of fear and alienation.28 And what is the
fear Brugués alludes to in Juan of the Dead? I suggest this fear is lodged in
the body as the legacy of the privations of the Special Period. Whether or not the
Special Period is over, the anxiety around shortages, especially food shortages,
remains a numbing or paralyzing force. The key characteristic that the zom-
bies and the zombie-busters share is insatiability. Juan has an insatiable thirst
for rum, Lázaro an insatiable desire for sex, and the growing throng of zombies
an insatiable taste for blood. At one point Juan refers to the encroaching zom-
bies around him by saying “They want to eat like in the Special Period, but they
25 The characters we find in Juan of the Dead are unlikely models of solidarity, nonetheless.
The title character is a loafer of doubtful morals, father to an estranged daughter who has
grown up outside the island. His sex-obsessed friend Lázaro is the father of a young son
whose principal activities are seducing and robbing female tourists; other characters in-
clude a massive Afro-Cuban named Primo (Cousin) who faints at the sight of blood, and a
transvestite named China. Together these marginalized characters form a loose coalition
that attends the official neighborhood meetings, but with a very different agenda from
their properly revolutionary neighbors.
26 Cedeño Rojas, “Acopalipsis revolucionario,” 285.
27 Peter Wright, “Poetics, Power, Possibilities, and Playfulness: Zombies, Performance, and
Making Meaning in Young People’s Lives,” Arts Education Policy Review 116, no. 3 (2015): 138.
28 Fernández Gonzalo, Filosofía zombie.
don’t limit themselves only to the cats.”29 In other words, the hunger of the
Special Period was so “monstrous,” Cubans took to eating cats, but now, they
have gone beyond that point, attacking other humans.
In an interview, Brugués explained how he found the inspiration for his
zombie film in the streets of Havana themselves. “When I had the idea for Juan,
it all came about very quickly, from a joke. I was walking along the street with
one of my producers and I saw someone who seemed like a zombie in real
life. I realized there were tons like that in the streets of Havana, and I said, ‘we
could make a film with them and we wouldn’t even need makeup, and it could
be called Juan of the Dead.’”30 What was it that made Brugués characterize his
neighbors as zombies? “Zombies were those who went along the street, accept-
ing everything, moving forward without caring where they were going.”31
One of the most dramatic scenes in the film takes place on the iconic
Malecón within sight of the monument to the victims of the Maine mentioned
earlier (24:35-27:00). Juan and his buddies watch a newscast that once again
blames “antisocial elements” in collusion with the “empire” for the zombie out-
break, and calls Cubans to rally the next day at 5 p.m. at the Anti-Imperialist
Tribune, a public forum full of flagpoles, defiantly stationed in front of what
was once the U.S. Interests Section and is now the U.S. Embassy. Juan, seem-
ingly channeling Sergio, once again uses a telescope to watch the crowds from
the roof of his apartment building. He asks Lázaro if there is anything new, and
his friend once again compares the situation to the Special Period. Juan and
his friends descend to the Malecón, and walk past the empty pedestal of the
Maine monument. Suddenly, a horde of fiendish protestors approaches them;
Lázaro’s son California first holds up a U.S. flag in defense, saying, “Hey, you
have to be prepared,” but Juan corrects him, noting that the enraged throng
is composed not of devouring Americans but of Cubans. But brandishing the
Cuban flag does not calm the horde either; the zombification has become too
widespread.
As did Gutiérrez Alea decades earlier, Brugués combines fictional and non-
fictional elements to call attention to threats to the wellbeing of the Cuban
body politic and to the physical bodies of its citizens. Although the zombie
29 The full quotation in Spanish is “Por lo que sabemos, a esta gente no hay quien la pare.
Quieren comer como cuando en el Periodo Especial, pero no se limitan solamente a los
gatos.”
30 Miyasaka, “Dinámica cultural,” 221. Brugués also refers to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981)
and other zombie films, including George Romero’s Day of the Dead, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie
2, Peter Jackson’s Braindead and Edgar Wright’s aforementioned Shaun of the Dead (2004)
as influences.
31 Ibid., 222.
146 Miller
framing emphasizes the fictional character of the film, the director ties it both
to real experience and to realist film genres: “During the process of writing,
what I did was see the reality around me and try to imagine it in the context of a
zombie movie. In a certain way, it’s a documentary.”32 Ultimately, in the process
of combatting the zombie epidemic that takes over the streets of Havana, Juan
abandons his earlier inertia and becomes a defender of his neighborhood and,
arguably, the wellbeing of the nation. He does not explicitly blame Cuba’s ills on
the figure of Fidel Castro or his successors, and he rejects the official discourse
of laying all blame at the feet of the U.S. “This time the bad guys aren’t the Yan-
kees, but a real enemy, and he is here in our midst,” Juan says. The chief danger,
then, is not external, imperialist forces, but internal alienation or ambivalence,
not unlike the characteristics expressed by Sergio in Memories. As Brugués
explains, “It seems to me that the way of living like zombies that we Cubans
have developed … accepting whatever comes from above without question-
ing it, and how we continue moving forward without knowing where we are
going, is precisely the cause of a good part of our contemporary problems.”33
The viewer can see that the evil power of “zombification” does not distin-
guish between Cuban and foreigner, revolutionary and non-revolutionary.34
The sensationalist aspects of this zombie comedy call attention to the enor-
mous demands the state has placed on the body, and the stark difficulties of
sustaining livelihood and camaraderie in the midst of those demands. It is at
once silly and serious.
As Stock has noted, several residential streets in the Vedado neighborhood
make their screen debut in the film, and the Plaza of the Revolution is this
time not the site of a political rally but of a zombie massacre.35 Is the sudden
transformation of neighbors and tourists into flesh-eating zombies ultimately
a metaphor for the excessive demands on the body that have characterized the
Cuban Revolution, especially during the Special Period? Is the zombie-busting
business Juan invents with his pals just one more way to turn a small profit in
the face of the continued demands on the body and the wallet, or is it also a
worthy mission to battle the body politic’s self-destructive tendencies, how-
ever camp the framing? In Juan of the Dead, the streets of Havana provide an
exaggerated dramatic stage for survival amidst bloody demise, suggesting that
insatiability and conviviality can coexist.36
32 Miyasaka, “Dinámica cultural,” 227.

33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 219.
35 Stock, “Resisting ‘Disconnectedness,’” 60.
36 As Kevin Power notes in an essay on the work of the Cuban performance artist Tania Bru-
guera, the body offers a highly charged site of both resistance and enunciation. Everyday
Spanning nearly a half-century of Cuban revolutionary history, Memories of

Underdevelopment and Juan of the Dead together suggest that mandates to sub-
mit the body to national dictates and discourses can result in disintegration of
that body, both literally and figuratively. Amidst their tongue-in-cheek efforts
to pragmatically address the body’s quotidian desires for food, sex, and liba-
tions, Juan and his motley crew offer a comic-serious look at the political po-
tential of “mindful embodiment” as outlined by Anita Chari in her 2016 essay.37
Citing Shusterman’s Thinking through the Body, Chari argues for an approach
that “takes the material body seriously as a valuable dimension of human ex-
perience and knowledge.”38 While Cuba’s revolutionary reformers clearly con-
sidered its citizens’ bodies as a potent force in the implementation of newly
defined national goals, crises in the state, especially the inability to cure Cuba’s
chronic economic dependency on external sources, ultimately led to failures in
the care and feeding of that body, both in the literal and the symbolic senses.
Whether in the alienated wanderings of Sergio, or in the fight against zombies
in the streets of Havana’s Vedado neighborhood by Juan and his compadres,
these films show us the unique relationship between the Cuban Revolution
and the bodies in its radius, as well as the beleaguered idealism at the root of
this strained relationship.
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37 Anita Chari, “The Political Potential of Mindful Embodiment,” New Political Science 38, no.
2 (2016): 226–240.
38 Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cam-
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Part 3
Performances of Resistance, Gender, and Crime
∵
Chapter 7
“Street” is Feminine in Italian: Feminine Bodies and

Street Spaces
Ilaria Serra
The word “street” – la strada – is a noun of feminine gender in the Italian lan-
guage. And yet, Italian public spaces are historically places of misogyny. A
case in point can be found in the famous movie La strada by Federico Fellini,
whose feminine protagonist, the naïve wanderer Gelsomina, is brutalized by
the experience of the street that remains a distinctively masculine space in
Italian culture: the kingdom of the strongman Zampanò. Starting with this
grammatical irony, this article addresses a watershed moment in Italian his-
tory that opened a discussion on the somaesthetics of the street: the 1970 wave
of feminist struggles. This was a time in which Italian women took possession
of Italian streets as they intensely reflected on their bodily experience of such
spaces.
This second wave1 of Italian feminism brought to the surface ingrained in-
equalities in the use of city space that, in time, had become bundles of habits,
socially shaped, limiting the opportunities available to women abiding in such
a “gendered city.” In those years, the street developed into a stage and even
an instrument of the struggle, a walkable space that offered visibility but one
that also became a matter of discussion involving bodies, actions, and sensa-
tions. The specific intersection of “soma-esthetics” discussed in this article is
one where soma is the feminine body and aesthesis is women’s sensorial per-
ception of the city – a case in point where private and public issues overlap
and mix, and somaesthetic diagnoses of bodily perceptions become gunpow-
der for rebellion. This article provides a specific Italian declension to Richard
Shusterman’s proposition for a socially minded, pragmatic somaesthetics, ca-
pable of turning self-awareness into social action.2 Far from considering bodily
1 The first wave of Italian feminism started at the end of the xix century and comprised the
struggles for voting rights and women’s education during the beginning of the xx century.
2 See Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Politics: Incorporating Pragmatist Aesthetics
for Social Action,” in Beauty, Responsibility and Power: Ethical and Political Consequences of
Pragmatist Aesthetics, ed. Leszek Koczanowicz and Katarzyna Liszka (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2014): 5–18. In this article, the author used a Confucian argument to propose the crucial im-
portance of personal action and personal self-government in the political area.

154 Serra
experiences as private matters, Italian women listened to their bodies to un-

derstand their position in society, and it drew them to the battleground of the
Italian streets in joyous, lively and scandalously earth-shaking carnivalesque
marches. This was one of the most effective moves in the women’s strategic
war upon the establishment: unveiling private – even bodily – issues in order
to make a political claim.
Feminism was a turning point in women’s history that included a redesign-
ing of the experience of city life for women. When Italian women flooded the
streets in the mid-1970s, their action entailed much more than just entering
the public arena following the paths traced by men. For Italian women, it was
a first. It was an appropriation of a new space traditionally precluded to them.
It also involved a deep realization of the “somaesthetic dissonance or dishar-
mony” perceived by their bodies in the street that became a fierce refusal of
their beleaguered state, a political resistance to oppression.3 And finally, this
movement symbolically redesigned and re-gendered city spaces through the
women’s physical occupation and specific body actions. These three aspects of
the movement will be discussed in this article.4
1 Negotiating the Gendered City
In the Italian collective imagination, the feminist movement remains chiseled

as an outdoor mass movement, with its marches, megaphones and crowds. In
Rome, large street manifestations asking for the legalization of abortion saw
20,000 women gathered in 1975, and 50,000 only a year later. For the first time in
history, women publicly took the center stage, at the same time forcing men to
the sidelines. A newspaper report of these events (see Illustration 7.1), entitled
“Donne in piazza per ‘contare di più’” (“Women in the Square to ‘Count More’”),
betrayed this groundbreaking female occupation of the city space by describ-
ing the scene with these words: “Male supporters were excluded, they had to be
contented with skirting the women comrades, from the side of the road.”5 The
author of this article, Liliana Madeo, highlighted the spatial crux of the femi-
nist fight by reporting the event using position-marked terms, as she hinted to
the common “annoyance that overcomes the man of the street when he sees
3 Ibid., 16.
4 I thank Patrizia Zane for her help with archival research in the Library of Centro Donna of
Mestre-Venezia.
5 “Il fastidio che l’uomo della strada tradisce quando vede la donna portare allo scoperto i
suoi problemi ‘privati’” (Italics in the English translation are mine. Liliana Madeo, “Donne in
piazza per ‘contare di più.’” La Stampa, April 4, 1976, 10).
“Street” is Feminine in Italian 155
Illustration 7.1 Article by Liliana Madeo in La Stampa
women taking their ‘private’ problems out into the open.”6 Madeo’s observa-
tion underlined the discomfort that male observers felt once formerly private
matters started to become political, and once issues of bodily integrity, such as
abortion, virginity, and sexual harassment, were being discussed in the streets.
The shock these women protesters provoked is undeniable. Their move sur-
passed the simple need for visibility. They took their fight to the streets with
special delight and purpose and for deeper reasons, because thus they were
able to breach an ancient barrier that separated male and female space. As
historian Luisa Passerini explains, space had everything to do with it: “The as-
sumption of new forms of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity manifests itself as
a critique of the relationship between private and public and the movement
of the boundaries between them. This is particularly evident in the reference
to spaces.”7 Feminists refused the architecturally ingrained subdivision of the
6 Ibid.
7 Luisa Passerini, Storie di donne e femministe (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), 162.
156 Serra
“gendered city” in which each space is marked by a specific gender, since –

as Sophie Watson notes – “urban development and planning have tended
to reflect, and also to reinforce, traditional assumptions about gender.”8 The
gendered city “constructs inequality”9 by constructing and enforcing a divi-
sion between masculine and feminine spaces. Masculine are the phallic streets
with their sense of directionality, and the agora, with its debate and decision-
making. Feminine are the enclosed, womb-like spaces, such as houses and
walled gardens. Heinrich Tessenow, a German architect and urbanist of the
Weimar era, described the different gender notions of streets and squares even
more pointedly –a description that forms a key point of this article:
The street differs from the square, just as male differs from female. There
is a close relation between the male principle and the street, and the fe-
male principle and the square. The streets, or to be more precise, the eter-
nally incomplete, the urge to press onwards, to progress, the even straight
line, and the sense of career and the like, are all attributes of the male
principle.10
In Italian history and society, women did not belong to the street – unless, of
course, they were its outcasts, the prostitutes. The Italian vocabulary provides
the definition of “donne di strada” (women of the street) as opposed to the
“donna casa e chiesa” (women of home and church) with a series of proverbs
supporting popular wisdom: “Women at home; husbands and boys outside,”
“Sheep and women: at home early,” “Women are the house key,”11 and the
Venetian “Woman should be pleasant, silent and stay at home.” When well-
to-do women occupied the street, they did so in a closed carriage or a covered
gondola. “Covered carriages were known in the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury; but they were used only by women of the first rank, for the men thought
it disgraceful to ride in them.”12 In Venice, covered gondolas served the same
purpose, bringing women to church or other homes, door to door, hidden from
8 Sophie Watson, “City A/Genders,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie
Watson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 237.
9 Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizen-
ship,” Political Theory 28, no. 3 (June 2000): 355.
10 Einrich Tessenow, “Strade e piazze,” Urbanistica: rivista dell’Istituto nazionale di urbanis-
tica 83 (1986): 27.
11 See Francesco D’Ambra, Proverbi italiani: ordinati e illustrati (Firenze: Salani, 1886), 208,
187, 192.
12 Johann Beckman, A History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins (London: Bohn, 1846), 70.
sight: “Elite males saw an important connection between women and gondo-
las… Gondolas allowed women to move about the city without having to travel
the streets.”13 These means of transportation were invented for the specific
purposes of transporting women while keeping them safely enclosed, from
one closed space to another closed space. The women and the streets did not
go together.
There is another moment in Italian history that highlights this uneasy re-
moval of women from the streets, at least symbolically. The Fascist period saw
an important and unprecedented use of street spaces. The regime turned them
into the set for parades that displayed all sectors of Italian society responding
to the Italian “type” proposed by the Fascist propaganda: the athletic man, the
disciplined boy, the prim girl, the fertile woman. But, this last stance proved
more awkward than others. The dyad of “street and woman” was particulary
embarrassing, even for a regime that normally used street parades as a per-
suasive tool of propaganda. Women were thus allowed to participate in the
parades – in the center of the avenue versus on its margins – but only in the
last years of the two Fascist decades. While the regime appreciated the support
of its Fascist women –as homemakers and mothers– it had difficulty accepting
their presence in the streets.
When some 70,000 Fascist women from all over Italy marched down the
streets of Rome on May 29, 1939, Pentecost Day, they presented a strident
sight for observers. Journalistic accounts of the event revealed this difficulty.
The descriptions became unusually personal in their reference to feelings of
embarrassment and unease. The awkward oxymoron of women marching in
the center of the street was difficult to decipher: they offered “an incongruous
spectacle, halfway between a fashion catwalk and the military parade.”14 Just
by walking the streets, the women in this parade seemed to be subjected to a
process of virilization, as one journalist pointed out through his word choice:
“They march with a brisk masculine pace.”15 It is also ironic to note that such
a “superb parade,” as the cover of the magazine La Domenica del Corriere
(see Illustration 7.2) described it in 1939, took place only one year after the few
bourgeois feminist groups (of the first wave of feminism) still existing in the
nation were banned (in 1938).
This characterization did not change in the post-war period, which saw a
process of social adjustment following the upsetting of the social order caused
13 Dennis Romano, “The Gondola as a Marker of Station in Venetian Society,” Renaissance

Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 8, no. 4 (1994): 363.
14 Michela De Giorgio, Le italiane dall’unità a oggi (Roma: Laterza, 1993), 312.
15 Ibid.
158 Serra
Illustration 7.2 Cover of La Domenica del Corriere 41, no. 24 (June 10, 1939) depicting the
“superb parade” of Italian Fascist women.
by the Second World War. Just as in the United States, during the years of the
hailed “Italian economic miracle,” women were invited to buy fridges and
washing machines while celebrating their identity as homemakers (casalinga).
This was their primary identity “that continued to be considered a natural ac-
tivity for the feminine personality and had no form of social value.”16
With the advent of the 1970s feminist movement, women started to challenge
their traditional exclusion from the city street in a willful and open manner.
Theorist Carla Lonzi, author of several bestselling feminist essays, including
Let’s Spit on Hegel (1970) and The Clitoridian Woman and the Vaginal Woman
and Other Writings (1971), expressed her feelings at the beginning of the femi-
nist movement with the metaphor of an evasion from jail: “We brimmed from
the will to exit the prison and mock our jailer.”17 Such metaphors of imprison-
ment abound in feminine memories of these times. As protesters recall in in-
terviews, “I felt like I was closed in a cage [when I was home with my family],”18
and “[i]f it weren’t for feminism, … we would be still locked in the house,”19
and – strongly to the point, “The personal sphere was separated from the po-
litical: the external world had a male neuter gender, and the inner world had a
feminine gender.”20
In 1976, a young feminist named Donatella pointed to the “eternal dichotomy
of home-street that kills our free movement. Home for the woman and street
for the man.”21 Donatella unveiled this false binary opposition between home
and street when reflecting on the issue of prostitution. In such a situation, the
woman is allowed, and even forced to be in the road for the pleasure of men:
“The street becomes the extreme setting for the male use of woman’s body and
the transgression to the rule forbidding their exiting the home.”22 Men are the
enforcers of women’s inability to enjoy the street freely: “This man maneuvers
and divides us, these at home, those in the street, according to his desires.”23
Italian women suffered the ages-long separation of private and public, in-
ner and outer, that enforced woman’s oppression by defining restrictive norms
of bodily being and shaping somatic experiences, as Simone de Beauvoir
16 Gloria Chianese, Storia sociale della donna in Italia, 1800–1980 (Naples: Guida, 1980), 112.
17 Lara Conte, Vinzia Fiorino, Vanessa Martini, eds. Carla Lonzi. La duplice radicalita’ dalla
critica militante al femminismo di Rivolta (Pisa: ets, 2011), 120.
18 Antonella Cammarota, Femminismi da raccontare. Un percorso attraverso le lotte e le spe-
ranze delle donne di ieri e di oggi (Roma: Franco Angeli, 2005), 118.
19 Ibid., 90.
20 Ibid., 71.
21 Donatella, “Casa-strada,” Sottosopra 4 (March 1976): 106.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
160 Serra
e xhaustively theorized in her 1949 The Second Sex. She especially denounced
the collision of productive and reproductive roles that are the reason for wom-
an’s imprisonment and interpreted the confined reality of women: “This world
has always belonged to males, and none of the reasons given for this have ever
seemed sufficient.”24 Italian feminists strove to undo a long tradition of space
confinement with their revolutionary demands – again as Beauvoir noticed:
“Today the combat is taking another form; instead of putting man in prison,
woman is trying to escape from it.”25
In 1976, feminist Laura Picco protested such spatial oppression within the
four walls in her comic pamphlet titled La fata rovesciata (The Upside-Down
Fairy). There, she underlined the important reproach that feminist women
posed to their male comrades: “Where are the women while you remake the
world on your own measure? … Women are cooking, cleaning, setting the ta-
ble, and filling bowls while you remake the world on your own measure.”26 Her
drawings clearly depicted the women’s imprisonment behind walls, while men
occupied the streets (see Illustration 7.3). The resentment against male com-
rades is diffuse among feminist women who noticed how male social struggles
had done little to change women’s roles. “After our nights together,” remembers
one girl bitterly, “the morning after, it was as if I weren’t there. I followed him
like a dog to the bar, to have breakfast, and to his discussions of high strategies
with his comrades.”27 A second woman adds: “They were all men with their
following of mute women.”28
On another page of the same pamphlet (see Illustration 7.4), La fata roves-
ciata uses the expression “the prohibited street” as the space that precluded
women since their childhood and repeated to them the message conveyed in
the fairy tales: “You will never be Peter Pan, you will always be Cinderella.” With
irony, Picco describes the ancillary role of women in workers’ fights:
They married and Cinderella’s female destiny was completed by cooking

and breastfeeding, keeping her mouth shut and waiting hours and hours
until her prince finished his important business. Then she would listen,
full of comprehension, to his important problems, she would massage his
important feet, and type his announcements. She was very, very happy.29
24 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 71. “One of the basic
problems for women has been reconciling the reproductive role and productive work”
(136).
25 Ibid., 754.
26 Laura Picco, La fata rovesciata (Roma: Ottaviano, 1976), 68.
27 Laura Lilli and Chiara Valentini, Care compagne. il femminismo nel pci e nelle organizza-
zioni di massa (Roma: Editori riuniti, 1979), 289.
28 Ibid., 290.
29 Ibid., 8.
Illustration 7.3 A page of Laura Picco’s La fata rovesciata
Particularly telling is the zoom-in sequence of three closed windows through

which the girl looks out and longs for the street outside, the “prohibited street”:
“I could not go out alone, there were dangers for a little girl. They taught me
to fear the world, because the streets were full of evil ogres. So, I would look at
the street and the people behind windows that did not speak, that rectangle of
prohibited street that I am unable to forget.”30
Paradoxically, feminists walked the street precisely because they should
have stayed at home and be the hearth’s angels (“angeli del focolare”). Just ex-
iting the house was a rebellious act, as we can hear in their own words; their
daring sent many a man into a crisis: “[My husband] lost his head as soon as I
put my head outside our home,”31 and again, “It was a shock for him not to find
his wife at home and the shirt ironed.”32 Groups of feminist women formed
the Committees for the Salary of Domestic Work in several cities, rebelling
against their unpaid work. All of them protested against low-pay home fac-
tory work, against their subservience to the father’s rules, and against the ser-
vitude to their “boss husband” and their “sultan son.” One of the most effective
metaphors used to show this home imprisonment was formulated by Ida Faré,
30 Ibid., 9.
31 Chiara Valentini, Le donne fanno paura (Milano: Saggiatore, 1997), 16.
32 Ibid., 23.
162 Serra
Illustration 7.4 A page of Laura Picco’s La fata rovesciata

who pointedly described the incessant and cyclical cleaning as the job of the
invisible woman who, in the domestic sphere, keeps cancelling her own foot-
steps to remain invisible.33 Such imprisonment made it difficult for early femi-
nists to gather, contact, and connect with other women: wondering why, they
answered “Because women, especially homemakers, are used to living in the
house. That is their place. They go somewhere else (the market, the children’s
school…) only to do something specific, and then they go home immediately,
and running. Rarely women meet in places outside the house.”34
2 Fearful Bodies in the Street
The relationship of women with city streets entailed another exquisitely som-
aesthetic aspect. Entering this space meant overcoming the fear they felt grip
their bodies the minute they walked out the door. Feminists clearly described
the psychological and sensorial effects on women’s minds and bodies and de-
nounced women’s unease in public spaces. They unveiled the power structures
that governed women’s experiences of a city that reinforced their oppression
through intimidation – since “bodies … provide an essential medium or tool
through which social norms and political power are transmitted, inscribed,
and preserved in society. Ethical codes, social and political institutions, and
even laws are mere abstractions until they are given life through incorpora-
tion into bodily dispositions and actions.”35 This is the exact point in which
somaesthetics turned into social action: they departed from a “somaesthetic
diagnosis of the bodily habits and feelings expressing that domination so that
they, along with the oppressive social conditions which generate them, can be
overcome.”36
33 Ida Faré, Il discorso dei luoghi. Genesi e avventure del moderno (Napoli: Liguori, 1992).
34 Antonella Nappi and Ida Regalis, La pratica politica delle donne (Milan: Mazzotta, 1978),
89.
36 Ibid., 9. In his Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Richard Shusterman argues that developing
one’s somatic capacities can increase one’s strength, confidence, and efficacy to engage in
social action. In the chapter “Somatic Subjectivities and Somatic Subjugation: Simone de
Beauvoir on Gender and Aging,” he particularly discusses Simone de Beauvoir’s fear that
attention to bodies and feelings can be counterproductive for women (aging ones too) as
it is distracting them from political action – even though, at the same time, she herself
acknowledges that their cultivation of physical strength and bodily self-awareness are
important tools to reinforce women’s sense of security and likeliness to resist manipula-
tion and exploitation.
164 Serra
Feminist women argued that their freedom was a matter of spatial right:
“Women’s sense of security in public spaces is profoundly shaped by our in-
ability to secure an undisputed right to occupy that space.”37 There are invis-
ible fences that keep women out of street spaces – invisible, yet physically
perceived. When exposed to the street air, the woman becomes vulnerable,
beleaguered – her body becomes a burden and a physical target and prey –
threatened, hunted, pierced and wounded by male gazes.
Such an invisible yet perceivable hunting ground is particulary clear if
we analyze the iconic image by American photographer Ruth Orkin, Ameri-
can Girl in Italy, taken in August 1952 in front of the caffe Gilli in the center
of F lorence (see Illustrations 7.5 and 7.6). The visual round-up of men, posi-
tioned all around the walking woman, is heightened by the expressions on
their faces, their invasive gazes, the movement of their heads, the leaning-in
of their upper-bodies – both threatening and overpowering. Both photogra-
pher and protagonist, when interviewed, claimed the photo was a celebration
of the woman’s freedom to travel alone and have a good time, while feeling
“appreciated.”38 Obviously if that was the intention, it is completely lost. This is
a clear example of Italian street harassment. The street space is evidently mas-
culine. The woman’s anguished face belies her so-called independence. She
does not belong there and hurries her steps to escape. The sensorial experience
of threat and intimidation seeps from her form, exposed by her body language.
In 1975, a young journalist offered a first-person description of what it
means to be that American girl, or any female passer-by, in an honest account.
Remaining anonymous, she wrote a long article in the Bulletin of the Committee
for the Salary to Domestic Work of Trieste, in which she expresses the feelings
of a beleaguered body in the streets of her city, Trieste, in the Italian North-
east. She maintains that the typical situation for a girl walking at 8 pm along
Via Carducci, a main artery of the city, included harassment by all kinds of
men, who not only scream appreciations and propositions, but follow the girl
and comment (and often touch) “all parts of your body.” They do it with any
woman, she writes, young or old, ugly or beautiful, hooded or hidden by an
umbrella, by day and by night, because of their erupting “male nature.” She
concludes:
37 Gillian Rose, “Women and Every Day Spaces,” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader,
ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 363.
38 Laura T. Coffey, “At 83, Subject of ‘American Girl in Italy’ Photo Speaks Out,” Today, August
18, 2011, http://www.today.com/id/44182286/ns/today-today_news/t/subject-american
-girl-italy-photo-speaks-out/#.WIjRQmIrLX4.
Illustration 7.5 Ruth Orkin, “American Girl in Italy”
Illustration 7.6
Detail from Illustration 7.5. Because it
is extremely explicit, it was censored
for many years
Even if women have borne this kind of behavior for centuries, I haven’t
gotten used to it yet. And certain times, on the street, I realize I am in
a state of tension, of walking with my head down and my gaze straight
in front of me, in order to avoid these forced meetings… When I look
around, I notice that almost no woman who walks the street alone has
a spontaneous, smiling, relaxed expression. … Let us build together the
166 Serra
strength to defend ourselves, to impose our interest, to own our bodies,

to gain respect and the freedom to walk any street, where we want, at any
hour of the day.39
Her experience is not unique in feminist sources. Another group of Milanese

women expressed their ingrained fear:
“It is irrational,” I would think with my head that had always confronted
men, with a body that had always borne the almost daily “small” acts of
violence such as hands on my ass in the cablecar, in the bars, the “usual”
sentences, the “usual” gazes: experiences that I always tried to forget to
avoid feeling only like a piece of forlorn flesh.40
Thus, several protest marches in those years targeted exactly this reclamation
of specific spaces that were virtually precluded to women, especially in cer-
tain times of day, by invisible barriers of fear and intimidation. In 1976, the
most dangerous part of the city of Rome, the area by the Termini train station,
was illuminated by torches in a “Take Back the Night” march, while women
chanted: “La notte ci piace / vogliamo uscire in pace” (“we like the night / we
want to go out freely”).41 In 1977, another torch march was organized in Mestre,
in the Venice mainland. A group of women reacted to the dangerous street by
brandishing bats: “We decided to start an action against these youngsters who
walked the streets with clubs and blades and other things. We organized a few
groups armed with bats”.42 It was no coincidence that their march coincided
with Carnival, a time when rules can be subverted and the king thrashed. These
groups appropriated the rebellious dimension of the carnivalesque in its em-
powering subversion against authority (male) figures, as we will see again later.
Even taking the street during a daytime parade proved difficult and dread-
ful. Giving up the protection of men felt like a conquest. The act of marching
39 Untitled article in “Donne all’attacco. Bollettino del comitato per il salario al lavoro do-
mestico di Trieste” (March 8, 1975), 4.
40 “Incontro in Vandea. Gruppo di Milano,” Sottosopra 1 (1973): 44.
41 Lilli Gruber, Streghe: La riscossa delle donne d’Italia (Milano: Rizzoli, 2008), 44. Recent re-
search on the sense of safety of Roman women in their city shows discomforting results:
68% feel safe only in certain areas, while 18% never feel safe. See Fiammetta Calvosa and
Simona Totaforti, “La sicurezza delle donne e l’estraneità di Roma,” in Estranee in città. A
casa nelle strade, nei luoghi di studio e di lavoro, ed. Antonietta Mazzette (Roma: Franco
Angeli, 2009), 119.
42 Anna Calabrò and Laura Grasso, Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso. Storie
e percorsi a Milano dagli anni ‘60 agli anni ’70 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2004), 85.
alone, without male company, took some guts, and it was not an easy decision
for the first protesters, as a 1977 article of Effe, the feminist magazine of the
time, revealed:
Some of us wanted to walk with the men whom they knew better, so they
would feel more secure. Some others wanted to start before the male par-
ticipants, but at the end the position of those of us who proposed having
a section only of women predominated. And so it was. Even those who
were first diffident and wanted to go with the males, joined us and so the
last memory of Bologna and us women is that of a beautiful parade, rich
in our creativity, in our will to be autonomously present, in our ironical
slogans, some old and heard, some invented at the moment, songs, round
dances, and the overcoming of fear.43
3 Somaesthetics of the Symbolic City
The feminist movement symbolically redesigned and re-gendered city spaces

through their specific behavior. Protests and marches took place mainly in the
big cities like Rome, Milan, Bologna, Padua, Mestre, and Trieste – because the
city is the traditional public arena for body politics. As Georg Simmel main-
tains, cities are the realm of intense stimuli that rouse the mind’s rational life,
and they are the “most complete locus for the production and circulation of
power.”44 That is why women demanded a re-negotiation of power forces by
protesting their exclusion from the public sphere and by initiating a new use
of public places.45 Dominating the city space means owning the body politics.
Fighting for women’s rights had to happen in the city streets because, “through
the masculinization of the body politic, public space was also represented as a
masculine arena.”46
43 Sara Marino, “Il disagio di essere femministi,” Effe 5, no. 10 (October 1977), on-line archive:
http://efferivistafemminista.it/2014/11/il-disagio-di-essere-femministi/
44 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary
Bridge and Sophie Watson (Chichester: Wiley, 2010), 11.
45 For Habermas, the public sphere is restricted to “certain classes of men,” while “women
and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere”
(Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge:
mit Press, 1991), 56).
46 Rose, “Women and Every Day Spaces,” 364.
168 Serra
When women entered the masculine arena, they did so in a distinctive man-
ner that flooded male spaces with a feminine spirit. They feminized it with
symbolic gestures and movements, besides walking and marching. They filled
it with voices and clever, cutting, provoking chants, such as “Tremble trem-
ble, the Witches have come back” (“Tremate, tremate, le streghe son tornate”);
“With your violence we are through / with our fight we take our lives back”
(“Con la vostra violenza la facciamo finita, con la nostra lotta ci riprendiamo la
vita”); “We are not docile, we are not cute. We are through with your mimosa
flowers” (“Non siamo docili, non siamo vezzose, ci avete scocciato con le vostre
mimose”).47
Women protesters also heavily resorted to music, theater and dance (see Illus-
tration 7.7) – in opposition to male parades.48 This gave the feminist movement
a joyous, carnivalesque tone that differed from the angrier one that character-
ized the marches of male factory workers. When Italian feminists took to the
streets, they did it with resolve and relish unknown to their male colleagues.
Just being there was a victory. “We would get out in our neighborhood very
frequently. A beautiful experience,” says a woman from Milan.49
The aural dimension of the women’s fight was also peculiar.50 Women sang
their resolution to occupy the street space and filled it with their voices. Their
music expressed their exuberant state of unity, much like a choir, and their
liberation. It manifested as a physical power surge of singlemindedness. They
formed spontaneous choirs and founded steady musical bands, such as the
Movimento Femmista Romano in Rome, the Gruppo Musicale del Comitato
per il Salario al Lavoro Domestico in Padua, and the Collettivo Femminista
Bolognese in Bologna. Some of their songs invited women to get out of their
homes. The 1977 song titled “Primo Maggio” (“May 1st”), composed by the Pad-
ua Committee for the Salary to Domestic Work, underlined the spatial move-
ment from the home to the square:
It’s the 1st of May when all women

Are in the square
Are in the square.
It’s the 1st of May when all women
47 Anna Maria Zanetti, ed. Le ragazze di ieri. Immagini e testimonianze del movimento
femminista veneto (Venezia: Marsilio, 2000), 95.
48 Three theater plays, titled Identity (L’identità), History of a Thing (Storia di una cosa), and
The Untamed Shrews (Le indomabili bisbetiche), were produced in Padua. Several LP re-
cords of feminist original songs were recorded both in Padua and in Rome.
49 Anna Calabrò and Laura Grasso, Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso, 221.
50 See also Ilaria Serra, “Canti di donne in lotta. L’esperienza veneta,” Forum Italicum: A Jour-
nal of Italian Studies 49 (August 2015): 545–566.
Do not stay at home

and sweep.
Women, let’s get out
out of our homes!51
Illustration 7.7 Drum beating accompanies a women’s march in Mestre, 1976
51 Gruppo musicale del comitato per il salario al lavoro domestico, “Primo Maggio,” Amore e
potere, Vedette-Zodiaco (1977).
170 Serra
Taking a step out, these lyrics suggest, is the founding element of feminist
fights. Another 1977 song, “Siamo tante, siamo belle” (“We are Many, We are
Beautiful”) insisted on the sense of unity and power derived from their new
identification as part of the many, and from being outside.52 Verses from this
song sound like a manifesto for a political fight that involves the physical di-
mension of participation and the bodily presence of the protesters:
Women, we are alone in the houses

But we are many in the squares.
Our fight in the house is individual
Our fight in the square is universal!53
Such songs transmitted the enthusiasm of this important first for Italian wom-
en. At the same time, specific bodily actions – such as line dances, round danc-
es, and hand-in-hand dances (“girotondi”) – completed and physically fulfilled
the voices at the microphone (see Illustration 7.8). Flavia Busatta, a protester
from Padua, remembers the climactic moment of the beginning of one such
dance. Her testimony is very poignant for its somaesthetic aspect:
The happiness of being so many could not be drowned in a sea of stale

words. We had to do something really transgressive, totally different from
the gray ending of the parades of the Left, something that could break the
sermon and give way to adrenaline. I took the megaphone,… and I “felt”
the crowd. It was inside me, in the folds of my brain and I smelled its odor
with open nostrils. I felt their wave of empathy like a wave that broke on
me and me on them. I don’t remember what I said, but I concluded, “let’s
have a girotondo [round dance], a teasing, witchy ball” and so it was. The
joy of so many women exploded in a provoking dance in front of the po-
lice … that laughter still resounds in my mind.54
There is something particularly symbolic in the triumph of the circular move-

ment of a feminist parade: it differentiates the female appropriation of the
street from the male. If, as Einrich Tessenow indicated in a quote at the begin-
ning of this article, the street owns a specific “sense of direction, the urge to
press onwards, to progress” as attributes of the male principle, women not only
52 “Siamo tante siamo belle,” Canzoniere Femminista, Amore e Potere.

53 Ibid. “Donne in casa siamo sole / ma nelle piazze siamo in tante / la lotta in casa è individ-
uale / la lotta in piazza è universale!”
54 Testimony by Flavia Busatta, in Anna Maria Zanetti, ed., Le ragazze di ieri, 108.
Illustration 7.8 Feminist girotondo in Piazza Missori, Milan, 1978
reached the same stage, by marching straight down, in one body, along the
street, but they did something more. They made the street feminine by infus-
ing it with the feminine principle of a round motion, a circular celebration of
the feminine wholeness.
Furthermore, a second tool these women devised to feminize the male
street space was the blurring of the boundaries within the private and public
spaces. Hence their slogan “the private is political.”55 The private/political line
was constantly hazy, as a participant in a group of self-analysis remembers:
“We used to speak of our most hidden issues. We defied minute after minute,
the fracture between public and private spaces, public and private relation-
ships, needs and desires… The division between the two spheres exploded.”56
These discussions reached the streets and influenced a new physical pres-
ence: for women marchers, the slogan “the personal is political” took a bodily
meaning – in accordance with the tenets of a somaesthetics geared to social
change. As their personal life was shaped by political stances, so their political
55 Some feminist theorists proposed new concepts of space, such as feminist separatist
spaces in Milan, only for women. See Elena Vacchelli, “Gender and the City: Intergenera-
tional Spatial Practices and Women’s Collective Action in Milan,” Les Cahiers du CEDREF
21 (2014).
56 Antonella Nappi and Ida Regalis, eds. La pratica politica delle donne, 35.
172 Serra
articipation took place through their person. Women took to the streets wear-
p
ing large sweaters, shawls and skirts, uncombed, wild hair, comfortable clogs
rather than high heels, no make up. All were choices that underlined their free
femininity and pointed to the refusal of the artifices imposed by society for the
sole purpose of attracting men.57 They refused to wear their straight-jacket/
bras and enjoyed the scandal-provoking sensorial freedom: “Only someone
who has worn one of those pointy bras can understand how relieved I was to
throw it on a chair and forget it. With my big breasts heaving if I walked fast, it
was uncomfortable sometimes, especially when I had to run from the police,
but what joy, what freedom,” writes Sandra Busatta, a Paduan feminist.58 It was
a clear defiance of the dominant male gaze that tailored women’s apparel and
appearances, making their personal look a political stance.
The strong carnivalesque dimension of some feminist parades is indisput-
able. Their proposed overturning of power forces in a gendered society rever-
berated with the subversive potentials of Bakhtinian carnival. Around these
parades echoed the disruptive laughter that Bakhtin finds in medieval folk
carnivalesque expressions – directed, like these, to thrash the king. “Festive
folk laughter,” wrote Bakhtin, “presents an element of victory not only over su-
pernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power,
of earthly kings, of earthly upper classes, of all that suppresses and restricts.”59
It was a laughing refusal of “boss husbands” and “sultan sons.” The following
image (see Illustration 7.9) shows the grotesque qualities of certain feminist
parades – up to more recent years. It shows a women’s march in Bologna, in
the year 2000. The turn of the millennium saw a third wave of Italian feminism,
reacting to the objectification of women during the TV-dominated Berlusconi
period. In this particular parade, protesters appeared wearing fake plastic su-
persized breasts, witch outfits, preposterous hats, and naked legs. Their physi-
cal appearance defied a male-oriented codification of a pleasing appearance,
and they responded with fierce determination – and a grimace – to the “ugly
feminist” trope used in anti-feminist propaganda.
In brief, scandal was one of the tools that women employed against the mod-
el of the prim lady. Noise was their weapon against the silent woman. And ugli-
ness was their hammer against the likable woman. In all these cases, expressions
of the body were vigorously employed to shake a stagnant society and to pro-
voke social change. The culminating point of this irreverent imposition of the
57 Patrizia Zane, psychologist, participant in the street manifestation in Mestre in the 1970s,
e-mail to author, January, 2017.
58 Testimony by Sandra Busatta, in Anna Maria Zanetti, ed., Le ragazze di ieri, 109.
59 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 92.
Illustration 7.9 Women’s march in Bologna in 2000

Note: The photo is titled “Lo spettacolo continua ora” (“The Show
Continues Now”), Bologna, iv Street Rave Parade, June 24, 2000. It is
published in Tano D’Amico, Una storia di donne (Napoli: Intra Moenia,
2003), 91.
private/feminine body on the public/male street was the famous “feminine

gesture.” Hands shaped in the form of feminine genitalia were held up over the
protesters’ heads, in defiance and provocation (see Illustration 7.10). Thus, the
most private part of the feminine body – the symbol of the weak sex, the castrated
sex, the measure of women’s lesser value according to the patriarchal criteria60 –
was paraded in triumph in a space that remained prohibited to women. More
than anything else, this image gives the weight of the presence of the feminine
body in the public space of the street – a triumphal waving of the “impurity”
that women have been marked with and are now able to proudly take back and
use offensively.61 It is one last, direct example of how somaesthetic tensions or
feelings of disharmony can be taken in hand and turned into instruments of
the fight according to Shusterman’s theory of pragmatic somaesthetics.
Visibility was still both a blessing and a hurdle in 2016, when Lauren Elkin
published her interesting book entitled Flaneuse: Men Women Walk the City
60 See Ilaria Bussoni and Raffaella Perna, Il gesto femminista. La rivolta delle donne: nel corpo,
nel lavoro, nell’arte (Roma: Deriveapprodi, 2014).
61 The idea of using “impurity” as a feminine philosophical counteraction to the main-
stream and marginalizing invocation of “purity” in philosophy is discussed by Cressida
Heyes’s Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2000).
174 Serra
Illustration 7.10 Il gesto femminista
in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. She delves into the paradox that
women all too well understand: “We would love to be invisible the way a man
is. We’re not the ones who make ourselves visible… But if we are so conspicu-
ous, why have we been written out of the history of cities?”62
In Italy, the fight to appropriate the streets is still not over. It has moved from
the realm of somaesthetics to the realm of toponomastics. Starting in 2012,
Maria Pia Ercolini founded a group by the name “Toponomastica femminile”
which asked for more streets to be named after important women. Their re-
search found that in Italy only 5% of streets are dedicated to women, 3% in
Milan, 3.7% in Rome, and these are mostly to women saints. Coincidentally, in
Rome, the biggest conglomerate of feminine names (numbering thirty wom-
en) is in a public park: Villa Pamphili. Again, protected in the locus amoenus of
the park – and still, again, away, far away from the streets of the brute Zampanò.
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Chapter 8
Bodies in Alliance and New Sites of Resistance:

Performing the Political in Neoliberal Public Spaces
Federica Castelli
1 Introduction
This paper focuses on the link between politics and urban space from a situ-
ated, embodied, gendered, intersectional, and feminist approach. The politi-
cal nature of urban experience has already been advanced by several studies,1
which point out the links between power and the structure of the city from
both a historical and political perspective. Nevertheless, there is another factor
that connects politics and urban space, and that is the bodies that live in and
experience it.
This paper reflects on bodies through a focus on embodied practices of
performing in public space. The choice of taking bodies into account cannot
be reduced to a focus on them as mere theoretical issues, a topic or a sub-
ject matter for a general argumentation. The feminist movement has clarified
that taking bodies into account means entering a political dimension that says
something about our existence – as human beings – in the world. Bodies are
not just something about which discussions can be held and knowledge can be
produced, but they are means of political creation.
As much as I draw on feminist theory, my approach is imbibed with – and
indissociable from – experiences of feminist activism and feminist urban prac-
tices. On one hand, the feminist intersectional approach allows me to take into
account differences among embodied subjectivities in all their possible forms,
and leads me toward an analysis of the processes of construction of identities
1 Such as Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collége de France 1977–1978
(Paris: Gallimard, 2004), Spazi Altri, in Spazi Altri. I luoghi delle eterotopie, ed. Salvo Vaccaro
(Milano: Mimesis, 2002); Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Le Seuil, 1967), Espace et
politique. La droit à la ville ii (Paris: Anthropos, 1972); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York,
London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), Territory, Authority, Rights: From
Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Expulsions:
Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press,
2014), and many others. See also my forthcoming book: Federica Castelli, Spazio Pubblico
(Rome: Ediesse, 2019).

178 Castelli
and different modulations of the relationship between the individual and the
collective. On the other hand, my embodied experience with feminist collec-
tives and protests provides me with important interpretative tools.
2 Feminist Theory and Activism Meet Somaesthetics
The link among bodies, politics and urban spaces becomes more and more
evident in light of the radical changes that mark the neoliberal city. Its enclo-
sures and structural expulsions have clearly shown the urgency for a serious
and new reflection on bodies as political means and sites of resistance, revolt,
reinvention and creation. In recent years we have seen the rise of new em-
bodied practices of performance in public space, practices that have opened
new spaces, both real and symbolic, and established new orders, relationships,
and alliances. These embodied practices have been central to several forms of
protest and resistance and have given life to new symbolic alternatives to neo-
liberalism. Even though these practices have been different, plural, and rooted
in the contingency of their social, political, and economic situations, a com-
mon trait among them is their focus on bodies as political. Far from being just
efforts toward “taking power” or claiming rights, most of these urban revolts
have prefigured new paradigms in politics, paradigms rooted on the one hand
in expression, creation, and the sharing of and caring for common and shared
spaces, and on the other, in alliances, political relationships, and practical ac-
tion among embodied subjectivities.
Bodies are political: this has been a key feature of Italian feminist theory,
namely of the so-called second wave feminism, together with the focus on
embodied practices and the notion of the personal as political.2 Italian sec-
ond wave feminism, which has been deeply marked by the political analysis of
Carla Lonzi and her collective, Rivolta Femminile, has not asked for inclusion
of women in society; rather, it has engaged in a struggle for its radical change.
It has provided a radical critique of given societies as patriarchal and sexist,
rooted in the irreducible differences between subjects. According to Italian
Feminist Theory, politics has to be intended as a combination of everyday em-
bodied practices among different subjectivities, arising from their personal
experiences and different positions inside the social context, and arising from
2 Diotima, Il pensiero della differenza sessuale (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987); Libreria delle donne
di Milano, Non credere di avere dei diritti (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987); Carla Lonzi, Spu-
tiamo su Hegel e altri scritti (Milan: Rivolta Femminile, 1974); Rivolta Femminile, “Manifesto
di Rivolta Femminile,” in Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo, 11–18.
Bodies in Alliance and New Sites of Resistance 179
their differences, primarily the sexual difference. The focus on sexual differ-
ence can give life to more transformative politics than the struggle for an ab-
stract equality: women and men are equal before the law, but sexual difference
between women and men is a fulcrum for radical change.3
When I first became acquainted with somaesthetics I was amazed by its
multiple similarities with the Italian feminist approach, immediately recog-
nizing how it could enrich my understanding of revolt from an embodied and
situated point of view. The parallels between Italian feminist theory and som-
aesthetics have already been discussed by Shusterman,4 who argues that both
approaches act to displace traditional Western categories that arise from the
dichotomy between mind and body. Somaesthetics goes beyond the traditional
philosophical approach, which imagines the human body as a thing, as some-
thing external, as being solely material, or, sometimes, as a cage.5 Every hu-
man body is intended as a living body, not just a passive substance we can act
on, manipulate, control, or silence. The soma is the lived, perceptive, sentient
body.6 Somaesthetics is, then, both a regaining of aesthetic experience (where
aesthetics stands for “sensory knowledge”) and a regaining of the real-life
situation, everyday experience, and relationships with the world around us.
Somaesthetics, as well as feminist theory, provides a new philosophical and
political vision where bodies are fundamental elements of being human. These
two approaches give centrality to embodiment as a fundamental dimension
of the human condition and ask for the abandonment of both the traditional
division between mind and body and the neglect of the embodied dimension
of human experience. They both make space for actual bodies against the uni-
versal, abstract, neutral image we have inherited from philosophy and western
culture: actual bodies are assigned to different sexes, they are gendered, they
get sick, they die, they get old, they generate, they change, they live.7 The body,
being both subject and object of perception, and being exposed to the other,
opens up the possibility of a new understanding of the human that involves
3 Diotima, Il pensiero; Luisa Muraro, L’ordine simbolico della madre (Rome: Editori Riuniti,
1991).
4 Richard Shusterman, “Soggettività somatica e soggiogamento somatico. Simone de Beauvoir
su genere e invecchiamento,” Rivista di Estetica 2 (2015): 149–182.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), “Etica ed estetica: Somaestetica e l’arte di
vivere,” Lebenswelt 3 (2013): 9.
6 Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Politics: Incorporating Pragmatist Aesthetics for
Social Action,” in Beauty, Responsibility and Power, ed. Leszek Koczanowicz and Katarzyna
Liszka (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2014), 5.
7 Shusterman, “Etica ed estetica.”
180 Castelli
ethics, aesthetics, politics and self-consciousness, completely redefining the

traditional vision.8 Feminism and somaesthetics depart from the objectified
and still body of anatomy and traditional knowledges, and see bodies in their
contingency, agency, performativity. They both claim an approach to the hu-
man – both theoretical and practical – that highlights vulnerability, exposition,
and relationship as ontological conditions of the human; shared conditions
rooted in the corporeal that link us one to another, to the world around us, and
to other animals in a relation of compassion, care, and responsibility.9 This
corporeal compassion and relationship make it possible to imagine equality
among the unequal, a scenario in which differences are preserved and give life
to an ethical and political posture.10 Somaesthetics pinpoints the contingency
and historicity of somatic norms influencing our perceptions, experiences, and
biographies, as Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler and other feminist thinkers
have similarly stressed.11 It recognizes the role played by historical, cultural,
and environmental situations on embodied subjectivities, as well as the roles
played by sexual difference and gender norms.
Many previous analyses of urban revolt are caught up in the dichotomy be-
tween revolt and revolution, where the latter is seen as the successful struggle
that has taken power, and revolt is seen as an explosion of rage, or an aborted
revolution – as something ineffective and transitory. An overthrowing of the
traditional conception of efficacy as the taking power and establishment of
new institutional orders is necessary; we need to move toward a focus on the
so-called “ephemeral practices,” working on different levels of efficacy and
eluding the traditional dynamics of takeovers.
All of these aspects contribute to my approach to embodied practices in
public space, an approach far removed from traditional approaches to the top-
ic. I tried to leave abstraction and universality behind, and I tried to take em-
bodied subjectivities and their real life experiences into account. I experienced
them in protests and occupations of public spaces, in contact with others and
through the struggles we shared.
8 Ibid., 27.
9 Ralph R. Acampora, Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Adriana Cavarero, Inclinazioni. Critica della
rettitudine (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2013); Federica Castelli, “Spazio pubblico appassion-
ato. Corpi e protesta tra esposizione, vulnerabilità e relazioni,” Leussein 9, nos. 1–3 (2016):
85–93.
10 Luce Irigaray, La democrazia comincia a due (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994); Acampora,
Corporal Compassion.
11 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); Judith Butler, Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990).
3 Embodied Subjectivities and Political Alliances
From western culture we have learned to think and assimilate a fundamental

dichotomy between mind and body. This binary has been reinforced to us at
various sites and through various situations – through religion, literature, phi-
losophy, medicine, and even politics. In different ways and to different degrees,
the lived body is presented to us in opposition to “something.” The opposition-
al schema seems to be a key feature of western knowledge and power.
As Loraux has observed, there are a number of dichotomies originating in
the self-representation of the 5th century bce Athenian polis that are still alive
in our contemporary world: Greek/Barbarian, man/woman, masculine/femi-
nine, natural/political, reason/passion, soul/body, private/public, freedom/
necessity.12 Since classical Athens, as demonstrated by the official discourse of
the polis, the body has been a controversial element of the political – seen both
as a passionate and irrational cage, and a vulnerable, feminine dimension im-
prisoning men in the natural domain – that culture, politics and reason have to
control and normalize.13 The body – and its connotations of sexual division, re-
production, care, disease, mortality, vulnerability, exposition, and life intended
as mere survival – enters into a symbolic collision with the official discourses
of the polis, and assumes all those elements that the polis doesn’t recognize as
political. From that moment on, the link between bodies and politics in west-
ern political theory has been variously used, abused, normalized, neutralized,
and sometimes erased.14
Feminism has opened up unforeseen spaces of action, new modalities of
association in politics, and different paths of liberation. In its struggle for lib-
eration, feminism has “unleashed” knowledge from its fastenings, and from
its dichotomous structure, overthrowing the traditional western relationship
between knowledge and power built upon the couple identity/alterity. Femi-
nism has enabled new forms of knowledge – embodied knowledge – eschew-
ing abstraction, universality, and dogmas. This embodied knowledge does
not start and end with a scholastic exercise that takes women as subjects
12 Nicole Loraux, Les expériences de Tirésias. Le féminin et l’homme grec (Paris: Gallimard,
1989), Né de la Terre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996); see also Pierre Bourdieu, La domina-
tion masculine (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
13 Adriana Cavarero, Corpo in figure (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2003); Loraux, Les expériences de
Tirésias, Né de la Terre, La cité divisée. L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes (Paris: Éditions
Payot & Rivages, 1997).
14 Federica Castelli, Corpi in rivolta. Spazi urbani, conflitti e nuove forme della politica (Milan:
Mimesis, 2015); Cavarero, Corpo in figure, Inclinazioni; Loraux, La cité divisée, “Un absent
de l’histoire?” Metis 12 (1997): 223–267.
182 Castelli
of investigation. Rather, it calls into question the foundational categories and

dichotomies of the Western philosophical tradition, revealing them as social
constructions rather than natural and immutable aspects of the human condi-
tion. Feminism has revealed how much those dichotomies have contributed to
a phallologocentric, patriarchal power structure – oriented toward unity and
homogenization of difference – along with its social taxonomies, hierarchies,
and exclusions.15 It has revealed how much power, hierarchies and exclu-
sions are intertwined with everyday experience, claiming that the personal is
political,16 and it has opened up new subjectivating practices rooted in embod-
ied presence and relationships.
Feminism doesn’t think of subjectivities in the duality of body and mind,
but as embodied subjectivities [soggettività incarnate], always caught in rela-
tions with human and nonhuman others. Every subject is an incarnate subject:
it has a story, it cannot be extricated from its material circumstances, from its
context, from its body. Moreover, a body is always developing through gen-
dered, racial, and economic dynamics. Every body has a sex assigned at birth,
from which different personal histories and personal choices arise, oriented by
the gendered modes of subjectivation that societies impose on us in order to
make us “visible” and “recognizable.”17 Our bodies are crossed and disciplined
by lines of power that try to normalize and govern them.
Taking bodies into account means identifying dependency, relationship,
and vulnerability as defining attributes of being human. This dependency, far
from being disempowering, is really what constitutes us as human animals and
what makes us political. Dependency on others and on other living processes
forms the basis of the possibility of acting together. Individuals are always
related to each other and find freedom in plurality (as Adriana Cavarero and
Judith Butler have learned from Arendt18). Continually exposed to others, to
environments, to power, our bodies are not self-sufficient. That absolute, sov-
ereign subject, in which philosophy has made many of us believe, does not
exist. We are always beyond ourselves because of our bodies. Our corporeality
reveals the human condition as one of dependency, contingency and expo-
sure, in violence, love, and care. So, to speak of embodied subjectivity means
to undo the idea of an absolute individual subject who would be free from
necessity and restriction, natural or social.19
15 Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel; Luce Irigaray, Speculum. De l’autre femme (Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 1974).
16 Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe; Rivolta Femminile, Manifesto di rivolta femminile.
17 Butler, Gender Trouble.
18 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
19 Cavarero, Corpo in figure.
Subjectivities are embodied, sexualized and gendered, exposed, rela-

tional and situated.20 Insisting on the connection between bodies and social
identities – rooted in embodied, material subjectivity – as the fundamental
means of political relationship, feminism (along with feminist postcolonial
thinkers) has irrupted into the public space, overcoming the dichotomies upon
which western political theory has built its own self-representation and iden-
tity. In the process, it welcomes all those categories traditionally excluded from
theory – desire, passions, relationships – putting bodies back into the very cen-
ter of the political scene.
The body is intended as a means of political interaction, and it is political
because it reveals our political condition. Bodies, which are always involved
with gendered, racial and economic dynamics, shine a spotlight on passions,
contingency, and desire for recognition, putting them at the very center of the
public scene. Bodies have needs, and they render relationship, exchange, and
embodied practices as fundamental dimensions of political action. Far from
just being a passive surface on which politics and governance practices op-
erate, they make political action possible, since they create a public space of
interaction. They make political relationship and the political sharing of the
world possible at all times. Bodies are political because they relate subjects to
the world around them and make the relationship between humans possible.
4 Embodied Subjectivities in Neoliberal Cities
Urban space provides an orientation and a framework for our perceptions and
knowledge of the world. It orients and organizes our relationships with things
and people, for example according to the distinction between private and pub-
lic. It organizes the circulation of news and culture, and it regulates our access
to goods and services. Moreover, it provides the essential framework through
which social norms defining us as individuals take life. These norms are nec-
essary for identifying us and making us visible within society, and for placing
us either on top or at the margins of a social structure of power. Urban space
changes along with power such that it can be described as culture, power, and
politics transformed into buildings, streets, squares, walls and fences.21 The
20 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004); Cavarero, Corpo in figure, In-
clinazioni; Diotima, Il pensiero della differenza sessuale; Irigaray, Speculum, La democrazia
comincia a due; Rivolta Femminile, Manifesto di rivolta femminile.
21 Elio Piroddi, “Uso sociale dello spazio pubblico nella città contemporanea,” in Idee di
spazio, lo spazio nelle idee. Metropoli contemporanee e spazi pubblici, ed. Claudia Mattogno
(Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2002), 100.
184 Castelli
way we perceive it and live in it is contingent on our position in relations of

power. Cities are complex assemblages, connecting different networks among
subjectivities, activities, relationships, and processes, as well as complex eco-
nomic and social fluxes, grids of power, organization and administration. Cit-
ies provide us with the framework for our relationships, our encounters, our
experiences, and our lives and personal biographies. In the city we construct
alliances and give life to forms of political interactions and resistance.22
Since the development of globalization and the rise of neoliberal ideology,
the issue of identity construction – both individual and collective – raised by
postmodernism and involving the debate between liberals and communitar-
ians has become more and more relevant.23 If, on one hand, as several analyses
have pointed out, this process seems to have become independent of the plac-
es we inhabit and conducted within new modalities of interaction deployed
by new digital technologies and new media, on the other hand, changes in
our present times have given renewed centrality to the territorial and urban
dimension of politics.24 The contemporary world is constantly connected
in the relentless exchange of information and goods, and we are witnessing an
increasing exclusion of those who stay out of these exchanges. The relentless
and accelerating pace of change and the complexity of the governance of ur-
ban space have led to a proliferation of new uses and practices in urban space,
where online and offline reality coexist and intertwine. Our cities are func-
tional and interconnected, and, sometimes, they seem interchangeable. They
are places where everything mingles and blends, but they are also the setting
for new forms of violence, destruction, exclusion and segregation.
Neoliberal policies and functionalism in urban planning have come togeth-
er in the reshaping of the modern city, giving rise to a number of deurbanizing
and desubjectivating processes, including fragmentation, the crisis of cohabita-
tion, isolation, segregation, and the desiccation of public space. Functionalism
is an approach to urban planning and architecture based on the principle that
buildings should be designed according to their purpose and function in soci-
ety. Married with neoliberal policies, functionalism has led to a disembodied
approach to the city, where spaces, as well as individual and collective behav-
iors, can be re-shaped by the impersonal heteronomous hierarchical powers of
law and economy and through the decisions and actions of so-called “experts”
22 Castelli, Spazio pubblico appassionato.

23 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1992); Iris Marion Young, Justice and Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990).
24 Saskia Sassen, The Global City.
(in planning, management, organization, etc.). This approach is marked by a

strong reliance on statistics, data, norms, standards, and indicators. Its effects
on urban spaces are evident. The dangerous convergence of neoliberal gover-
nance and functionalism has led to divisions and expulsions of people in the
name of standards, norms, and data that isolate and separate while gathering
people as users and consumers.25 Thus walls, limits, and frontiers have com-
bined with the desertification of everyday sociality. We have seen the rise of
private spaces as new forms of anti-political public space, gathering people in
a heteronormative fashion, on the basis of consumer preferences. When public
spaces give way to private spaces for public use – where consuming is the only
vector for relationship and sociability – those excluded as consumers are also
excluded from public space. Expulsion from the economic space is expulsion
from public space; an exclusion from society. Urban space is, then, at stake in
the struggle between those who are visible and have voice and those who are
excluded from agency and political presence.26
After the economic crisis of 2008, neoliberal governance has led to the pro-
liferation of austerity and dispossession policies. Sassen identifies in our times
the increasingly violent emergence of the logic of expulsion, generated both by
a precise political vision and as a consequence of a number of economic and
technological changes.27 These changes have precipitated the welfare crisis,
increasing intolerance, and new enclosures, as migrants and the poor have be-
come positioned as the foci of governance, populist rhetorics, and social preju-
dice. As Pierre Bourdieu has remarked, neoliberalism produces misery.28 But
misery should be distinguished from poverty, since poverty is an objective fac-
tual condition, while misery is a “misery of position” that originates and devel-
ops in a precarious socio-physical space from which one cannot escape. Misery
is related to social relations and the self-perception of individuals; it is rooted
in social desiccation and in the crisis of social institutions of welfare societies.
Misery is lack of possibilities, forcing people into positions of ineffectualness,
non-existence, and uselessness. In misery, violence and intolerance intertwine
in categorizations and symbolic violence. Thus, society becomes polarized and
produces its outcasts, its “wasted lives.”
More than simple inequalities, neoliberalism produces out-right expulsions
from systems. The forms of such expulsions are manifold, and their brutality
25 Cristina Bianchetti, Spazi che contano. Il progetto urbanistico in epoca neo-liberale (Rome:
Donzelli, 2016).
26 Lefebvre, Espace et politique.
27 Sassen, Expulsions.
28 Pierre Bourdieu, La misére du monde (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993).
186 Castelli
tracks the increasing complexity of economic systems. Therefore, expulsions

can and do coexist with traditional notions of economic “growth.”29 They fol-
low multiple pathways and have different levels of brutality. They produce
fierce competition within societies. As Sassen has noted, where the processes
of accumulation do not rest on production but on world-spanning financial
flows, there is no reason to recognize social rights.30 So it is possible to proceed
on the basis of the dual move of expulsion and cancelation-by-incorporation.
A “systemic edge” arises, as an intermediary zone where those dynamics expel-
ling people from their world takes place – economically, socially, ecologically.31
In Italy, austerity policies and new forms of dispossession have become
more and more common since 2008. Women, LGBTQI subjectivities, mi-
grants, and other precarious subjectivities have found themselves targeted by
sexist and racist policies, populist and nationalist rhetorics, and securitarian
public discourses, such as those on decoro [decency] and urban decay. From
Berlusconi’s “un soldato per ogni bella donna” (“there should be a soldier to
protect every beautiful woman”); Minniti’s ordinance on migration and pub-
lic security; Salvini’s discourses on migrants and his declarations against LG-
BTQ’s rights; Fontana’s (head of the “Family” Department, previously called
the “Equal Opportunities Department”) declarations against gay couples, and
the struggle against the independent and self-organizing women’s spaces (as in
Rome, where women’s shelters, free clinics, and cultural spaces are put at risk
of eviction – see the cases of Casa Internazionale delle Donne, Lucha y Siesta,
and many other feminist spaces), a climate of fear, racism and sexism has been
fostered. The examples of application of such ideology are clearly more exten-
sive than what is listed here.
A number of axes come together in the dynamic of expulsions enacted by
such policies: economics, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, race.
An intersectional transfeminist analysis has illustrated how the dynamics of
exclusion from public space take root in bodies – namely women’s bodies and
migrants’ male bodies – linking victimizing sexism and racism.32 This is par-
ticularly clear if we look at populist rhetoric involving decency and urban de-
cay, where urban space is envisioned as a house in need of being purged of dirt
and filth.33 The migrant woman – both as “prostitute” and victim of violence –
and the migrant man – as dangerous (mostly for white women), criminal, and
29 Sassen, Expulsions.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Non una di Meno, Piano Femminista contro la violenza maschile sulle donne e violenza di
genere, 2017.
33 Tamar Pitch, Contro il decoro. L’uso politico della pubblica decenza (Roma-Bari: Laterza,
2013); Anna Simone, “Securitarismo, rischio ed uso strumentale del corpo delle donne,”
brutal – are the emergent figures of this rhetoric. Both figures exemplify how
the content of discourses of decay has switched from behaviors to subjectivi-
ties. There are some specific identities which are, it is assumed, a “problem”
for the security and decency of us all. Migrants, first, are portrayed as trou-
bling and dangerous subjects. Meanwhile, gendered divisions in public and
private spaces in the city have become bound-up with securitarian discourse
and the victimization of women as objects of violence, expelling them (as well
as those who constitute “a menace” to their safety) from public space. Despite
the huge amount of femicides in domestic space, this rhetoric demarcates a
clear separation between spaces deemed dangerous (or safe) for women, and
the instrumentalization of female bodies as central elements in the discourse
of urban decay, and for the “legitimation” of control based on the repression of
“dangerous subjectivities.”
The rhetorical equation that sees women mainly as objects of violence, the
securitarian policies and discourse on urban decency and decay, and the dy-
namics of privatization and fragmentation serve to expel women from public
space (“dangerous and masculine”) and reinstitute a confinement in domestic
space (“safe and feminine”). As we have seen in Italy (in Rome, Pisa, and Mi-
lan), neoliberal policies make women’s self-organized places precarious under
constant threat. These places are always under attack: they can be privatized,
subjected to eviction, or closed at any time. Moreover, the lack of local services
makes it impossible for women to live a full life, forcing them to be mothers
or workers or activists, etc. Reconciliation politics, despite facilitating the ful-
fillment of everyday tasks, fails to make room for political debate concerning
production and the reproduction of society. In this sense, urban space acts as
a further dispositif of gender violence, expulsion and political effacement. The
architectonics of neoliberal urban space becomes the means and illicit justifi-
cation for expulsion of women from public space and circumscription of what
can become a matter of political dispute.
5 Embodied Practices of Revolt
Neoliberal cities are marked by divisions, ghettos, and expulsions; policies

oriented by data, norms, standards and statistics, and looking at individuals
as users and consumers have given life to de-socializing and desubjectivating
in Città. Politiche dello spazio urbano, eds. Chiara Belingardi and Federica Castelli (Rome:
Iaph Italia, 2016).
188 Castelli
dynamics. But new practices and spaces of resistance have arisen, rooted in
embodied subjectivities and urban everyday practices, all different from one
another yet in alliance. These alliances are not idealistic, nor carried on in the
name of universal and abstract goals, but are rooted in material situations,
volatile, and bound to the contingency of bodies.
In recent years we have seen a large rejection of neoliberal expulsions made
manifest in the rise of new forms of mobilization in Europe as well as North and
South America. On the one hand, rooted in the “right to the city” (and in a re-
vival of Lefebvre’s work from 1967),34 an alliance between different urban prac-
tices has coalesced to fight against the neoliberal dynamics of dispossession
and isolation. These protests have followed dispossession since the beginning,
but they have seen an upsurge internationally since 2011, the so-called “year
of global revolts” (or, as Žižek has said, the year “of dreaming dangerously”35).
The year 2011 inaugurated a global wave of protests that touched almost every
continent. As sparks crossing oceans and frontiers, they have reached differ-
ent cultural, social and economic situations. Local yet world-spanning, they
have spread without leaving any watchword, established program, or general
guidelines, and have avoided any reduction to a homogeneous political iden-
tity. Their common feature can be found in the shared desire for a reappro-
priation of space, for the possibility of livable lives, and for collective action.
Through the occupation of streets and squares, these protests have critiqued
and performed an alternative to neoliberalism, bringing into question the di-
chotomies, hierarchies, and exclusions on which contemporary public space
has been built. At the same time, the return of feminism in squares has awoken
the urge for a struggle against – and an analysis of – gender violence that takes
into account structural violence arising from urban space and aims to over-
throw the securitarian approach. This has involved recognizing the link be-
tween women-city-violence as victimizing, oppressive and heteronormative.
I am thinking of Tahrir Square in 2011, of Indignados in Madrid, the Occupy
movement in both the u.s.a and in Turkey, and also the Italian movements
linked to urban commons and the right to the city, or the feminist occupations
of recent years like the Slutwalks and the Night marches. All of these practices
have reshaped our urban experience. Consider also Non una di Meno, the in-
tersectional transfeminist movement that arose from the Argentinian Ni una
Menos that soon went transnational: a multi-faceted experience, tied to differ-
ent territories and situations and yet connected. Maintaining a multitude of
practices, uses of space and modalities of political interactions and gathering
34 Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville.

35 Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012).
together – in a contingent alliance – an entire constellation of feminist, les-

bian, transgender, cisgender, and queer groups and activists activated a shared
yet heterogeneous struggle.
Non una di meno is a large (trans)feminist and queer movement born in
Italy in the last two years from an alliance between cisgender and transgender
women aimed at facing gender violence. In Italy the number of femicides have
increased sharply in recent years, most being committed by husbands, boy-
friends, and relatives despite the racist rhetoric that linked them to migrants.
In opposition to racist and securitarian policies, Non una di Meno has orga-
nized several assemblies and occupations and drafted an independent femi-
nist Plan against violence on women and gender violence.36 The Plan was the
result of a huge collaboration among different cities, collectives and groups on
a national scale. It addressed a number of topics (escaping gender violence;
laws and norms; welfare and work; sexual and reproductive health; education
and formation; feminisms and migrations; media communication of gender
violence; sexism in political movements; gender violence and urban spaces)
and aims to be a feminist response to gender violence against sexism, racism
and populism. At the same time, Non una di Meno has organized flash mobs,
occupations, demonstrations, assemblies, and general strikes that have gath-
ered together different generations of (cis- and trans-) women and different
waves of feminist activists.
The protests of recent years, as well as transnational feminist mobilizations
(such as Ni Una Menos/Non una di Meno), have put a spotlight on the link be-
tween bodies, politics and public space, giving renewed centrality to living and
performing the political. From clashes to occupations, the experience of pro-
testing forces a reconsideration of politics in connection with bodies; bodies
that incarnate dissent by fighting, clashing, and meeting, but that also give life
to new political alliances. These agents of protest occupied the public scene in
ways that lived-out the fullness of what it is to be a (political) body: exposed,
vulnerable, and interdependent. Occupying public space with bodies – fully
and realistically imbibed with their needs, relationships, and practices – has
been recognized as essential in order to resist the disintegrating dynamics of
economic crisis. Public assemblies and protests have brought bodies to the
very center of public space as fully political and living bodies, shining a spot-
light on the links between bodies, politics and public space that have been
abused or silenced by western political theory.
Urban practices of revolt put the embodied and gendered experience of
subjects in public space at the heart of their struggles, in a stance that puts
36 Non una di Meno, Piano Femminista.

190 Castelli
the value of relationships, bodies, and passions before rights.37 Bodies are in-
tended as sites of resistance, expression, political relationship and creation,
renewing the bond between bodies and politics. They are intended to enact
what gives life to politics and public space, and to introduce the possibility of
change into the world. This dissent has been rooted in several kinds of per-
formance and embodied practice – assemblies, protest marches and parades,
occupations – each involving action together in public space; sharing it and
caring for it through embodied practice. Such experiences have highlighted ac-
tion in concert as the living and sharing of public space. They disclose shared
spaces of action against economic and social processes that dispossess people
of their lives, time, and spaces; they have called into question the dichotomies
defining contemporary public space and compelled us to rethink politics as
a praxis, as an acting in common, beyond any normative reduction to a neo-
liberal governmental technique. Moreover, they have offered an alternative
economy of bodies which is desiring and passionate and recognizes exposure
and vulnerability as conditions of politics.
These experiences underscore the essential fact that bodies are political be-
cause of their exposure and relationship to the world, and to alterity. This un-
deniable fact defines the human condition. Assemblies perform the fact that
bodies are political and enact politics in public space. Through their proximity,
and in their physical contact, bodies in squares and in the streets embody their
dissent, rooted in their corporeality – in their “being there” – and being exposed
to the contact (and violence) of others. As Canetti has remarked, such physical
proximity in concerted embodied action is really what constitutes their po-
tential for political change.38 Far from being a quantitative potential, through
action in concert they have expressed the possibility of change, and the exten-
sion of the institutions of democracy against the normative reduction of poli-
tics to neoliberal technique. Far from being passive surfaces to be inscribed by
biopolitics and economics, assemblies embody dissent here and now, rooted
in real bodies, in their material, social, cultural, and political needs. Embodied
subjectivities decide to “appear” – in the Arendtian sense – in a public space
everyday more and more disembodied, risky, and inaccessible, claiming their
right to be political actors. Appearance subverts the modes of subjection that
heteronormatively cast political subjects as consumer subjects. It produces
self-determined agency: freedom embodied. Bodies entering the public scene
together exercise their right to “appear” – their right to be “visible” in the public
37 Castelli, Spazio pubblico appassionato.

38 Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1960).
scene – in a plural, performative modality against the conditions of precarity,

isolation, and dispossession of contemporary neoliberal experience.
Neoliberal dynamics make our bodies disposable and precarious, while the
decline and crisis of modern public space neutralizes collective action. Policies
affect life chances and relationships, acting in tangible ways on bodies through
mechanisms of governance and (self-)control. In a social context where invis-
ible norms shape our lives through the economic organization of life, bring-
ing the dependency, vulnerability, and precarity of our bodies into the public
space is both a way to reaffirm citizenship and a political act of revolt. In this
framework, being together, fully present, exposed and vulnerable to others, is
indeed an insurgent act. Through embodied presence, these experiences loud-
ly claim that the answer to life’s precarity – seen as a fundamental element
of the human condition but one that neoliberal governance has made more
violent and evident – does not lie in securitization, but in equality in depen-
dency and in the equal ability to achieve a livable life;39 they affirm interde-
pendency against neoliberal dogmas of individualism, competition, agonism,
and self-sufficiency of subjects. Avoiding the fictive institution of a homoge-
neous group identity, these experiences gather together different dynamics of
relationship, both political and sustaining, in struggling and living together.
They embody pluralistic forms of resistance and collective agency that turn
on the condition of precarity, isolation and dispossession: plural actions but
individual stories conjuring together a necessarily plural dimension of politics.
But the subject, in these protests, does not disappear in the crowd. Instead it
stands, in political relationship and interconnection with the others, together.
Bodies have become the loci of a broader conflict that poses serious ques-
tions for traditional politics. As Judith Butler has noted, bodies, acting together,
ask fundamental questions of public space.40 These questions concern surviv-
al, health, and the claim to be part of a common (social) world enriched by our
passions, desires, relationships and love, or in other words, with all those pas-
sions that makes us human, and that politically unite us in a passionate way.41
Singing, standing together, and occupying the public scene: these embodied
alliances give life to a new idea of the public space – plural, fueled by contin-
gency, fragility, and vulnerability of humans – and bring desire, social passion,
and concerted action to its center.
39 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015).
40 Ibid.; Federica Castelli, “Cosa possono fare i corpi insieme? Intervista con Judith Butler,”
in Il genere tra neoliberismo e neofondamentalismo, ed. Federico Zappino (Verona: Ombre-
corte, 2016), 164–174.
41 Castelli, Spazio pubblico appassinato.
192 Castelli
Bodies in squares contribute to the construction of new realities and new

practices, and to the opening up of new political possibilities. Rooted in plu-
ral embodied relationships in and through urban space, these protests do not
demand change; they realize change through new public-political formations.
They produce a shift from traditional dynamics of power; they are not fight-
ing for power, “taking back control” of institutions, nor are they demanding
something of established authorities or governments. Rather, they are creat-
ing a new collective space and a new idea of politics out of the dynamics of
traditional power, by living the public space together, taking care of the public
and the common. This is why these embodied protests cannot be valued in the
light of the traditional idea of efficiency, according to which a revolution or
a struggle is successful when it takes control over power and institutions. In-
stead, it must be evaluated on a symbolic level, since these protests try to create
the new world they claim by living together, acting together, and taking care
of the space they are occupying. The Italian lexicon provides an instructive
case for reflection on this point: occupying (occupare, in Italian) is also taking
care of (occuparsi) a shared and common dimension.42 The act of occupying a
square embodies a caring for the city, as demonstrators build up and take care
of shared and political spaces. “Taking back” a square is, then, a regenerative
act, building a more-than-symbolic city within a city. In this sense, occupying
public space ought not to be viewed as an “attack” on authorities, but as the
foundation for a new political space that brings to life a political and social al-
ternative to the antagonistic dynamic of the revolutionary struggle against po-
litical institutions, of parties, and of institutional government. It is a refusal of
hierarchical organization and the enactment of horizontal decision-making.
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Chapter 9
East End Prostitution and the Fear of Contagion:

On Body Consciousness of the Ripper Case
Chung-jen Chen
One day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth
century.1
Jack the Ripper
∵
Both in and outside Great Britain, “Ripperology,” the study of the Jack the
Ripper murders, has captured the imagination of both criminal investigators
and the general public for at least a century. Because of this prolonged fasci-
nation, Jack the Ripper and his milieu of East End London have been made
the subject of not only serious studies but also popular entertainment includ-
ing comics, novels, drama, musicals, and most significantly, films.2 Yet despite
the surfeit of academic studies and popular representations of the case, there
seems to be little sign that interest in the case has been exhausted.
This article explores the geographical and biological representations of East
End London in narrative accounts of the serial murders committed by the man
known as “Jack the Ripper.” In revealing the necessarily uneven, incomplete,
and inconsistent narrative of the social body of the city and the female bodies
of prostitutes, this article attempts to challenge the institutionalized methods
1 The origin of this famous quote is unclear. Although it is often attributed to one of the Ripper
letters, it may have been an invention of the 1979 Ripper film Time After Time, and it was
popularized as an authentic quote from the Ripper only by the influential graphic book From
Hell and its film adaption. See the discussion on the Casebook website: “One Day Men Will
Look Back and Say…” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, 2010, accessed July 25, 2018, http://www.
casebook.org/forum/messages/4923/7670.html.
2 Denis Meikle’s study Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies analyzed 63 movies from
1915 to 2001. 2001 alone saw the release of the movie From Hell and three other movies on
the Ripper: Bad Karma, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Ripper: Letter From Hell.
More than a hundred years after his crimes, the Ripper remains a popular subject for the film
industry. See Denis Meikle, Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies (London: Reynolds &
Hearn, 2002), 212–235.

196 Chen
of observing the pathologized and victimized female bodies. Through narra-

tives of prostitution that surfaced during media coverage and official coroner
autopsies, I argue that the fascination with the Ripper cases is heavily shaped
by somaesthetic transformative cultivation of both the individual and collec-
tive body. In the Ripper narratives, the urban space of the serial murders was
explicitly associated with the victimized and pathologized bodies of the pros-
titutes. The fascination with the mutilated female bodies described by coroner
reports also shows a growing interest in the physiological features of conta-
gion, as Victorians increasingly looked at the Ripper’s victims (and women
like them) from the vantage point of the social body, adopting a mentality of
governance. The associations between geography and biology in the Ripper
narratives demonstrate that the emphasis on eliminating excess and waste
from the living environment also extended to society as a whole. The eternal
fascination with the Ripper is rooted in the ambivalence of medical authority
toward defining clean and normal bodies, a discursive operation that was chal-
lenged, furthered, and amplified in the dissections of the sexualized bodies of
prostitutes.
Just as the bodies of the prostitutes become subject to obsessive scrutiny,
initial responses to the Ripper case, motivated by a collective fascination with
the slums, continually constructed and reconstructed the geographic setting
of East End London. I examine the process through which fascinations with
the East End are configured through the collective imagination of the urban
body. Jack the Ripper became synonymous with the East End, which in turn
became identified with unclean sex with cheap prostitutes, and the lust, wan-
tonness, excess, and filth that surrounded that act. The figure of the Ripper was
associated with sexuality, a lack of sanitation, and discipline – each of these
aspects serving to make him ever more infamous. The Ripper case as depicted
in journalistic accounts, street literature, and autopsy reports, became an ur-
ban allegory of a morality of the body that demanded the purge of whatever is
unclean, excessive, and immoral – such as the bodies of prostitutes – through
violence, if necessary.
I contend that this fascination with the Ripper has developed into an indus-
try of body consciousness, a term which I borrow from Richard Shusterman
and his pioneering work in somaesthetics. The moralistic metaphors created
by the corporeality of body images continue to power academic research, artis-
tic creation, and even entertainment surrounding the Ripper case. The critical
study of how we experience and use “the living body” as well as the metaphori-
cal construction of the urban body as “a site of sensory appreciation” and “cre-
ative self-fashioning” gives us new and powerful insights into the narratives of
East End Prostitution and the Fear of Contagion 197
the Ripper case.3 Our body is the basic medium of perception and action, and
the Ripper continues to mediate public and individual fascinations with the
terminology and valuation of the body. In 1888, it was the rationalist mode of
observation only recently labeled “criminology,” assisted by what was then the
most advanced science available, that described the East End as a den of total
depravity. It was the physicality of urban existence which made the Ripper
case the embodiment of fear and anticipation.
1 A Walk with the Ripper
When I first visited London sixteen years ago, I visited the information center
at Leicester Square to see my options for tours. Among the walking and bus
tours offered to global visitors by the booming London tourist industry were a
“Dickens walk” and a “Shakespeare walk,” but I found myself drawn to a rather
more salacious option – “the Jack the Ripper Walk.” I decided to join the walk,
and found it as awesome and thrilling as advertised. My tour was, of course,
only one of many; guides operate the “Jack the Ripper Walk” tour every day for
at least the past sixteen years. What about these geographical locations filled
visitors with a sense of terror and excitement, and how were those feelings
transformed into fascination? And why has this fascination with the darker
part of London lasted over a century?
The obsession of these tourists centers on the murder of at least five women
in Whitechapel in east London in the fall of 1888. Polly Nicholls (also known
as Mary Ann Nichols) was killed on August 31; Annie Chapman (also known
as Dark Annie) was killed on September 8; Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth
Stride were killed on the same night, September 30; and Mary Jane Kelly was
killed on November 8. All of the victims were prostitutes and all had turbu-
lent backgrounds: they were alcoholics, they were raised by unstable families,
or they were involved in abusive relationships. These serial killings took place
within a ten-week period and were the subject of a steady stream of media
accounts, many of which provided gory details.4 The internal organs of all the

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1.
4 As violence against prostitutes in the East End was not rare and the killer and his/her mo-
tivation was never identified, it has been difficult to isolate the cases for which the Ripper
was definitely responsible. Most current discussions of the Ripper adopt the theory of the
“Macnaghten Five” based on Sir Melville Macnaghten’s 1894 case notes. See Philip Sugden,
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, revised edition (New York: Carrol & Graf P ublishers,
198 Chen
victims – with the exception of the third, Elizabeth Stride, whose attacker was
believed to be interrupted in the act – were removed or mutilated. The victims
were all butchered in densely populated areas of Whitechapel, but no witness-
es, not even to the screams of the victims, could be found.5
Considering how similar the backgrounds of the victims were, it is worth-
while to examine why such women in the Victorian era would become sex
workers. Judith R. Walkowitz notes that previous Victorian studies provided
the insufficient explanation that prostitutes were the pathetic progeny of
social injustice or innocent victims of middle-class seduction and betrayal.
Walkowitz instead argues that Victorian prostitution was simply a “low-grade
and unskilled female occupation.”6 According to Walkowitz, over fifty percent
of Victorian prostitutes had been servants, and the rest had worked in other
dead-end jobs: sewing, laundering, charring, street-selling, waitressing, and
bartending. Poverty, all too common in the East End of the nineteenth century,
drove women into prostitution, but unfortunately, the income p rostitution
brought was trivial considering the risk of disease, violence, and exploitation.
For many women, not just the Ripper victims, the wages of sin really were
death. The identity of these women is an important part of the gothic atmo-
sphere which drives the fascination with these merciless killings. In the words
of Ed Glinert, crime has long been “the great local growth industry” of the East
End.7 The East End has spawned a host of infamous criminals: Spring-heeled
Jack, the Ratcliff Highway murderer, the Bessarabians, and the Kray Twins, to
name a few. Jack the Ripper is only one among many in this gallery of villains,
but the horror of his crimes still make him a uniquely powerful symbol for the
dark side of London.
Richard Sennett notes that during the nineteenth century, urban develop-
ment and the Industrial Revolution pushed immigrants and the poor to the
2002), 7–19; Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper (London: Penguin, 1992),
132–136; Robin Odell, Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phe-
nomenon (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2006), xvii–xxiv; Paul Begg, Jack the Ripper:
The Definitive History (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2004), 213–215.
5 Most bodies were found by people going to and from their places of employment, as the
Ripper crime scenes were located on the same streets where residents worked. Nevertheless,
subsequent investigations found no credible eyewitnesses. In the chaotic environment of
Whitechapel, loud disturbances were often dismissed as background noise. See Sugden, The
Complete History, 15–17, 36–40, 84–89, 167–176 and 311–312; and Judith R. Walkowitz, City of
Dreadful Delight (London: Virago, 1992), 190–191.
6 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cam-
bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16.
7 Ed Glinert, East End Chronicles (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 2.
east of the City of London, the financial heart of the city, and as a result, the
attendant ills of crime and prostitution prospered in the East End.8 During the
early Victorian era, the East End carried no special significance; only during
the last two decades of the nineteenth century did the neighborhood become
a powerful symbol of Victorian destitution.9 The Ripper murders further trans-
formed the image of the area from a place that represented the problem of pov-
erty to an active threat to the social order.10 Even the term “East Ender” came
to signify “someone unfortunate, someone to be pitied, ignored or avoided.”11
The way in which the case forcefully transformed the image of the city
has made it an object of perpetual interest for many. The release of Stephen
Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution in 1986 encouraged many amateur
detectives or retired policemen join the search for the killer. “Ripperology”
continues to be a best-selling genre, but most of the works that belong to it
are more focused on compulsively reviewing (and often sensationalizing) the
facts. Ironically, the public obsession over the murders makes trying to under-
stand their significance only more difficult.
In Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980) and City of Dreadful Delight (1992),
Judith R. Walkowitz pioneered the shift from trying simply to solve the Ripper
murders to examining their social significance in the larger context of gender
violence in the Victorian era. This study opened the door to a host of fruitful
academic inquiries. Clive Bloom noted that although the Ripper’s violence was
sadly ubiquitous in its time and place, as indicated by the killer b eing given
the very common name of “Jack,” the massive readership of the media ac-
counts turned this figure into “a major figure of international interest.”12 Kate
Lonsdale argues that the simultaneous “unknowability” and ubiquity of Jack
the Ripper is the reason why they continue to fascinate. In Lonsdale’s succinct
8 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York
and London: Norton, 1994), 322.
9 P.J. Keating, “Fact and Fiction in the East End,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities,
vol. 2, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), 585–586;
Dick Hobbs, “The History of East London: A Stroll Down Felony Lane,” in Urban Culture:
Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 4, ed. Chris Jenks (London and New
York: Routledge, 2004), 136; Martin Fido, The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 4–6.
10 William Fishman, “The Image and the Reality,” in Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Liter-
ary and Cultural Studies, vol. 4, ed. Chris Jenks (London and New York: Routledge, 2004),
66.
11 Glinert, East End Chronicles, 2.
12 Clive Bloom, “The House that Jack Built: Jack the Ripper, Legend and the Power of the Un-
known,” in Nineteenth Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle, ed. Clive Bloom, Brian
Docherty, Jane Gibb and Keith Shand (Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 1988), 123.
200 Chen
formulation, “We do not know the Ripper’s real name” but “we all ‘know’ who
Jack the Ripper is.”13 Alex Murray takes Lonsdale’s theory of Jack the Ripper’s
ubiquity even further, arguing that there was no one person who committed
these murders and so “the only thing to be revealed in the investigation of Jack
the Ripper is ourselves.”14 Looking at a century of Ripperology, we have not
yet been able to determine the identity of the killer, but we can see ample
evidence of our own faith in the capacity of rational human thought, knowl-
edge, logic, and deduction. And we can also see a long history of associating
the crimes of the Ripper with dystopic geographies and abnormal bodies. The
Ripper murders have long been understood as the foulest possible expression
of male rage and aberrant male sexuality. We can understand the perpetrator
of these crimes as an individual named “Jack,” or the East End, or Victorian so-
ciety at large, but it does not change the nature of the horrific crimes, nor does
it deter our continued fascination.
2 The Somaesthetic Politics of Human Waste
The Ripper cases were inextricably linked to the setting in which they took
place. As Philip Sugden suggests, “the Whitechapel killer had chosen a perfect
hunting ground.”15 Paul Begg similarly speculates that if the Ripper had “killed
anywhere else or killed at any other time he would today be a footnote in crim-
inal history.”16 Whitechapel provided “a stark and sensational backdrop for the
Ripper murders: a moral landscape of light and darkness, a nether region of
illicit sex and crime, both exciting and dangerous.”17 It was widely known at
the time of the murders as an alien place notorious for foreign immigrants
and refugees, as a place where the transient and homeless poor slept on the
streets or in run-down boardinghouses, as the “proletarian center” of the city.
Police were rumored to hesitate before patrolling the most dangerous streets
13 Kate Lonsdale, “Rounding Up the Usual Suspect: Echoing Jack the Ripper,” in Functions
of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, ed. Christine L. Krueger (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 97. Lonsdale uses Freud’s fort da game of disappearance and return to
explain why the murders continue to fascinate: in the constant cycle of new theories and
potential solutions to the case, we feel the pleasure of capture and release. This repeti-
tion of pleasure is one of the aspects of the mystery that has made the Ripper “genre” so
popular. See Lonsdale, “Rounding Up,” 97–98 and 101–103.
14 Alex Murray, “Jack the Ripper, the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Search for Spiritual
Deliverance in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings,” Critical Survey 16, no. 1 (2004): 52.
15 Sugden, The Complete History, 69.
16 Begg, Jack the Ripper, 4.
17 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 193.
of Wentworth and Dorset alone.18 It was only a matter of time before the mys-
terious, deprived, haunted East End served as the setting for a horrific spec-
tacle. When the murders finally occurred, they came to represent the anxieties
of the age associated with the East End, the very anxieties which prefigured
them. In media representations, the Ripper and his victims together become
the physiological and biological image of the East End, the city transformed
into a grotesque half-man, half-beast body that unites the sadistic killer and
the mutilated victim.
This geographical-biological fascination with the city is by itself somaes-
thetic. I am suggestively applying what Richard Shusterman coined “analytic
somaesthetics,” the theoretical or descriptive study of how bodily perceptions,
actions, and values functions “in our knowledge, action, and construction of
the world.”19 Constructing, mapping, and transforming a modern city is usually
an embodied experience. As Richard Sennett argues, the complexity of social
life makes the city a space that is experienced on a physical level as difference,
complexity, and strangeness. Empowered city residents have the luxury to
move freely within the city, while the deprived and displaced are discouraged
from leaving their designated areas. The contrast between “bodily movement”
and “bodily passivity,” inclusion and exclusion, constructs the urban space.20
According to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, the urban subject in the
nineteenth century was primarily understood through body politics. The city
was an Aristotelian body, with an “upper body” which represented urban civi-
lization and the noble thoughts it could produce, and a “lower body,” the slums
and sewers of the city, associated with bodily desires and urges.21 In Peter
Ackroyd’s “biography” of the city, the city as a whole takes “the form of a young
man with his arms outstretched in a gesture of liberation” and Ackroyd con-
tinues to build on his physiological metaphors: “The byways of the city resem-
ble thin veins and its parks are like lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban
autumn, the shining stones and cobbles of the older thoroughfares look as
if they are bleeding.”22 London fulfills different physiological metaphors and
bodily functions – it even takes on the texture of different parts of the body.
18 Ibid.
19 Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 42.
20 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 324.
21 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London:
Methuen, 1986), 144–145; “The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch,”
in Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 3, ed. Chris Jenks
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 194.
22 Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2001), 1.
202 Chen
To paraphrase Shusterman’s words, “I both am body and have a body.”23 The

city certainly is body and has a body, but it remains an open question whether
it has a soul. Roy Porter answered in the negative, arguing that London was
growing so fast and so big during the nineteenth century that “it had no soul.”24
Just as the human body that “exemplifies our multiform ambivalent human
condition between power and frailty, worthiness and shame, dignity and brut-
ishness, knowledge and ignorance,”25 so the corporeality of the city accommo-
dates a complexity of ambivalences regarding the human condition.
The darkest somaesthetic affiliation of the embodied city of London was be-
tween the East End and prostitution. David L. Pike describes Victorian London
as a “vertical city,” the implication being that all the infrastructure innovations
of the metropolitan railways, tunnels, arches, and embankments were built to
divide the rich and the poor, the law-abiding and criminal, the healthy and
diseased, and the familiar and the foreign.26 The nineteenth-century metropo-
lis, Pike points out, was the first in which the rich and the poor did not live
in a mixed urban space. The idea of the underground emerged as part of the
process of spatial segregation and the creation of single-use spaces, as a set of
unseen spaces where identities that were unacceptable in public could be put
on display. It was an idea founded on the basic logic of sanitation: the under-
ground space was to be used for the disposal of all sorts of waste, including
human undesirables.
And like the sewers, this underworld emptied out into the lifeblood of
the city, the River Thames, where it seemed as if “the savagery and mayhem
derive[d] from the proximity of the river [Thames].”27 Poor immigrants gath-
ered around the quay areas of the East End, where the housing was affordable
and they lived in close proximity to jobs on the docks. The high density and
poor sanitation of the neighborhoods along the Thames presented a tangible
health risk to the society. Diseases tended to hit the East End first and inflict
the most devastation, but even diseases that may have originated in other
neighborhoods of the city were quickly brought by the sewers to the slums
on the banks of the Thames.28 For Londoners, epidemics were a tangible sign
23 Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 28.

24 Roy Porter, London: A Short History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 280.
25 Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 30.
26 David L. Pike, “Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in Nineteenth-Century
Paris and London,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan
Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 51.
27 Glinert, East End Chronicles, viii.
28 Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City, 1840–1870 (London: Phoenix, 2006), 1–26;
Glinert, East End Chronicles, 2.
of the threat the East End posed. By the early Victorian era, the problems of
poverty, exploitation, and contagion caused by poor sanitation became impos-
sible to ignore, and London launched a series of philanthropic and humanitar-
ian efforts to alleviate the suffering of the city’s inhabitants.29 Yet when public
sanitation reforms finally did arrive, they came to every other section of Lon-
don before the East End.30 The last two decades of the nineteenth century
brought considerable improvements, but the infrastructure of the East End
was still greatly inferior to the West End. London’s fourth outbreak of cholera
in 1866 struck after most of the West End’s public underground sewage system
had been constructed, and almost all reported casualties occurred in the city’s
East End.31
In the macrocosmic body of the city, the East End functioned as the lower
part of the body, the West End functioned as its upper part, and the latter was
clearly seen as superior to the former.32 In order to maintain its cleanliness
and decency, the West End depended on the East End to channel out filth, vul-
garity, and excess; and it was the prostitute in particular who performed this
excremental role. At the same time as the prostitute disposed of what could
not be accepted by polite Victorian society, they were also seen as transmitters
of disease and obscenity.
The Victorian East End was associated with every conceivable type of evil,
but particularly prostitution. Prostitution had been a part of life in London
since at least Roman times, but only in the Victorian era did it come to be
considered a social ill.33 By the 1850s, prostitution had become known as “the
29 Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: Norton, 1973), 38–50; Fishman,
“The Image and the Reality,” 66–75.
30 See Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of
the Victorian Capital (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 124.
31 According to Stephen Halliday, there were four major cholera outbreaks in London dur-
ing the nineteenth century. The first three outbreaks occurred in 1831–1832, 1848–1849,
and 1853–1854. During these outbreaks, there was no modern underground sewage sys-
tem for the city, and city authorities did not know to take precautions. The result was
a dramatic number of casualties: 6,536 for the first outbreak, 14,137 for the second, and
10,738 for the third. The epidemics affected the eastern and western sections of the city
equally. See Halliday, 124–143.
32 Poorer East End London was usually contrasted with the wealthier West End, but in fact
the neighborhood was not as homogenous as it was commonly depicted. See Fishman,
“The Image and the Reality,” 73–75; Hobbs, “The History of East London,” 138; Victor E.
Neuburg, “The Literature of the Streets,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 1,
ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), 206–207; H.J.
Dyos and D.A. Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 1,
ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), 363.
33 Ackroyd, London: The Biography, 370.
204 Chen
Great Social Evil”34 and the East End, the place most closely associated with
the profession, was commonly referred to as “the evil quarter-mile.”35 The so-
cial anxieties surrounding prostitution and the East End were manifested as
violent malice directed at prostitutes in particular, but also at women in gen-
eral. According to Judith Walkowitz, husbands would sometimes terrify their
wives into submission with the threat “I’ll Whitechapel you!” The Ripper mur-
ders served as a “dark male fantasy” about disciplining women into docility
through violence.36
Whitechapel did indeed house an astonishing number of prostitutes. A
survey conducted in 1888 found sixty-two brothels in the neighborhood, and
that did not include the prostitute streetwalkers, of which there were over a
thousand.37 There were contemporary reports of prostitutes standing in rows
near the Bank of England “like hackney coaches.”38 Young men could not walk
down the street in the evening without being accosted by prostitutes.39 Pov-
erty was the primary motivation for most women to engage in prostitution;
in Roy Porter’s formulation, these women had to “render up [their] body or
die.”40 Yet although the role poverty played in driving prostitution was clearly
recognized by Victorians, the general attitude taken towards prostitutes was at
best ambivalence and only rarely sympathy. As horrific as the Ripper murders
were, prostitutes posed a threat to society and were deeply associated with the
filth of urban life. As a result, the popular media representations of the victims
were ambivalent and very much sensationalist.
34 Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 32.

35 Glinert, East End Chronicles, 162.
36 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 191–192.
37 The actual number of prostitutes in Victorian society was difficult to determine. Some dis-
tricts were so overwhelmed by massive waves of immigration that it proved impossible to
accurately count new residents. The phenomenon was also deeply heterogeneous. Some
prostitutes only worked occasionally, and some were devoted mistresses to specific men,
and neither category would have been counted as part of the frequent surveys conducted
during the Victorian era. However, it does seem that prostitution was on the rise in the
mid- and late Victorian period. There were 2,828 publicly identified brothels in 1859, and
The Lancet estimated the number of brothels could be twice that number, which would
mean that there were 80,000 prostitutes working in London, generating over £8,000,000
in revenue annually. See Glinert, East End Chronicles, 149; Walkowitz, Prostitution and
Victorian Society, 14–15; Porter, London: A Short History, 299; and Ackroyd, L ondon: The
Biography, 377.
38 Porter, London: A Short History, 299.
40 Porter, London: A Short History, 299.
One of the earliest newspaper accounts of a potential Ripper murder re-

vealed the associations Victorian society drew between the East End, poverty,
social class, and the bodies of the victims:
A woman, now lying unidentified at the mortuary, Whitechapel, was fe-

rociously stabbed to death this morning, between two and four o’clock,
on the landing of a stone staircase in George’s-buildings, Whitechapel.
George’s-building are tenements occupied by the poor laboring class. A
lodger going early to his work found the body. Another lodger says the
murder was not committed when he returned home about two o’clock.
The woman was stabbed in 20 places. No weapon was found near her, and
her murderer has left no trace. She is of middle age and height, has black
hair and a large, round face, and apparently belonged to the lower class.41
The woman this report referred to was Martha Tabram, who was murdered
on August 7, 1888, less than a month before the first universally-agreed upon
Ripper murders. Although some Ripperologists do not include her as a Ripper
victim, the case of Martha Tabram is still deeply significant because it happened
at a time before the public imagination was infected by the wild exaggerations
of the Ripper media frenzy. The casualness with which this horrifically brutal
crime is described suggests that such brutality might have seemed ordinary to
East Enders. The report emphasizes the location of the crime: the cheap, over-
crowded George’s-building, home to the poorest London laborers. The report
also makes a special point of mentioning the late hour of her body’s discovery,
underlining that Whitechapel did not follow the rhythms of polite English so-
ciety. Finally, as if the readers could not determine that she was from the lower
classes by context, it is stated explicitly at the end of the item.
As more victims were killed and more descriptions of those victims were
published in newspapers, these reports became a grim tour of the East End and
its miserable way of life. The stories on these women dwelled on their “descent”
into prostitution. According to the narrative established by the newspapers,
these were women who lived contentedly as housewives, until evil influences
ruined their lives to the point that they could only sustain themselves through
the sex trade. For example, the second victim of the Ripper murders, Annie
Chapman (or “Dark Annie”) was described as one of the “sad, broken-down
little prostitutes” who lived “a precarious and semi-nomadic existence on the
41 “A Whitechapel Horror,” quoted in Sugden, The Complete History, 19.

206 Chen
streets and in the common lodging houses of Spitalfield.”42 Follow-up reports

dug into her past, but found little that was remarkable about her background.
She had married a coachman named John Chapman on May 1, 1869 and had
three children by him. The eldest child died young, the second was sent to a
charitable school, and the third to a French performing school. The pressure
of maintaining the family turned both husband and wife into heavy drinkers,
and the marriage eventually fell apart. Annie Chapman went to live with an-
other man who made wire sieves, but continued to collect an allowance from
her husband for three or four years. When her husband died, both the allow-
ance and the sieve maker’s interest in her disappeared. She was forced to live
by selling crocheted antimacassars and flowers, but she did not make enough
through this work to support her addiction. The police report dismissed Dark
Annie as “unprepossessing” in appearance. She was five feet tall, plump, and
already 47 years old at the time of her death. Her hair was wavy, she had a large,
thick nose, and was missing two teeth in her lower jaw.43 Her lack of beauty did
not affect her success as a prostitute, however, and she managed to eke out a
living by selling her services to working-class men.
What made Annie Chapman a target in the eyes of the London press was
not that she was extraordinary, but that she was all too ordinary. The Ripper
murders were only an extreme, graphic example of what Walkowitz describes
as “covertly sanctioned male antagonism toward women and buttressed male
authority over them.”44 London’s “segregation of social space,” in which “good”
women were confined to the interior of homes and men were free to walk
where they pleased, also enabled the Ripper’s crimes.45 As many Londoners
saw it, these prostitutes transgressed the barrier of the segregation of social
space, and their death was just punishment for that act.
42 Sugden, The Complete History, 77. The descriptions of the victim’s lodgings also followed
a series of tropes used to depict the spaces in which prostitutes lived and operated. Ac-
cording to the Report of the Association for Promoting the Extension of the Contagious
Disease Act, “They generally rent a room in lodging houses situated in slums behind the
beershops, and which commonly belong to the beersellers, at a cost of one or two shil-
lings a week.” See Association for Promoting the Extension of the Contagious Disease Act,
1866, to the Civil Population of the United Kingdom, Report on the Extent of Venereal Dis-
ease, on the Operation of the Contagious Disease Act, and the Means of Checking Contagion
(London: H. Bailliere, 1868), 35.
43 Sugden, The Complete History, 77–79.
44 Judith R. Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,” Feminist Studies 8,
no. 3 (1982): 203–204.
45 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 194.
3 The Body under the Medical Gaze
The way the bodies of the Ripper’s victims were understood reflected a trans-
formation in the very paradigm of vision. Advances in medical technology
made human bodies more transparent, exteriorizing the interior part of the
body into a visual spectacle that could be readily comprehended. José van
Dijck argues that these images have come to dominate our understanding of
health and illness since the emergence of modern medical imaging in the late
nineteenth century. Mechanical instruments now represented human bod-
ies as decipherable codes, and this new transparency connotes “perfectibility,
modifiability, and control over human physiology” in a way that furthers the
authority of modern medicine.46 In short, seeing is curing. The medical gaze
allows doctors to identify poorly functioning parts of the body that can be
fixed; doctors are therefore able to attempt to fix those parts, and thereby cure
illness. However, as van Dijck insists, medical visualization only offers a partial
picture of the human body because the mediated body is a complex, contested
cultural object.47 Medical imaging technologies yield new clinical insights, but
at the same time, they give rise to a host of ethical and cultural problems.
The general concept that the human body is culturally and socially con-
structed to be something more than just flesh and blood was most famously
put forward by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic. Foucault argues that
the discursive practice of medicine is “the total set of relations that unite, at a
given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures,
sciences, and possible formalized systems.”48 In that discourse, human bod-
ies become the product of a coalition of epistemological and empirical cogni-
tions, the object of the mechanical-clinical gaze of physiology and anatomy
that externalizes the internal and invisible; in Foucault’s words, bodies become
“sites where organs and eyes meet.”49
The victimized bodies of East End prostitutes in the Ripper cases were in a
very literal way, “sites where organs and eyes meet” – bodies transformed into
a political and cultural site by a socially dominant mode of medical imaging
which externalized that which was hidden. It was this exposure of invisible
pathologies which fascinated those who consumed the early Ripper accounts.
These readers were continually speculating on and making a spectacle of the
46 José van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 2005), 5.
47 Ibid., 4.
48 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 191.
49 Ibid., xiv.
208 Chen
victims. They medicalized what they saw as the victims’ sexually aberrant
bodies – inspecting them as if they were dissecting pathologically abnormal
patients after death – and then visualized a cure. The gaze they applied was
not a sympathetic one, but a therapeutic gaze at best, and a voyeuristic one at
worst.
Victorians were fascinated with abnormal human bodies.50 This fascination
was satisfied not only through the freak show of the roadside circus but also
through mediated medical spectacles which combined information, knowl-
edge, ideology, and entertainment. The excessively large, small, tall, and short
challenged strict Victorian norms for the body and thus became objects of
“simultaneous horror and fascination.”51 In media reports of the Ripper mur-
ders, the victims were described as sexually abnormal in a way that trans-
formed them into a similar kind of “freak.” They were sexually Other, even
physiologically deformed, in a way that defied medical standards of normalcy.
And because their bodies defied those standards, they had to be inspected and
regulated.
The transformation of the Ripper victims into freaks is readily apparent
upon closer examination of their media representations in the immediate af-
termath of the killings. On September 2, 1888, just a few days after the death of
the first commonly acknowledged victim of the Ripper, The Times published
an analysis of the common backgrounds of the victims: “All three women
[Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, and Polly Nicholls] were of the class called
‘unfortunates,’ each so very poor … and each was murdered in such a similar
fashion.”52 This sentiment was also reflected in the informal literature of the
street. As one verse commonly recited or sung by East Enders, “Lines on the
Terrible Tragedy in Whitechapel,” summarized the politics of sympathy: “‘Twas
thought that soldiers had killed that poor creature, / And on them many peo-
ple laid the blame.”53 The terms used by The Times and by the street ditties –
“unfortunates,” “poor women” – were euphemisms for prostitutes. This use of
euphemism was just one of many ways in which Victorian society confidently
rendered judgment on these women while at the same time occluding them
50 Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1978).
51 Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freak as/at the Limit,” in Freakery: Cultural Spec-
tacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie G. Thomson (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 56.
52 Quoted in Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Companion: An
Illustrated Encyclopedia (New York: Carrol & Graf Publishers, 2001), 34.
53 Quoted in Sugden, The Complete History, 56.
from view. The focus of the media reports was not on the investigation, but on
the victims and their bodies. The freakishness of the last victim, Mary Kelly, for
example, was illustrated by a detailed description of her abnormal routines:
According to all accounts, the woman who was murdered was not a reg-
ular habitué of the place; on the contrary, she was rather well dressed,
apparently about twenty-five years of age, and even good looking. As to
what time she came to the house on Friday morning, and as to a descrip-
tion of the man who accompanied her, no definite information has been
received at the time of writing, thanks to the reticence of the police. This
much, however, has been found, that some payment was made by the
man for the use of the room; that payment was received by someone re-
siding in the house; and that the murderer and his victim entered the
place in the small hours of Friday morning.54
This coverage was coy about what exactly Kelly was but clear about what she
was not: she was not the good Victorian housewife, in a stable relationship
with a husband, who stayed at home and did not venture outside at dangerous
times with dangerous people. These women were even made freakish by how
attractive they were. Media reports contrasted the “rather well dressed” and
“even good looking” Ripper victims with the other prostitutes of Whitechapel,
who were depicted as being ragged, old, and unattractive.
One of the reasons why the victims did not become an object of sympathy
was that prostitutes had been held principally responsible for the spread of
syphilis throughout the Victorian era. From the 1830s onward, the female body
was increasingly medicalized as a pathological body where disease could fes-
ter.55 By the 1850s, prostitution was commonly referred to as “the Great Social
Evil.” To be fair, the public health threat posed by venereal diseases was very
real. By 1862, one out of eleven hospital patients suffered from venereal dis-
eases. Venereal disease had become a critical threat to the British armed forces
as well – an 1864 survey found that one out of three military men on sick leave
was suffering from a venereal disease.56 Prostitutes were blamed for carrying
these contagions, and they became public enemies, associated with filth, dan-
ger, and chaos.57
54 Quoted in Don Souden, “The Murder in Cartin’s Court,” Ripper Notes 21 (January 2005): 5.
55 Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-
Century Medical Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 35.
57 Ibid., 47.
210 Chen
Evangelical writers of the period focused on the “Great Social Evil,”

a pproaching it from a narrowly moralistic perspective that was widely influ-
ential, and they advocated for the immediate establishment of a pervasive sys-
tem of police and medical supervision to regulate the trade. William Acton,
a Victorian gynecologist who rose to fame for his writings on masturbation,
referred to syphilis and venereal diseases as “our enemy … always with us, op-
erating on the happiness and the physical condition … of the community.”58
Acton felt that a massive campaign of vaccination and quarantine adminis-
tered by the state was the only effective defense Victorian England could mus-
ter against this enemy.59 Similarly, James Miller, a professor of surgery at the
University of Edinburgh, claimed that “Syphilis, doubtless, is the product of
prostitution” and that the state was therefore obliged to place prostitution
“under its surveillance.”60 The Association for Promoting the Extension of the
Contagious Disease Act, an organization established in 1867 to urge that the
1864 Act be extended to cover the entire country, used statistical evidence to il-
lustrate the link between syphilis and prostitution. The Association demanded
that prostitutes be made subject to mandatory “police regulation” and “peri-
odical personal” inspection.61
The great social pressure that Parliament do something to control prostitu-
tion culminated in the passages of the Contagious Disease Acts (also known as
the C.D. Acts) of 1864, 1868, and 1869. These laws gave authorities, most notori-
ously the plainclothes members of the Metropolitan Police Force, the power
to conduct a medical examination on any suspicious woman for symptoms
of sexually transmitted diseases. Supporters of this measure assured skep-
tics that “the women who are under surveillance are subjected to examina-
tion only when the police have reason to suppose them diseased.”62 If signs
of disease were found, the prostitute could be detained in a hospital for up to
three months “until the surgeon can certify them to be free from active local
disorder.”63 The extreme measures of the C.D. Acts satisfied the public demand
for strong action against syphilis and the prostitutes who carried it.
58 William Acton, Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, & Sanitary Aspects, in London
and Other Large Cities, with Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of Its Attendant
Evils (London: John Churchill, 1857), 152.
59 Ibid., 14.
60 James Miller, Prostitution Considered in Relation to Its Cause and Cure (Edinburgh:
Sutherland and Knox, 1859), 28.
61 Association, Report on the Extent of Venereal Disease, 29, 35.
62 Ibid., 32, italics mine.
63 Ibid.
The enactment of the C.D. Acts was, in the words of Walkowitz, an embodi-
ment of “class and sex prejudice.”64 The Acts assumed that the primary trans-
mitters of venereal diseases were women, especially prostitutes, who were
made vulnerable to “a morbid condition by excessive intercourse.”65 Men were
innocent victims suffering from excessive and unhealthy desires; wanton, ir-
responsible women preyed upon them. The Acts empowered male authorities
to supervise and expel those who were seen as both a moral and social con-
tamination. The ultimate goal of the Acts was to create “a moral and sanitary
utopia.”66
There were figures like the pioneering feminist Josephine Judith who
criticized singling out prostitutes, but these voices were mostly outside the
mainstream, and most Victorians were firmly biased against the women.67
Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, the Victorian medical expert and museum founder,
made explicit the implicit reasoning behind this bias: if men were blamed for
spreading syphilis, fear of the disease would pose an imminent threat to the
bourgeois family and the whole society, so it was necessary to maintain a dip-
lomatic silence on the means of transmission.68 The surgeon Alfred Cooper
insisted that men are the “natural” and “potential” victims of syphilis as soon
as their wives become pregnant or even soon after marriage. The tragic irony,
in Cooper’s opinion, was that even a man who never contracted the disease
would become melancholic, fearing that his wife and children might become
infected.69 Max Nordau felt that syphilis could be transmitted through inno-
cent contact, and, like Cooper, bemoaned the threat that fear of the disease
posed to the idea of marriage, the family, and all the associated values of de-
cent Victorian society.70 With this threat in mind, Victorian medical experts

65 Ibid., 63.
66 Ibid., 70.
67 Walkowitz does point out that the efforts of Josephine Butler and other advocates of
women’s rights did eventually shift social attitudes toward the C.D. Acts. By the 1880s,
Victorian society began to hold middle-class men responsible for the spread of the dis-
ease. See Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 90. Andrew Smith disagrees with
this account, arguing that English society remained firmly biased against prostitutes
throughout the nineteenth century. See Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Mas-
culinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester and New York: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2004), 96–100.
68 Jonathan Hutchinson, Syphilis (London, Paris and New York: Cassell & Company, 1887),
406.
69 Alfred Cooper, Syphilis and Pseudo-Syphilis (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1895), 349.
70 Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: William Heinemann London, 1892), 415.
212 Chen
believed it essential to place the blame on the epidemic on women and police
their aberrant behavior.
The Victorian era, according to Foucault, was the period in which a scientia
sexualis emerged, in which normal and “aberrant” sexual practices were made
to correspond with immoral and moral behavior, normal and abnormal bodies.
The politics of preserving the family and the health of the family demanded
a scientific practice that could police the boundaries between normal and ab-
normal. This practice placed sexually transmittable diseases in opposition to a
healthy family. Accounts of syphilis, both from the layman and the specialist,
indicated the cultural anxiety about masculinity and class that was hidden be-
neath the fear of the disease itself. Bodies under threat from syphilis became,
in Shusterman’s words, “the primordial instrument in grasping the world,” a
tool for learning about the society and physical environment that surrounds
us.71 When syphilis began to jeopardize the economic, moral, and cultural
power of the middle class, the regulation of aberrant behavior became an is-
sue of utmost political importance.
The C.D. Acts were the legislative realization of the ideal of eradicating all
plausible sources of physical and moral contamination, a regime which im-
prisoned or forcibly treated prostitutes, the embodiment of “aberrant” or “ab-
normal” sexuality, until they submitted to Victorian sexual norms. The crimes
of the Ripper were only a more horrific, more violent manifestation of the
same moral logic; the Ripper forcibly purged the abnormal prostitute from ex-
istence. In certain respects, the Ripper’s crimes were a devastating illustration
of Foucault’s insistence that even as public executions were prohibited and
new forms of punishment such as the scaffold and the prison were introduced,
the body remained the arena for power and discipline.72 The Ripper’s crimes
made the punishment of those who defied social mores a public spectacle
once again.
The Victorian era was “the great age of the post-mortem, of pathology’s as-
cendancy;” Victorian teaching hospitals and morgues conducted more autop-
sies than any previous period in history.73 Andrew Smith claims that Victorian
autopsies were “as much cultural as medical procedures” which “open[ed]
up the lives of the victims to a controlling male gaze.”74 Autopsies generated
medical knowledge but also moral evaluations, and unlike today, there were

72 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3–31.
73 Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 188.
74 Smith, Victorian Demons, 90.
no standards in the Victorian era for preserving the privacy and dignity of
murder victims. A bloodthirsty media was only too happy to satisfy male voy-
euristic desires with images of mutilated female bodies. Murder reports gave
sensationalist, graphic, detailed accounts of bodies maimed, stabbed, or sub-
jected to any imaginable cruelty.75 The victimized bodies of prostitutes were
displayed almost pornographically as dreadful yet fascinating spectacles of
medico-moral judgment.
Popular “Ripperologists” tend to favor explanations for the murders rooted
in social resentment. The “royal conspiracy” theory, one of the most popular
theories of the Ripper, holds that Prince Edward Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s
grandson, had an affair with a woman named Annie Elizabeth Crook who
worked on the East End streets, and that they lived happily together with a
newborn girl until the queen discovered her grandson’s indiscretion.76 Crook
was a commoner, a Catholic, and syphilitic, and the queen demanded that the
situation be handled. In this improbable lurid scenario, the queen’s personal
physician, Sir William Gull, lobotomized Crook so she would have no memory
of the relationship, and because Annie’s fellow prostitutes knew about the se-
cret marriage and the prince’s exposure to syphilis, Gull orchestrated a series
of murders to ensure that the secret was kept and to punish the profession for
threatening the health of the royal family.77
75 L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2001), 68–69.
76 This theory was popularized, along with many others, in Stephen Knight’s Jack the Rip-
per: The Final Solution (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986). In this controver-
sial book, Knight weaves a fascinating tapestry of conspiracy, discussing virtually ev-
ery person who has ever been considered a Ripper suspect and introducing a few new
possibilities. Serious “Ripperologists” have disproved Knight’s conclusions multiple
times, but they continue to appeal – the “royal conspiracy” theory in particular. Knight’s
book is still in print after more than two decades and is one of the most widely read
on the topic. His influence can be seen in many popular representations of the Ripper
such as Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s famous graphic novel, From Hell, and the
2001 cinematic adaptation starring Johnny Depp. See “Good Knight: An Examination of
the Final Solution,” Casebook: Jack the Ripper, 2010, accessed July 5, 2018, http://www
.casebook.org/suspects/knight.html; and Bob Hinton, From Hell: The Jack the Ripper Mys-
tery (Abertillery: Old Bakehouse Publications, 1998), 194–196.
77 Many Ripperologists believe that the almost systematic evisceration of the victims is
evidence that the Ripper was a doctor or medical student familiar with human anatomy.
Recent studies, however, based on contemporary surgeons’ examinations of mortuary
sketches, have concluded that the techniques used by the Ripper more resemble those
used by nearby slaughterhouse workers than those used by professional surgeons. See
Andrew Knight and Katherine D. Watson, “Was Jack the Ripper a Slaughterman? Human-
Animal Violence and the World’s Most Infamous Serial Killer,” Animals 7, no. 4 (2017): 30,
https://doi.org/10.3390/ani7040030. But even if he were not a surgeon, the fact that his
214 Chen
An August 31, 1888 report on Polly Nicholls in the records of the Metropoli-
tan Police reveals how the voyeurism of the male gaze manifested itself within
purportedly dispassionate and objective documents. The post-mortem inspec-
tion emphasized the cruelty: “her throat had been cut from left to right, two
distinct cuts being on left side, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut
through.”78 The report on the second victim, Annie Chapman, could not main-
tain clinical detachment when describing the horrific way in which the killer
distorted her body and placed the victim back in the setting in which she was
found: “The small intestines and other portions were lying on the right side
of the body on the ground above the right shoulder, but attached.”79 Perhaps
the most hallucinatory of these descriptions were the reports on the case of
Mary Kelly, likely the last victim and certainly the most severely mutilated. Ac-
cording to descriptions released to the public, Kelly’s body was so severely de-
stroyed that it could be recognized only “by the ear and eyes:”80
The whole of the surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and
the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the
arms mutilated by severely jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond
recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round
down to the bone. …The face was gashed in all directions, the nose,
cheeks, eyebrows, and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched
and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There
were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features. …
The pericardium was open below and the heart absent.81
The satisfaction from this voyeuristic male mode of vision came from the
sense of complete control, of total vision, which it offered. Under the pretext
of scientific, objective accuracy, the pathologizing, normalized medical gaze
satisfied a latent, primitive desire to know and control. The author of Martha
Tabram’s autopsy report dwelled not only on the thirty-nine stab wounds she
received, but also on “the very well nourished” body:
eviscerations were read as potentially medical in nature is sufficient evidence that the
Ripper’s actions were grotesque manifestations of a medical gaze.
80 Karyo Magellan, By Ear and Eyes: The Whitechapel Murders, Jack the Ripper and the Murder
of Mary Jane Kelly (Chippenham, Wiltshire: Longshot Publishing, 2005), 132.
81 Quoted in Scott Palmer, Jack the Ripper: A Reference Guide (London: The Scarecrow Press,
1995), 108–109. For more police reports and eyewitness accounts, see A.P. Wolf, Jack the
Myth: A New Look at the Ripper (London: Robert Hale, 1993), 61–69 and 88.
The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung was pen-
etrated in two places. The heart, which was rather fatty, was penetrated
in one place, and that would be sufficient to cause death. The liver was
healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was penetrated in
two places, and the stomach, which was perfectly healthy, was penetrat-
ed in six places. The witness did not think all the wounds were inflicted
with the same instrument.82
This autopsy report was published by The Times on August 10 with the head-
line “The Murder in Whitechapel.” The criminological inquest was presented
alongside a sociocultural investigation of the victim’s lifestyle and condition of
health. The descriptions of the fatty heart and healthy liver were a lurid allu-
sion to the sexual, corporeal life of the underworld. These reports tapped into
the public’s already lurid imagination of the life these victims led, and made
use of the same detachment and the same pseudo-scientific presumptions
that the poor of the East End were hopelessly socially, even biologically, back-
ward. These reports showed what Sennett termed the “bodily passivity” of the
city at work.83 The observers assumed a pose of objectivity and detachment, as
if that pose in itself would make the investigation more scientific and insight-
ful. Yet the uncanny bodily passivity of the prostitutes’ corpses only confirmed
their role as mindless objects in the discourse over desire and contagion, and
the voyeuristic pleasure taken in the cutting and exposing was ultimately a
more civilized form of that taken by the Ripper himself.
4 Conclusion
The fascination with the Ripper was a geographical-biological fascination

with Victorian London, and more specifically, a grotesque fascination with
the strange social underworld of the East End which formed the city’s “lower
body.” Victorians used metaphors of the body to explain London’s social dy-
namics, and the murders in Whitechapel prompted them to use images of the
mutilated body to describe the East End. The fact that these victims were using
their bodies to earn a living on the streets of the East End of London made
them objects of revulsion rather than sympathy. The victims led cheap, filthy,
and wretched lives; they spread syphilis; and worst of all, they defied Victorian
morality. It was necessary for society to discipline them, and although this
82 Quoted in Curtis, Jr., Jack the Ripper and the London Press, 24.
83 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 324.
216 Chen
d iscipline would ideally be meted out in a moderate fashion by duly appointed

authorities, if they were murdered instead, they only got what they deserved.
The almost ritualistic brutality could be read as a form of public punishment,
the uncanny return of older penal spectacles.
The Victorian obsession with the Ripper reflected a great deal of ambiva-
lence. Few would say explicitly that the Ripper’s crimes were justified, but
the rage at contagious bodies of prostitutes that challenged and potentially
undermined male authority was familiar to many. The killings and the forbid-
ding atmosphere of the East End inspired terror, but also excitement; and the
reports quickly became a media spectacle. Newspaper reports combined the
medical images of the prostitutes’ autopsies with voyeuristic investigations
into their lives, presenting both with a sense of intellectual supremacy. The
medical defamiliarization of the prostitutes into freakish “spectacles” dulled
the impact of the violence itself. And just as we continue to be fascinated
with the Ripper case, the gendered medical gaze that was directed toward his
crimes continues to shape our perceptions of murder, prostitution, and the
human body.
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Chapter 10
Towards a Somaesthetic Conception of Culture in

Iran: Somaesthetic Performance as Cultural Praxis
in Tehran
Culture, as Raymond Williams observes, is “one of the two or three most com-
plicated words in the English language.”1 This is even more acutely the case
with its corresponding Persian word: farhang, with its ancient civilizational
baggage that reflects the vicissitudes of Iran’s cultural history and its hetero-
geneous cultural configuration.2 Indeed, an etymological exploration of the
history of the term “culture” in the European and Iranian traditions, respec-
tively, confirms the issue at stake. A scrutiny of the term “culture” in English
(culture), French (culture) and German (Kultur) reveals it to have been derived
from a root which signifies husbandry, horticulture, and cultivation of the land
and animals (and, by metaphorical extension, of human selfhood). Accord-
ingly, culture in the European traditions not only entails the enhancement of
moral-spiritual virtues and social values (through enabling the cultivation and
actualization of human potentials). It also affirms the material premise of the
culture: the necessity of embodiment, senses, emotions, and land as the lo-
cus of historical-geographical root and heritage.3 On the other hand, the very
etymology of the word farhang in Persian exposes the significantly different
ways in which the concept-phenomenon has come to be conceived in various
historical periods and social discourses in Iran. Indeed, a sweeping survey of
the classical literary works that use the term farhang, along with its cognate
hang, (for instance, those by Ferdowsi, Onsori, Asadi, Khaghani and Nezami)
can yield insights into the historical encumbrance and conflictual facets the
word farhang carries in Persian. Farhang, etymologically, comprises two seg-
ments: “far” and “hang.” Far- (and farrah-) is a prefix and designates forwards
and up. Hang (from the Avestan thang) is polysemic and contains the ensuing
designations: (1) glory, spiritual power, mystical-metaphysical aura; (2) reason,
wisdom, nobility; (3) to stretch, drag, extend, elevate. Interestingly, according
1 Raymond Williams, Keywords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1976]), 87; see also 92.
2 See Dariush Shayegan, Bothaye Zehni va Khatere-haye Azali (Tehran: Amirkabir Pubs., 2001),
13–33, 38–55.
3 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (London: Blackwell, 2000), 7–9.

Somaesthetic Performance as Cultural Praxis in Tehran 221
to the Dehkhoda Dictionary, hang also designates a brook or rivulet as well

as running or digging a conduit for the flowing of water. Faint resonances be-
tween the two discourses (Persian and European) are audible; nevertheless,
what the etymologies of the corresponding terms reveal is that materialist and
immanentist underpinnings of culture are inextricable from the term in the
European traditions, whereas the term has primarily transcendental and spiri-
tual connotations in Persian trends. As we shall see below, the immanentist
and transcendentalist models of culture are not mutually exclusive neither
generally nor, more specifically, in relation to Iran. In modern Iran, they, albeit
in conflict, are rather reciprocally constitutive in a binary economy. Iranian
culture indeed contains components of both. The fact remains, however, that
in the two prevailing cultural trends in contemporary Iran (religious/anti-
imperialist and secular-consumerist, expounded below) one (the transcen-
dent) is invariably privileged over the other (immanentist) to the point of
dichotomization.
By the same token, in the studies of Iranian culture, the fundamental dimen-
sion which curiously remains underexplored is the body. Even when incorpo-
rated into discussions of Iranian culture, the Iranian body has chiefly been
approached from the perspectives of feminism and/or gender studies. The his-
tory of Iranian bodies is as convoluted as Iranian history. Equally importantly, the
genealogy of the contemporary Iranian body(ies) is deeply entangled with the
evolutionary history of the urban space in Tehran and its socio-spatial configu-
rations. A genealogical exploration of the Iranian body can reveal how it is best
perceived as a palimpsest, inhabited by contradictions where various ideologi-
cal and moral norms and truths, in conjunction with embodiments and bodily
practices concomitant with them – p atriarchalism-matriarchalism-feminism,
nationalism-tribalism, religiousness-secularism, metaphysicalism/mysticism-
materialism, Western consumerism-Islamist anti-Imperialism – c oexist in per-
petual collision. Such a condition arises from the coexistence of incongruent
values and layers of meaning and knowledge sedimented, or embedded, in the
Iranian collective and individual psychosomatic unconscious across history.
In fact, the Iranian body emblematically illustrates Foucault’s genealogical ac-
count of the body (and the “nervous system”) as the primary locus of disciplin-
ary practices across various discourses: “the body is the inscribed surface of
events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas); the locus of a dissociated
self (adopting the illusion of a substantive unity), and a volume in perpetual
disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the
articulation of the body and history.”4 Here, as well as in The Birth of the C
linic,
4 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 82–83.
222 Fakhrkonandeh
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault delineates the
ways bodies are constructed, schematized, semanticized and d ifferentiated
under diverse categories such as gender, class, race, and status, as vectors of
power. This condition is shared by the Iranian body. The common thread in
Iran’s historical itinerary and array of political discourses at work during both
pre-Islamic and post-Islamic eras is that each historical period has tended
to fabricate its own body politic by implementing its concomitant value sys-
tems (social morality and cultural norms) and forms of biopolitics and “soma-
politics” in the modern Iranian city. These normative political values (saliently,
ranging from Enforced Unveiling to Enforced Veiling, and from whole-hearted
promotion of Western codes of clothing and importation, production and con-
sumption of Western clothing/cultural products in pre-Revolutionary Iran, to
the stringent anti-imperialist and religiously revolutionary codes of clothing
and consumption in post-Revolutionary Iran) have not only engendered their
own convoluted modes of embodiment and possibilities of bodily practices
for the Iranian bodies, but also allocated a complexly disciplined urban, socio-
cultural space to such bodies. As such, the contemporary Iranian body, riven
with the foregoing contradictory values, is a body which sorely needs, and yet
either resists and/or is prohibited from, somaesthetic practices.
Interestingly, however, the chief component that has served as a cohering
element, fostering a sense of cohesive social/national identity and historical
continuity over this cataclysmic history, has been the idea of culture. But the
internally divided nature of the concept and phenomenon of culture in Iran
has been neglected by theorists, and especially the ground upon which cul-
ture is inscribed and enacted: the body. This essay undertakes to address this
lacuna by exploring contemporary patterns of Iranian perceptions of the body
in conjunction with the critical-creative possibilities for somaesthetic praxis
in Iranian urban space. I focus on Tehran because it not only is the capital of
Iran since 1776 but is also the city in Iran that most evinces the characteristics
of a late-modern megacity and consequently best represents the changes in
Iranian urban space that in turn affect the psychosomatic state of Iranians.
This will engage both somatic theory and the body’s condition in Iranian con-
sumer culture, which seems to be a jarring amalgamation of capitalism and
socialism, to determine to what extent a city like Tehran allows for the embod-
ied citizen-subject to embark on critical-creative somaesthetic interventions.
Somaesthetics, as Shusterman defines it, is “the critical study and meliora-
tive cultivation of how we experience and use the living body (or soma) as a
site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”5 It is a
5 Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1.

discipline that “comprises both theory and practice.”6 This chapter analyzes a
form of somaesthetic praxis that a group of performers carried out in Tehran in
July 2015 to see how the possibilities of such interventions can raise awareness
about the cognitive-affective reification of citizen-subjects – both in relation
to their own selfhood (as embodied consciousness) and their inhabited urban
space, namely Tehran, with its specific political economy, bio-politics, and
socio-cultural history. This essay aims to propose a pragmatic model, in rela-
tion to Iranian culture, for aesthetic-ethically informed cultural practices and
a holistic conception of (civic) selfhood as a process; a model that transcends
both mind-body dualism and the polarity of somatic degradation/sacrifice and
somatic devotion.
1 Urban Space as a Site of Culture in Modern and Postmodern Iran:

A Symptomatology
Tehran is the most populous city in Iran (8.8 million) and Western Asia, and it
has the second-largest metropolitan area in the Middle East; it is ranked 29th
in the world by the population of its metropolitan area. Tehran’s profile, akin
to many other Asian and European metropolises, is a multi-faceted one with
ever-encroaching and ever-growing satellite towns, suburban areas and under-
ground heterotopias.7 The emergence of Tehran as both the socio-cultural and
political hub of a nation’s evolution and a simultaneously peripheral-central
part of the global economy and world history has a crisis-ridden history.8 In
the course of this history, Tehran’s cultural landscapes and its modes of so-
cial life have all undergone drastic vicissitudes: the establishment of the first
modern technical school (1848), the Constitutional Revolution (1906–09), au-
thoritative modernization (1921–41), the White Revolution (1963–79), the so-
called 1979 Islamic Revolution, the recurrent air-raids during the Iran-Iraq war
(1980–88) and the Green Movement (2009–10). Although plans for the urban
modernization of Tehran were fully implemented in the 1920s, Tehran’s his-
tory of urban evolution began far earlier. The first phase of modern planning
in Tehran (pre-1945) was preceded by three decisive efforts that set the blue-
print for the city’s growth and development. These efforts include walling the
6 Ibid.
7 See K. Ziari, “The planning and functioning of new towns in Iran,” Cities 23, no. 6 (2006):
412–422.
8 See John Foran, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution.
(Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1993), 3–9.
224 Fakhrkonandeh
city (1550s), expanding the walled city (1870s), and building new urban infra-
structure (1930s). These initiatives were undertaken by various governments
in an attempt to instigate change and to shape the city in conformity to the
new economic, social and demographic needs through large-scale infrastruc-
ture projects.9 In consequence of such transformations, Tehran underwent
substantial socio-spatial transformations in the period between the two world
wars (1920–1940) to the point of being unrecognizable compared to what it
used to be before 1920.10 In 1920, Reza Shah declared his position on Iranian
modernism to Farangestan Magazine thus:
Iran should resume her life again and everything should be renewed. We
want to have a “modern Iran” and a “modern nation.” We (as the central
government) want to convert Iran into a European country. Tehran will
be the first modern city in Iran and then it will be used as a model for
other Iranian cities. In keeping with the morality of Iran, let us hold this
sentence in our minds as our instruction: Iran should be mentally and
somatically, outwardly and inwardly European-oriented.11
Importantly, Reza Shah’s manifesto/mandate bears striking affinities, both

structurally and in terms of its social-political intentions and motivations, with
the modernization of Paris initiated by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1852–1870)
in 1854. To establish his authority and legitimacy, Bonaparte iii pursued a pol-
icy of modernization and progress. Highly similarly in Iran “[t]he municipality
of Tehran widened the streets of the northern city from the 1870s expansion
and built new squares at their cross-sections. In the southern city, it construct-
ed new straight and wide streets by cutting through the old neighborhoods.”12
Through these projects – more strictly, constructing buildings with uniform
façades and extroverted architecture alongside the new streets and squares
and incorporating pre-Islamic motifs in architecture – the Pahlavi state super-
imposed a new spatial pattern on the old fabric in Tehran.
9 A. Madanipour, “Urban planning and development in Tehran,” Cities 23, no. 6 (2006): 433;
see also A. Madanipour, Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis (Chichester: Wiley, 1998),
28–44, 433–438.
10 See Ashkan Rezvani-Naraghi, “Middle Class Urbanism: The Socio-Spatial Transformation
of Tehran, 1921–41,” Iranian Studies 51, no. 1 (2018): 97.
11 Y. Aryanpour, From Saba till Nima, vol. 2 (Tehran: Sherkat-e-Sahami-Ketab-haye- Jibi,
1979), 245.
12 Rezvani-Naraghi, 97
By the same token, the cataclysmic changes in the urban design and spaces
in Tehran caused corresponding alterations in cultural landscapes and the
forms/modes of social life in the city. The investigation of Tehran in the inter-
war period (1921–1945) demonstrates that, on the one hand, the pursuit of mo-
dernity by the state and society, particularly the modern middle class, resulted
in the systematic transformation of traditional social spaces. These changes
in urban and industrial respects were concomitant with attempts at cultural
and social modernizations: university, introduction of a modern health sys-
tem, unveiling and introduction of a Western code of dress, among others. This
has been poignantly observable in the pursuit of a relentless socio-cultural
move from coffeehouses to cafés, from Tekiyyehs and religious performances
to cinemas and theaters, and, finally, from zurkhānehs to sport clubs. Not only
did the state alter and regulate the long-established socio-spatial configura-
tion of these spaces by introducing new and modern public facilities and by
imposing strict guidelines, but such state-induced socio-cultural transforma-
tion was inexorably promoted through hegemonic and discursive measures,
such as the media, periodicals and nezāmnāmehs (regulation manuals), taken
to normalize and valorize the latter in each above-mentioned pair.13 These
urban transformations and the socio-cultural inclination to Westernization
were c ontinued with more intense urgency by Mahammad Reza Shah. During
this period, the consolidation of the discourse of modernity more explicitly
resulted in the development of social and political desires for the production
of forms of socio-cultural life and spaces explicitly modeled after the fashion
of Western countries (America and Europe).
The fast-paced modernization of society and culture conducted during the
Pahlavi period (1925–79) was brought to an abrupt halt with the 1979 Revo-
lution, particularly given its dominant ideology being anti-imperialist and
anti-colonialist in conjunction with its ideological claim as to its being a social-
ist Islamism, promoting the support of the impoverished, marginalized and
oppressed against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the elites. This
trend became even more entrenched with the outbreak of the war waged by
Iraq on Iran (1980–1988). With the cessation of the war, a fully-fledged recon-
struction plan for Tehran was launched comprising two phases: reconstruction
(1989–1996) and reform (1997–2004), each involving a different approach to
urban planning in Tehran.14 The urban environment/space in contemporary
Tehran is primarily characterized by stifling traffic, visual-aural immersion,
congested streets, hypermarkets, the impersonal space of highways, intensely
13 See Madanipour, Tehran, 44; see also Rezvani-Naraghi, 104.

14 Madanipour, Urban Planning, 435.
226 Fakhrkonandeh
disciplined communal spaces such as neighborhoods, few remaining commu-

nally- and locally-active squares, and overcrowded building constructions.15
One of the most symptomatic and revealing shifts in Tehran’s urban architec-
ture, however, is the excessive construction of highways and their replacement
of the boulevards and neighborhoods (localities) in Tehran. Deriving insight
from Marshall Berman’s observations on the relation between the two in the
cataclysmic context of modernity, one can argue that boulevards provide a
public and relationally interactive space between citizens-subjectivities and,
compared to highways, are far more communal because, in boulevards, cars
and city dwellers/pedestrians co-inhabit a space with less abstraction and ex-
clusion of one in favor of the other. As Berman observes, with highways, people
can now only participate in city life through being in the midst of traffic, and
this is only realized by turning themselves into quasi-machines, to wit, by be-
ing seated in their cars and using cars as the medium of participating in the
city space.16
Another salient feature of the contemporary (post-revolutionary and post-
war) urban space in Tehran is the predominance of an ideologically admin-
istered civil space, where moral norms and ideological tenets prevail not just
in disciplinary terms but visually and aurally, ranging from the wall-writings
and paintings to the construction of mosques and centers for religious and
ritual practices. Such a politics of space is not only intended to control what
Deleuze, elaborating on Foucault, calls “the visible and the sayable,”17 but to
psychosomatically and spatio-temporally envelop the citizen-subject, hardly
leaving them any “critical distance.”18 Such spatial-visual measures have been
paralleled by an attempt at the construction of a revolutionary body for the
citizen which would serve (in terms of personal economy, desire and psycho-
dynamics) as an apparently counter-capitalist and counter-imperial space as
well as a medium for the implementation and practicing of Islamic values
and norms. An effective way of realizing this revolutionary body has been
through the evocation of a psycho-geography comprising four nodes: Mash-
had (Imam Reza shrine in Iran), Karbala (Imam Hossein shrine in Iraq),
Quds (the first Q ibla of Muslims and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem where
Prophet Mohammad first ascended to Heaven) and Mecca (in Saudi Arabia).
15 See F. Farnaz Arefian and H. Iradj Moeini, eds., Urban Change in Iran: Stories of Rooted His-
tories and Ever-accelerating Developments (London: Springer, 2016), 31–46, 61–70, 87–100.
16 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London: Penguin, 1988), 155–169.
17 See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988), 47–68.
18 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodernism and Its Dis-
contents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988), 48.
The constitution of such a fourfold schema is intended to constitute an ideo-

logically informed “built environment,” which, in turn, is planned to engender
a cognitive-affective mapping from which the Iranian citizen-subject is ideally
expected to derive their psychic bearings.
In any diagnostic study of urban space, one of the determining points to
be underscored is how, in the spectrum of human sensory perception, the vi-
sual and representational (both literally and metaphorically) have dominated
the kinaesthetic and somaesthetic modes. This domination is symptomatic of
the conditions of the embodied consciousness in Iran’s contemporary society.
There is, probably, no more effective way to capture the interaction between
urban space and the psychosomatic state of the Iranian citizen-subject than
by investigating the dynamics of the visual order and street optics in the urban
space in Tehran. The latter seem to be dominated by two categories of image,
commanding mimesis, identification and introjection. On the one hand, the
visual landscape of the city is overridden by a complex network of images, bill-
boards, banners, wall paintings, wall writings and similar urban signs (either
physically or digitally-electronically displayed) – including religious, moral
and ideological mottos, aphorisms and injunctions in conjunction with pic-
tures of martyrs and religious/ideological leaders. These elements coalesce to
serve as reminders of religious-ideological and spiritual-metaphysical values,
and seek to exhort the citizen-subject to assume a revolutionary ethos of self-
negation and resistance to imperial and Western forces and to relinquish their
concomitant material values.
Such a politics of space, in Tehran, is inextricable from its politics of vision.
Inherent in the nexus of signs and regimentation of image in Tehran streets
is an overdetermined specular order and hegemonic (phallogocentric) gaze.
Such a determinate habitus provides a subjectifying context for state machin-
ery’s cartographically-implemented subjectification of the individual. This dis-
ciplinary space constrains the infinite possibilities of imaging or conceiving
other conceptual territories beyond the limits of subjective territory. The key to
transcending the limits of such a space through creative-critical maneuvers, as
we shall see below, resides in the opening, or creation, of a transversal territory:
the non-subjectified region of one’s conceptual territory. On the other hand,
it is the signs and signifying order of consumerism that dominate the visual
order of the streets in Tehran; the market forces governing the life of the eye. I
have extensively delved into this second order below.
This prevalence of the visual-representational in the streets of Tehran, and
Iran by extension, has three manifestations. First is the relentless surveillance
and disciplinary control and observation of the citizen-subjects in a panopti-
cal system; the constant presence of moral guidance police; the moralizing and
228 Fakhrkonandeh
judgmental gaze of other citizens; the embedded traditional (mainly Islamic

and/or phallogocentric) values; and the ingrained idea of God as omnipres-
ent and all-seeing/panoptical. Second is the way the ocular-visual mode in
conjunction with the panoptical aspect of the city has a disembodying, ab-
stracting and objectifying effect. And third is the emergence of a new econ-
omy of visibility.19 The urban space in Tehran can be considered to comprise
the units of panopticism’s “cellular grid,” “stable” and “isolatable” divisions
of space; not just as places delineated by the map, but also constituting the
multi-dimensional assemblage of official and subjective territory: the com-
bined disciplinary, physical, conceptual, and emotional range through which
people experience. The vexing question is how to resist the reifying patterns of
these subjective territories and the concomitant panoptic contemporary gaze
in Iranian urban space, and more generally.
In fact, it is in the wake of the rampant sway held by a media-saturated and
fragmented yet homogeneous society, and the modern world of mass consum-
erism and culture industry – diagnostically described by Simmel, Adorno, and
Baudrillard – that the individual experiences a relentless battering and bom-
bardment of the nerves and hypertrophied sensitivity. This state, as Waugh
puts it, eventually prompts either a neural collapse of benumbed sensibility,
the adoption of a blasé attitude, or a compensatory withdrawal into an ab-
stract and bodiless intellectualism.20 Henri Lefebvre distills this ocularcentric
and reifying dynamic thus:
Bodies are transported out of themselves, transferred and emptied out…

via the eyes: every kind of appeal, incitement and seduction is mobilized
to tempt them with doubles of themselves in prettified, smiling and hap-
py poses; and this campaign to void them succeeds exactly to the degree
that the images proposed correspond to “needs” that those same images
have helped fashion.21
Tehran, particularly in its central and northern areas, illustrates a situation

where commodity fetishism has reached a peak and has become a quasi-
religious narcotic. Indeed, the rampant spread of many psychosomatic
19 David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation
( London: Routledge, 1988), 252–253, 287–309; and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish,
trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 187–189.
20 See Patricia Waugh, “Writing the Body: Modernism and Postmodernism” in The Body and
the Arts, eds. Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2009), 134.
21 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 99.
pathologies (ibs, neurasthenia, obesity, drug addiction, anorexia nervosa,

chronic fatigue, chronic backache or headache, etc.)22 can be explained in
relation to the lifestyles and models of identity brought about by advancing
techno-consumerism. The illustrative correlate of such a global perceptual
and phenomenological alteration in urban space and design in Tehran can
be found, I argue, in the transition from Azadi Tower to Milad Tower. The es-
tablishment of Milad Tower (built in 2008 and 435 meters high) was the most
paradigmatic example illustrating the drastic alterations that the urban space
and city architecture of Tehran underwent between 1979 and 2009. Supersed-
ing Azadi Tower (built in 1971 and 45 meters high), Milad Tower was built to
become the new symbol of (post-modern) Tehran and, by extension, Iran. The
phenomenological, architectural and socio-cultural differences between the
two manifest themselves if we scrutinize their respective structural and aes-
thetic features psychosomatically and semiotically.
Azadi Tower has geometrical and architectural traits that have haptic and
optic appeal. The architecture is mimetically susceptible to the dimension and
proportions of human body; in consequence, it does not seem insurmount-
able and overbearing at all (attested by films and pictures taken from various
eras, particularly during the days of Revolution when people would climb the
tower via its curving marble-based wings. Azadi Tower is characterized by an
evocative use of curves, folds, twists and torsions, and arches (partly inspired
by the figural forms pervading Iranian calligraphy and Sufi dancing) both in
the central part and head of the tower (where the architectural density and
tension are concentrated) and the wings (where a sense of release and resolu-
tion of the tensions is vividly palpable). Azadi Tower thus embodies a highly
haptic and synaesthetic dynamics, thereby fostering a sense of participation,
inhabitation and chiasmatic intertwinement.
Milad Tower (Borj-e Milad), on the other hand, is a spectacular structure
that is mimetically non-susceptible to the lived dimensions and schema of the
human body. The shaft is a concrete structure about 315 meters high from the
ground floor. The head of the tower is a steel structure weighing about 25,000
tons and consisting of 12 floors. The attribution of the term “tower” to both
Azadi and Milad, as a descriptor, is misleading since the latter is incomparable
to the former in terms of scale, architectural logic, dynamics and aesthetics. Mi-
lad Tower overawes and keeps away due to its visual sway; significantly, one can
only ascend and have a meaningful relationship with it, as a lived structure, by
22 See Kurt Fritzsche, Susan McDaniel, and Michael Wirsching, eds., Psychosomatic Medi-
cine: An International Primer for the Primary Care Setting (New York: Springer, 2015),
95–154.
230 Fakhrkonandeh
taking the lift that takes visitors from the base to the peak of the tower, which
is the only inhabitable part where various facilities, including concert halls and
services, are located. Metaphorically, Milad Tower evokes the mind-body split,
since the base (read: body) serves solely as a carrier of the head rather than
encouraging the individual to participate in its perceptual totality. The kind of
architecture embodied by Milad Tower not only instigates an alienating effect
and merely a visual appreciation from a distance, but also aggravates the mind-
body split. This point is substantiated by Jameson, who observes that “our daily
life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by
space rather than categories of time.”23 Exploring newer (or postmodern) ar-
chitecture in its various manifestations, Jameson argues that our evolutionary
perceptual-cognitive capacities are not yet well-equipped for such an archi-
tecture. As Jameson explains, “we do not possess the perceptual equipment
to match this new hyperspace,”24 and thus, such an architecture strikes the
citizen-subject as “an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium
and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible,
dimensions.”25
The ontological and perceptual shift delineated here in relation to Azadi
and Milad towers is not restricted to Iran and seems to be geographically
widespread. This point is attested by Hartoonian’s contention about “the mar-
ginalisation of the tectonic and tactile dimensions of construction”26 since
Le Corbusier’s description of technologically-oriented and -based modern
and postmodern architecture. The latter follows a “logic of the image” thus
appearing to us as “retinal architecture.”27 Taking issue with Le Corbusier’s
visuo-centric perspective, Pallasmaa argues that the use of various design
technologies has aggravated “the detachment of construction from the reali-
ties of matter and craft,” and that this process leads to turning architecture
into “stage sets for the eye.”28 Indeed, this perceptual difference resonates with
Wolfflin’s earlier hypothesis that “the emotional tone of a form is explained
by the kinaesthetic response of the eye when its focus follows the lines.”29 He,
23 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 39.

24 Ibid., 38.
25 Ibid., 39.
26 G. Hartoonian, “The limelight of the house-machine,” Journal of Architecture 6, no. 1
(2001): 54.
27 J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (London: Academy Editions, 2005), 26.
28 J. Pallasmaa, “An Architecture for the Seven Senses,” in Questions of Perception: Phenom-
enology of Architecture, ed. S. Holl, et al. (San Francisco, CA: William Stout, 2006), 29.
29 H. Wolfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Art in Theory 1815–1900: An
Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. C. Harrison, P. Wood and J. Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 712.
nevertheless, valorizes a more replete bodily involvement within the percep-

tion of architectural space over this ocularcentric approach,30 a direction valo-
rized and pursued by a somaesthetically-grounded culture.
2 A Genealogy of the Iranian Bod(ies)
Studies of the contemporary Iranian body have chiefly been confined to gen-
der-related issues conducted from a feminist perspective. Such studies mainly
focus on the questions of veiling-unveiling, pregnancy, and other ways the
female body has variously been subjected to disciplinary practices over the
course of a patriarchal history.31 The cultural-historical status of the contem-
porary body in Iran is far from being confined to and defined in terms of the
oft-invoked binary categories of enforced unveiling (between 1935 and 1941)
and veiling (since 1979). Indeed, it is high time we attended to the hitherto
neglected genealogy of the Iranian body and bodily practices coupled with
the numerous issues besetting it. Such a dichotomy, regardless of its being ap-
plicable mainly to one gender (female) while ignoring the male body on the
one hand, neglects the issue of corporeality in Iranian cultural history more
generally.
Upon closer inspection of the cultural history of Iran, it becomes evident
that mind-body dualism is one of its long-standing and prevalent features.
Mind-body dualism, far from being simply a legacy of Islamic ontology, is in-
delibly linked with the dualistic ontology, a dichotomy between the physical
and the metaphysical, traceable to pre-Islamic religious and intellectual tradi-
tions. Zoroastrian, Mithraic and above all Manichaean traditions are paradig-
matic cases in point. The latter traditions’ stance towards the body can be said
to have two common characteristics: bodily modesty and mind-body dualism.
Although scholars acknowledge that there is a dualism in Zoroastrianism, they
tend to argue that it is more nuanced than a belief in “hard-edged dualism”
between body/matter and mind/spirit, since, in Zoroastrianism, the body is
deemed a creature endowed with the divine grace of Ahura Mazda. Hence it
should “be treated with respect. Indeed, the body here and now is seen as re-
flecting the inner nature, and it has been rightly observed that bodily sickness
denotes sickness of soul.”32 As Williams explains: “In Zoroastrianism the body
30 See also J. Pallasmaa, “Logic of the Image,” Journal of Architecture 3, no. 1 (1998): 297.
31 See Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sex-
ual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 132–156.
32 Alan Williams, “Zoroastrianism and the Body,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley
232 Fakhrkonandeh
is not something which is to be mortified or even disadvantaged unduly in favor

of non-corporeal existence. Indeed asceticism, celibacy and self-mortification
are frowned upon in the religious texts as demonic tendencies.”33 Nevertheless,
the fact remains that the dualism is firmly in place: “Zoroastrianism is neither
this-worldly nor other-worldly: it is both-worldly. But always the primacy is
given to the other world, the world of unseen spirit, out of which this world of
visible matter is born.”34
The advent of Islam compounded the whole situation. Strict, systematic
moral codes and norms were introduced and principally articulated under
the rubrics of interior and exterior, private and public, permitted (halal) and
prohibited (haram), and najes (contaminated) and pak (pure, unadulterated,
immaculate). Although Islam consistently promotes bodily hygiene and health
(evidently reflected in numerous verses from the Quran, Hadith tradition
and Resalehs, which are religious precept manuals) as well as marriage and
procreation, the body is deemed subsidiary to the soul and is mainly depict-
ed negatively, particularly in the spheres that concern the questions of self-
purification and eschatology. The body is also depicted as a finite, ephemeral
and perishable phenomenon. Crucially, in Islam, it is both the body and the
soul that are considered as sites of sin, rather than merely the former, as is
chiefly the case in Jewish and Christian traditions. More strictly, the locus of sin
is identified in terms of nafs (different faculties of the soul)35 rather than the
body. According to the Quran, human beings are created from dust and return
to dust. The crucial point that distinguishes Islam’s stance towards the body,
I would argue, is its notion of “corporeal resurrection” (Ma’ad Jesmani). The
Quran explicitly refers to the resurrection of the dead in their original bodies,
since for the individual to give an account of his/her deeds he/she needs to
embody all the capacities in which s/he committed a good or evil deed. Hence,
it can be inferred from such a doctrine that Islam posits an essential relation
between mind (spirit/soul), body and selfhood. This less negative conception
of the body and non-dualistic conception of mind-body relationship is a sur-
prisingly progressive and insightful one, since it assumes that the body is an
essential and integral part of one’s selfhood and that body and soul/mind are
inextricably intertwined.
33 Ibid., 155.
34 Ibid., 155.
35 According to Quran exegetes, there are four kinds of nafs that are explicitly invoked in
the Quran: nafs ammareh (the sin-inducing part), nafs lavvameh (the reproachful part, or
conscience), nafs molhameh (the intuition-related part), nafs motmaeneh (the spiritually
sublime and self-assured part).
In modern Iranian history, the body played a prominent role and was charged
with a chief role in the promotion and establishment of Pahlavi’s modernizing
discourse and its attendant secular values. The State primarily implemented
its policies through an evolving economics of desire and domesticity, two of
whose chief components were consumerism and encouraging women to tran-
scend the confines of the domestic sphere and adopt Western codes of dressing
and bodily conduct.36 Central to the modernizing agenda was the aspiration
to render the body less resistant and more useful while making it more intel-
ligible, visible and analyzable by diluting and dispelling the traditional forms
of bodily presence and practice. The disciplinary measures applied to the body
by the apparatus of modern mass and industrial society during the Pahlavi
period had the aim of rationalizing and normalizing a logic of identity and
belonging to the nationalist, modern and secular life. These measures included
bio-economics and soma-economics of the individual through implementing
a new spatial politics of personal and communal spaces as well as an economy
of visibility and health coupled with anatomo-politics and bio-politics of the
body, including ideologically legible desires, hygiene, population, birth con-
trol, hospitals and medicine, and codes of dressing. Significantly, the body in
Iran during this period featured as a place where discursivity and materiality
conjoin, to the point where a “symptomatological” or “medicalised” discourse
emerged in which a vast array of bodily tropes were wielded to diagnostically
identify socio-political and national malaises and problems. The body, how-
ever, served not merely as a template for cultural and socio-political inscrip-
tions but also for interiorizing and interpreting them. Nevertheless, during this
period, the failure of the nationalist and socialist movements as well as the
structural and cultural changes arising from rapid urbanization and industri-
alization resulted in the loosening of social bonds and the diversification of
cultural spaces and practices. Minoo Moallem explains this manifold process
as follows:
Discourses of Westernization and modernization, along with their op-

positional counterparts, have been invested in determining the meaning
of the civic body in Iran. The civic body creates an inside and an outside
within the order of the nation-state, which forms boundaries that ratio-
nalize and normalize a logic of identity and belonging.37
36 See Pamela Karimi, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran (London: Routledge, 2013),
20–44, 85–107.
37 Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and
the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 40.
234 Fakhrkonandeh
In more recent history, the body has served as a site of social and political
resistance, ideological transgression and non-conformism, civil disobedience,
and subversion of the norms and values of the dominant discourse. Moallem’s
observation confirms the foregoing point: “In the revolutionary and postrevolu-
tionary era (1979 and after), the body became a site of enunciation and a gency
through the association of its subjection and subordination with a quasi-
colonial order.”38 Revolutionary situations and actions provide an opportunity
for liberating the disciplinary economy of the body wherein the body gains
agency for the enunciation of the hitherto excluded or repressed forces or
practices or, alternatively, serves as an emancipatory site for the enactment
of revolutionary ideology. This attitude, however, takes the body as a means
of realization of an ideological ideal, rather than the body as a Lebenswelt
for what Foucault calls “self-stylization” or “stylistics of existence”39 and what
Merleau-Ponty calls the body’s “marvel of a style.”40 This ideological weapon-
ization of the body is not necessarily conducive to a mind-body integration or
the possibility of self-cultivation. Moallem’s observation is elucidating: “The
political encoding of the body and its representation as an abstract civic body
have been essential to the project of modern state-building and to the repre-
sentation of citizenship as universal.”41
Today, myriads of Iranians are zealously working their bodies with height-
ened investment – as if to counter a long-standing tradition of corporeal mod-
esty and the self-effacing treatment of the body and desires entrenched in
culture by pre-Islamic ideals (Zoroastrianism), ascetically-oriented Sufism tra-
ditions and Islamic spiritualism as well as the imposed austerity ideals of the
1980s – but in fact to keep up with fashion trends and hone their external ap-
peal and appearance.42 Correlative to this somatic devotion is the proliferation
of gyms, cosmetic surgeries, body boosts, and rampant use of supplementary
products among Iranian youth. Notably, the body in such cultural and social
conditions, as argued by Shusterman, is characterized by conflictual values and
states: simultaneously an object of beauty, pleasure and exhibition and a site
of identity crisis and split-self; a product of social conformity and the result of
38 Ibid., 76.
39 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality ii (London: Penguin, 1992), 10–11, 37, 143–144.
40 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 65–66.
41 Moallem, 80.
42 See See Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society In Medieval Islam (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011), 27–48; and Scott A. Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mys-
ticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2007), 1–41, 166–288.
heightened individualism; a gift of technological freedom but also a reaction

to our technological enslavement and the consequent fear of body atrophy.43
Shusterman’s description of the status of the body in postmodern consumerist
culture equally applies to the status of the body in contemporary Iran:
In postmodern urban culture, gyms and fitness centers proliferate,

largely replacing both church and museum as the preferred site of self-
meliorative instruction, where one is obliged to visit in one’s leisure as a
duty to one’s self, even if it involves inconvenience and discomfort. Ever
more money, time and pain is being invested in cosmetics, dieting, and
plastic surgery. Despite mediatic dematerialization, bodies seem to mat-
ter more.44
Pondering the psychology of image consumption through an anatomy of

urban visuality in the era of late capitalism, thinkers such as Jameson, Bau-
drillard, and Kristeva seek to accentuate the link between the evisceration of
cognitive-affective capacities and the erosion of psychic space (or soul) on the
one hand and stimulation-addiction and information-addiction on the other.
They have variously characterized this era in terms of the prevalence of media-
tized bodies, “atrophy of the senses,” “hypertrophied sensitivity,” “benumbed
sensibility,”45 “waning of affect”46 and virtual space. They also emphasize how
this twofold process is implemented primarily through the visual and the
sense of sight. “The city…is a zone of signs” where “you are overwhelmed with
images.”47
Connected with this visual emphasis is a preoccupation with one’s body im-
age that is central to the somatic turn in consumer culture. This preoccupation
with somatic representation is reinforced by an underlying assumption of a
link between improved appearance and existential improvement because of a
deeper assumed link between physical beauty and moral goodness. The corol-
lary in consumer culture is the assumption that the modification and cosmetic
enhancement of the body, through a range of regimes and technologies, can
be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. This
specular/visual logic finds its paradigmatic articulation in the consumer cul-
ture in Iran, whose transformational logic of “look good: feel good” is presented
43 Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2000), 157.
44 Ibid., 137.
45 Waugh, 134.
46 Jameson, 10–14.
47 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage Publications), 78.
236 Fakhrkonandeh
as within the reach of all. This consumerist spell of body image has increasingly
come to include Iranian men too, particularly those more exposed to overseas
media and values. If women are plagued by anorexia nervosa, men struggle
with what some describe as “athletica nervosa,”48 whose goals are solely at-
tainable through extreme regimens, special products, and endless workouts
in the gym. The radical option of improving the body’s looks through cosmet-
ic surgery is now a widespread phenomenon and is common even in Iran.49
Without a better understanding of embodied subjectivity, its incorporation of
societal patterns and individual history, and a reflective critical somaesthetic
consciousness of the somatic self, the ravages of the mind/body split continue.
3 Somaesthetic Performance as Cultural Praxis
The somaesthetic performance – designed by Alireza Fakhrkonandeh and

scripted by Mehdi Mirbagheri – comprised nine people, eight of whom carried
Rasool Kamali’s framed photomontages (60 × 80 cm, see Illustrations 10.1–10.4)
and one carried a map of Tehran. All wore garments that accorded with the vi-
sual content of the pictures. The foremost reason for choosing R
asool Kamali’s
work is his depiction of the manifold nature of the Iranian body, which he sees
as a palimpsest overlaid with multiple layers of discursive inscriptions where
subjectivation and objectification coexist and previous historical-personal ex-
periences remain residually legible. The I ranian body occupies the threshold
of integral unity and fragmentariness, erasure and survival or presence. What
distinguishes Kamali’s work is the way it interweaves a genealogy of bodily
practices in Iran, histories of urban spaces, disciplinary norms and forces, a
phenomenology of lived modes of experience, and a symptomatology of the
currently fragmented, excluded, or schizoid state of the embodied subjectivity.
The common thread in all the photomontages is the motile, fragmented body
in various kinaesthetic and gymnastic postures and placed in various urban
contexts, which manifest themselves through a residual architectural presence
or the shards of window glasses of institutes and stores. The photomontages
are rendered as if they were painted on window glasses of certain types of
shops and sports/recreational activity centers that are now extinct, obsolete,
or prohibited. As such, the photomontages do not depict a purely kinaesthetic
48 See D.C. Giles and J. Close, “Exposure to ‘Lad Magazines’ and Drive for Muscularity in
Dating and Non-dating Young Men,” Personality and Individual Differences 44, no. 7 (May
2008): 1610–1616.
49 Ronen Cohen, ed., Identities in Crisis in Iran: Politics, Culture, and Religion (London: Lex-
ington, 2015), 121–126.
(or phenomenologically interesting) body. The body in them also becomes the
object that reflects personal, political, and socio-cultural histories.
The eight performers carried the lightly framed photomontages by Kamali
along Vali Asr Street (from Chaharrah/Junction to Meidan/Square). At every
pre-determined station, (three in total), two performers set aside the photo-
montages and assumed the roles of psychological therapist and patient per-
forming a script, while the photomontages formed the backdrop. As such,
Illustrations 10.1–10.4 Rasool Kamali, samples from Torn Letters of the Bodies:
Anamorphics of the Iranian Body through the Looking-Glass of
History. 2014–2015
Photomontage
238 Fakhrkonandeh
the performance had a double context: that of the photomontages depicting

now-absent or excluded possibilities of bodily practice and the real city street
with its audience of pedestrians. Equally importantly, Kamali’s work revealed
a mode of corporeal being and somaesthetic dynamics that involved an inter-
play between presence and absence, fragmentation and integrity, a mode that
normally remains invisible.
The performance with Kamali’s artworks and their semiotic interaction
with wall images and inscriptions (reflective of state ideology and religious-
moral norms and imperatives) as well as with advertisements and consumerist
messages, formed a heterogeneous signifying system that accentuated differ-
ent perceptions of the body and somatic consciousness. More importantly, this
heterogeneous signifying system conveyed the possibility of transversal bodily
practices in the urban space as a mode of cultural production that is not pub-
licly permitted in Tehran.
At the first station of the performance’s ambulatory trajectory the perform-
er playing the patient complained about suffering from bouts of intense anxi-
ety, panic attacks, bowel ailments, and chronic headaches while describing
relevant details from his personal life and emotional conditions. The therapist
offered tips and remedies. The content and dynamics of the session and inter-
personal relationship between the two then changed to trigger some sort of
counter-transference in which the psychotherapist revealed his pent-up psy-
chosomatic problems. At the second station, the course of the dialogue was re-
versed, and the therapist, prompted by the client’s condition and undergoing a
process of “counter-transference,” compulsively started weaving his own issues
and problems by way of sympathy into the snatches of utterances by the client
to the point of becoming the main speaker. In the episode at the third station,
two of the marginal performers who were simply holding the images put them
aside and started enacting five kinds of touch50 on the therapist and the client.
Subsequently, the pictures were arranged in a circle and six of the characters
who were holding them did a quasi-ritual, mystical Persian dance while other
performers were seated in a lotus-like position of meditation; the two main
characters walked among them trying to imitate and learn from them. This
culminated in a harmonious, dance-like movement. To ensure that passersby
in the street would recognize the purpose behind the performance, one of the
50 Nick Totton, in his attempt to elaborate a rigorous conceptual-practical framework for

body-psychotherapy, distinguishes between five kinds of touch: touch to explore contact,
touch as comfort, touch as amplification, touch as provocation, and touch as skilled in-
tervention. See Body Psychotherapy: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Open University Press,
2003), 117–123.
performers carried from the outset a large banner on which the performance’s
stages were concisely delineated.
The somaesthetic performance thus juxtaposed two modes of relationship
between the soma of the citizen-subject and the urban space: representation-
al-cartographical and somaesthetic-transversal. In the same vein, I sought to
counterpoint the street optics with street kinetics and kinaesthetics. Indeed, I
planned this performance as an unsolicited somaesthetic and visual interven-
tion into the visual-hegemonic and symbolic-disciplinary order of the street in
order to challenge the dominant visual-hegemonic orders of both consumer-
ism and religious-ideological normativity in Iran’s urban space. What made
this somaesthetic street performance even more effective and acceptable to
the audience of passersby was the long-standing tradition of ambulatory street
performance and street theatre in various Iranian rituals. Prominent examples
include Nowrus, Naqqali (dramatic recitation), Siah-Bazi (Blackface-Clown
Show), T’azieh (Shieh’s passion plays) and Moharram’s rituals, which have
been brought into the streets since the Islamic Revolution. Here processions
of mourners (at once the performers and the audience) march through the
streets while interweaving religious beliefs and historical narratives, cultural
performance and music and songs.
4 Somaesthetic Performance as a Praxis in Transversality

and Anamnesis
As already noted, the performance’s visual content included eight framed pho-
tomontages by Kamali and one large map of Tehran. When arriving at each
station, the two main characters put the photomontages aside (propping
them against the wall or other performers) and initiated their performance.
My intention in this juxtaposition was to convey to the audience three differ-
ent conceptions, layers or possibilities of perception of space and interaction
with it, as elaborated by Lefebvre.51 These three dialectically related aspects of
the social production of space include: conceived space (abstract and with-
out life), perceived space (the space for practice), and lived space (the space
of representations). This triadic distinction between three kinds of space was
meant to convey to the audience the way that space, far from being a neutral
and categorical grid or merely the a priori of perception, can function as an ab-
stract (and abstracting) disciplinary force (as in the map, along with other dis-
ciplinary/discursive modes of spatial politics) that constrains and reductively
51 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 22–23.

240 Fakhrkonandeh
represents the rich complexity of the citizen-subject’s psychosomatic experi-

ence of the city (laden with memory, desire and the virtual futurities of the
possible). As Foucault states: “Discipline organizes an analytical space.”52 Re-
garding this disciplinary-cartographical impulse, a manifestation of which is
the “current geographical” map, Certeau’s view can be illuminating: “in the
course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse, the
map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition
of its possibility.”53 The earliest kind of map, as Certeau explains, was “not a
‘geographical map’ but a ‘history book.’” And, maps, with their tacitly imposed
spatializations, attempt to definitively demarcate “what one can do in … and
make out of” a space.54
The performance’s second layer of spatial-visual and con-tactile configura-
tion was Kamali’s work. These images were intentionally juxtaposed with three
other perceptual layers: the map of Tehran (as a representational space), the
actual bodies of the actors involved in somaesthetic practice, and the images
belonging to two visual orders of the street in Tehran: the consumer culture
and religious-ideological-disciplinary order. The intention here was not only
to foreground distinctions between representational bodies and affective bod-
ies but also to present a symptomatology of the image in the contemporary
life of Iranian subjects in urban consumer society.55 Here the prevalent body
image is as a static, photographic object whose movement and unfolding are
captured but erased in a still photograph that gives a clear but superficial im-
age. To counter such an impairing conception, it is imperative to reconceive
the body as a body-in-movement, implicated in a complex set of relations to
the spaces surrounding it. It is also imperative to insist that the body as soma
is never a mere object of still imagery but always a sentient, living, affective
subjectivity involved with movement. Here again the performance’s essential
ambulatory dimension expresses this idea.
The third plane of the performance’s spatio-visual aesthetic is the visual or-
der and optics of the street (Vali Asr) in which the performance took place. The
visual order and disciplinary norms of urban space in Tehran can be character-
ized by two salient features: consumerism and panopticism. Panopticism has
two chief manifestations in Tehran; one is the architectural-spatial abstraction
and ocularcentrism of the urban design, and the other is the panoptic power
52 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143.

53 Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 120.
54 Ibid., 122.
55 See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002),
59–61.
exerted by the repressive, ideological state apparatuses. These range from the
ubiquitous morally-charged gaze of the public (towards whatever strikes them
as abnormal, transgressive or non-normative), to the gender-based divisions
of the public spaces, to the physical presence and intervention of the Moral-
Guidance Police. On this premise, we can argue that the cognitive, affective
and socio-political value of the praxis of somaesthetic transversality in our
performance resides in the ways it reveals and resolutely resists the panoptic
spatialization of the city on the one hand, and on the other the oppressive nor-
malization of the subject in an increasingly homogeneous, officially ordered,
repressive space.
In this respect, the choice of the place for the performance was intentional.
Vali Asr Boulevard is the longest and most beautiful boulevard in Tehran. We
sought to foreground the spatial, social, aesthetic, affective, and psychosomatic
differences between boulevards and highways, and the adverse effects that the
latter has had on city life. It was also a performative tactic adopted to creatively
counter the psychosomatic grid of the normalized discursive space, but also to
retrieve long repressed practices and modes of bodily presence and relation-
ship in Tehran’s streets, in particular along the exemplary street of Vali-Asr.
As such, this performance was not only a site-specific performance and a site-
situational intervention but also one intended to be extendable to most urban
places in Iran. It was largely inspired by Certeau’s idea of the act of transversal
walking as an act of anamnesis. As Certeau acutely contends, the construction
of an alleged “utopian” city (Tehran in our case) is accomplished through car-
tographic and panoptic procedures, which are in turn predicated upon acts of
forgetting. Consequently, transversal walking functions as a practice that sub-
verts the semiotics of the institutionally imposed space by re-embodying the
relation between now disconnected spaces as well as by remembering forgot-
ten places and practices and the subsequent reconfiguring or imbuing of them
with new meanings.56 It also works by fostering a double or overdetermined
memory and consciousness through a transversal act of cartography, that is, by
restoring practices to their original (but now forgotten or excluded) memory
or site while maintaining the horizon of present possibility of action. Similarly,
one of the salient features of Kamali’s palimpsestic images is their genealogical
exposure of (effaced or forgotten) traces of various historical spaces, practices
and sign-systems. As such, the performance, by incorporating these historical,
visual orders, sought to enact a process of anamnesis, of retrieving the prac-
tices that have been ideologically banished from the present semiotics and
order of Tehran. The somaesthetic walking as transversality in Tehran enables
56 Certeau, 104–105.
242 Fakhrkonandeh
the Tehrani audience not only to remember but also to “re-signify through ap-
propriation” and the exercise of their own imagination. It also gestures to the
observing audience of bodies in the streets to share in some way the experi-
ence and meanings of this praxis.
5 Conclusion
I conclude with another pivotal facet of our somaesthetic performance in

Tehran: how its aesthetics of reception constitutes an alteration in the poli-
tics of culture and an exercise in democracy. The somaesthetic performance
instigated a new “partition of the sensible.”57 We gleaned from subsequent
interviews with the audience that the performance had altered the ways the
field of the sensible (the urban space in Vali Asr and, more largely, in Tehran)
was perceived prior to the performance. This field of the sensible includes the
subject’s self-relation as an embodied consciousness, the subject’s cognitive-
affective relation to the social space, and the bio-politics and political econ-
omy pervading this space. For Rancière, the aesthetics of politics is a “matter
of configuring the sensible texture of a community.”58 Politics is therefore a
material practice, an embodied practice. Aesthetics as politics redistributes
the sensible. It alters the texture of a community as it is available for sensory
apprehension at a given moment. Community is here considered in tactile
terms; each possesses a particular feel. This feel, this sensory aspect to the
communal, is changeable. The given is a form accorded to sense. Political con-
flicts are therefore grounded in the aesthetic in that they are related to which
forms are allotted to apprehension and which are excepted. Accordingly, the
somaesthetic practice by introducing new cognitive-affective practices and
reconfigurations ushers in sensibilities hitherto absent from a community’s
sensible texture, thereby establishing a productive dissensus. The emancipa-
tory aspect of such a somaesthetic performance resides in its improvisatory
nature. The somaesthetically-oriented political subject emerges out of a kind
of extemporizing rather than through pre-given acts. The affective-cognitive
structures of perception, action and identification informing the kinaes-
thetic and con-tactile aspects of the performance were all intended to turn
the civil-subject from a spectator to a participant – and hence to convey the
necessity of c ommunication and transmission of somaesthetic patterns of
57 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001): 10–12.
58 Jacques Rancière, “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière,” Parallax 15, no. 3
(2009): 8.
c ritical self-consciousness and relationality. Such a somaesthetic community

involves sensus communis internally and dissensus communis externally – in
relation to the dominant discourses of religious ideology and consumer
capitalism – creating a space where individual affect is grafted onto the social
way of being.
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Part 4
Bodies in the Streets of Literature and Art
∵
Chapter 11
“Terrae Incognitae”: The Somaesthetics of Thomas

De Quincey’s Psychogeography
Evy Varsamopoulou
…it is true that the calamities of my noviciate in London had struck root
so deeply in my bodily constitution that afterwards they shot up and
flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that has overshad-
owed and darkened my latter years […] Thus, however, with whatsoever
alleviations, years that were far asunder were bound together by subtle
links of suffering derived from a common root.1
1 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Somaesthetics
In this early passage from Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De

Quincey uses the language of plants to express the profundity and fixedness of
painful early experiences. They literally make the self their ground and coun-
teract the centripetal forces of time and physical movement on individual
identity. This “common root,” woven by “calamities,” that maintains cohesion
and continuity has its seeds in his first experience of independence and of
London. In this essay, I trace the ways in which the body, dreaming, drifting,
and opium transform the cityscape in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of
an English Opium Eater. It is a Romantic autobiographical narrative that re-
inscribes the modern, anti-Augustinian Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
for the English tradition. Like Rousseau, and contrary to Augustine, there is
no spiritual conversion in these Confessions. More darkly than in Rousseau,
1 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 35. This text was first published in the September-October,
1821 edition of London Magazine.

250 Varsamopoulou
here there is no deliverance from the “noxious umbrage” of early suffering, no

thanks, in part, to the unbeatable habit of opium. Instead of deliverance from
mundane sufferings through a conversion to truth and a new life, De Quincey
enfolds his sufferings –bereavement, separation, hunger, opium nightmares –
into a cherishing experimental discourse of self-exploration at the limits, in
which truths lead to more truths, always tantalizingly beyond reach. The auto-
biographical exploration becomes itself an unbeatable habit, continuing into
further formal experimentation in the unfinished sequel (perhaps because un-
finishable), Suspiria de Profundis.2 Finally, by transposing the idyllic promise
of nature into the hallucinatory power of the urban metropolis, De Quincey’s
Confessions pushes both Rousseau and his beloved Wordsworth into a more
recognizable metropolitan modernity.
The unresolved conflicts of class and aspiration persist and mark his Confes-
sions as a text riven by the contrary desires of its narrator/autobiographer. At
the outset, De Quincey renounces Rousseau and Frenchified European auto-
biographical/confessional tendencies.3 However, the Confessions of an English
Opium Eater not only continues in a Rousseauistic vein, made acceptable by
the mediating figure of his idol, Wordsworth, but also can be seen to emulate
the deep significance of wandering the countryside, drifting freely from one
situation to another and rejecting any restrictions to freedom, especially free
movement. These are only some of the features exhibited by De Quincey’s ret-
rospective narration of the period spent in Wales and London. De Quincey’s
Confessions, however, is at the same time anti-Romantic, and looks forward to
modernism in the replacement of the idyllic countryside by the dark, chaotic,
cold and dangerous allure of the cityscape of the great metropolis. Whereas
Rousseau’s dream is of pastures and healthy living on a farm, De Quincey’s
well-being is initially guaranteed only by wine, which he describes as a kind
of prelude to his later addiction to opium. No “artificial paradise” of wine and
opium however is romanticised because their consumption is clearly stated to
be due to the contraction of his stomach through chronic hunger and the in-
ability to hold down food as a result. Later on there is another kind of pain, the
2 Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and

Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87–182.
3 The third sentence of the Confessions begins with the very long disclaimer (a sentence of just
over eleven lines in the Oxford edition): “Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feel-
ings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars
[…] for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sym-
pathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to French literature,
or to that part of German, which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the
French” (3).
“Terrae Incognitae” 251
pain of a headache, leading to the equally cheap and ready remedy of opium-
eating. Even the most unbearable physical pain or suffering can be soothed by
drug use.
Drinking wine and eating opium open up for the young Thomas another
level of signification of nourishment. It evolves from an initially physical type
of sustenance to a spiritual nourishment and a cure for psychological pain that
not only puts an end to the agony of suffering, but also magically transforms
all experience by liberating him from his “mind-forged manacles” in an ecstatic
subjectivity. De Quincey contemptuously dismisses all previous reports, in-
cluding those by doctors of medicine, on the effects of opium on the mind and
body: “with respect to its bodily effects […] I have but one emphatic criticism
to pronounce –Lies! lies! lies!”4 He then puts forward a contrastive evaluation
of wine and opium in terms of their effects on the mind, extolling the benefits
of the latter at the expense of the former.
Wine causes disorder in the mind, whereas opium brings “exquisite order,
legislation and harmony” and “invigorates” a man’s “self-possession.”5 Opium
“communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive:
and with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply
that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would
probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian
health.”6 It “gives an expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections,”
but unlike wine, the opium-eater never behaves in a “maudlin” or ridiculous
fashion. Instead, opium produces “a healthy restoration to that state which the
mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation
or pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart origi-
nally just and good.”7 Whereas wine “brings out the merely human, too often
the brutal” side of people, the internal effect of opium is that the opium-eater
“feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affec-
tions are in a state of cloudless serenity; and overall is the great light of the
majestic intellect.”8 The religious language of this final analytic observation
makes the Christological statement that follows less surprising. De Quincey
declares himself to be “the alpha and the omega” and unique member of “the
doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium.”9 He also refutes any va-
lidity to the description of the effect of opium as an “intoxication” or leading
4 Ibid., 39.
5 Ibid., 40.
6 Ibid., 41.
7 Ibid., 41.
8 Ibid., 42.
9 Ibid., 42
252 Varsamopoulou
to a depressive aftermath; lucidity and “unusually good spirits” is all he has to

report from the foundation of the “true church”: his own physical experience.
In a reconstruction of youthful days spent in aimless penury in London that
alternates between the sublime and the grotesque, De Quincey looks forward
to the twentieth century psychogeographers and subverts his own purported
political conservatism.10 In considering the complexity of De Quincey’s so-
cial and political sympathies, literary critics have focused more on ideological
rhetoric than on the account of bodily experience that, in De Quincey’s own
words cited as an epigram to this essay, contain the root and the ground for his
sense of self.11 In earlier studies, I have considered the illuminating potential
of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and theories of hunger and addiction for a
fuller appreciation of De Quincey’s Confessions.12 Notwithstanding the insight
gained thereby, the recent reformulation or redirection of aesthetics towards
an awareness of the body and its cultivation in everyday life by somaesthetics
has opened new and wider lenses through which to read De Quincey’s auto-
biographical narratives.
2 Psychogeography as Somaesthetic Praxis
[S]omaesthetics’ improvement of sensory acuity, muscular movement

and experiential awareness […] could also enhance our appreciation of
the natural and constructed environments that we navigate and inhabit.13
The Confessions offers an account of a somaesthetic praxis that encompasses

all three dimensions defined by Richard Shusterman: analytic, pragmatic and
performative. Shusterman defines somaesthetics as “the critical, meliorative
10 I am in agreement with Robert Morrison’s evaluation of the complexity – being both

ambivalent and ambiguous – and strategic nature of Thomas De Quincey’s conservative
political views. See Robert Morrison, “‘Earthquake and Eclipse:’ Radical Energies and De
Quincey’s 1821 Confessions,” in Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions,
ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (London: Routledge, 2008), 63–80.
11 See, for instance, the editors’ introduction and the essays collected in Morrison and Sanjiv
Roberts, Thomas De Quincey.
12 I am referring to my section on De Quincey’s “Palimpsest,” from Suspiria de Profundis, in
Evy Varsamopoulou, The Aesthetics of the Künstlerinroman and the Aesthetics of the Sub-
lime (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), and to “Adventures in Addiction: Thomas de Quinc-
ey’s Exploration of the Body in Extremis,” La Questione Romantica, Special Issue, 3, no. 1
(2011): 105–116.
13 Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (Lan-
ham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 278.
study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic

appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”14 Of the three dimen-
sions identified, analytic somaesthetics is descriptive: it “describes the basic
nature of bodily perceptions and practices and their function in our knowl-
edge and construction of reality.”15 This analytic dimension alone would merit
a long study, and has been the object of much literary critical attention. The
Confessions explores the pleasurable and painful effects of opium ingestion, its
varied cognitive effects, which include both amplification of lucid awareness
and hallucinatory states, and its dual significance for creative self-fashioning
of one’s social identity as opium-eater and creative re-fashioning of the world
in representational and experiential modes. Paradoxically, though very much
due to the general lack of sufficient medical knowledge at the time, De Quin
cey avows that his opium habit had begun as a way of improving his health,
continued as a way of heightening perceptual awareness and cognitive func-
tion, but ultimately ruined health due to overuse (in today’s terms, addiction).
Even this unfortunate final phase, the warning against which the narrative
sets as a further objective, qualifies the Confessions as being an account of a
form of performative somaesthetics, defined as “disciplines devoted primarily
to bodily strength or health.”16 Michel Foucault, identified as one of the pro-
genitors of somaesthetics, seems to follow the line of experimentation of the
nineteenth-century opium-eaters by enlisting drugs to enrich the possibilities
of experience and self-transformation. De Quincey has a somewhat ambigu-
ous and equivocal stance on the opium habit (which, as we know, he never
entirely managed to quit). Nevertheless, De Quincey is clear that his purpose
in taking opium was first as a cheap and easily available pain-killer. Later, along
with countless others, he took up habitual consumption in order to induce
greater pleasure in ordinary activities and in art appreciation. His examples
include walking around London or going to the opera.
Reading the Confessions in terms of the transformation of everyday somaes-
thetics into psychogeographical practice and, finally, into a work of art in which
the aesthetic and ethical dimensions are intertwined has the benefit of both
enhancing our appreciation of this work and better understanding the continu-
ing appeal of intoxication for attaining the heightened level of experience that
John Dewey identified with art. This Deweyan goal is certainly what Thomas
De Quincey aimed at: “Experience in the degree in which it is e xperience”:

15 Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 276.
16 Ibid., 275.
254 Varsamopoulou
“heightened vitality […] active and alert commerce with the world […] com-
plete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events.”17 Perhaps
then, it is neither surprising nor accidental when the thirty-five-year-old De
Quincey will decide to turn these experiences into art in the Confessions; for
experience, as Dewey continues, “is art in germ.”18
As a signal text in the history of English literature, Confessions of an English
Opium Eater has been notoriously difficult to place in any generic or discursive
category. My argument is that this is because De Quincey’s Confessions antici-
pates the much later development of the Situationist practice of psychogeog-
raphy, which, as I will argue in the following section, is itself the most complex
and complete form of somaesthetic praxis. As a narrative of a psychogeogra-
pher’s London, subtitled, Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar, the text
traverses and ultimately undoes the boundaries between inside and outside,
individual and community, natural, unnatural and supernatural, earth and sea,
dream and reality, pleasure and pain. The very purpose of the writing down
and publishing of this period of his youth is stated at the outset to be ameliora-
tion: to reveal the truth of the effects of the opium habit, so prevalent at the
time, including the greater awareness it bestows in both waking and sleeping
states; the intensification of pleasure when taken at appropriate intervals; and,
finally, the dangers to one’s quality of life and health if not consumed with
some degree of control. Therefore, we are dealing with an extraordinary Ro-
mantic text of analytic, pragmatic and performative somaesthetics, in which
the everyday experience of the opium-habit is, moreover, turned into a com-
pelling and sophisticated literary work of art.
De Quincey’s account of physical realities is predicated on the oxymoronic
truths that manifest themselves to him through his particular experience of
becoming lost, intoxicated and disoriented in London. In 1802, when Thomas
De Quincey fled Manchester Grammar School he was just seventeen: under-
age, with very little money in his pocket and even less definite ideas about
where or what he wanted to be, except far and free from the oppressive, con-
stricting subjection to tutors and guardians. When he arrives in London from
North Wales (where his wandering first takes him) though penniless, home-
less and hungry, he withstands the abjection of his situation for months. The
“ransom” of those days of suffering, as he later describes it in 1821, when he first
publishes Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in the London Magazine, is
not only so many more years of tranquillity in the future, but also the ambiva-
lent reward of a unique, oxymoronic voice and vision. The oxymoron in De
17 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 2005), 18.

18 Ibid., 19.
Quincey’s Confessions is not a problem to be resolved either via interpretive

reductions or psychoanalytic deconstructions of its authorial persona. This
oxymoronic depiction and stance towards the physical has to do with the body
and the city in their twin (perceived) dimension as a source of pain and thresh-
old for transcendence. The city is the space of freedom and possibility, and the
ecstasy of being lost in the crowd or mingling with others in walks of life nor-
mally not encountered will later became a favourite with realist and modernist
writers. When De Quincey begins the narrative of his time in London, he de-
scribes this period as the “stage” of his “agony” due to his intense suffering from
hunger. Yet out of the pain of physical suffering, the body becomes acquainted
with the “cure” of opium. By narrating the very different perceptions, feelings
and experiences for someone in physical pain, compared to his later state of
opium-induced pleasure, De Quincey makes London the first city where the
interface of body and urban space redefines modern subjectivity in literature.
De Quincey revisits the original place of trauma when he returns to London
in 1804, but there is no sameness in this repetition. In 1804, with the opium in
his blood-stream, he wanders the streets of London at a “safe distance” from
the life-threatening and immediate dangers of the first stay as a runaway. Now,
he wanders by choice in the city streets and marketplaces, not because he has
no place to go; and the wilfulness of his losing his way in the labyrinthine streets
or “passing” amidst the poor is experienced ecstatically. The ecstasies of intox
ication and freedom mix with the ecstatic movement of losing one’s self, one’s
defined social identity, and enjoying the otherness of either the I talians at the
opera or the poor families on their cheap nights out in markets and other pub-
lic spaces. Even more significant, as the 1821 text inscribes it, is the otherness
of the city itself, which he ecstatically surrenders to: vast, uncharted, labyrin-
thine, full of surprises, full of new encounters and haunted by old ones. Early
nineteenth-century London is sublime, uncanny, and grotesque all at once.19
None of this would have been possible without that first risk, without the first
19 In his wide-ranging, critical history of the rise of modern cities, The Seduction of Place:
The History and Future of Cities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), architectural his-
torian Joseph Rywkert traces the ineluctable developments in Britain that resulted in the
first “huge wave of dispossessed, rural populations” flooding London “and swelling it to
breaking point” (21). This series of events range from the passing of the enclosures acts
and the impoverishment of the rural populations, to the development of machinery and
managerial logistics for the growth and proliferation of factories. The stench from horse
manure and urine, inadequate sewage infrastructure, and smoke from chimneys are not
mentioned in De Quincey’s narrative but were what would have first impressed a visitor
to London. See Rywkert, 21–42.
256 Varsamopoulou
days in London in 1802–1803, which guaranteed him a multiple rite of passage,

a painful initiation into transcendence.
De Quincey has been hailed as “the first actual practitioner” of psycho-
geography by Martin Coverley. For Phil Baker “Classic urban psychogeogra-
phy could almost be said to begin – retrospectively, and from a Situationist
influenced perspective – with Thomas de Quincey.”20 If De Quincey is the first
psychogeographer, then London is the first city in which something like the
mid-twentieth century theory and practice of psychogeography takes place.
Inevitably, this marks London as the other capital of the nineteenth century,
perhaps a dark precursor or double to Walter Benjamin’s Paris, the city of light.
If, as Guy-Ernest Debord writes, Haussmann’s modern city plan for Paris is all
about the open spaces that enable police control of crowds, then De Quincey`s
description of the “labyrinths of London” and its “terrae incognitae” readily
point to this obvious contrast.
According to Debord, psychogeography “could set for itself the study of the
precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously
organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”21 Debord’s
reference to “precise laws and specific effects” would have us believe that psy-
chogeography is a scientific area of study, and that the influence of the envi-
ronment (natural or built) upon a person is in one direction. However, Debord
rejects the positivist approach to analysis since, as he says: “The slightest de-
mystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different
influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of
the era or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.”22
Debord`s aim is clearly non-conformist and anarchic: to identify, sub-
vert and derail any attempts to control human behaviour and influence hu-
man emotions either by the civic and state authorities and their executives
in charge of urban planning or by large capitalist industries like Hollywood
and Coca-Cola. The anarchic energies of the psychogeographers are not ni-
hilistic however, they are creative. Psychogeography proposes a Nietzschean
renewal of values, a social, political and moral enterprise of Dionysian pro-
portions in which individuals are prompted to “to turn the whole of life into
an exciting game,” to “disregard official maps and directives,” “disrupt” and in-
habit a geographical environment of their own creation. The ultimate goal is
20 Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials, 2006), 42.

21 Guy-Ernest Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, The Situationist Inter-
national Text Library, accessed March 8, 2018. http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/
en/display/2.
22 Ibid.
“the c omplete construction of architecture and urbanism that will someday

be within the power of everyone,” based on “new notions of pleasure,” their
own desires and moral imperatives. In his Introduction to a Critique of Urban
Geography, Debord advocates that: “We need to work toward flooding the
market – even if for the moment merely the intellectual market – with a mass
of desires whose realization is not beyond the capacity of man’s present means
of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old so-
cial organization.”23 Psychogeography is envisioned as a revolutionary project.
Debord’s psychogeographical manifesto asserts “The revolutionary transfor-
mation of the world, of all aspects of the world, will confirm all the dreams of
abundance.”24
In stark contrast to such dreams of abundance, young Thomas’s days as a
runaway in 1802 are marked by the intensity of the pain of hunger and of the
precariousness he shares with the lives of the disenfranchised poor, orphans,
and prostitutes. There is a nameless child who is his co-squatter in the shady
lawyer’s empty house, and there is Anne, a girl his age who has fallen into pros-
titution after being wronged by a man from whom she has no hope of restitu-
tion, who becomes his best friend and saves him at a crucial moment. These
are two young girls with no one to count on but themselves. Anne could be
the future of the nameless child who sleeps innocently next to Thomas, like
a younger sister. If anything, De Quincey’s psychogeographical account of his
first period in London impresses as an intensely melancholy, embodied experi-
ence of the city, in which the suffering body is at its limits, a state not just of the
mind but first of all of the stomach, which cannot be ignored by any analysis of
this body’s movements in the urban topography.
In the second period, when he visits London while a university student, it
is the ingestion of opium that will affect his psychogeographical activity. This
raises the question of whether it should be described more precisely as psy-
chotropicgeography, despite De Quincey pains to prove the incredible lucidity
and alertness of the faculties, rather than any deluding intoxication or drowsi-
ness, after opium eating. De Quincey is not alert when he is constantly hungry,
as in the first London experience, but his senses are keenly heightened when
he revisits and is taking opium. He reports on the wide demand for opium
confirmed by the early preparations of apothecaries to meet this demand, es-
pecially at the weekends. The obvious political point is that the urban poor
may more easily afford a dose of opium over the counter to heighten their
weekend enjoyment rather than a hearty meal. In a reversal of Marx’s dictum,
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
258 Varsamopoulou
it is opium that is the religion of the poor in nineteenth century London.25 It

is under the effect of opium that the urban population of the metropolis can
relish any “revolutionary transformation of the world” that “will confirm all
dreams of abundance,”26 the aim of psychogeography in Debord’s manifesto.
In the narration of how he spends his days and nights in London, and in
the descriptions he gives of the urban environment, the London he inhabits
is shown to belong essentially to runaways, strangers, the poor, prostitutes
and the disenfranchised who, in common with him, seem always to be found
outside – even when they are not, since the inside of a house is described,
as we shall see later, in terms of exterior space. The indoors are presented as
places of the most temporary lodging or “refuge” from the bad weather and the
night, having no sense of the intimacy associated with “home.” In general, the
city is identified by its outdoors, its immense maze of streets, shops, doorsteps,
parks and public places, rather than by the interior (or even exterior) of its
homes. As a consequence, the outside is paradoxically the home of the city by
virtue of the anonymity and cover provided by its proliferation of routes, open
spaces, and public places, but also because of its emphasis on movement and
circulation.
This radical displacement of the place and sense of home has repercussions
for the experience of intimate spaces, and also for the intimacy of experience;
specifically, the lack of the former results in the quantum intensification of the
latter. For Gaston Bachelard, “Space that has been seized upon by the imagina-
tion cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of
the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality
of the imagination.”27 But whereas Bachelard finds in psychology, psychoanaly-
sis, and poetry, “grounds for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human
soul,”28 finding sufficient proof that “the house image would appear to have
become the topography of our intimate being,”29 in the Confessions it is instead
the imagery of central London in which Thomas wanders, along with myriad
other people, that becomes the topography of his soul. It does so in a way in
which the traumatic experience of suffering will mark him (body, mind, and
soul) for the rest of his life, if we are to take for evidence his autobiographical
25 Richard Shusterman, through e-mail correspondence, suggested to me this reversal of

Marx’s famous dictum that religion is the opium of the people.
26 Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.
27 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994),
xxxvi.
28 Bachelard, xxxvii.
29 Ibid., xxxvi.
writings. If “a house remodels man,”30 then it is equally true to say that London
remodelled Thomas De Quincey, despite the brevity of the period of his life
spent in London; his age at the time combined with the shocking novelty
and intensity of the experience to have this effect. Without the benefit of the
protective envelope of a home, his psyche is directly and without mediation
exposed, defenceless and naked, as it were, to the topography and ambience
of the city.
For the best illustration of the strange effects of this displacement, which
causes an erasure of the contrast and opposition between “house and uni-
verse,” we need only read the way De Quincey imaginatively experiences each.
I say imaginatively because, as Bachelard poignantly demonstrates through his
poetic material, “In the reign of the imagination, they [house and universe]
awaken daydreams in each other, that are opposed.”31 De Quincey`s text, al-
though written as prose, unquestionably retains the lyricism and poetic vision
that, in his time, was mostly limited to poetry in verse. As a hybrid kind of
writing – combining autobiographical, medical, lyrical and philosophical dis-
course – it is especially illuminating for its treatment of the experience of lived
space. The language he uses to describe the house where he is squatting bears
witness to Bachelard’s statement that: “A house that has been experienced is
not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”32
Before moving into the “large, unoccupied” (except for the lawyer and the
girl servant) house, De Quincey had slept for two months outside, in London,
in unspecified locations. Rather than lamenting this fact, he passes over it in
a brusque, cursory manner, in fact noting only the positive (even life-saving)
effects that sleeping “in constant exposure to the open air” had on him, as dur-
ing this period he was almost constantly starving.33 But, the weather turning
colder, he moves into the house that is described as unoccupied in the sense
that “there was no household or establishment in it; nor any furniture, indeed,
except a table, and a few chairs.”34 Then, while the sleeping conditions and his
insomnia due to stomach pains are described in some detail, he is again mys-
teriously vague and dismissive of his whereabouts all day long, when he has to
leave the house: “for, as soon as the hours of business commenced, I saw that
my absence would be acceptable; and, in general, therefore, I went off and sate
in the parks, or elsewhere, until night fall.”35 In contrast to this matter-of-fact
30 Ibid., 47.
31 Ibid., 43.
32 Ibid., 47.
33 De Quincey, Confessions, 16.
34 Ibid., 16
35 Ibid., 18.
260 Varsamopoulou
brevity, on the very next page De Quincey focuses his literary attentions on a
light, playful, and allusive poetic description of inhabiting the interior of this
“unoccupied” dwelling: “in common with the rats, I sate rent-free; and, as Dr
Johnson has recorded, that he never but once in his life had as much wall-fruit
as he could eat […] ‘the world was all before us,’ and we pitched our tent for
the night in any spot we chose.”36 He describes the house as being located “in
a well-known part of London”; in fact, he later (in 1856) gave the address: 38
Greek Street, Soho. While it now no longer exists, when he wrote the Confes-
sions (almost twenty years after his stay at this house), he admits: “I never fail
to visit it when business draws me to London,” and then, writing to the mo-
ment, he says:
about ten o’clock, this very night, August 15, 1821, being my birth-day –I
turned aside from my evening walk, down Oxford-street, purposely to
take a glance at it: it is now occupied by a respectable family; and, by the
lights in the front drawing-room, I observed a domestic party, assembled
perhaps at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay. Marvellous contrast in
my eyes to the darkness –cold –silence –and desolation of that same
house eighteen years ago, when its nightly occupants were one famishing
scholar, and a neglected child.37
The nostalgic return to both his former dwelling and his haunts in and around
Oxford Street repeat only the unreality of the past, where all three signifi-
cant figures: the lawyer, the orphan girl servant and the prostitute Anne, have
disappeared. Equally, if oxymoronically, it is the incredible unreality of the
present that the contrast reveals. In this constant contemplation of loss, De
Quincey emphasizes not the uniqueness but the infinite iterability of those
figures, as can be seen in his elegiac address to “Oxford-street, stony-hearted
step-mother!”(34):
…thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of
children, at length I was dismissed from thee: the time was come at last
that I no more should pace in anguish thy never-ending terraces; no more
should dream, and wake in captivity to the pangs of hunger. Successors,
too many, to myself and Anne, have, doubtless, since then trodden in our
footsteps –inheritors of our calamities: other orphans than Anne have
36 Ibid., 19.
37 Ibid., 19–20.
sighed: tears have been shed by other children: and thou, Oxford-street,
hast since, doubtless, echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts.38
One of the reasons for which Bachelard’s work is especially apposite to a read-
ing of De Quincey is that not only does he, like the Romantics in general,
“consider the imagination as a major power of human nature,”39 but he also
considers the study of poetry as the best source for an understanding of the
significance of space. This is because the poetic image goes beyond description
“in order to attain to the primary virtues, those that reveal an attachment that
is native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting.”40
In De Quincey´s imagination, Oxford-street appears as his most intimate
home, rather than the house on Greek street, and this happens through the im-
plied metaphorical reference to the mother as the very heart of the home, the
very source of protection, love and shelter. The difference is that Oxford Street,
as in fairy tales, has the very cold hearth/heart of the “wicked” step-mother
where the myriad of the destitute find themselves forsaken, abandoned, and
ignored. Although he returns to London in a far better and much safer situation
in life, De Quincey retains the memory of this terrible stepmother. The peering
in from the street at a scene of cosy, domestic bliss, just serves to emphasize
the paradoxical outsideness, the short but insuperable distance that separates
him, and those like him, from belonging to such a conventional home. The
reality of the feelings of anguish, pain, and suffering retain their primacy in the
psyche, even when, as he says, in later years he found himself a very warm and
affectionate home:
…and if again I walked in London, a solitary and contemplative man

(as oftentimes I did), I walked for the most part in serenity and peace of
mind […] assaults of suffering were met with a fortitude more confirmed,
with the resources of a mature intellect, and with alleviations from sym-
pathizing affection –how deep and tender!41
During his second stay in London, almost two years later, he repeats his city
wanderings with what seems to the contemporary reader as the purposefulness
and intent of a psychogeographer avant la lettre. For the Situationists, psycho-
geography could never be only a theory, it must also be a kind of praxis. Their
38 Ibid., 34–35.
39 Bachelard, xxxiv.
40 Ibid., 4.
262 Varsamopoulou
intention was to provoke similar responses from others in the city not involved
in the “exercise,” so that the debilitating isolation of individuals that facilitates
their manipulation and domination in the capitalist society of the spectacle is
effectively dissolved, even if briefly, for the duration of the situation.42
What does De Quincey, a poor but no longer starving student do on his
Saturday nights out in London? He goes to the opera to lose himself in the
pleasures of the music, but rather than recording an interest in the visual spec-
tacle, he seats himself where he can equally enjoy the pleasure of the musi-
cal sound of the language spoken by the Italian women in the audience. Next,
he goes in search of a very different kind of experience, seeking the places
“where the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages”: mar-
kets, but also other, unspecified places. De Quincey literally goes in pursuit
of the poor, tries to lose himself amongst them, to mingle in their little family
groups, in order to “become familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and
their opinions.”43 Not wanting to be an outsider, he joins in on their conversa-
tions once he has become familiar with their discussion of their lives. Is this
not one of the links of suffering from his past that makes him want to maintain
a connection, a community of sympathy, with the London poor? The link is
rooted in past experience but also in feeling; De Quincey feels with the poor,
sympathizes with them, but his sympathy is with their pleasures and with their
positive and cheerful way of dealing with their troubles:
Sometimes there might be heard murmurs of discontent: but far oftener

expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope,
and tranquillity. And, taken generally, I must say, that, in this point at
least, the poor are far more philosophic than the rich –that they show a
more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremedi-
able evils, or irreparable losses.44
42 As one anonymous author points out, “space is not neutral terrain that we simply in-
habit or stroll through, rather it is, for better or worse, the lived sphere of influence […]
Space is a form of domination sui generis […] which is seen to militate against individual
action and social interaction […] to stultify desire and the imagination. The combined
effect is psychic and social fragmentation, combined with reinforced pacification. Thus,
space, is another form of the spectacle, and the contestation of society begins […] with a
radical reconstruction [détournment] of the lived environment, with the supercession of
‘urbanism’ by ‘unitary urbanism.’” See “Drifting with the Situationist International,” The
Situationist International Text Library, accessed March 8, 2018, http://library.nothingness.
org/articles/SI/en/display/238.
44 Ibid., 47
Though critics of De Quincey, the avowed Tory, have read only hypocrisy and
imperiousness in this passage, such an ideologically-driven response fails to
recognize this as an exemplary instance of the ways in which the “common
root” of sufferings from the early days had had a formative influence on his
selfhood. An imperious, hypocritical Tory De Quincey would instead have
found affirmation of his political identity in expressing pity and sympathy for
the poor’s sorrows. De Quincey does not do this, nor want to do this, because
he feels himself to be, at his emotive, physical and psychical core, one with
them. He therefore wants to share their joys, aspirations and pleasures and
to learn from them in the way one learns from those one wants to emulate,
not distance oneself from. Here is where we have an illustration of what can
be called drifting, creating a situation and a détournment, turning around the
repressive, isolationist domination of the spectacle society.
For the Situationists, the way the spectacular can be exposed is through
the creation of nonspectacular ruptures. These are called “situations.” The
situation is a demonstrative breaking of the spectacular, which permits
the expression of desires and emancipated possibilities that everyday
life has suppressed […] What these desires are cannot be stated a priori.
They will emerge in the revolutionary process of situation-creation, of
détournment. Presumably, communality, unification, and public urban
space will emerge as more desirable than commodification, fragmenta-
tion, and privatization.45
In his aimless rambling under the pleasurable influence of opium, De Quincey

writes of how he loses his way in an imaginative transformation of the pre-
sumed solidity of the cityscape into the fluidity of a seascape:
And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical prin-

ciples, by fixing my eye on the pole star, and seeking ambitiously for a
north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-
lands I had doubled my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such
knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s
riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the
audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen.
I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer
of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet
45 Max Anger, “Go Beyond the SI in 10 Simple Steps,” The Situationist International Text Li-
brary, accessed March 8, 2018, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/78.
264 Varsamopoulou
been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however,
I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized
over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back
and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities moral or intellec-
tual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the
conscience.46
Here we have the allusion to the effects of the urban space on the young
Thomas from all those undescribed early days where he sat “in the park or
elsewhere,” but also to the fear of becoming separated from his friend Anne,
“in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street,47” as in the end it did happen.
The streets meet but also separate people from each other, who may be “in
search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths
of L ondon; perhaps, even within a few feet of each other –a barrier no wider
in a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!”48
The use of the language of sea voyages and navigation reinforces the sense of
vastness but also of mystery, danger, and the unknown. This transposes the
cityscape of solid streets and buildings into the primal fluidity of the earth,
where instead of the use of landmarks or maps to find one’s way, the city ram-
bler tries to look not around him but above him, to the night sky, for guidance.
The exaggerated magnitude of Oxford Street in this metaphorical descrip-
tion resonates with the language of sublimity in terms of Immanuel Kant’s
concept of the sublime as defined in The Critique of Judgment.49 The grand size
of this thoroughfare and the crowds constantly moving through it reinforce the
feelings of awe and disorientation arising from the labyrinth of unchartered
streets. Ultimately, Oxford Street gives rise to a new kind of spatial infinity by
virtue of the transience of human bodies ceaselessly flowing through it like
ocean currents. This experience of sublimity will reveal its negative charge in
the opium nightmares that De Quincey later lists as one of the “pains of opium.”
De Quincey likens the dizzying creativity of his opium nightmares to the gothic
irrationalities of Piranesi’s sketches and Wordsworth’s poem “The Excursion,”
from which he quotes a section and then comments: “The sublime circum-
stance –‘battlements that on their restless fronts bore starts,’ might have been
copied from my architectural dreams, for it often occurred.”50 Architecture
46 De Quincey, Confessions, 47–48.

47 Ibid., 27.
48 Ibid., 34.
49 Immanuel Kant, “The Analytic of the Sublime,” in The Critique of Judgment, trans. James
Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1790]), 90–203.
gives way to lakes and, in a third phase, “become seas and oceans.”51 In this
last phase, De Quincey’s opium consumption seems to have acted as a catalyst
for the anxiety of the individual overwhelmed by the crowded streets of the
metropolis. The Kantian gives way to a Burkean experience of the sublime,
dominated by anxiety and fear:52
…the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some
part of my London life might be answerable for this […] the sea appeared
paved with innumerable faces: upturned to the heavens: faces implor-
ing, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by
generations, by centuries: – my agitation was infinite, – my mind tossed –
and surged with the ocean.53
All this does well to indicate the lasting significance of the London cityscape
on De Quincey, but before these tormenting dreams had begun to plague his
sleep, he returns to walking in London in his opium-eating phase to intensify
the experience of happiness. Whereas De Quincey’s first days are focused on
his self, his return is remarkable for his pursuit of others and otherness, in
which he actively seeks to lose himself, while also enjoying an “oceanic” feel-
ing of the city.
3 Somaesthetics, Psychogeography, and the Sublime
“Piranesi is psychogeographical in the stairway.”54 Debord refers here to the

same set of images in this quotation that claims Piranesi for psychogeogra-
phy as did De Quincey in the final section of his Confessions: the Carceri
d’Invenzione of 1745. De Quincey calls these images Piranesi’s Dreams and they
had been described to him by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great poet and
opium-eater of De Quincey’s youthful worship. In these prints, Piranesi is de-
picted on multiple staircases that end in mid-air, flagrantly defying Newtonian
laws of space-time and realistic representation, but the terms of De Quincey’s
description make evident their metaphorical value for the S isyphean task of
the writer/artist-labourer:
51 Ibid., 72.
52 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1757]).
54 Guy-Ernest Debord, “Exercise in Psychogeography,” Potlach 2, June 29, 1954, accessed
March 18, 2018. http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/327.
266 Varsamopoulou
…vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and
machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. expressive
of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along
the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his
way upwards was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and
you perceive it come to an abrupt termination, without any balustrade,
and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, ex-
cept into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you
suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But
raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which
again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of
the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is
beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on,
until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom
of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction
did my architecture proceed in dreams.55
The description is rich in combining allusions, on the one hand, to the pure ma-
terial force of labour exerted by the artist and the use of technique (mechani-
cal means and inventions), and, on the other, to the aura of fear, uncertainty,
mystery, uncanninesss, and danger aroused by gothic interiors. Simultaneously
however–and simultaneity is a key feature for the co-existence of multiple oxy-
moronic truths–there is the anti-realism of the fantastical staircases and the
magician-like ability of the self-represented artist as hero, Piranesi, but also
De Quincey. All this is communicated in a language where awe, elevation, and
the act of raising one’s eyes (and therefore one’s perception) constantly higher
and higher, while forfeiting any stable foundations or ground under one’s feet.
This constant ascent that goes by leaps and bounds clearly signals to the reader
that De Quincey is describing these prints as an allegorical representation of
the sublime. He is invoking the sublime by the allusion to heights in his de-
scription (the original, Longinian term for the sublime being hypsos, which in
Greek means height) and to the Kantian description of the sublime as pertain-
ing to that which is registered as a failure of the imagination but rescued by the
greater powers of our ideas of reason. Indeed, the gothic elements suggest also
a Burkean sublime. The discourse of the sublime used here, by image and word
(the prints and De Quincey’s description of these), belongs both to the fantas-
tical, gothic Romantic tradition and to the rhetorical, Longinian tradition.
55 De Quincey, Confessions, 70–71.

Thus, the terms of the description of Piranesi’s prints, though fascinating

in terms of a mise-en-abyme effect within De Quincey’s text, would be quite
obvious to De Quincey’s contemporary readership, well-versed in the language
of the sublime that was still so prevalent in the early nineteenth century. At
the same time, however, as this description of Piranesi’s prints shows, the vivid
feeling for urban space and the fantastical dimension that De Quincey is able
to perceive in the cityscape are not separate from the affect or the fantastical
dimension of either intimate or inner space. The inner and the outer, the inti-
mate and the vast, the city streets and the ocean, are spaces that overlay and
define each other in a constant transformation of the understanding by the
imagination. “Being at home” or “feeling at home with oneself” in Confessions
of an English Opium Eater is an effect of the fluidity and ultimate erasure of
boundaries. The staircases that do not connect are like the uncharted, labyrin-
thine London streets on which De Quincey wandered as a runaway and then
as a student. The non-rational, disorienting, overwhelming, and bizarre exist
in the urban environment, while the gothic atmosphere of a prison may be
evoked by either a cold, large, empty house or the large avenue of a sprawling
metropolis.
It is the complexity of the Piranesi image as an imaginary space with a fantas-
tical quality that escapes the rational and realistic that enchants De Quincey.
He sees its allegorical potential as a topographical model of the sublimity at-
tending the struggle to shape and transform everyday experience into liter-
ary art, an image that places the somasthetic dimension of his writings on a
new level. In both Confessions and the Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey looks
with awareness and with wonder into the dizzying heights and depths of so-
maesthetic experience: bliss, ecstasy, joy, contentment but also pain, trauma,
terror and grief. The tendency towards the sublime in his writing testifies to
his valuation of somaesthetic experience. His evaluation of the opium habit
remains ambivalent where the analysis gives clear evidence of the surfeit of
the sublime, tending towards an exhaustion of the affective and mental facul-
ties. The clarity and vigour of the early period of opium-taking as a young man
in London is succeeded by a list of afflictions in the final section, “The Pains
of Opium,” many of which were caused by an attempt to quit the habit. He
mentions “unutterable irritation of the stomach,” “intense perspirations,” and
“palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.”56
This suffering is De Quincey’s riposte to potential reproaches by readers
that he did not attempt to wean himself off opium. Opium has caused unbear-
able overstimulation of his imaginative faculty, mostly manifest in his dreams:
56 Ibid., 64.
268 Varsamopoulou
“a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which pre-
sented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”57 He goes on to enu-
merate four specific effects: 1. Whatever image he conjured in a waking state
appeared in his dreams exquisitely amplified “into insufferable splendour that
fretted my heart.”58 2. This splendour was accompanied by a contrastive mood
of “deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy” that was ineffable.59 3. Space
was “amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity,”60 while time –something
worse for De Quincey – was expanded in one night to “a duration far beyond
the limits of any human experience.”61 4. “The minutest incidents of child-
hood, or forgotten scenes of later years were often revived” and relived.62
This final effect gives rise to the first and longest section, “The Affliction
of Childhood” in the Confessions’ sequel, Suspiria de Profundis, published in
Blackwood’s Magazine over twenty years later.63 De Quincey there shows him-
self to have been a most careful reader of Rousseau by his sensitive and philo-
sophical appreciation of childhood experience. The death in childhood of his
beloved sister, “the noble Elizabeth,”64 and its effect on De Quincey at the time
and throughout his life is a narrative replete with insights on the traumatising
afterlife of bereavement and grief. De Quincey’s narration explores the “com-
mon root” of his sufferings to its arche-event of separation: “But the deep, deep
tragedies of infancy, as when the child’s hands were unlinked forever from his
mother’s neck, or his lips forever from his sister’s kisses, these remain lurking
below all, and these lurk to the last.”65
Shusterman has argued that “a pragmatist aesthetics should not restrict
itself to the abstract arguments and generalizing style of traditional philo-
sophical discourse. It needs to work from and through concrete works of art.
57 Ibid., 68.
58 Ibid., 68
59 Ibid., 68
60 Ibid., 68
61 Ibid., 68
62 Ibid., 68
63 De Quincey published the Suspiria de Profundis from March to July 1845 (with the ex-
ception of May), but was not happy to leave it in its original form. He revised its parts,
changed their order, and mixed the original publication with other writings in his Auto-
biographical Sketches of 1853 and still planned further work on this sequel to the Confes-
sions. In his note on the text of the Oxford edition of Confessions cited throughout the
present paper, Grevel Lindop, a De Quincey scholar and general editor of the Routledge
complete works (1999–2003) who published a biography of the author (Dent, 1981), con-
cludes that De Quincey “had come to regard Suspiria as an undefined repository for all his
more fantastic prose works” (xxiv).
65 Ibid., 146.
These should be taken […] as foci of sustained aesthetic analysis, objects

whose experience is enriched through close and theoretically informed criti-
cal study.”66 It has been my endeavour that this essay contributes to the expan-
sion and exploration of somaesthetics, which, in turn, has allowed for much
greater appreciation and understanding of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions
of an English Opium Eater for a contemporary audience. In his somaesthet-
ic, psychogeographical Confessions, De Quincey has used his experiences to
laboriously construct the imaginative staircases by which to ascend and tran-
scend the repressive, the mundane, the painful, or the fatally tedious elements
that trouble city dwellers steam-rolled into a bureaucratically organized rou-
tine of mechanized everyday life that cumulatively destroys our chances for
experience in myriad ways. From the more overtly political interventions of
psychogeography to the emphatic redirection of somaesthetics toward an
ethico-aesthetic based on heightened somatic consciousness and ameliora-
tion of bodily function and feeling, the interrupted staircases De Quincey de-
scribes in the Piranesi prints have been redrawn and continue to seek a way
out of the constrictions of contemporary everyday urban life.
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SI/en/display/238.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994 [1958].
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1757].
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Debord, Guy-Ernest. “An Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography̒.” The Situa-
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.org/articles/SI/en/display/2.
Debord, Guy Ernest. “Exercise in Psychogeography.” Potlatch 2, June 29, 1954. Accessed
March 18, 2018. http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/327.
66 Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, xvi.

270 Varsamopoulou
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Ox-

ford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
De Quincey, Thomas. Suspiria de Profundis. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
and Other Writings, 87–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigree, 2005 [1934].
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ford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1790].
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Confessions.” In Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions, edited
by Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, 63–80. London: Routledge, 2008.
Morrison, Robert and Sanjiv Roberts. “‘I Was Worshipped; I Was Sacrificed:’ A Passage
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tions, edited by Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, 1–18. London: Rout-
ledge, 2008.
Rykwert, Joseph. The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities. Oxford: Oxford
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Varsamopoulou, Evy. The Aesthetics of the Künstlerinroman and the Aesthetics of the
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Chapter 12
The Empty Spaces You Run Into: The City

as Character and Background in William S.
Burroughs’s Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch
Robert W. Jones ii
1 Burroughs and Fringe Science
Despite growing up in rural St. Louis, William S. Burroughs spent much of his
adult life both living in and writing novels set in cities. Over the course of his
early period these settings shift from New York, to New Orleans, to Mexico
City, to Interzone (a fictional city largely based on Tangiers, Morocco). These
settings mirrored his nomadic existence and drew on his experiences in the
underground cultures of homosexuality and drug use of the 1940s–1960s, leav-
ing their mark on his novels and especially on the protagonists, which are all
fictionalized versions of Burroughs himself. Life in these mid-twentieth cen-
tury cities, as portrayed in his novels, is crowded, isolated, noisy, and shaded in
chiaroscuro. These cities reflect many of Burroughs’s intellectual and artistic
interests, including a wide-ranging philosophy of the body, mind, language,
and control. For Burroughs, the first three of these interests are sites of subju-
gation, resistance, and freedom from the fourth.
Control is a constant theme and antagonist for Burroughs, and as he often
notes, it is an insidious tool of power which is deployed via social constructs
and language. Burroughs uses the body within the novels discussed, as well as
within his personal life, in order to subvert control and attempt to experience
freedom. The techniques that he employs in this struggle are largely based on
the theories of Alfred Korzybski, Wilhelm Reich, W. Grey Walter, and Vladimir
Gavreau, thinkers from the physical and social sciences who articulated the-
ories on language, the body, and control. These ideas became the themes in
Burroughs’s works that would make him famous. This paper utilizes material
from each of these four thinkers, Burroughs’s own thoughts on their discover-
ies, and the theory of somaesthetics in order to create a critical framework.
Somaesthetics may seem to be an odd fit for a critical approach to Burroughs.
A philosophy grounded in pragmatism and influenced by Zen practice hardly
seems appropriate for an iconoclastic opiate junkie. However, I contend that
for Burroughs the relationship of the body to the mind is of central importance.

272 Jones
Burroughs’s concern with the body is a direct result of his wide-ranging in-
terest in fringe sciences and the web of control that the powerful forces in
western society (the usual suspects: media, government, institutionalized rac-
ism) use to manipulate the populace.1 Burroughs’s interest in unconventional
thought and practice can be positioned as an oppositional stance to the uses
and abuses of power, but it also indicates that he was interested in exploring
alternatives that challenged social conventions and safe modes of living. As
such, my approach in this paper is to construct an intellectual history across
a range of fringe activities in which Burroughs can be placed and which also
help to explain his aesthetic and philosophical outlooks, especially as they re-
late to the body.
Burroughs came by his interest in the body honestly; he was intrigued and
influenced by several thinkers concerned with the body, notably, Wilhelm
Reich, W. Grey Walter, Vladimir Gavreau, and Alfred Korzybski. Wilhelm Reich
(and his experimentation with the fringe, bioenergetic concept of orgone en-
ergy) finds his way into Burroughs’s life and work via Burroughs’s ongoing psy-
choanalysis and personal experiments with orgone accumulators. Burroughs
felt these devices could tone up and regulate numerous bodily systems includ-
ing those that are part of the addiction mechanism. Additionally, Burroughs’s
own iconoclasm made him amenable to a thinker such as Reich, who was a
dissident former Freudian as well as someone who went to jail for his belief in
the work he was doing. In a 1949 letter to Jack Kerouac, Burroughs noted that
“he [Reich] is the only man in the analysis line that is on that beam.”2 Thus,
Burroughs positioned Reich (an outsider in the psychoanalysis community)
as the only analyst whose methods were effective. This shows how Burroughs
admired not only the scholarship and methods of Reich, but, crucially his out-
sider status.
W. Grey Walter’s cybernetics and flicker experiments were also key as they
led to the “breaking down [of] some of the physiological barriers between
different regions of the brain” via the exposure of the subject to stroboscopic
lights flashing between eight and thirteen times per second.3 This idea was
the basis for Burroughs’s experiments in film and with the “Dreamachine,” a
device designed by Burroughs’s collaborator Brion Gysin and systems adviser
1 For the purposes of my research, fringe sciences in the United States in the mid-twentieth
century are considered to be those that were outside the mainstream and not accepted with-
in academia or the ‘military industrial complex’ (as President Eisenhower called it in his
Farewell Speech of 1960).
2 William S. Burroughs, The Letters of William S. Burroughs, Vol. 1: 1945–1959 (New York: Penguin
Books, 1994), 51.
3 W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 58.
The City as Character and Background in William S. Burroughs 273
Ian Sommerville that consists of a rotating cylinder with strategically placed

openings which produces flickering lights within the range of eight and thir-
teen flashes per second. Additionally, the use of flickering images permeates
much of Burroughs’s written work. For similar reasons Burroughs turned to
Vladimir Gavreau’s research on infrasound as he felt that infrasound had po-
tential to create similar somatic effects to flicker. Gavreau is quoted on the ef-
fects of infrasound on the human body: “[i]t not only affects the ears…but it
works directly on the internal organs. There is a rubbing between the various
organs…it provokes an irritation so intense that for hours afterwards any low-
pitched sound seems to echo through the body.”4 As with flicker, Burroughs
was interested in the transcendent qualities of these forms of body manipula-
tion. When one thinks of the elements of nearly any city, the ideas of flashing
lights and sound are some of the first sensory perceptions that leap to mind.
Burroughs uses these elements within his texts to set the stage, and act as guid-
ance or instructions toward an existence free from control. These clues are in
plain view but are only accessible to those who know what they are looking for.
Alfred Korzybski is most known for his theory of general semantics and
his maxim “The map is not the territory,” which had a deep influence on
Burroughs’s thought. The crux of Korzybski’s theory revolves around a com-
plete dismissal of the “is” of identity. As Burroughs explains, “[t]he IS of iden-
tity always carries the implication of that and nothing else, and it also carries
the assignment of permanent condition.”5 As someone who believed in a con-
stant program of self-improvement (and perhaps self-destruction), Burroughs
was naturally opposed to any philosophy that would preclude human evolu-
tion and development. It was this larger project of human development and
challenging the established social order that also led Burroughs to the work of
dissident Freudian and iconoclast Wilhelm Reich.
It should be noted that Burroughs was also interested in some of Wilhelm
Reich’s slightly more controversial theories that suggest orgone energy can fight
and cure cancer.6 These elements may, in fact, have been central to B urroughs’s
formulation of the virus theory of language and of many of his ideas concern-
ing addiction and kicking certain habits. We get a very clear picture of how
Burroughs envisions the interplay between orgone energy, heroin addiction,
and kicking the habit in chapter twenty-eight of the original version of Junk.
Burroughs blends his addiction theory with Reich’s cancer theories when he
4 Daniel Odier and William S. Burroughs. The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (New
York: Penguin Books, 1989), 52.
5 Odier and Burroughs, The Job, 309.
6 Burroughs, Letters 1945–1959, 58.
274 Jones
writes that “[i]n junk sickness the junk-dependent cells die and are replaced.
Cancer is a premature death process. The cancer patient shrinks. A sick junkie
shrinks … if the [orgone] accumulator is a therapy for cancer it should be ther-
apy for the after-effects of junk sickness.”7 Burroughs describes his experience
with his homemade accumulator as having “an aphrodisiac effect” and that he
felt “a rhythmic vibration” as if in the deep woods or on a city street. Further, he
states that “[a]fter using the accumulator for several days my energy came back
to normal. I began to eat and could not sleep more than eight hours. I was out
of the post cure drag. ”8 Hence, we can see that Burroughs was using his body
and his body’s need for opiates to experiment with the orgone accumulator
and test its efficacy. This device was the perfect dose of life energy to combat
the inoculation of death that Burroughs felt junk was. It is because of his per-
sonal experience with the orgone accumulator that he continued to promote
Reich’s work and theories within his own writing throughout his life.
Additionally, Reich was adamant in his opposition to the authoritarian fam-
ily structure as he believed that it was a building block of fascism. The tradi-
tional family structure of control thus needed to be challenged, as the concept
of authoritarianism and fascism were both anathema to Burroughs’s more
classical libertarian leanings. Burroughs notes that “nations are simply an ex-
tension of the family. And (possibly this is a matter for future techniques) the
whole present method of birth and reproduction. Those are basic formulas
that need to be broken down,”9 in order to break free of society’s rigid control
that infects individual experience. Shusterman’s somaesthetics also introduces
Reichian bioenergetics as a technique to counter the socially induced block-
ages that constrain individual freedom and spontaneity.10 Since population
centers contain numerous families, these building blocks of hyper nationalism
are challenged in Burroughs’s novels.
It is clear through his writing on the body that Burroughs was interested in
its function as both an objective and subjective feature. However, more cru-
cially he viewed the body as co-equal (at least) to the mind as a perceptive
organ and experience-processing medium. One place that this can be seen is in
his essay “On Freud and the Unconscious” (1985), where Burroughs states that
Freud’s concepts of the id, ego, and superego, “floating in a vacuum without any
reference to the human nervous system, strike me as dubious.”11 This leads to
a discussion of the efficacy of manufacturing emotions (or at least emotional
7 William S. Burroughs, Junky: The Definitive Text of “junk” (New York: Grove Press, 2012), 135.
8 Burroughs, Junky, 135–136.
10 Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2000), 174–178.
11 William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine (New York: Grove Press, 2013), 91.
responses): “irrational fear, aggression, anxiety can be produced by electrical

stimulation of certain brain areas.”12 While Burroughs clearly states that he is
not “a materialist,” he does “insist that anything that affects the human nervous
system must have a point of reference that is a definite location in the nervous
system.”13 Therefore, Burroughs is locating consciousness within the somatic
realm and emphasizing the role of the body as sentient and thinking.
As it was Burroughs’s quest to move his literary output forward in order to
connect with his readers’ unconscious minds, it is no surprise that his writ-
ing was based on ideas he found in the works of Reich, Korzybski, and Walter.
In addition, since Burroughs was a believer in the concept of a corporeal lo-
cus for human consciousness, it makes sense that he would gravitate to the
places in these authors’ works that correspond to a recognition of the body’s
centrality in experience and cognition. The theories of Korzybski help to in-
form these ideas about consciousness since Burroughs interpreted Korzybski’s
views on consciousness as “the reaction of the organism as a whole to its total
environment.”14 Therefore, experience and cognition must be connected to the
body. Korzybski writes that “[i]nvestigation shows the possibility of a simple
and obvious physiological theory of the use of our nervous system, which auto-
matically leads to desirable psycho-logical, semantic states of general sanity.”15
Hence, much like his counterparts in the realm of body-centered therapies
(Moshe Feldenkrais and F.M. Alexander) Korzybski understands, via his gen-
eral semantics, the specific psychological use of the components of the ner-
vous system. Apart from Burroughs’s promotion of and devotion to Korzybski’s
semantics, this paper will examine the body as part of the body-mind, as the
site of experience, and as a storehouse for memory.
We should consider the links between the evolution of Burroughs’s
thoughts on the body-mind problem and the roots of somaesthetics. One of
the strongest points of connection between Burroughs’s somatic philosophy
and Shusterman’s somaesthetics is the relation of Feldenkrais with the work of
Korzybski. In an interview with Edward Rosenfeld (1973) that focuses primarily
on awareness and consciousness, Feldenkrais notes:
Cold and warm are not opposite. Cold is just a little less warm than warm,
and that there is less mobility of atoms and electrons when it is cold.
This is not an opposition. Korzybski has already pointed out that this is
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 92.
14 Ibid., 97.
15 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and Gen-
eral Semantics (Brooklyn: Institute of General Semantics, 1995), 316.
276 Jones
i nfantile thinking. This comes from that structure of ours which demands
simple opposition.16
This minor, almost casual, reference to Korzybski is important in that it in-

dicates that Feldenkrais was familiar with the linguist, and these brief few
sentences indeed distill some of the key points of Korzybski’s theory as it re-
lates to language and concepts. More important, however, is the link between
Korzybski’s view of the body and certain somatic practices. Korzybski advo-
cated a relaxation technique for awareness to commence his teachings and
lectures. Charlotte Schuchardt Read notes that “[a]t the seminars of general
semantics Korzybski insisted that everyone should become relaxed, because
he felt that it was not only verbal work that was needed—awareness of how
we speak and think—but awareness of our organism.”17 She further notes that
“it was unusual for a student, when they thought that in general semantics we
talked about ‘thinking,’ to include, ‘How does our body respond?’”18 Thus, at the
core of Korzybski’s semantics is an awareness of the body in order to be cogni-
zant of the ways in which the soma reacts to thoughts, words, and abstraction.
The relation of the body-mind to Korzybski’s theory on language is com-
plex, but relevant to the ideas found in Burroughs’s work. Korzybski notes
that “some of the psycho-logical problems enormously complex and difficult
to reach, or even inaccessible are solved, not by preaching, but by the most
simple and elementary physiological training [emphasis in the original text].”19
Korzybski’s awareness of the efficacy of physiological training as a means to
correct psychological problems shows a clear understanding of the impor-
tance of the Feldenkrais Method as a means to train the mind via the use of
the body. Korzybski furthers his commitment to somatic practices when he
states that the usefulness of such techniques is “a fact which has been verified
empirically.”20 This illustrates that Korzybski’s theories were, at their core, so-
matically based and concerned with heightening cognition by improving the
function of the body; these are the same goals as somaesthetics.
16 Moshe Feldenkrais, Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais (Berke-
ley: North Atlantic Books, 2010), 194.
17 Louise Boedeker, “Charlotte Schuchardt Read on Sensory Awareness,” etc: A Review of
General Semantics 62, no. 4 (2005): 439.
18 Ibid., 440.
19 Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 316.
20 Ibid.
2 Drugs, Language, and the Body
The link between Burroughs and Shusterman’s somaesthetics comes from

Reich and from Korzybski’s theories (via Feldenkrais) but also through appli-
cation of somaesthetic theory to the use of drugs. In an article “Entheogens
and Education: Exploring the Potential of Psychoactives as Educational Tools”
(2003), Ken Tupper suggests that certain drugs (entheogens), also classed as
phantastica, so named due to their association with imagination, can have un-
told benefits in a learning environment.21 One of Tupper’s key points is the
idea that the value of entheogens comes from the fundamental limits of the
educational process in the western world. He suggests that education (and
by extension the entire process of teaching) misses out on the “cognitive, aes-
thetic, somatic, and spiritual insights that so many people ... have derived from
their entheogenic experiences.”22 The role of the aesthetic and somatic brings
a natural connection to Shusterman’s somaesthetic project, and the inclusion
of a footnote on Tupper’s work would suggest that Shusterman is not opposed
to the use of his theories as a means of legitimizing the closely controlled drug
experience.23 Tupper also notes, correctly, in utilizing somaesthetics that Shus-
terman is concerned with “the limits of logic and language.”24 If the limits of
language drove some of Shusterman’s earlier works of literary criticism, there
would be further common philosophical ground between his work and that
of Burroughs.25 It is also of note that the skepticism towards language in these
diverse thinkers leads to a place where the body (or perhaps the body-mind
nexus) becomes the focal point for learning and transcendence.
During the period between the publication of Junky and the writing of
Queer, Burroughs took a lengthy journey to South America in search of yagè
(also known as ayahuasca) a legendary vine that allegedly allowed shamans
to contact the spirit world and enabled other, less shamanically inclined,
adventurers to develop telepathy and tap into an expanded consciousness.
Burroughs sought yagè to expand his knowledge of the body, its functions,
and responses as a way to further his overall project. The outcomes of these
21 Kenneth W. Tupper, “Entheogens & Education: Exploring the Potential of Psychoactives

as Educational Tools,” Journal of Drug Education and Awareness 1, no. 2 (2003): 146.
22 Ibid., 147.
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 39.
24 Tupper, “Entheogens & Education,” 153.
25 Richard Shusterman, The Object of Literary Criticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984); and T.S.
Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
278 Jones
e xperiments and Burroughs’s continued investigation into the body-mind/

language problem have been explored by some of his earlier critics, such as
Robin Lydenberg in her 1985 essay “Notes from the Orifice: Language and the
Body in William Burroughs.” In this article Lydenberg investigates the problem
through the primary metaphor of the anus in Burroughs’s work.26 Lydenberg
also challenges Serge Grunberg’s book A la recherche d’un corps: Langage et
silence dans I’oeuvre de William S. Burroughs, which she defines as too narrow27
because it only examines Burroughs through the lens of psychoanalytic theory
and Cary Nelson’s “The End of the Body: Radical Space in Burroughs.”28
Some of Burroughs’s earliest thoughts on language are codified in a 1966
interview with John Calder, where he states that words “can stand in the way of
the nonbody experience.”29 This statement raises a natural question of autho-
rial intent because Burroughs’s writing is so deeply laden with images of the
body (and of incredibly vivid descriptions of bodily processes, be they drug use
and abuse, sexual imagery, or violent executions performed for the voyeuristic
pleasure of an audience) that we must confront what, precisely, he meant by
“nonbody.” It seems that Burroughs as an author was, at the very least, inter-
ested in the body as the subjective site of cultural norms and practices, even
if Burroughs the philosopher was (at this stage in his career) ready to “leave
the body behind,” a step he felt was crucial to humanity’s development and
survival.30 Relating to his concept of “nonbody,” Burroughs cites a difference
between his writing and that of Samuel Beckett: “Beckett wants to go inward ...
I am aimed in the other direction: outward.”31 This idea places Beckett and
Burroughs as the two heads of Janus, joined together yet focused in opposite
directions. One way to rectify the disparity between these two points is to
consider that Burroughs was driving at a new way of presenting a more ho-
listic view of the body-mind dichotomy. While it seems in these quotations
that Burroughs privileges the mind over the body, his statements on Aristo-
telian philosophy (in the same interview) reveal that he was not so ready to
accept the concept of a mind that is distinct from the body. Burroughs notes
26 Robin Lydenberg, “Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in William Burroughs,”
Contemporary Literature 26, no. 1 (1985): 55–73.
27 Serge Grünberg, “A la recherche d’un corps:” Langage et silence dans l’oeuvre de William S.
Burroughs (Paris: Seuil, 1979).
28 Cary Nelson, “The End of the Body: Radical Space in Burroughs,” in William S. Burroughs
at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959–1989, ed. Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 119–32.
29 William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 2.
30 Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind, 2.
31 Ibid.
that “either-or thinking is just not accurate thinking ... I feel the Aristotelian
construct is one of the greatest shackles of Western civilization.”32 Hence,
Burroughs constantly struggles against the construct of either body or mind
and their separation from one another.
In a sense, when Burroughs suggests that he is working towards a “nonbody”
experience, what he is actually moving toward (in an anti-‘either-or’ construct)
is a recognition of the unification of the body and the mind in a way that sub-
verts the role of language as a control mechanism. This raises the issue of
the cultural construction of the body and of language; as Shusterman notes,
“whether we speak of the body-mind or body and mind, we are dealing with
what is fundamentally shaped by culture.”33 In that way Burroughs himself is
working to both destroy and employ culture as a means of attaining freedom
as he challenges “languages, values, social institutions, and artistic media” in
the service of his battle with the forces of control.34 This linguistic subversion
allows the subject/reader to break free of conditioning and lead a truly fulfilled
life.
The skepticism towards language is common territory in twentieth-century
literature and philosophy. One need only look at the pleas of the titular char-
acter of T.S. Eliot’s play Sweeney Agonistes, who states “I gotta use words when
I talk to you/ But if you understand or if you don’t/ That’s nothing to me and
nothing to you.”35 The character of Sweeney (like Burroughs) knows that word-
based language (and specifically spoken words) can be misunderstood. The
resignation of Sweeney is, however, in contrast to Burroughs, who felt that lan-
guage was a preeminent mechanism of a system of control that kept humanity
from reaching its potential. This revelation caused Burroughs (and the char-
acters in his novels) to become antagonistic toward language so much so that
he broke syntax and narrative structures as a fundamental part of his works of
the 1960s. Burroughs’s thoughts on language would evolve to the point that he
would famously claim that “the word is now a virus.”36 He would begin work-
ing towards a communication that was beyond written language, a goal that
he never achieved. In the works that this essay engages, Junky, Queer, and Na-
ked Lunch, there is a clear trajectory toward this confrontation with languages.
Junky is a straightforward narrative, Queer is transitional in that Burroughs
32 Ibid., 5–6.
33 Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2012), 27.
34 Ibid., 27.
35 T.S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Faber & Faber, 2004), 133.
36 William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text (New York: Grove Press,
2014), 56.
280 Jones
uses extended hallucinatory sequences, and Naked Lunch is a free form novel
that, as Burroughs noted, is close to automatic writing.37
3 The City and the Addicted Soma
Burroughs understood the living, breathing nature of the city, and he illus-
trated this in his first published novel Junky (1953). Understanding the ebbs
and flows of New York was essential to his fictionalized persona William Lee, a
junky and a drug dealer. After being accosted by a client’s friend, Lee prepares
to make an exchange, writing “I had two caps in my hand and waited for one
of the empty spaces you run into in a city.”38 These spaces are crucial, and im-
portantly mirror the empty spaces that exist within the body, functional voids
that provide cushion and comfort for bodily processes. The spaces and crowds
that Burroughs describes as part of his living and breathing cityscapes were
prefigured in the works of both William James, who in The Principles of Psy-
chology refers to “this crowded age,”39 and Nietzsche, who in Beyond Good and
Evil refers to “the century of the crowd.”40 The crowd, for Burroughs, provides
cover for illegal activities, so an understanding of the way the crowd moves is
essential. Beyond using the city as cover, Burroughs uses a dystopian backdrop
to explain the horrors of opiate withdrawal, writing about his powerful visions
of “New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in and out of
empty bars and drugstores.”41
The somatic reaction to a shortage of opiates in the body is to map a short-
age of the addictive substance onto the city itself and to see it in decay and va-
cant in ways that mirror the death and decay of the addict’s body. Importantly,
for the character of Lee, bars and drugstores form vital nexus points where his
need is satiated and where he both sells and purchases drugs. The relationship
of restaurant, bar, and drugstore roughly correlate to the digestive system and
various neurotransmitters and chemicals, such as endorphins and the endo-
cannabinoid system, within the body. Burroughs had a special affection for the
area of 103rd and Broadway, stating that it was “like any other Broadway block”
but that it “is junk territory. Junk haunts the cafeteria…roams up and down the
37 Burroughs, Letters 1945–1959, 355.

38 Burroughs, Junky, 216.
39 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), v.
40 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York:
Vintage, 1966), 197.
block.”42 Burroughs notes that even though “there are no more junkies at 103rd
and Broadway…the feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows
you along the block, then falls away.”43 In this way, opiates are an ever-present
and constant source of pleasure and pain for the city as well as the user. These
lingering sensations that Burroughs describes for the urban locations where
opiates might be procured correlates with Burroughs’s idea that once you are
an addict your body is always susceptible to reigniting a habit due to “perma-
nent cellular alteration,” suggesting that “you can stop using junk, but you are
never off after your first habit.”44 Junk, for Burroughs, alters the urban land-
scape in the same way that it alters the body, creating new pathways and break-
ing down structures. These alterations allow the characters in Junky to interact
with the novel’s urban locations in ways that defy conventional understanding
of feeling and perceptions.
Burroughs’s/Lee’s first experience with opiates, which he chronicles in
Junky, produces a subtle shift in the narrative of the text. The narrator de-
scribes a key part of his first experience with opiates in terms of the physical
effects. “Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck,
a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones
so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As
this relaxing wave spread through my tissues,” it is followed by a heightened
level of mental distress and a deep sense of anxiety manifesting physically, as
he “felt nauseous.”45 The visions and physical toll continued: “I experienced a
strong feeling of fear” and “I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures
passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger
and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress
carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear
of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.”46 In writing about
his first opiate experience, Burroughs shows the seduction and the horror of
the drug; Lee feels relaxed, and his muscles are loose, which are undoubtedly
pleasurable feelings. However, they are placed in stark contrast to feelings of
nausea and the fear of the physical impact of death. Regarding the connection
to the city, the visions are recounted in sensations of pleasure and then in a
series of images rooted in the city: neon lights, streets and traffic, a waitress.
This progression of images moves Lee from his calm, placid state into the city
42 Ibid., 67.
43 Ibid., 69.
44 Ibid., 152.
45 Ibid., 12.
46 Ibid., 13.
282 Jones
and the general fear and dis-ease that addicts are subjected to within the urban
sphere of mid-century America.
In order to support his habit, Burroughs/Lee found himself turned from Ivy
League graduate to petty thief. While partnered with Roy (a junky, pickpocket,
and lush-worker), Lee began to “work the hole,” code for robbing drunks on the
subway. The somatic implications of this act are described by Roy: “When you
take a lush on the car you got to gauge yourself to the movement of the car. If
you get the right rhythm you can work it out even if the mooch is awake.”47
This once again shows that the rhythms of the city are of vital importance to
members of the criminal underworld and that being attuned to these rhythms
is essential not only for robbing a drunk commuter, but, by extension for sur-
vival. Burroughs notes that every injection of “junk is an inoculation of death
that keeps the body in a condition of emergency” and that “when the junk is
cut off, emergency reactions continue. Sensations sharpen, the addict is aware
of his visceral processes to an uncomfortable degree.”48 These responses to the
lack of junk and the various ebbs and flows of the city take on their own role
as shown by the connection of heightened sensory response to the presence
of opiates.
The heightened senses that Burroughs/Lee developed become specifical-
ly linked with some of the numerous figures and locations where junk was
bought, sold, and consumed, such as 103rd and Broadway mentioned above
and various locations in New Orleans covered later in this essay. Oliver H arris
likens Burroughs’s detailed writings on the milieu of people, locations, and
customs to an “ethnographic field report, detailing the territories and habits
of various urban American subcultures and documenting their emergence or
decline in the immediate postwar era.”49 This connection between soma, en-
vironment, and opiates allows Burroughs/Lee to have access to levels of con-
sciousness and connection with the cities he inhabits.
Burroughs describes the somatic response that he has in such locations as
he writes about arriving in New Orleans. “I don’t spot junk neighborhoods by
the way they look, but by the feel… I am walking along and suddenly the junk
in my cells moves and twitches like the dowser’s wand: ‘Junk Here!’”50 Lee lists
off a handful of neighborhoods that have that junk feel, including St. Charles
and Poydras, Lee Circle, and Canal and Exchange Place. This passage occurs
47 Ibid., 38.
48 Ibid., 125.
49 Oliver Harris, “Introduction,” in Junky: The Definitive Text of Junk, by William S. Burroughs
(New York: Grove Press, 2012), i.
just after the protagonist of Junky arrives in New Orleans clean and free of opi-
ates after a stay at the Lexington Narcotics Farm. Despite not currently having
a heroin habit, Lee is still able to somatically connect with the latent junk in
and around these areas. By tuning into the rhythms of the street and the latent
presence of junk, Burroughs is suggesting a highly tuned (if twisted) somatic
response. His body has been so permeated not only by the chemicals of the
drug trade but by long-term rituals involved in securing, preparing, and imbib-
ing these substances.
Burroughs heightened his own somaesthetic response to elements of soci-
ety and the drug trade in ways that directly correlate to how he had trained his
body. This also suggests a reading of Burroughs’s texts that is predicated along
background/foreground lines.51 The relationship of these two principles comes
up time and again within Shusterman’s writing on somaesthetics and becomes
relevant to a study of how Burroughs (as well as his literary persona and char-
acters) sense and feel junk in the cities that they inhabit. It is clear that in
these instances Burroughs’s characters are in touch with the background, as it
is “beyond or beneath [their] foregrounding focus” and their interpretation of
the background in these situations is “based on some prior understanding.”52
In the case of the fictional Lee, his use of narcotics and a specific attention to
the way that opiates affect his body and mind, have created a space in which
the background is being recognized and acted upon by his flesh. Thus Lee (and
Burroughs’s other characters) are deeply connected to the underground ele-
ments of the cities they inhabit. This idea is akin to Burroughs’s own core be-
liefs about the sentient nature of the entire body, a point summed up by Alfred
Korzybski’s maxim that “[y]ou think as much with your big toe as with your
brain…and a lot more effectively.”53 This idea forms the basis of what Korzyb-
ski referred to as neural muscular intentioned behavior that helped provide
the foundation for his General Semantics.
Korzybski recounts many experiments on animals (i.e. worms, moths, etc.)
that proved the idea that cognition and memory exist within the “organism as
a whole” rather than simply in the nervous system or brain. One of these ex-
periments involves “training” a worm to follow a certain route and using nega-
tive reinforcement (sandpaper and electric shock) if the worm took the wrong
path. After the worm was trained or conditioned the experimenters began dis-
secting the worm, first cutting it nearly in half to watch its movements. Then
they removed the brain, cut the worm in half again and so on. At each phase of
51 Shusterman, Thinking through the Body, 65.

52 Ibid., 55–56.
53 Burroughs, The Adding Machine, 97.
284 Jones
the experiment the part of the worm that was without a brain or connection
to the larger sections of the nervous system still retained the memory of which
path to take in order to avoid negative consequences. This idea is extended
to the (almost) molecular level when Korzybski states that “colloidal behav-
ior is exhibited by materials of a very fine subdivision…which involves surface
activities and electrical characters…[A]ll life processes, ‘feelings,’ ‘emotions,’
‘thought,’ semantic relations, and so forth involve at least electrical currents.”54
If we consider the movement of the junk-dependent cells in Lee’s body as
only simple reflexes, then we must also consider Merleau-Ponty’s point that
“reflexes are never blind processes: they adjust themselves to a ‘direction’ of
the situation, and express our orientation towards a ‘behavioural setting’ just
as much as the action of the ‘geographical setting’ upon us.”55 This implies
some deeper knowledge (like Korzybski’s organism as a whole idea) on the
muscular level, for if the process is not blind and can react to both behavioral
and geographic settings, then some consciousness must, as both Korzybski
and Merleau-Ponty imply, be at work.
The somatic practice of injecting heroin and other opiates, is centered on
the repeated perforation of the skin. The rite is performed many times a day
and takes on the hallmarks of a religious ritual: the need for sacred instru-
ments (needles, spoons, droppers), a sacrificial substance (either the junk or
the junky), a structure and hierarchy. The last is evident when Lee is speaking
about a friend and fellow addict named Bill Gains, whom Lee describes as a
“prelate of junk,” noting that “Gains was a mere parish priest in the hierarchy
of junk. He would speak of the higher-ups in a voice of sepulchral awe.”56 With
the trappings and power structure of a religion in place, Lee (and by extension
Burroughs) would perform this ritual perforation of the flesh numerous times
a day. This constant puncturing of the soma created the causes and conditions
for the character to experience a kind of permeability, a concept described
by Antonio Damasio: “Life is carried out inside a boundary…the selectively
permeable wall that separates the internal environment from the external
environment.”57 This concept is also found in the later works of John Dewey.
When elucidating his work on the transactional nature of organisms, Dewey
observes that “[t]hey live, as much, in processes across and ‘through’ skins as in
54 Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 121.

55 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2002), 91.
56 Burroughs, Junky, 76–77.
57 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Con-
sciousness (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999), 137.
processes ‘within skins.’”58 In this way, the life of the junky in the city is carried
out within a membrane that is less “selectively permeable” due to the constant
violation of the flesh. In turn, this more permeable somatic boundary allows
the city (and all of its essence) to permeate Lee, which creates more points
of connection and intersection with the city and makes Lee more susceptible
to the various elements of the city that would cause his body to twitch “like a
dowser’s wand” in response to the latent presence of opiates and the opiate
trade.59
This somatic sense and response is akin to another concept Damasio em-
ploys, namely homeostasis. Damasio defines homeostasis as an “unwitting
and unconscious urge to stay alive [that] betrays itself inside a simple cell in
a complicated operation.”60 Burroughs notes that kicking a heroin habit in-
volves the death of junk-dependent cells; thus the twitch that Burroughs feels,
via his permeable flesh, is an attempt to stay alive. This raises the question of
who (or what) has ownership of the body. If the junk-dependent cells have
this level of control and autonomy one could consider that they are the true
life-force within. The interconnection between homeostasis and Burroughs’s
larger somatic project suggests a consciousness of the flesh that is rooted in
the junk-dependent cells and their latent consciousness. As Damasio notes,
“homeostasis requires something not unlike perception in order to sense an
imbalance; it requires something not unlike implicit memory…it requires
something not unlike a skill to perform a preemptive or corrective action.”61
As Burroughs attempts to stay clean, the junk-dependent cells in his body are
driven by a desire to achieve homeostasis, creating a somatic response to the
cultural and geographic cues that signify the presence of opiates within the
city.
Not all of the action in the text is motivated by the titular narcotic. As a
member of the counterculture, Burroughs/Lee had the opportunity to write
about the pursuit of other drugs, even if they took a secondary role to heroin
use. In one example, after failing to meet with his connection for morphine
syrettes, Lee spends an evening with Jack’s girlfriend, Mary, traveling the city
looking for cannabis. That mission turned into Lee’s first experience with
Benzedrine: “Ronnie’s was a spot near 52nd and Sixth where musicians came
for fried chicken and coffee after one pm…Mary cracked a benzedrine tube
58 John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 16: 1949–1952, Essays, Typescripts, and
Knowing and the Known (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 119.
60 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 137.
61 Ibid.
286 Jones
e xpertly, extracting the folded paper.”62 After Mary instructed Lee to roll up
the paper and swallow it with coffee Burroughs notes that “[t]he paper gave off
a sickening odor of menthol. Several people nearby sniffed and smiled.”63 By
stating that this is a place where musicians come for sustenance, and immedi-
ately noting that those around him smiled (knowingly), Burroughs is showing
how interlinked 1940s urban jazz culture was with the idea of drug use and
getting high.
Moving from one city to another is a hallmark of Burroughs’s early work (as
well as his life from the 1950s through the mid-1970s). After completing and
publishing Junky (1953), he used material that was excised from the final manu-
script to begin work on Queer. Although Burroughs completed the book in the
mid-1950s, the manuscript was lost and the book was not published until 1985.
Queer is set primarily in Mexico City, with the city and the bodies that inhabit
it functioning and reacting in dissimilar ways to the characters portrayed in
Junky. For example, there is no implied somatic sense of finding or locating
opiates. Rather, the protagonist (Lee) gets his fix from a variety of dubious
sources (i.e., other addicts and even through the Mexican government pro-
gram). The bustling, fictionalized Mexico City is then replaced as the central
setting of the narrative in Queer by the jungles of South America. In contrast
to areas teeming with humanity and other travelers in the international drug
and homosexual underground of the 1940–1950s, the jungle, despite being an
area flush with life, is described as “empty of life.”64 Indeed, after an unsuc-
cessful hunting expedition, Lee claims that “[t]hey [Lee and Allerton] did not
see a living thing in the jungle.”65 This rejection of life in the jungle is linked
with the notion that opiates are life-preserving for the addict. Since there are
no (or few) opiates in the jungle, there is no life in the jungle. These two areas
(city and jungle) become contrasted in Queer, where life and therefore bodies
are associated only with the developed settings of cities. Yet, the quest that Lee
takes on is the search for a mythical drug within the jungle (yagé, also known
as ayahuasca, or Banisteriopsis caapi), which will help him connect with others
via telepathy as well as cure his opiate addiction.
Burroughs writes about cities as if they are alive and about the jungle as
if it is lacking any living thing. This complicates the metaphor of drug use in
the text. He states that “[j]unk is an inoculation of death;” therefore the drug

63 Ibid.
64 William S. Burroughs, Queer, 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2010),
118.
65 Ibid.,119.
of choice is associated with a lack of life while being exclusively linked to ur-
ban areas. This association is contrasted to the idea that the jungle, where aya-
huasca is located, is lacking in living things. This in turn means that in order to
find a proper entheogenic, Lee must travel toward an absence of life, putting
himself in harm’s way. If successful, he would find his ayahuasca experience
and use it as a tool for growth as well as to kick his addiction.
Connections to the body are more intense within Queer, as illustrated
by Lee’s pining for human contact and his fascination with the character of
Allerton which manifests in increasingly visceral ways. For example, while on
a trip to the cinema to see Cocteau’s Orpheus, Burroughs writes that “[i]n the
dark theater Lee could feel his body pull toward Allerton, an amoeboid pro-
toplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s
body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera
and genitals.”66 Lee, as constructed by Burroughs, is aware of what his body
is doing but seems detached and not in full control. This is also one of the
earlier written pieces that prefigures the schlupp that has become a famous
Burroughsian idea in later work, notably in the “Bradley the Buyer” section of
Naked Lunch. For Burroughs, the schlupp is the combination of two beings into
one sentient entity. Burroughs challenges philosophy’s idea that the body is
a “mere servant” while still acknowledging that it is a torturous prison of de-
ception, temptation, and pain.67 Almost in response to Lee’s hunger, “Allerton
shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit.”68
This sets up both bodies as more than servants, as both are cognizant of the
drives, desires, and apprehension within the other soma. When one considers
this interpretation of the body alongside the themes of Cocteau’s film (and the
Greek plays that inspired it), themes of love, loss, and obsession, there is ample
evidence for Lee that the body is indeed the locus of emotion and cognition.
In “The Black Meat” section of Naked Lunch Burroughs describes the plaza
area of the fictional city of Interzone in somatic terms as “a vast kidney-shaped
plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cu-
bicles and cafés, some a few feet deep, some extending out of sight in a net-
work of rooms and corridors.”69 The shape of the kidney serves an important
narrative function in that the perforations and chambers are highly suggestive
of nephrons, medullary interstitium, and individual filters (glomeruli), a place
66 Ibid., 32–33.
68 Burroughs, Queer, 32–33.
69 William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (New York: Penguin Books Ltd.,
2015), 45.
288 Jones
of cleansing and purification. As this section happens immediately after Lee

leaves Mexico City (and the recognizable real world), this sets up the idea that
the city of Interzone is directly connected with the human body. And, as it is
specifically the kidney, it suggests that contact with Interzone will cleanse or
purify the narrator. Further in the novel the city is said to be constructed of
the “[d]istant rumble of stomachs…Poisoned gas pigeons rain from Northern
Lights…The reservoirs are empty…Brass statues crash through hungry squares
and alleys of the gaping city…Probing for a vein in the junk sick morning.”70
This cements the relationship of the processes of the body with the city and
adds the connection of gaping alleys to veins, which suggests a deep connec-
tion between the narrator, his addiction, and the city.
4 Self-Transformation through Writing and Lights
In line with Burroughs’s belief in the importance of the body for achieving
transcendence, one could use the works of Michel Foucault as a lens to read
Burroughs’s work, in particular, “Technologies of the Self” and “Self Writing.”71
All four of the technologies Foucault indicates (of production, of sign systems,
of power, and of self-transformation) often work together, and the urban envi-
ronments that Burroughs constructs in his texts are the perfect setting to per-
form and describe such technologies of the self. Burroughs uses his own body
as a laboratory for transformation and transcendence that he then illustrates
within the texts through the description of various actions and their effects on
his inner and outer wellbeing. His texts become a kind of instruction manual
for any interested party. In addition, Burroughs’s practice of self-writing pro-
vides the foundation for his own personal transformation. Not only his fiction
writing but also his correspondence is significant here. In fact, in a 1954 let-
ter to Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs noted that “maybe the real novel is letters to
you.”72 Thus, when Burroughs creates his routines, via letters to Ginsberg (and
others), he is performing an act of creation and self-growth via “manifesting
oneself to oneself and others.”73 The bodies, cities, and other urban settings
that Burroughs manifests in his works are “narrative[s] of the self” and so func-
tion as the “two strategic points” or “privileged objects” that Foucault defines
70 Ibid., 166.
71 Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1998), 207–251.
72 Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (New York: Twelve, 2014), 301.
73 Foucault, Ethics, 215–216.
as “the interferences of soul and body (impressions rather than actions)” and
“leisure activity (rather than external events).”74 In this way Burroughs’s own
somatic project, and the writings that emerged from it, explore and complicate
ideas of the soul and the body, as Burroughs always maintained his belief in
the Judeo-Christian notion of a soul and an afterlife. Because of this ingrained
belief system his writing was, in some ways, a confessional for his transgres-
sions and failures.
The act of writing takes on many forms and usages in Burroughs’s work. No-
tably, writing is a defined work on the character of the author, an analysis tool,
a technology (in Foucauldian terms), and a medicine. In the preface for the
1985 edition of Queer, Burroughs states that he viewed “writing as inoculation,”
suggesting that once something is committed to written language it “loses the
power of surprise.”75 Burroughs was concerned with the influence of more au-
thoritarian leaning ideologies and thus crafted characters and conurbations in
order to write a better future, simultaneously inoculating himself against the
constraints of his past, his crimes and criminal records, as well as tradition. In
this way, literary forms are even robbed of their power not only to surprise, but
to punish and determine a person’s place or value.
Burroughs often claimed that “[a]nything that can be done chemically can be
done in other ways, with sufficient knowledge of the mechanisms involved.”76
Burroughs even goes so far as to claim in a letter to Allen Ginsberg that “it’s
all electric brain stimulation. As you may know you can now make someone
come by pressing a button.”77 This returns us to the work of W. Grey Walter and
his flicker research. Walter used flicker in conjunction with an eeg scanner so
that he could see the responses to various rhythms on the brain waves of his
test subjects. These experiments began with Walter’s interest in epilepsy dur-
ing the 1930s, specifically in the role epilepsy (or similar conditions) played in
human evolution. Further, Walter believed that flicker experiments could be
the basis for “indiscriminate, widespread bodily reform.”78 The idea of bodily
reform fits well with the positions of both Reich and Korzybski, as they felt the
need to re-evaluate how we use the body and how we construct ideas about the
relationships between body and mind. On a physical level, stroboscopic flicker
“appeared to break down some of the physiological barriers between differ-
ent regions of the brain,” which meant that “the stimulus of flicker received
74 Ibid., 216.
75 Burroughs, Queer, appendix.
77 Miles, Call Me Burroughs, 244.
78 Walter, The Living Brain, 131.
290 Jones
by the visual projection area of the cortex was breaking bounds—its ripples
were overflowing into other areas.” These overflow areas, for Burroughs, are
linked with synesthetic experiences like “hearing colors, seeing sounds and
even odors,” all of which can be likened to drug experiences.79
Because Burroughs was concerned with the concept of control, he valued
the use of flicker for both its ability to enable a subject to transcend ordinary
states of consciousness, and also as a means to fracture (or cut-up) and gain en-
try into the deep levels of a person’s psychological matrix in order to determine
what kinds of programming are going on beneath the surface of conscious-
ness. For example, if an individual is programmed by society with a certain set
of values or prejudices, it would stand to reason that exposing him or her to
a flicker experiment could be a means of exposing or heightening awareness
of that programming, thus allowing the subject to make a conscious decision
about what (if any) action he or she should take. This idea and use of flicker
is directly discussed in Walter’s 1953 book The Living Brain, in which he notes
that “the alpha rhythms, as might be expected, are a source of more general in-
formation about personality.”80 Hence, as Burroughs studied flicker and sought
to deploy it, both in real life and throughout his written and multimedia texts,
he was well aware of the fact that it was the eight to thirteen cycles per sec-
ond rhythm (associated with alpha waves) that he needed to manipulate and
explore. This most often shows up in the motif of flickering lights and electric
currents in Naked Lunch.
Since the late nineteenth century when humanity developed the means
to cheaply and efficiently generate, harness, and transport it, electricity has
been a key part of urban life. Places as diverse as Paris, France and Scranton,
Pennsylvania (nicknamed the electric city) have embraced lights and elec-
tricity as core parts of their identity. In Burroughs’s works, cities are electric
and city lights are often referred to in terms of flickering or flashing. While
there is a larger argument to be made that links the electric nature of the
city to the electrical charges that run through our bodies, I will only focus
on one element here, the relationship of flickering lights in Naked Lunch to
the flicker experiments of Grey Walter, and the related Dreamachine exper-
iments of Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The flickering lights of the city are a
consistent motif throughout Naked Lunch, and I maintain that this was Bur-
roughs’s way of instructing his readers without being didactic. For exam-
ple, within Naked Lunch Burroughs writes about mainlining cocaine or C:

80 Walter, The Living Brain, 147.
“You can smell it going in clean and cold… a rush of pleasure right through
the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in little white
explosions.”81 Thus, Burroughs is linking the introduction of drugs to a visual
flicker (tiny white explosions) as a way of reinforcing his ideas of synthesizing
chemical reactions with light. A few pages later in the same section of Naked
Lunch, he writes “[t]he C charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flash-
ing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm…Of course the effect of C could be
produced by an electric current activating C channels.”82 For Burroughs and
his characters the electricity of the city is channeled into them via drugs, yet,
the way Burroughs characterizes these experiences through his mirrored de-
scriptions of flashing lights, movement, and structures, suggests that the body
is connected to the city and that drugs may provide an additional conduit for
this connection.
While I do not believe that Burroughs would have been happy to be consid-
ered a philosopher, at least with regard to the more academic definition that
the word has come to embody, it is clear that somatic philosophers such as
Foucault and Shusterman are of a somewhat kindred spirit to Burroughs. One
of Foucault’s and Shusterman’s key goals is to bring back the idea of philosophy
as an art of living and to bring attention to the combination of bodily disci-
plines and philosophical writing as an “important tool for artfully working on
oneself—both as a medium of knowledge and of self-transformation.”83 This
goal places their theories as well as those of Burroughs squarely in an avant-
garde tradition of lived experience and is illustrative of the twentieth-century
avant-garde’s transatlantic conversation. Burroughs writes extensively about
the body, and the descriptions that he conjures proceed in a way that clearly
draws the reader’s attention to her/his body. This effect is amplified when com-
bined with the multimedia practices that Burroughs and company engaged in
throughout the period covered in this paper. On a personal level, Burroughs
felt that writing was one of the key therapies that he could undertake in order
to transcend out of a deeply flawed being and into a better person. Thus, as
Burroughs constructed the universe of the Nova Trilogy in the 1960s and re-
lated multimedia projects, he was self-fashioning and working out a system of
philosophy and knowledge that could be passed on to his readers.
81 Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 22.

82 Ibid., 25.
83 Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New
York: Routledge, 1996), 3.
292 Jones
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and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1998.
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S. Burroughs. Paris: Seuil, 1979.
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Burroughs, ix–xxxvii. New York: Grove Press, 2012.
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Chapter 13
The Somaesthetic Sublime: Varanasi in Modern and

Contemporary Indian Art
Pradeep A. Dhillon
Are there not many holy places on this earth?

Yet which of them would equal in the balance one speck of Kashi’s dust?
Are there not many rivers running to the sea?
Yet which of them is like the River of Heaven in Kashi?
Are there not many fields of liberation on the earth?
Yet not one equals the smallest part of the city never forsaken by Shiva.
The Ganges, Shiva and Kashi: Where this trinity is watchful,
No wonder here is found the grace that leads to perfect bliss.1
1 Varanasi as a Cosmopolis
Hindus say of the city of Kashi, also called Varanasi or Banaras, that it “stands
at the center of the earth as the place of creation, and gathers the whole of the
sacred universe in a single symbolic circle, the mandala. Yet it is not an earthly
city. Kashi is said to sit above the earth as a ‘crossing place’ (tirtha) between
this shore and the ‘far shore’ of the transcendent Brahman.”2 It is said to be the
oldest inhabited city in India located on the banks of the sacred river Ganges.
This river is said to flow from Lord Shiva down to the Himalayas onto the Bay
of Bengal. It considered by most Indians, and all Hindus, as the divine made
material. This river, is also the Goddess Ganga, the consort of all three Hindu
gods: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
In the words of the lesser Hindu deity Skanda,
O Agastaya, one should not be amazed at the notion that this Ganges is
really Power, for is she not the Supreme Shakti of the Eternal Shiva, taken
the form of water?
1 Kāshī Khanda 35.7–10, cited in Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1999), dedication. The spelling of the city as “Benares” is also common and is
sometimes used in this text.
2 Eck, Banaras: City of Light, 4.

Somaesthetics, the Sublime, and Varanasi 295
The Ganges filled with the sweet wine of compassion, was sent for the
salvation of the world by Shiva, the Lord of Lords.
Good people should not think this Triple-Pathed River like the thou-
sand other earthly rivers, filled with water.3
Kashi then is not merely an earthly city. It is said to be a crossing place between
the embodied, mundane, world and spiritual transcendent. Dying in this city,
being cremated here, or even having your ashes immersed in the sacred wa-
ters of the River Ganges, is said to ensure freedom from the embodied cycle of
death and rebirth, from reincarnation.
The Sanskritist Diana Eck, seeking to comprehend the city in terms of its
place in the Hindu imagination, but as someone who stands outside the tradi-
tion, speaks somaesthetically when she says,
As we stand at the riverfront at dawn, we are challenged to comprehend

the whole of India in one sweeping glance. The India we see here reflects
the elaborate and ancient ritual tradition of Hinduism. It is a tradition
of pilgrimage to sacred places, bathing in sacred waters, and honoring
divine images. It is a city in which all of the senses are employed in the
apprehension of the divine. Its shrines are heaped with fresh flowers and
filled with the smell of incense, the chanting of prayers and the ringing
of bells. It is a tradition that has imagined and imaged God in a thousand
ways, that has been adept at discovering the divine everywhere and in
bringing every aspect of human life into the religious arena. It is a reli-
gious tradition that understands life and death as an integrated whole.
Here the smoke of the cremation pyres rises heavenward with the spires
of a hundred temples and the ashes of the dead swirl through the river
waters of the Ganges, the river of life.4
This is not to say, however, that Varanasi, like India, is not a multi-religious city.
Almost one-third of its 4.1 million inhabitants are Muslim. As noted by Rajnish
Mishra, “Muslims have always been a minority in the city, but a very promi-
nent and significant one. They have contributed to the formation of the mate-
rial and cultural essence of the city.”5 Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Christians
have established centers of pilgrimage, research and education in the city. For
the Jains, Varanasi has been a site of pilgrimage since the 8th century bce.
3 Ibid., 217.
4 Ibid., 6.
5 Rajnish Mishra, “The Minority in Banaras: Intercommunity Power Friction and Heterogene-
ity,” Voices 4, no. 1 (2014): 50.
296 Dhillon
The Buddha is said to have delivered his first sermon after enlightenment in its
suburb of Sarnath. Varanasi has been important to the development of Sikh-
ism since the early sixteenth century, and Christianity established itself here
during the 19th century. Not surprisingly, Varanasi (or Benares, or Kashi) is
called a microcosm of India. Hence, given its importance in the Indian cultural
landscape, this city looms large in the Indian visual imaginary and is often the
subject of art; including modern and contemporary Indian art.
In her chapter, “City of All India,” in Banaras: City of Light, Diana Eck pres-
ents an elegant description of all of India being represented in Varanasi, ex-
emplified within the city by the presence of pilgrimage sites from all parts of
the country. Varanasi is thus a cosmopolis. Eck also describes some of the for-
tunate and unfortunate events that have served to make Varanasi diverse, not
only within various Hindu traditions, but also in terms of social and religious
identifications. In Eck’s words, speaking of the efforts of 19th century mission-
aries to convert the Brahmins of Banaras to Christianity,
Little did Kennedy [one such missionary] dream that when the Brahmins
of Banaras went forth, it would be to the West, and they would teach
Indian music, Vedanta philosophy, Ayurvedic medicine, Hindu medita-
tion, and yogic exercises to the many millions in Europe and America
who would appreciate their message.6
In this passage, Eck places Banaras on a global platform.

Historically, all the major Indian religious traditions have had deep histori-
cal and intellectual relations with the city. Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, the
founder and first Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University in 1916, recognized
this diversity both in his fundraising efforts for the establishment of the Uni-
versity and at the actual laying of its foundation. Pandit Malviya traveled all
over India requesting and receiving funds from all sections, religious tradi-
tions, and regions of India. The Sikh maharajas of Punjab made contributions,
but so did ordinary men and women from all over India. Before the laying of
the foundation stone by the Viceroy, all religious traditions were invited by
Pandit Malviya to perform prayers to mark the auspiciousness of the occasion.
A quote demonstrating this commitment to diversity is included on the Uni-
versity’s homepage:
India is not a country of the Hindus only. It is a country of the Muslims,

the Christians and the Parsees too. The country can gain strength and

develop itself only when the people of the different communities in India
live in mutual goodwill and harmony. It is my earnest hope and prayer
that this centre of life and light which is coming into existence, will pro-
duce students who will not only be intellectually equal to the best of their
fellow students in other parts of the world, but will also live a noble life,
love their country and be loyal to the Supreme ruler.7
In this essay, I will examine the ways in which three leading Indian modern
artists – Ram Kumar (1924–2018), M.F. Hussain (1915–2011), and Paresh Amity
(1965-) – represent bodies, dead, decaying and living, in the streets of the sa-
cred city of Banaras. Specifically, I will examine how these artists represent the
concept of an iconic Indian place as they negotiate their way between tradi-
tion and modernity in both style and content. The paintings of the ancient city
by the three artists – Kumar, Maity and Hussain – represent a shifting relation-
ship with the meaning of the city and the national body politic. We see these
shifts in paintings beginning from the 1950s, shortly after the formation of the
independent, democratic Indian State, through the 1970s, when the notion of a
secular India was at its apogee, and into the late 20th and early 21st century, as
India starts to shake off its colonial past. As modern and contemporary India
seeks to identify itself on its own terms, contestations have arisen around the
concept of “Indianness,” specifically around issues of religious identifications.
Through representations of the city of Varanasi by these three artists, we see a
shift away from a modernistic notion of the city to one that signals a turn to a
postmodern sublime – one that is embodied and not merely representational.
It is important to note that despite their different orientations to the city and
its place in the Indian (particularly Hindu) moral and political imagination, all
three artists use a modernist visual vocabulary that allows identifications with
a global history of modern art. These identifications with the local but also with
the global underlie the development of Indian modern art.8 Through a focus
on these representations, I seek to deepen our understanding of the s ublime
through the lens of somaesthetics as articulated by Richard Shusterman in his
essay, “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime.”9 I will argue that taking a somaes-
thetic view of the notion of the sublime in representations of Varanasi enables
us to not only obtain a deeper appreciation of the sublime as articulated by
7 www.bhu.ac.in , accessed on October 8, 2015.

8 Pradeep A. Dhillon, “A Kantian Approach to Global Art History: The Case from Indian Mod-
ern Art,” in The Many Faces of Beauty, ed. Vittorio Hosle (South Bend: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2013), 302–325.
9 Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime,” in Thinking through the Body: Es-
says in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 145–165.
298 Dhillon
Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, but also of thinkers of the postmodern
sublime like Jean-Francois Lyotard.
2 From the Burkean to the Somaesthetic Sublime
Two remarks focused this interest on the sublime in aesthetic judgment in gen-
eral and in relation to Indian modern and contemporary art in particular. The
first came from Bertrand Russell, who found no place for the sublime, or even
aesthetics, in his history of Western philosophy. Speaking derisively of Kant, he
writes: “Like everybody else at that time, he wrote a treatise on the sublime and
the beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is
beautiful; man is sublime, woman is beautiful; and so on.”10 The second remark
was by Georg Hegel, who did indeed find a place for aesthetics in philosophy. He
even seemed to have found a place for Indian art. However, in Hegel’s view, with
the Hindu vision, due to the proliferation of gods and their representations in
most of their paintings and sculpture, all artistic efforts that seek to present the
Absolute must fail. Therefore, on his view, the Indian tradition cannot be said to
have a notion of the sublime due to the tension between the need to represent
the absolute while recognizing the impossibility of doing so. In his words:
The main difference, however, between it (the Indian sublime) and the
true Sublimity consists in this, that the Hindoo imagination does not in
the wild exuberance of its images bring about the essential nothingness
of the phenomena which it makes use of, but rather through just this very
measurelessness and unlimited range of its visions believes that it has an-
nihilated and made to vanish all difference and opposition between the
Absolute and its mode of configuration. In this extreme type of exaggera-
tion, then, there is ultimately little of real kinship with either true sym-
bolism or Sublimity: it is equally remote from the true sphere of beauty.11
Hindus are denied both beauty and the sublime. In Hegel’s view, Hindus en-
gage in artistic activity and create works of art, but these are devoid of beauty
and can make no claim to the sublime. Thus, he maintains European suprema-
cy in the aesthetic realm as he develops his theory of human history.
10 Cited in Andrew Wilton, “Sublime or Ridiculous? Turner and the Problem of the Histori-
cal Figure,” New Literary History 16, no. 2, The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations
(Winter 1985): 343.
11 Cited in Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 170.
In this essay, I claim the importance of developing an embodied notion of

the sublime but one that takes account of the global context, against which all
contemporary philosophical investigation must take place. I do so by drawing
on examples of modern and contemporary Indian art that is both global and
national. Indian modern and contemporary art (like that of other regions, such
as China, East Africa, the Middle East and so on) seeks to articulate a vision
of Indian self-knowledge that is international and also profoundly Indian.12
I focus on the return of the sublime in aesthetic judgment when considering
modern visual representations of Hindu (and, more broadly, Indian) spaces of
devotion like Varanasi.
If Frederic Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard have mainly been respon-
sible for the contemporary interest in the political sublime, it is Shusterman
who takes us back to Burke to highlight the importance of the body in any con-
sideration of the sublime. While both Jameson and Lyotard emphasize Kant’s
notion of the sublime in thinking about the body politic, it is Shusterman who
locates the body as such in Burke’s sublime:
In examining Burke’s views in relation to contemporary somaesthetics,

cognitive psychology, and physiology, [Shusterman] shows that though
Burke’s somatic arguments can be criticized as overly simplistic and
mechanistic, his recognition of the crucial bodily dimensions of aesthet-
ic experience should be taken more seriously. In refining Burke’s insight
that bodily factors can help explain our aesthetic reactions, somaesthet-
ics further urges that improved somatic understanding and performance
can provide valuable means for enhancing our aesthetic response.13
Both Burke and Kant base their theories of the sublime on the fear and trem-
bling, and ultimately the delight, that is aroused by the objects and ideas of
absolute greatness. For Burke, it is objects that are sublime, like Niagara Falls
when viewed from the deck of the Maid in the Mist. We can feel the awesome
power of the falls and imagine the horrific result of their impact on our vessel
and ourselves. We feel relieved when we consider the falls and their destructive
power while we remain safe in the boat. This relief, for Burke, e licits an a esthetic
response from us as it causes pleasure, even delight. Thus, for Burke, the object
in all its awesome power is sublime. Kant, however, who also rests his theory on
the awesomeness and magnitude presented to us, does not r egard the object
12 Dhillon, “A Kantian Approach to Global Art History.”

13 Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime,” British Journal of Aesthetics
45, no. 4 (October 2005): 323.
300 Dhillon
as sublime but rather the feeling that an encounter with the object engenders
in us. This engagement produces in us terror, a “negative pleasure.” For Kant,
sublime dread is aroused when we engage with or confront something that we
experience as boundless and formless. In his words, unlike beauty,
if something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any rea-

soning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear
in its form, contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate
with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination,
and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that.14
In other words, we stand helpless in the face of that which arouses the feeling
of the sublime in us. Helpless, because unlike beauty that relies on form to
make itself available to our power of judgment, the sublime resists judgment
and representation, and fiercely inhibits our imagination. Reason, a universally
held capacity, inevitably moves to overcome this resistance. For Kant, then, the
sublime – this seriousness in the play of imagination – is all the more deeply
appreciated since it makes us aware of our capacity for reason. It is reason that
allows us to recognize and act on the possibilities of freedom afforded us qua
human.
Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that Kant’s theory of the sublime under-
lies Kant’s entire philosophical project.15 Hence, in his view aesthetics is the
cornerstone of the philosophical architecture of Kant. Furthermore, Lyotard
views the sublime as legitimating the avant-garde as a way of extending the
critical enterprise to the arts. The innovative methods artists develop and use
are, for him, incomprehensible. To fully grasp the artistic struggle of the avant-
garde we need to be familiar with the incommensurability of reality to concept
and representation implied by the Kantian philosophy of the sublime.16
Significant though these developments are in refining our understanding
of the concept and significance of the sublime, in the eagerness of philoso-
phers to step away from Burke they miss the critical insight that Shusterman
brings to the fore: the importance of the body in experiencing the sublime.
14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis/Cambridge:

Hackett Publishing Company, 1987 [1790]), 99.
15 See especially Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1994), and “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”
in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79.
16 See, for example, Anthony David, “Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime,” International Studies
in Philosophy 29, no. 4 (1997), 1–9.
He p resciently notes the physiological, embodied response of fear and trem-

bling that is just as present in Kant as it is in Burke. Through a reading of the
representation of Varanasi in Indian modern art,17 with somaesthetics in view,
I intend to deepen our understanding not only of the paintings themselves but
also of the philosophical concept of the sublime.
3 The Somaesthetic Sublime and Representations of Varanasi
In scholarly representations of Varanasi, the concept of the sublime is often

evoked. Thus, Rana Singh explicitly invokes the feeling of an unrepresentable
wholeness through his rich description – a layered and intertextual account of
the geography, demography, myth, sacred texts, and history – of the River Gan-
ges and the sacred city of Varanasi.18 Diana Eck, too, gives us a strong sense of
the dazzling array of the historical, mythical, religious, and geographical that
go into the making of the city, of the materiality of death, the dying, and the
hope of the cessation of repeated cycles of life. She presents, in other words, a
whole that is more than a sum of its parts, a place that makes us deeply aware of
the awesome unknowable reality that awaits us all. Varanasi, this place where
the blessed are brought to die, be cremated, and have their ashes scattered
in the sacred River Ganges, is the place where the circles between individual
lives and those of the gods intersect. The rituals accompanying death (sacred
chants, flowers, and lights floating in the river) seek to bring together that we
can know with the vast unknowable in this city of Lord Shiva.
The ghats are a series of platforms and steps by the river. It is here that cre-
mations take place on pyres of sandalwood, and from here that devotees de-
scend to the river to give offerings of light and flowers to the goddess Ganga
or to bathe in atonement for wrongdoing. These ghats are a liminal space be-
tween embodied reality and the transcendent and can be reached by boat or
through the streets of the city. In describing the movement of dead and dying
bodies carried through the city by the living, Eck speaks of the value of walking
to the ghats:
The Panchtantri pilgrimage to the “Five Tirthas” along the riverfront is

one of the most popular in Kashi. Along this route, pilgrims travel the
17 Eck, Banaras, City of Light, vii.

18 Rana P.B. Singh, Banaras: The Making of India’s Heritage City (Cambridge: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2009).
302 Dhillon
entire length of the city by banks of the Ganges. Some pilgrims make the
journey by boat, but as is the case with all pilgrimages, it is better to prac-
tice the tapas of walking.19
Starting at the Dashashvamedha Ghat and stopping at various ghats along

the way, pilgrims finally come to the most sacred Manikarnika Ghat. Living
and dead bodies move along the streets. Those carrying a flower-covered dead
body follow the bier chanting, stopping now and then along the way to buy
more flowers, incense, or other accouterments needed for the death rituals.
The streets are alive with the business of living and dying. “At each stage of
the journey,” Eck tells us, “the pilgrims make a statement of intention called
sankalpa, explicit profession of intent to worship that accompanies every im-
portant ritual act.”20 The body is the ground on which these rituals are enacted.
Mourners listen to the Brahman reciting the chants. They cup their right hand
over the left, holding rice, flowers, or betel nuts, as, in Eck’s words, they listen
to the recitation of Sanskrit scriptures and locate their bodily presence at that
time and on that street in relation to their places of origin and their family
lineage.
The meaning and experience of this city (both material and spiritual) sits
well with Kant’s theory of the sublime. The city compels us to face the terrify-
ing inevitability and incomprehensibility of death even as its inhabitants and
pilgrims try to represent the hope that death holds through ritual, sacrifice,
and offerings. Shiva is
terrible and as well [is] blessed. He is repulsive as well as attractive; he

destroys and yet he creates; he wounds and yet he heals … [he is] the
frightening and captivating One. In addressing him, the early Vedic hym-
nists would one moment invite him to be present and the next entreat
him to keep his distance.21
In other words, a visit to Varanasi makes us insistently aware of the somatic

dimension of our lives, including our mortality and animality, even as we be-
come aware of our innate freedom to redirect ourselves in a more meaningful
and moral fashion. It is precisely for this reason why the sublime as aesthetic

20 Ibid., 218.
21 Ibid., 97.
judgment can be said to hold an essential place in Kant’s moral philosophy.22

However, it is vital to note the centrality of the body as it provides the very
condition that makes sublime experience, manifested as fear, trembling, and
awe, possible. This aspect of the sublime has been overlooked. Following
Shusterman, an explicit turn to somaesthetics, I would argue, serves to refine
our understanding and use of the concept of the sublime by drawing our atten-
tion to the rootedness of the experience in the body.
It has been argued that Kant’s notion of the sublime insists that we can in-
voke the concept only in relation to nature. This notion, it is claimed, cannot
be extended to the non-natural worlds. We could object to this argument in
two ways. Firstly, we could note that Varanasi, rooted as it is in our human
physical reality (our deteriorating, dying, or dead bodies) is the sublime real-
ized through organic flesh, which is nature itself, even if it is nature in its hu-
man (hence also cultured) form. Furthermore, it is nature at its most terrifying
since here we cannot escape confronting the abyss that awaits us all. In the
most secular of terms, we could say Varanasi is a reminder of the inevitability
of our physical deterioration and mortality. A pilgrimage to Kashi evokes in us
a motivation to live what is left of our lives as responsibly as we can.
There are good arguments to be found in support of restricting Kant’s con-
ception of the sublime to objects of nature, such as the Himalayas, the Pacific
Ocean, the Sahara Desert and so on. In this view, it is argued that for Kant,
the feeling of sublimity can only be arrived at through encounters with na-
ture of enormous magnitude. Thus, Paul Guyer insists that the experience of
the sublime “does seem to be exclusively an experience of nature rather than
art.”23 However, he goes on to say, as Robert Clewis notes, that “[t]his does not
mean that Kant thinks there is no sublime in art, or at least no artistic repre-
sentation of the sublime.”24 For Clewis, Guyer’s concession does not make for
a full acknowledgment of sublimity in art. Keeping in mind Kant’s insistence
that the sublime lies not in the object but in the feeling of sublimity an object
can engender, Clewis argues: “However, since an artistic representation of the
sublime might differ from the evocation of the sublime, Guyer’s second claim
does not by itself amount to a full acknowledgment of sublimity elicited by
art.”25 In other words, Clewis and others have argued quite convincingly that
22 See Pradeep A. Dhillon, “Examples of Moral Perfectionism from a Global Perspective,”

Journal of Aesthetic Education 48, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 41–57.
23 Cited in Robert Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 117.
24 Ibid., 118.
25 Ibid.
304 Dhillon
art can, and often does, evoke the feeling of the sublime; and this takes the
concept beyond the bounds of mere nature.
I have already argued that the city of Varanasi has the potential for evoking
a feeling of sublimity in the minds of pilgrims and the more secularly inclined
alike. Now I turn to a consideration of artistic representations of the city in
modern and contemporary art. In his early philosophy, Lyotard privileges art
since it draws attention to the limits of representation. In his later philosophy
of postmodernism, he develops an aesthetic theory of postmodern art. It is
important to note that for Lyotard, in distinction to some of the other theo-
rists and artists, postmodernism is intimately related to the modern. First, he
considers postmodernism to be the avant-garde that is always at work within
the modern. It is the disruptive force that changes existing norms of the pro-
duction and appreciation of art. More importantly, this disruptive force never
loses its power to disturb since it is related to the feeling of the sublime. Mod-
ern art, for Lyotard, aims to present the fact of the unpresentable.
Thus, Ram Kumar (1924-), one of India’s most distinguished and nation-
ally lauded artists –awarded both the Padma Shree and the Bharat Ratna26 –
represents Varanasi in a series he painted in the early 1960s in a style that fits
in well with Lyotard’s understanding of the modern in art. During his time as
a student of economics at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, he accidentally came
upon some modernist paintings and changed course by taking up the study of
modern art under Sailoz Mukherjee. It was during this period that Kumar met
and became friends with the leaders of the Progressive Art Movement, M.F.
Hussain and S. Raza. Like them, he too rejected British classicism and adopted
the modernist vocabulary to articulate India’s reality after colonialism. In 1950,
he left for Paris to join the ateliers of Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger.27
While in Paris, Ram Kumar joined the French Communist Party. His gazed
focused firmly on the material –with an outright rejection of all matters related
to a transcendental ideal – it is not surprising that in his Varanasi series, he
represents desolation and despair but without any representation of the bod-
ies that provide the fabric of, and give meaning to, this city. In this series, he
depicts Varanasi as a complex of ramshackle hovels, leaning one against the
other, devoid of movement and life. It is, for him, the city of death and suffer-
ing. His bleak paintings of Benares are marked by an absence of life and move-
ment in this bustling city seen as the place of liberation where the fortunate
are brought to die and be cremated. Reminiscing about his initial experience
26 These are the highest awards given by the Government of India for exemplary service to
the nation.
27 Toby Treves, Indian Art: The Moderns Revisited, Volume 1 (New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery,
2006), 42.
of Benares, the reality of which brought him sharply up against the city in the
Indian, in the Indic imaginary, he says:
(M)y first visit to the city invoked an emotional reaction as it had peculiar
associations. But such romantic ideas were dispelled when I came face
to face with reality. There was so much pain and sorrow of humanity. As
an artist, it became a challenge to portray this agony and suffering, its
intensity required the use of symbolic motifs, so my Benares is of a rep-
resentative sort.28
For Lyotard, both modern and postmodern art is concerned with the unpre-
sentable. Modern art presents the fact that there is an unrepresentable. That is,
modern art alludes to something quite specific even if its referent is absent
in the presentation. Thus, while people are absent in Ram Kumar’s paintings,
their presence and bleak existence is palpable. Perhaps it was a good strategy
not to represent their physical and emotional suffering, particularly poignant
in this city. Such an effort could easily lead to the ridiculous, in the absence of
a fully contextualized understanding, as the art historian Andrew Wilton tells
us in speaking of Picasso’s efforts at depicting misery in Guernica.29
What Picasso sacrifices to his deliberate simplification he regains, not so

much by the grand scale of his picture, but by that sense of the pitiable
vulnerability of mortal flesh which he conveys primarily through his in-
trinsically ludicrous distortions.30
This paradoxical task arouses in the viewer the mixture of pleasure and pain
that is the sublime. For Lyotard, it is Barnett Newman who best exemplifies
the sublime in postmodern art. Let us consider for a moment Newman’s 1950
painting Cathedra, in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam.
The deep field painting of cobalt blue is formless and the image rendered asun-
der by a white line, often called the zip.
Everything is there – dimensions, colors, lines – but there are no illusions.

So much so that it is a problem for the commentator. What can one say
that is not given? It is not difficult to describe, but the description is as
28 Cited in Seema Bawa, “Ram Kumar: Artistic Intensity of an Ascetic,” Art Etc. News & Views,
Accessed October 7, 2015, http://www.artnewsnviews.com/view-article.php?article
=ram-kumar-artistic-intensity-of-an-ascetic&iid=30&articleid=846.
29 Wilton, “Sublime or Ridiculous?”
30 Ibid., 354.
306 Dhillon
flat as a paraphrase. The best gloss consists of the question: what can
one say? Or of the exclamation ‘Ah’. Of surprise: ‘Look at that.’ So many
expressions of a feeling which does have a name in the modern aesthet-
ic tradition (and in the work of Newman): the sublime. It is a feeling of
‘there’ (Voila). There is almost nothing to ‘consume’, or if there is, I do not
know what it means. One cannot consume an occurrence, but merely its
meaning. The feeling of the instant is instantaneous.31
In viewing Ram Kumar’s representations of Varanasi, we observe the austerity

of lines that suggest the puzzle of streets and buildings that constitute an un-
planned, organically developed city. The colors are subdued, quite in contrast
to the actual experience of the riot of colors that define any Indian city. It is
a quiet city, quite distinct from the cacophony that defines India’s cities. Ram
Kumar confronts us with the bleakness of our existence, presenting the inevi-
tability and emptiness of death without the redemptive promise of moksha.
With that in mind, let us turn to Paresh Maity, an important Indian artist
educated first in Kolkata and then in Delhi. Maity, known for his large atmo-
spheric canvases and watercolors, was awarded the Padma Shree in 2014. His
paintings represent iconic images of places around the world, as well as various
regions and places within India. His style has evolved from the atmospheric to
one that is rendered much more forceful through a use of strong black lines,
creating schemas of peoples and places filled in with vibrant, usually primary
colors with some shadows in dark grey. It is, however, his Varanasi paintings
from the early 1980s that are most relevant to the discussion of the Kantian
sublime, which if we recall “is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so
far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation
of the limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.”32 While his
paintings are located in the context of modern art, they are postmodern in
the Lyotardian sense in that it is impossible to grasp that which they seek to
represent. The lines, colors, and dimensions of his canvases quickly evoke the
ghats, boats, and lights floating in terracotta votives on the river, which have
come to represent the city of Varanasi (see Illustration 13.1). The recognition
of the city, however, does not complete the movement of the mind, for the
city itself points to the boundless and formless whole that lies beyond. Ma-
ity’s paintings are directly evocative of the dance between the finite and the
31 Jean-François Lyotard, “Newman: The Instant,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans.
David Macey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 79–80.
32 Cited in Paul Crowther, “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” Oxford Journal of Art 7, no. 2
(1984): 52.
Illustration 13.1 Paresh Maity, Benares. 2007. Oil on canvas.
infinite that the city itself represents, as pointed out by Rana Singh and Diana
Eck, among others. Despite the terror that the sense of boundlessness arouses
in us, there is also an a wareness of wholeness that both Eck and Singh consider
vital to their description of Varanasi and its meaning to Hindus in particular
but Indians more generally.
For Kant,
…[t]his is most important – to be able even to think the infinite as a

whole indicates a mental power that surpasses any standard of sense. For
[thinking the infinite as a whole while using a standard of sense] would
require a comprehension yielding as a unity a standard that would have a
determinate relation to the infinite, one that could be stated in numbers;
and this is impossible. If the human mind is nonetheless to be able even
308 Dhillon
to think the given infinite without contradiction, it must have within it-
self a power that is supersensible, whose idea of a noumenon cannot be
intuited but can yet be regarded as the substrate underlying what is mere
appearance, namely, our intuition of the world.33
Kant’s underlying structure of the experience with objects that are overwhelm-
ing or terrifying is to be viewed solely from the perspective of human mortality –
acknowledging its somatic dimension but, also by the finite human subject’s
capacity to affirm itself rationally – through artistic presentation in the face
of such overwhelming and terrifying phenomena. It is this combination of
the body and its functions that point to the somaesthetic dimension in Kant’s
theory of the sublime. In other words, it is the awareness of this somaesthetic
capacity that arouses fear, terror, and, eventually, delight in the experience of
sublimity for Kant. This formulation is quite distinct from Burke’s idea that the
delight in sublimity comes from an experience with an object that arouses a
kind of horror in us which, when viewed from a place of safety, affords us a sort
of tranquility tinged with terror. The somaesthetic refinement of the concept
by Shusterman not only furthers (by critically improving) Burke’s view but also
deepens our understanding of Kant’s notion of the sublime, as it draws our
attention to the place of the body in aesthetic judgment, something that is
almost entirely overlooked in considerations of the sublime in both Burke and
Kant. That said, it leaves intact a critical difference between the two philoso-
phers, with Burke offering a resolution to the feeling of the sublime in tran-
quility and Kant refusing such a resolution, instead maintaining its dynamic
nature by speaking of its redirection of our attention from the phenomena to
the nature of our minds.
Maity’s Varanasi paintings are particularly useful in explicating this point.
Maity’s early paintings draw us into a vortex of this city celebrated for the in-
tersection of the immanent and the transcendent, representing a boundless,
yet whole infinity. In Maity’s paintings, the assertion of a rational response
in the face of the terrifying abyss evokes a sublime feeling in us. To quote
Rabindranath Tagore on this:
May mortal bonds decay,

May the great universe embrace me
And in my heart know without fear
The great unknown.34
33 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 111.

34 Rabindranath Tagore, Shesh Lekha: The Last Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, trans. Pritish
Nandy (Calcutta: Dialogue Publications, 1973), 1.
Lyotard saw Barnett Newman as making such an experience possible.

ewman’s paintings, with a whole ruptured by a zip that renders the parts
N
of the whole in an incommensurable position, represented the sublime. Ma-
ity’s paintings, too, seek to represent an ineffable whole, but the meaning
they afford is not that of nothingness, as Lyotard interprets Newman’s paint-
ings. Rather, with a few lines, Maity draws us into an incomprehensible total-
ity. However, unlike Maity, the rupturing line in Newman’s painting validates
Lyotard’s theory of the differend – a difference that can never be overcome; it
represents incommensurability.
Maity, who identifies himself as a global artist like the other Indian modern
and contemporary artists, refuses the influence of Barnett Newman. He does,
however, seek precedence for his paintings in those of J.M.W. Turner. Turner’s
early paintings of buildings and topography, both in watercolors and oils, like
Alnwick Castle (1829), are more faithful to a Burkean sense of the sublime. It
is the object that is inherently sublime, and through the use of diffuse strokes
of paint and an almost monochromatic palette, Turner seeks to present this
inherent sublimity in urban areas where it can be found just as easily as in wild
nature. While Maity’s earlier representations of Varanasi, as I have just argued,
sustain a view of the Kantian sublime, his more recent representations of the
city hark back to the romanticism of the early Turner. The later Turner makes
a slow but sure shift away from the romantic sublime and toward one touched
with terror and faced with rationality, as we see in Snow Storm – Steam-Boat
off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842), where humans in their frail craft face nature in
its most violent and terrifying state. His subsequent paintings show a growing
awareness not only of the violence that nature can unleash against humans
but also the violence that humans can unleash against each other. In 1840, he
painted what is probably his most important canvas, Slave Ship (originally ti-
tled Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying). This painting refers to the
slave ship Zong, where the slavers threw overboard about 130–142 Africans in
the days following November 29, 1781, in order to claim insurance for the loss
of their “goods” on their return to England.
If Robert Clewis and others have argued, most plausibly I might add, for a val-
id extension of the Kantian sublime to certain works of art, then Paul Crowther
argues for a further extension that would embrace the social and the political.
He believes that rapid urbanization (with its important somatic dimension of
bringing so many different bodies in the streets) demands that we extend the
notion of the sublime in a manner such that the pressures of difference can
loom threateningly just as wild seas and expansive deserts. He writes:
In the late nineteenth century, the experience of society becomes fun-

damentally an urban one, organized around the capitalist economy.
310 Dhillon
This organization implies at once order and disorder. Order, insofar as

capitalism is a force for cohesion; disorder insofar as it involves crisis and
oppression and breeds revolt. [This bears] relation to the capitalist sys-
tem and marks the new context wherein the experience of sublimity is
displaced from its previous orientation towards nature.35
Through the evolution of his paintings, we find Turner groping towards the
kinds of theoretical arguments for the extension of eighteenth-century con-
cepts made in the late twentieth century. Maity’s paintings do not reflect such
social and political engagement; he is content to depict the sublime in its most
terrifying but ultimately conservative conception. His paintings are a reflec-
tion on the redemptive moksha Kashi offers.
For the social and political extension of the sublime, we would need to
turn to a third artist, M.F. Husain (1915–2011). In 2008, Ms. Usha Mittal com-
missioned M.F. Husain, probably the most well-known of all modern Indian
artists and a founding member of the original Progressive Artists Group, to do
a series of eight triptychs to capture Indian civilization. It is important to note
that Hussain was in self-exile at this time because his sexualized representa-
tions of Hindu goddesses had drawn death threats from some more traditional
Hindus. He died shortly after completing this commission while still in exile.
One of these triptychs is titled A Tale of Three Cities. The first panel represents
Delhi, the power center of India, the second represents Varanasi, the spiritual
center of India, and the third represents Kolkata, the cultural center of India.
It is the second panel that is relevant to this discussion. In his notes for the
central panel of the triptych we read:
Up about in the crimson sky Hanuman flew past, touching the golden
pinnacles of temple. On the footsteps of river Ganga a sadhu in asan, sa-
cred scripture and kaumandal in front. Holy dip of worshipping women.
Shiva’s Nandi bull. And at the bottom Bismilla Khan blows his Shenai.
JAI Bum Bhole.36
The images that he invokes here are all an integral part of mythological Hin-
du iconography as well as material Hindu practice. In one pictorial plane he
brings together the spiritual and the mundane, and men and women engaged
in spiritual practice. We have Hanuman, a symbol of human devotion in Hindu
35 Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
163.
36 http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/mfhusain/about-the-exhibition/ Accessed
on April 7, 2019.
mythology, and the towering figure of Madan Mohan Malviya, the founder of
the Banaras Hindu University with its cosmopolitan mandate, men meditating
and women ritually bathing in the sacred waters of the Ganga. However, with
the figure of Bismillah Khan,37 a Muslim and preeminent exponent of Indian
classical music, at the bottom right of the pictorial space in this panel, Hus-
sain introduces a difference but one that is still a part of the whole. Husain’s
concluding phrase, “Jai Bum Bhole,” celebrates Lord Shiva, also known as Bhole
Nath, who is the lord of the cosmic whole. Thus, he brings to mind the multi-
cultural whole that was Varanasi and, by extension, India. With the image of
Bismilla Khan he represents a chasm that has emerged in a society that has
always been multicultural. In so doing, Husain introduces a difference, a rup-
ture. Unlike the rupture of Barrett Newman that marks incommensurability –
Lyotard’s differend, Husain, like Raja Ram Mohan Malviya (the founder of the
Banaras Hindu University), maintains a sense of the social and political whole
that is India.
4 Conclusion
This whole can be terrifying at times and too often leading to a politics of ex-
clusion. That said, it is one that all Indians are deeply aware of, and struggle
towards realizing and maintaining. This rupture as Hussain well knew is of-
ten experienced as being incommensurable (a differend) with Indian national
identity by sections of India’s populace. Unlike Lyotard, however, Kant rec-
ognizes the rupture but exhorts us towards a duty of moral perfectionism to
overcome it. In somaesthetic terms of cultivating and respecting our embod-
ied humanity, we are being called to turn the Other into Another.38
The Lyotardian experience of the sublimity of the political and social whole
resting in bodies of difference is, for Kant, as he notes in his essay “On Per-
petual Peace,” a duty we owe future generations and one that we owe ourselves
as moral, rational, embodied beings. Kant calls on us to struggle with ourselves
and others, to make ourselves worthy of saying, “I am Kashi” –the cosmopoli-
tan whole – regardless of our contingent identifications. Placing somaesthetics
at the center of any discussion of the sublime makes this position not only ten-
able but mandatory to a robust understanding and use of the concept not only
in cognitive but also in normative terms. This can be noted either by embracing
the mystical view of the city or by denying it. Thus, in the words of Muslim
poet Sheikh Ali Hazim (1697–1766), popularly cited in Benares, “I won’t leave
37 Bismillah Khan was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2001.

38 Dhillon, “Examples of Moral Perfectionism.”
312 Dhillon
Benares for anywhere else/As it’s a house of realising universalism.”39 We find

the same longing for universalism in the words of the iconoclastic fifteenth-
century poet Kabir, himself a resident of the city and a critic of the sacred
powers ascribed to it:
His death in Benares

Won’t save the assassin
From certain hell,
Any more than a dip

In the Ganges will send
Frogs – or you – to paradise.
My home, says Kabir,

Is where there’s no day, no night,
And no holy book in sight
To squat on our lives.40
In this essay, I have argued for a turn to the somatic that Shusterman finds
in Burke’s conception of the sublime and that can also be found, if one looks
deeply, in the Kantian treatment of the concept, without losing sight of the
difference between them. Through the use of examples of the body in the city
drawn from Indian modern and contemporary art, I have sought to demon-
strate that, without a turn to somaesthetics, we could not reasonably extend
the notion of the sublime to the social and political dimensions that postmod-
ern thinkers like Lyotard have sought to do. In sum, without the turn to som-
aesthetics, the sublime would be of little use in understanding the role of art in
moral and civic education.
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39 Cited in Rana P.B. Singh, “On Banaras: Ghalib’s ‘The Lamp of the Temple,’” in Cultural
Landscapes and the Lifeworld: Literary Images of Banaras (Varanasi: Indica Books, 2004),
128–138.
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Name Index
Ackroyd, Peter 201 Clewis, Robert 303

Acton, William 210 Cocteau, Jean 287
Alexander, F.M. 275 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 265
Arendt, Hannah 182 Cooper, Alfred 211
Aristotle 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 38, 91 Coverley, Merlin 256
Augé, Marc 38 Crowther, Paul 309
Aung San Suu Kyi 96
Damasio, Antonio 284–285
Bachelard, Gaston 258–261 de Beauvoir, Simone 159, 163n36, 180
Bakhtin, Mikhail 172 De Quincey, Thomas 7–8, 249–269
Barthes, Roland 63–64 Debord, Guy-Ernest 8, 256–258, 265
Batista, Fulgencio 139 Deleuze, Gilles 226
Baudelaire, Charles 25, 27–29, 33, 34n30, 35, Desnoes, Edmundo 136
50 Dewey, John 90, 92–93, 101, 106, 147n36,
Baudrillard, Jean 228, 235 253–254, 284
Beckett, Samuel 278 Donatella 159
Begg, Paul 200 Dorno, Carl 53
Benjamin, Walter 28–30, 32–35, 38, 45, 48,
50, 60–62, 64–65, 67–75, 78, 80, 82–84, Eck, Diana 295–296, 301–302, 307
256 Eliot, T.S. 279
Berlusconi, Silvio 172, 186 Elkin, Lauren 173
Berman, Marshall 226 Engels, Friedrich 25–26
Bloom, Clive 199 Ercolini, Maria Pia 174
Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon 224
Bourdieu, Pierre 117, 185 Faré, Ida 161
Brezhnev, Leonid 123n46 Feldenkrais, Moshe 275–277
Bruguera, Tania 146n36 Fellini, Federico 153
Brugués, Alejandro 132n2, 133, 140–146 Flash, Grandmaster 18–19
Burckhardt, Lucius 41 Foucault, Michel 117, 207, 212, 221–222, 226,
Burke, Edmund 265–266, 297–301, 308–309, 234, 240, 253, 288, 291
312 Freud, Sigmond 200n13, 274
Burroughs, William S. 271–291
Busatta, Flavia 170 Galeano, Eduardo 143
Busatta, Sandra 172 Gavreau, Vladimir 271–273
Butler, Judith 180, 182, 191 Geirola, Gustavo 139
Ginsberg, Allen 288–289
Calder, John 278 Glinert, Ed 198
Calvino, Italo 48 Gonzalo, Jorge Fernández 141
Camus, Albert 55 Grunberg, Serge 278
Canetti, Elias 190 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 130, 138, 139n11
Castro, Fidel 130, 133–134, 146 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás 133, 136, 145
Cavarero, Adriana 182 Guyer, Paul 303
Ceausescu, Nicolae 112–123 Gysin, Brion 272, 290
Chari, Anita 147
Cienfuegos, Camilo 130 Haarder, Bertel 82n42
Clark, Simon 143 Habermas, Jurgen 167n45
316 Name Index
Halliday, Stephen 203n31 Maity, Paresh 297, 306, 308–310

Harris, Oliver 282 Mañach, Jorge 140n12
Hartoonian, G. 230 Marin, Noemi 4, 111n2, 118n25, 119
Hasse, Jürgen 45 Marx, Karl 133, 136, 142–143
Hazim, Ali 311 McLuhan, Marshall 61
Heidegger, Martin 94–95, 98, 101, 107 Meikle, Denis 195n2
Hegel, Georg 298 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 46, 89n2, 90n4,
Hellpach, Willy 5 92n16, 234, 284
Hippocrates 53 Mesa-Lago, Carmelo 134n4
Hussain, M.F. 297, 304, 310–311 Miller, James 210
Hutchinson, Jonathan 211 Mirbagheri, Mehdi 236
Mishra, Rajnash 295
Iliescu, Ion 126n59 Moallem, Minoo 233–234
Iohannis, Klaus 127 Morrison, Robert 252n10
Mubarak, Hosni 102–105
Jacobs, Jane 38 Mukherjee, Sailoz 304
James, William 98, 280 Mumford, Lewis 21, 32
Jameson, Fredric 230, 235, 299 Mungiu, Cristian 116
Jude, Radu 116 Murray, Alex 200
Musil, Robert 23–24, 31
Kamali, Rasool 236–241
Kant, Immanuel 264–266, 298–312 Naumann, Friedrich 125n56
Kaplan, Robert D. 114–115 Nelson, Cary 278
Kerouac, Jack 272 Neruda, Pablo 139
Kligman, Gail 115 Newman, Barnett 305–306, 309–311
Knight, Stephen 199, 213n76 Nietzsche, Friedrich 20, 106, 280
Korzybski, Alfred 271–277, 283–284, 289 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 78n32
Kristeva, Julia 235 Nordau, Max 211
Kumar, Ram 297, 304–306
Kundera, Milan 125n56 Orkin, Ruth 164
Ortiz, Fernando 133n3, 140n12
Le Breton, David 51
Le Corbusier 230 Parks, Robert 38
Lefebvre, Henri 49, 55, 188, 228, 239 Pallasmaa, Juhani 230
Leger, Fernand 304 Passerini, Luisa 155n7
Lhote, Andre 304 Piano, Renzo 82
Lindop, Grevel 268n63 Picco, Laura 160
Lonsdale, Kate 199–200 Pike, David L. 202
Lonzi, Carla 159, 178 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 264–269
Loraux, Nicole 181 Plato 20n10, 21, 91
Lukacs, Georg 115n15 Plessner, Helmut 14, 15n2, 27
Lydenberg, Robin 278 Poe, Edgar Allan 3, 7, 25, 27–28
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 298–300, 304–306, Porter, Roy 202, 204
309, 311–312 Power, Kevin 146n36
Puiu, Cristi 116
Maceo, Antonio 138
Madeo, Liliana 154–155 Rancière, Jacques 242
Name Index 317
Rasmussen, Steen Eiler 68n15 Tagore, Rabindranath 308

Reich, Wilhelm 8, 271–277, 289 Tessenow, Einrich 156, 170
Rivera, Angel A. 143 Tismaneanu, Vladimir 113n8, 120
Rosenfeld, Edward 275 Totton, Nick 238n50
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 20, 249–250, 268 Tupper, Ken 277
Russell, Bertrand 298 Turner, J.M.W. 309–310
Rywkert, Joseph 255n19
Ujica, Andrei 116
Sassen, Saskia 185–186
Schuchardt, Charlotte 276 van Dijck, José 207
Schuh, Angela 53n42–45, 54n47, 56n53 Vertov, Dziga 49
Sennett, Richard 198–201, 215 Viamontes, Flavia 135n5
Shah, Mahammad Reza 224–225
Shusterman, Richard 39–41, 50, 90, 92, 96, Wade, Francis 97n36
102, 106, 117, 121–122, 136, 147, 153, Walkowitz, Judith R. 198–199, 204–206, 211
163n36, 173, 179, 196, 201–202, 212, 222, Walter, W. Grey 271–272, 275, 289–290
234–235, 252, 258n25, 268, 297–300, Watson, Sophie 156
303, 308, 312 Watsuji, Tetsuro 42
Simmel, Georg 3, 22, 24, 26, 38, 167 Waugh, Patricia 228
Singh, Rana P.B. 301, 307 West-Durán, Alan 141–142
Sitte, Camillo 69–70 White, Allon 201
Smith, Andrew 211n67, 212 Williams, Alan 231
Socrates 20n10 Williams, Raymond 220
Sommerville, Ian 273 Wilton, Andrew 305
Stallybrass, Peter 201 Wirth, Louis 38
Stalin, Josef 123n46 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 31
Stefanescu, Bogdan 120n38, 124–125 Wolfflin, H. 230
Steinbeck, John 94, 98–99, 106–107 Wordsworth, William 250, 264
Stock, Ann Marie 143, 146
Sugden, Philip 200, 206n42 Žižek, Slavoj 188
Sykes, Mark 105
Sztompka, Piotr 125n55
Subject Index
activism 6, 177–180 Bologna 167–168, 172

addiction 7–8, 206, 229, 235, 250–253, Buddhism 96–97, 102, 295–296
272–273, 286–288 Bucharest 114, 117–121, 127n62
aesthetic, the 19, 23, 28, 31–32, 35n30, 38–49,
56, 69, 133n3, 139–142, 179–180, 229, Cairo 4, 90, 96, 102–103, 106
240–242, 252–253, 269, 272, 277, capitalism 119, 133n3, 139, 142, 222, 226, 235,
298–306 243, 256, 262, 309–310
aesthetic experience 3–6, 32, 35n30, 179, 299 Christianity 96, 232, 289, 295–296
aesthetic judgment 298–299, 308 city 38–57, 60–84, 96–99, 106–107, 114–118,
affect 26, 46, 54, 223, 227, 235, 240–243, 251, 130, 138, 153–167, 177–178, 184–215,
267 222–241, 249–269, 273–274, 280–290,
agriculture 22, 42, 95, 134 294–312
air-conditioning 53–57 city-size 3, 18, 20, 22, 26
alienation 3, 29–30, 65, 139–147, 230 city-state 2, 17
Amsterdam 305 districts or neighborhoods 23, 29, 46, 55,
Arab Spring 4, 89–90, 96, 102–107 79, 82, 202
art 14, 27, 32, 40, 46, 126n58, 238, 253–254, population 2–8, 16–18, 22–23, 26, 43,
266–268, 294–312 54n47, 96n36, 113–115, 116n20, 134, 143,
art of living 13, 32, 291 223, 233, 255n19, 258, 274
atmosphere 1, 3–4, 8, 13, 29, 38–39, 42–43, class 15, 35, 54, 103, 117, 124, 142, 172, 186,
47, 55, 63, 72, 79, 103, 198, 216, 267 198–212, 222–225, 250
austerity 185–186, 234 climate (see also weather) 1–3, 23, 38–48,
authority (and authoritarianism) 3, 21, 24, 54–57, 61, 186
99–104, 111, 124, 166, 192, 196, 203n31, collective, the 6, 25, 30, 32, 35, 49–50, 62, 112,
206–216, 224, 256, 274, 289 125, 178, 189, 191–192, 196
colonialism (and the postcolonial) 124–125,
Babel 20 142, 183, 225, 234, 297, 304
Banaras (or Benares, see also Kashi and communism (and post-communism) 4–5,
Varanasi) 294n1, 296–297, 304–305, 111–128
311–312 contagion 7, 19, 206–209, 215
Berlin 2, 4, 23, 28, 40–41, 61, 70, 80, 83–84 Copenhagen 2–4, 61, 77, 82n41–42, 84
bioclimatology 38 courtyards 65–72, 82
biopolitics 57, 190, 222–223, 233, 242 crowd 1–9, 13, 22–35, 40, 76–77, 99–100, 121,
body 14, 16n4, 53–54, 112n7, 117, 121, 131–138, 145, 154, 170, 191, 255–256, 264, 280
141, 144, 146n36, 147, 163n36, 177–183,
189–191, 196–197, 198n5, 201, 205, death 5, 9, 16, 21, 63, 102, 139–142, 172, 198,
207–208, 214–216, 221–223, 228, 231–237, 205–208, 215, 268, 274, 280–286, 295,
240, 271–281, 287 301–312
consciousness 5, 41, 52–54, 196, 115n14, Delhi 304, 306, 310
116n18 democracy 46, 55–56, 119, 125–127, 142, 190,
feminine 153, 163n36, 173, 195–196, 209, 242, 297
213 desire 5, 13, 20–21, 99, 131–134, 144–147, 159,
language 95, 139, 164 171, 183–201, 211–215, 225–226, 233–234,
politic 17, 31, 133–136, 145–146, 167, 181, 240, 250, 257, 262n42, 263, 285–287
201, 222, 297–299 disease 6–7, 31, 53, 181, 198–202, 203n31
temperature 41, 52 venereal (see also syphilis) 209–211
Subject Index 319
drugs 8, 253, 277–285, 291 individual (and individualism) 6, 15n3, 18,

opium 8, 249–269 24–33, 39, 42–49, 57, 75, 81, 92, 106,
133–136, 178–197, 221, 227–236, 243, 254,
Eastern Europe 5, 111n1, 118, 124–128, 135 274, 290, 301
embodiment (see also body) 4, 15, 38, 147, inequality 55–56, 134, 153–156, 185
177–192, 197, 201–202, 211–212, 220–242,
252, 257, 297, 299–301, 311 Jack the Ripper, the case of 6, 195–216
embodied subjectivity 177–182, 188–190, Jerusalem 41, 226
236
environment 4, 22–23, 39, 47, 50–51, 61–62, Kashi (see also Banaras and Varanasi)
72–83, 93–95, 101, 180–182, 196, 212, 227, Kolkata 306, 310
252, 256, 262n42, 275–277, 282–284
natural 3, 22, 43–45 liberalism (and neoliberalism) 6, 18n7, 178,
urban 3, 38, 225, 258, 267, 288 184–191
evil 142, 146, 161, 203–206, 209–210, 232, 262 lifestyle 42, 215, 229
existentialism 89, 92, 235 London 2, 6, 8, 25, 43, 195–216, 249–267
experience 3–9, 15–16, 24–25, 29–32, 34n30, East End 6–7, 195–208, 215–216
38–57, 60–84, 89–107, 112–114, 122n42,
126, 131n2, 133–138, 146–147, 153–154, Madrid 188
163–168, 177–184, 188–191, 196, 201, 222, Manchester 254
228–230, 236, 240–242, 249–291, Mandalay 4, 96–100, 106–107
299–311 masculine, the 133, 153, 156, 167
Mecca 226
fascism 157, 274 medical gaze 207, 213n77, 214–216
feminism 154–189, 211, 221, 231 meliorism 15, 39–41, 57, 89–91, 102–104, 135,
feminist theory 177–179 222, 235, 252
Italian feminism 6, 153–179 Mestre 166–167
film 5, 50, 116, 126, 130–147, 195, 229, meteoropathy 53–57
272, 287 Mexico City 8, 271, 286–288
flâneur 1, 13, 27–30, 50, 57, 68, 81–83 Miami 136
Florence 164 Milan 167, 174, 187
Florida 56 military 18n7, 23, 96, 97n36, 99–100, 113,
freedom 3–5, 16, 22, 29–30, 102–105, 116–128, 119n30, 120, 134, 157, 272n1
164–166, 172, 181–182, 190, 235, 250, 255, morality 144n25, 196, 211–213, 224,
271–279, 295, 302 302–303
Moscow 2, 4, 61, 67n11, 71–75, 78–79,
Ganges 9, 294–295, 301–302, 312 83–84
gender 1, 5, 15, 40, 50, 114–117, 124, 153–159, murder 6, 103, 195–216
172–189, 216, 221–222, 227, 231, 241
violence 6, 187–189, 199 Naples 75
Nay Pyi Taw 96
habit 5–7, 16n4, 34, 38–40, 45, 57, 60, 67n13, New Orleans 8, 271, 282–283
75, 84, 90–92, 100, 117–118, 131n2, 153, New York City 2, 8, 18, 56, 77, 271, 280
163, 250–254, 267, 273, 281–285
Havana 5, 130–141, 145–147 orgone 272–274
Hinduism 9, 96, 294–299, 307–311
home 5–8, 20, 27–35, 56, 61, 77, 82n42, 91, Padua 167–168, 170, 172
114, 116n20, 123–126, 156–169, 205–209, Paris 2, 9, 29, 63–64, 77, 83, 304
258–267, 312 patriarchy 5
Hong Kong 2, 9 peace 21, 77, 82, 116–117, 138, 261
320 Subject Index
performance 7, 14–16, 39–40, 51–52, 98, revolution 4–5, 48, 74, 104–106, 111–128,
104–105, 177–181, 188–191, 223–225, 130–147, 180, 192, 198, 222–229, 234–239
236–242, 252, 278, 284–288, 296–299 rhetoric 4, 111–128, 131–136, 185–189, 252, 266
permeability 75, 284–285 rhetorical space 112, 122–127
phenomenology 14, 38–40, 53–54, 89–92, rhythm 30, 42–55, 68, 101, 205, 282–283, 290
101, 229, 236–237 rights 31, 51, 55–57, 104, 122, 153n1, 164–167,
philosophy 1–2, 15–20, 41, 48, 54–57, 65, 178, 186, 190, 211n67
89–91, 121, 133, 140n12, 141, 173n61, Romania 4, 111–128
179–182, 259, 262, 268–279, 287–291, Rome 2, 48, 154, 157, 166–168, 174, 186
296–308
photography 43, 61–62, 76–83, 104, 164, 240 San Francisco 9
Pisa 187 Sanskrit 295, 302
polis (see also city) 2, 17–18, 31, 38, 115n15, self-consciousness 41, 180, 243
124–126, 181 sensescape 38, 47
politics 1–7, 55, 111n2, 115n14, 116n18, 117–127, sex (and sexuality) 17, 49, 115n14, 133,
134, 177–192, 208–212, 222–227, 233–234, 144–147, 173, 179–186, 195–216, 271, 286,
239–242, 252, 256–257, 269, 297–299, 310
309–312 sexism 178, 186–189
body politics 89–107, 167, 201 Shanghai 2
poverty 6, 18, 74–75, 185, 198–199, 203–205 Shiva 294–295, 301–302, 310–311
power 2–7, 16n4, 20–24, 32–35, 54–55, 80, Singapore 56
99–102, 117–120, 125, 130–141, 146, situationism 8, 254–256, 261–263
163–172, 177–184, 192, 202, 210–212, skiing 61–84
220–222, 240, 250, 261–266, 271–272, snow 3–4, 23, 38, 43, 47, 61–84
284–289, 299–300, 310 soma 6–9, 14–27, 34–35, 38–57, 112,
soma power 5, 27, 112, 118–127 118–123, 153, 179, 222, 239–240, 276,
pragmatism 89, 113, 271 282–287
private (versus public) 5, 23–26, 56, 60, 65, soma/city analogy 3, 17–25, 49–50, 202
79, 90–92, 114–117, 122–123, 136–138, somaesthetics 13–15, 39–57, 89–90,
153–159, 171–173, 181–187, 232 118n25, 136, 222, 252, 269–277, 299–303,
prostitution 6, 13, 126n60, 156–159, 186, 311–312
195–216, 257–260 analytic 201, 252–254
protests 1–4, 13, 89, 102–107, 118–122, 127, experiential 54, 84, 102–106, 253
153–174, 178–180, 188–192 and feminism 153, 163, 171–180,
psychogeography 8, 249–269 180
public 6, 20–23, 30, 41, 47, 60, 79, 91–105, performative 52, 102–105, 121, 180,
111–128, 133n3, 135–138, 145, 153–174, 252–254
177–192, 195–216, 225–226, 232, 241 and politics 117, 123–126, 134–136
space/sphere 5–6, 30, 33, 75, 120n35, practical 121, 180
130–131, 167n45, 241, 255–258, 263 pragmatic 111n2, 153, 173, 252–254
representational 102–105, 253–254
racism 142, 186–189, 272 songs 6, 49, 94, 100, 167–170, 239
regulation 3–8, 16, 22, 49, 56, 100, 112–115, space 5–6, 19, 23–26, 33, 38–45, 50–57,
126n60, 127, 183, 208–212, 225, 272 65–75, 78n32, 79, 104–106, 113–116,
thermoregulation 52n36, 53–55, 99 120n35, 122–127, 153–174, 177–192,
revolt 4, 90, 99, 105–106, 119–121, 178–180, 202–206, 225–227, 235–241, 255–267,
187–192, 310 280
Subject Index 321
lived space 95, 239, 259 urban, the (see also city) 1–9, 13–35, 38–57,
rhetorical 112, 122–127 60–84, 89, 114, 127, 130, 156, 177–192,
urban 33, 38, 75–79, 183–187, 228–229, 196–204, 220–243, 250, 256–258,
255, 263–264 267–269, 281–290, 309
streets 1–9, 13–14, 19–35, 46–50, 60–84, 97 urbanity 14, 19, 38, 42, 50, 57, 75
141–146, 198n5, 200, 224–227, 239,
260–264, 281, 302 values 5, 15, 16n4, 32, 106, 211, 220–241, 256,
political uses of 26, 35, 111n2, 114n12, 115, 279, 290
116n20, 118–122, 126–127, 188 Varanasi (see also Banaras) 8–9, 294–311
varieties of 9, 13–14, 19, 29, 33, 65–69, Venice 9, 156, 166
106, 117, 131, 225–226, 241, 267 Vienna 2, 23–24
sublime, the 8–9, 33, 232n35, 252–255, vulnerability 8, 43, 103, 164, 180–182, 189–191,
264–267, 297–312 305
surveillance 5–7, 68n15, 103, 130, 210, 227
syphilis 7, 209–215 water 4, 45, 70, 89–107, 294–295, 311
weather 4, 22, 38–57, 61, 72–74, 83–84
Tangiers 271 women 5, 115, 116n18, 153–174,
Tehran 7, 220–243 187–189, 198, 204, 211
theatre 14, 26, 32, 46, 56, 168, 225, 239,
268, 287 Yangon 96
Timisoara 118, 120
Tokyo 2 Zhuhai 43
totalitarianism 5, 111–128 zombie 5, 140–147
Trieste 164, 167

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Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life

Richard Shusterman (Florida Atlantic University, usa)

Roger Ames (University of Hawaii, usa)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sis

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

List of Illustrations VII

Introduction: Bodies in the Streets and the Somaesthetics

2 The Weather-Worlds of Urban Bodies 38

3 White on Black: Snow in the City, Skiing in Copenhagen 60

4 Body Politics: Revolt and City Celebration 89

5 Bodies in the Streets of Eastern Europe: Rhetorical Space and the

6 From Dancing to Dying in the Streets: Somaesthetics of the

7 “Street” is Feminine in Italian: Feminine Bodies and

8 Bodies in Alliance and New Sites of Resistance: Performing the

9 East End Prostitution and the Fear of Contagion: On Body

10 Towards a Somaesthetic Conception of Culture in Iran: Somaesthetic

11 “Terrae Incognitae”: The Somaesthetics of Thomas De Quincey’s

13 The Somaesthetic Sublime: Varanasi in Modern and

Name Index 315

7.10 Agnese De Donato. Il gesto femminista. 1974. Photograph. Photo by Agnese De

Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, Pragmatist Aesthetics (published in fifteen

Bodies in the Streets and the Somaesthetics of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004411135_002

international institutions (banks, embassies, consulates, associations, schools,

(hurried or leisurely or bent under an umbrella) and even to weather-related

i­ndicates how other totalitarian communist regimes in Eastern Europe like-

through a sensitive reflection on the sacred city of Varanasi (also known as

I conclude these introductory remarks by thanking some institutions and

Bodies in the Streets: The Soma, the City, and

1 Ambiguities and Ambivalence

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004411135_003

and eventually shapes also the metaphorical extensions of these notions in

2 Analogies of Soma and City

New York New York, big city of dreams

The Grandmaster elsewhere highlights the effects of overcrowding in the mis-

It’s like a jungle sometimes

9 Richard Shusterman, “The Urban Aesthetics of Absence: Pragmatist Reflections in Berlin,”

consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions

3 The Crowd and the Individual on the Street

a human soma maintains its identity through changes of size, appearance,

to lose himself” in the crowd, to savor a delicious moment of self-abandon, a

4 Intoxication and Alienation from the City Streets

Benjamin describes the flâneur as essentially “out of place,” a creature at home

and an enriched aesthetic education in cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity.

Cities, as Musil remarked, have their distinctive aesthetic identities or particu-

5 Drama, the Art of Living, and Somaesthetic Self-Fashioning

How do the streets themselves contribute to this somaesthetic social drama

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Aristotle. Politics. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

The Weather-Worlds of Urban Bodies

1 Aristotle, Politik (Hamburg: Meiner, 1981), 1330b, 260.

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exceptions3) to be left to natural scientists, who translate physical atmospheres

1 Meteorological Aesthetics and Urban Somaesthetics

According to Richard Shusterman, somaesthetics is “concerned with the criti-

r­eflection, then sensitivity to weather is also not essentially social-oriented;

2 History, Society and Climate

1. Correspondence. Urban bodies are under the weather. Somas do not

g­rowing world population together threaten to place the atmo-

On each of these levels an urban somaesthetics would have to interact with

7.10 Agnese De Donato. Il gesto femminista. 1974. Photograph. Photo by Agnese De

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indicates how other totalitarian communist regimes in Eastern Europe like-

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reflection, then sensitivity to weather is also not essentially social-oriented;

1. Correspondence. Urban bodies are under the weather. Somas do not

growing world population together threaten to place the atmo-

a lleviating the effects of Wetterfühligkeit include moderate physical exercises

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F ebruary of 2011 and reoccurrences afterwards up until the summer of 2013.

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