Somapower: Somaesthetics Reads Politics: Somaesthetics Reads Politics

Scholars such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have shown how the body can become a site of oppression. But after all, the body can become a vehicle for resistance or emancipation. The contributors to this volume, referring to Richard Shusterman's concept of somaesthetics, show through various examples how this is possible. Moving away from Foucault's and Bourdieu's construal of the body as a site of oppression, the contributors to this volume draw on Richard Shusterman's somaesthetics to argue that the body can also be a vehicle for resistance and emancipation. Contents Preface: Somapower; or, Somaesthetics Reads Politics References Acknowledgements Part 1: Practices of Somaesthetic Resistance 1 For a Somaesthetics of Carceral Resistance: Dissociation, Sensation, and the Intercorporeal Field Abstract Keywords 1 Penality and Sensation: the Case of Solitary Confinement 2 Toward a Political Concept of Dissociation 3 Carceral Somaesthetics 4 Perceiving the Somatic Field: Neurodiversity and Relational Perception 5 Somaesthetic Resistance 6 Sensing the Field in Carceral Spaces 7 The Practice: Sensing the Body, Sensing the Field 2 Misfit Mutiny: Somaesthetic Discomfort against the Abjection Abstract Keywords 1 Somaesthetic Discomfort 2 Misfitting and Non-normate Discomfort 3 Conclusion Acknowledgements 3 Somaesthetics and the Somatic Experience of White Privilege Abstract Keywords 1 Getting One’s Own House in Order 2 Somaesthetics and Whiteness 3 White Privilege as a Somatic Social Practice 4 Toward a New White Self via Somatic Style 5 Conclusion 4 Body Ecology and Digital Urbanism: Assimilation-Resistance-Hybridity Abstract Keywords 1 The Dawn of Digital Urbanism 2 As in VR, so Below: so Below, so in VR; the Urban Hybridity 3 The Metaverse and the Metaverse(d) City 4 B × C × D = AHH 5 Hacking the Hacker? The Logic of Resistance in Hybrid Urban Environments 6 Body Ecology and Hybridity: a New Approach to Digital Urbanism 7 Conclusion 5 The Body as a Place of Resistance to the Pandemic Politics of Global Corporations: Recovering Abstract Keywords 1 From the Disciplinary Society to the Society of Control: Digital Modulations of Lives and Identities 2 The Governance of Global Corporations and the Pandemic Engineering of the Population 3 Recovering Sensibility as a Political and Economic Stake Part 2: Somaesthetics of Taste 6 Cooking as Somaesthetic and Political Education Abstract Keywords 7 Pragmatist Aesthetics, Ethics of Taste, and Feminism Abstract Keywords 1 Pragmatist Aesthetics and Ethics 2 The Aestheticization of the Ethical (and the Ethicization of the Aesthetic) 3 Neo-pragmatist Aesthetics and Ethics: Shusterman with/against Rorty 4 Somaesthetic Developments and Feminist Issues 4.1 The Sexed Soma between Nature and Culture 4.2 Somaesthetics and the Dialectics of Lovemaking 4.3 Feminist Directions in Somaesthetic Research Acknowledgments 8 Somaesthetics and the Political Potential of Taste Abstract Keywords 1 Food, Politics, and Somatic Style 2 Owl and Friends: or, the Genealogy of Modern Eating in Poland 3 Conclusion: Somaesthetics and the Political Relevance of Food 9 Biopower and Somapower: Suggesting a Theoretical Framework on a Heraclitan Basis Abstract Keywords 1 Some Heraclitan Fragments 2 Biopower versus Somapower as a Heraclitan Contradiction Afterword: Somapower and Politics; Action, Affect, and Atmosphere References Index We do politics in, through, and as bodies. All our political activity is inevitably corporeal. Parliamentary debates, party assemblies, street demonstrations, and civil disobedience are all bodily actions. Political regimes maintain their power by controlling our bodies, both through explicit acts of violence and, more insidiously, by inculcating somatic norms of obedience to the political authorities and ideologies. This oppression can be effectively challenged if we use somaesthetics to identify and examine the bodily habits and feelings that express and reinforce such domination. Somaesthetically explored, they can be refashioned and help overcome the oppressive social conditions that produce them.