“We might conclude that, if the human experiment was aimed at expanding the sphere of rationality and reducing chaos, the human experiment is over. The very tools that enabled the expansion of rationality and human control (science, technology, industry, and information) have subsumed life to abstraction. And living warmth can only be found outside the icy wall of the citadel of reason.” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi in Breathing: Chaos and Poetry)

“Mask-up,” “maintain social distance,” “we’re at the limit of available ventilators,” “have you experienced shortness of breath?,” “get your knee off our necks!,” “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

Breathlessness is all around us. Our social respiration is suffocating on every level imaginable. As such, this performance is about therapy and, in many ways, about life and death. Berardi asks, “How do we deal with the suffocation that abstraction has produced in the history of humankind?” His answer argues for “a poetical reactivation of the erotic body of the general intellect as the only pathway of liberation from the oppression of financial capitalism.” His work traces the problem in terms of respiration, i.e., rhythm, spasm, suffocation, and death. For him, something that began with the Occupy protests in 2011, and has been in the process of realization since and across varied uprisings, is not so much a political movement as a reactivation of the social body from the abstract domination of financial absolutism. Practically, this means that only our self-organizing efforts in alliance with poetry might “reverse humanity’s slide toward self-annihilation.”

Therefore, my unreasoned, irrational, and dare I say “poetical” proposition in response to this argument is to ask what happens to financial capitalism if we—instead of pleading for breath under its oppressive boot—begin to imagine ourselves less as available resources to be extracted, and more as already discarded actants which amid the heap of humankind have poetically self-organized around the sole and lasting act of all human potency, breathing? In an act of anarchical subsistence, I created a material apparatus intended to visualize my body’s only purpose of existence is to breathe, and to assist in imagining the agency of the discarded.