THE FUNAMBULIST PAPERS VOLUME 2 26 GUEST WRITERS ESSAYS FOR THE FUNAMBULIST CURATED AND EDITED BY LÉOPOLD LAMBERT HANNA BAUMANN / ALEX SHAMS / ERIN MANNING MIMI THI NGUYEN / PHILIPPE THEOPHANIDIS INA KARKANI / JOANNE POUZENC / STUART ELDEN NANDITA BISWAS MELLAMPHY / SARAH CHOUKAH SOPHIA AZEB / ELENA LOIZIDOU / ALAN PROHM GRÉGOIRE CHAMAYOU / CHRYSANTHI NIGIANNI SOFIA LEMOS / LOREDANA MICU / DEREK GREGORY PEDRO HERNÁNDEZ MARTÍNEZ / DAN MELLAMPHY NICK AXEL / ADRIENNE HART / RENISA MAWANI TINGS CHAK / SEHER SHAH / GASTÓN GORDILLO ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS - MIHALOPOULOS THE FUNAMBULIST PAPERS: VOLUME 02 © Léopold Lambert, 2015. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2015 by The Funambulist + CTM Documents Initiative an imprint of punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-0692423240 ISBN-10: 0692423249 Cover artwork specifically created by Loredana Micu (2015). Cover design by the editor (2015). This book is the product of many people’s work: a very grate- ful thank you to Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Ed Keller, Hiroko Nakatani, Loredana Micu, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Philippe Theophani- dis, Hanna Baumann, Sophia Azeb, Derek Gregory, Stuart Elden, Gastón Gordillo, Pedro Hernández Martínez, Tings Chak, Alex Shams, Sofia Lemos, Grégoire Chamayou, Renisa Mawani, Nick Axel, Sarah Choukah, Alan Prohm, Erin Manning, Adrienne Hart, Joanne Pouzenc, Elena Loizidou, Chrysanthi Nigianni, Ina Kar- kani, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Dan Mellamphy, and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy. INDEX/ 0 | COVER: Loredana Micu 6 | INTRODUCTION: CORPOREAL POLITICS Léopold Lambert 8 | PROFILING SURFACES Mimi Thi Nguyen 14 | CAUGHT IN THE CLOUD: THE BIOPOLITICS OF TEARGAS WARFARE Philippe Theophanidis 24 | BODIES ON THE LINE: SOMATIC RISK AND PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES IN URBAN EXPLORATION AND PALESTINIAN ‘INFILTRATION’ Hanna Baumann 31 | PALESTINE MADE FLESH Sophia Azeb 36 | CORPOGRAPHIES: MAKING SENSE OF MODERN WAR Derek Gregory 46 | CHAMAYOU’S MANHUNTS: FROM TERRITORY TO SPACE? Stuart Elden 54 | NAZI ARCHITECTURE AS AFFECTIVE WEAPON Gastón Gordillo 64 | BODIES AT SCENE: ARCHITECTURE AS FRICTION Pedro Hernández Martínez 71 | RACIALIZED GEOGRAPHIES AND THE FEAR OF SHIPS Tings Chak 77 | URBAN SPACE AND THE PRODUCTION OF GENDER IN MODERN IRAN Alex Shams 86 | NORM, MEASURE OF ALL THINGS Sofia Lemos 98 | PATTERNS OF LIFE: A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF SCHEMATIC BODIES Grégoire Chamayou 117 |BEE WORKERS AND THE EXPANDING EDGES OF CAPITALISM Renisa Mawani 127 |WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? Nick Axel 134 |OF ASSOCIATED MILIEUS Sarah Choukah 142 |~~FJORD~~ AND //DESERT// BODIES ~~LEAKING~~ AND //CONTAINED// BODIES Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 148 |DRESS BECOMES BODY: FASHIONING THE FORCE OF FORM Erin Manning 173 |A SENSING BODY - A NETWORKED MIND Adrienne Hart 177 |DREAM OF FLYING - FLYING BODIES Elena Loizidou 184 |THE ACT OF WAITING Joanne Pouzenc 191 |BODIES IN SYMPATHY FOR JUST ONE NIGHT Chrysanthi Nigianni 198 |FRAMING THE WEIRD BODY IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN CINEMA Ina Karkani 204 |BUILDING BODY: TWO BRIEF TREATMENTS ON LANDING SITE THEORY Alan Prohm 212 |A.V. (ANTHROPOCOSMOGONIC VASTUPURUSHAMANISM) Dan Mellamphy 224 |GHOST IN THE SHELL-GAME: ON THE MÈTIC MODE OF EXISTENCE, INCEPTION AND INNOCENCE Nandita Biswas Mellamphy 236 |PORTFOLIO: BODY WEIGHT Seher Shah INTRO/ CORPOREAL POLITICS BY LÉOPOLD LAMBERT This book is the second volume of texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011.1 The editorial line of this second series of twenty-six essays is dedicated to philosophical and political ques- tions about bodies. This choice is informed by my own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Corporeal politics do not exist in a void of objects, build- ings and cities; on the contrary, they operate through the continuous material encounters between living and non-living bodies. Several texts proposed in this volume examine various forms of corporeal violence (racism, gender-based violence, etc.). This examination, however, can only exist in the integration of the designed environ- ment’s conditioning of this violence. As Mimi Thi Nguyen argues in the conclusion of this book’s first chapter, “the process of attending to the body — unhooded, unveiled, unclothed — cannot be the so- lution to racism, because that body is always already an abstraction, an effect of law and its violence.”2 The designed environment does not merely stop at the perceptible limit of the various objects — whatever their size — that surround our bodies: it includes the atmospheric composition of our bodily condi- tion of “Being-in-the-breathable,” as shown by Philippe Theophani- dis in the second chapter dedicated to the “biopolitics of teargas 6 warfare.”3 This notion of breathable strikes us for its resonance with the recent political affirmation about the reality of what it means to be an African American body through Eric Garner’s last words be- fore being strangled to death by a New York police officer: “I can’t breathe!”4 Fifty-five years earlier, Frantz Fanon had described the colonial conditions under the following terms: There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and indepen- dence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, 1 See Léopold Lambert (ed), The Funambulist Papers: Volume 1, Brooklyn: punctum books, 2013. 2 Mimi Thi Nguyen, “Profiling Surfaces,” in this volume, 13. 3 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009, 47. Philippe Theophanidis, “Caught in the Cloud: The Biopolitics of Teargas Warfare,” in this volume, 14-23. 4 Eric Garner was killed by a white NYPD officer in Staten Island on July 17, 2014. its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.5 This book does not intend to produce a total or a proper knowledge about the body, since such a production never operates without a violence implicit within it. The most literal example of such a correla- tion can be found in the active participation of doctors in various forms of modern torture, from the Nazi concentration camps to the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques, and includ- ing the French colonial doctor in Algeria, also described by Fanon.6 This anatomic and biological literality should not however obscure another form of production of knowledge about the body, a less transcendental one: the empirical normative production of social performativites. This present volume attempts to produce knowl- edge about the conditions through which the body is entangled in mechanisms of power, as well as how it is able, by its very material- ity, to implement strategies of resistance against various forms of dominant discursive and physical violence. As already briefly outlined, the critical treatments offered by this book’s contributors allow to go much further than the usual (and often blindly obsessive!) arguments developed in my own writ- ings for The Funambulist.7 Although the readers won’t find indica- tions about the disciplinary background of the contributors — the “witty” self-descriptions at the end of the book being preferred to academic resumés — the content of the texts will certainly attest to the broad imaginaries at work throughout this volume. Dialogues between dancers and geographers, between artists and biohack- ers, between architects and philosophers, and so forth, provide the richness of this volume through difference rather than similarity. Some of the authors here consider bodies as moving assemblag- es (Hanna Baumann, Grégoire Chamayou, Adrienne Hart), others 7 as sites of normative violence (Mimi Thi Nguyen, Tings Chak, Alex Shams, Sofia Lemos), others as the (sometimes esoteric) genera- tive source of their material environment (Pedro Hernández Mar- tínez, Alan Prohm, Erin Manning, Dan Mellamphy), and one author even interprets the notion of the body in its non-human character- istics (Renisa Mawani): approaches are as rich as various. For this reason, I would like to formally thank the twenty-seven friends and contributors for having dedicated the time and efforts to their texts presented here. Together, we form a community of ideas that, I hope, will prove useful both for us and for our readers. 5 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, New York: Grove Press, 1994, 47. 6 See Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” in A Dying Colonialism, New York: Grove Press, 1994, 121-146. 7 See the volumes of The Funambulist Pamphlets (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2013-2015) to be convinced of it. 61/ PROFILING SURFACES BY MIMI THI NGUYEN In June 2010, the New York Times published a feature provocatively titled, “The War is Fake, the Clothing Real,” about David Tabbert, a fashion-conscious costumer for a company that clothes play-acting Afghan or Iraqi insurgents and civilians in war games staged for the United States armed forces.1 “Though Mr. Tabbert, 28, person- ally prefers G-star denim