Becoming-imperceptible: insalubriousness as artistic life choice

In the introduction to Against Health – How Health Became the New Morality (NYU Press, 2010), one the article collection’s editors, Jonathan M. Metzl, addresses possible objections to the book’s title: yes, all the writers believe in the medical profession’s recommendations and encourage equal access to healthcare system. Yet, as Metzl points out, "health" as a term is loaded with judgments and hierarchies – in short, the idea of health denotes an ideological position. Thus, the topic of health is of primary relevance in the discourse of biopolitics. In my presentation I address the health/biopolitics intersection from the point of view of an artistic response to the ideological imperative of wholesomeness. In particular, I consider the case of the Paavoharju collective, a Finnish music group that gained surprising international renown in the early 2000s with their debut album. Interest towards them was equally due to stories of their unconventional lifestyle as to the amateurishly otherworldly quality of the music that was produced on very meagre means. Living in a small provincial town of Savonlinna, subsisting on home-brewed alcohol and food found from dumpsters, they occupied various abandoned buildings and vagrant shacks, ending up in a dilapidated dairy, into which they built hidden living quarters. All this created a mythology – a "sonic fiction" – around the group, especially in international alternative music media. When perusing the history of that scene, what stands out is the almost childish joy and affirmation of the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions of the group’s chosen life at the time. It is not hard to view these life choices as resistance to the ideals and norms of biopower and I bring up the theoretical implications of this chosen insalubriousness, applying the Deleuzian concepts of becoming-imperceptible and molecularity, as well as Agamben’s idea of existence as potentiality, to these considerations. Further, I reflect on the role of fictioning (or sonic-fictioning) in this schema.