Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces

Tonino Griffero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317177487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Originally published in Italian in 2010, this book is the first to address the theory of atmospheres in a thorough and systematic way. It examines the role of atmospheres in daily life, and defines their main characteristics. Outlining the typical phenomenological situations in which we experience atmospheres, it assesses their impact on contemporary aesthetics. It puts forward a philosophical approach which systematises a constellation of affects and climates, finds patterns in the emotional tones of different spaces (affordances) and assesses their impact on the felt body. It also critically discusses the spatial turn invoked by several of the social sciences, and argues that there is a need for a non-psychologistic rethinking of the philosophy of emotions. It provides a history of the term 'atmosphere' and of the concepts anticipating its meaning (genius loci, aura, Stimmung, numinous, emotional design and ambiance), and examines the main ontological characteristics of atmospheres and their principal phenomenological characteristics. It concludes by showing how atmospheres affect our emotions, our bodies' reactions, our state of mind and, as a result, our behaviour and judgments. Griffero assesses how atmospheres are more effective than we have been rationally willing to admit, and to what extent traditional aesthetics, unilaterally oriented towards art, has underestimated this truth.

Chapter 1
Atmospheric Perception

1.1 Atmospheric Segmentation?

The atmospheric – while uniting and allowing for a productive tuning – divides at the same time, given that ‘through the entire world of human life, under the sign of the atmospheric, just as in the animal reign under the sign of the olfactory, there are numerous invisible, yet selective and efficacious, frontiers’ (Tellenbach 1968: 56). That is, segmentations that are natural as much as socio-cultural, like that (more violent than one would imagine) between the ‘happy few’ self-elected priests of good taste and all ‘the others’. With their facilitating factors of unification, objects undoubtedly guarantee representational, and therefore ontological, advantages on the basis of dualisms (in primis that between mind and body) that would even count as the evolutionary answer of the species.¹ And yet, as soon as the cognitive distance (required by representation and judgment so as to overcome the roughness of lived experience) is reduced, as soon as one leaves behind the thingness typical of naïve physicalism as well as the obsessive epistemic causalism, things change and it is not so much dualisms that impose themselves on us for their undisputable aesthetic primal character, but rather emotional situations that involve us on the affective-corporeal level. And their ontological primal character, on the contrary, suggests the hypothesis – opposed to that of evolutionary psychology – that the separation between things and meanings is only a late phenomenon in biophysical evolution (being, moreover, exclusively human) with respect to the more primal symbioticity.

In this sense, the basic ontological elements would not be things but (atmospheric) meanings, namely ‘that kind of living system of meanings which makes the concrete essence of the object immediately recognizable, and allows its “sensible properties” to appear only through that essence. […] In the normal subject the object “speaks” and is significant, the arrangement of colours straight away “means” something’ (Merleau-Ponty 2005: 151) – notwithstanding that, following Aristotle, what is prior in experience can turn out to be cognitively successive (and more enigmatic). Why on earth, in fact, should solid and contoured bodies be more real than vague entities, which we experience without referring them to solidity,² such as fluids, gas processes or even quasi-things like atmospheres? So much so that atmospheres, far from being abstractions or mere possibilities, preserving their identity in our (especially involuntary) memory, seem to guarantee even ‘the immutable preserved in what is past’ (Tellenbach 1968: 31). Be it the innumerable and elegant examples of atmospheric memories of the Recherche (from the Madeleine onwards) or Léon Daudet’s more prosaic pea soup,³ what every good novel exemplifies extensively is that our lived experience – especially if untied from generally reifying senses like sight and touch – is not segmented first of all into discrete objects, but in feelings poured out in the surrounding space, felt by the felt-body before any analytical distinction.

Due to their priority and (relative) objectivity, atmospheres must certainly then be registered in the ontological repertory originated by our ordinary, intuitive and pragmatically efficacious segmentation of reality (which is firstly aesthesiological, then socio-cultural and so on). In short, it is a matter of affective and corporeal conditions aroused in the subject by external situations;⁴ they are pre-dualistic and, in principle, opaque to the so-called expert knowledge and yet, as invariants obtained from a flux, still classifiable into a familiar and sufficiently systematic repertory (atmospheric topics) of affective-emotional kinds:⁵ a phenomenologically ‘true’ repertory, as it is passively perceived,⁶ almost as if it were the point of view of things.⁷

1.2 Perceiving Atmospheres

Philosophers, one could say, have so far only interpreted the world, in various ways: now the point is to perceive it. Also atmospherically. Then it might be convenient to begin by precisely defining, though with no pretentions of exhaustiveness and systematicity, what kind of perception the atmospheric one is, starting also from what it is not.

a. First of all, like ordinary perception, it is never only the belief of perceiving. While counting on the same reality index (owing to the identity of the real and the perceived), atmospheric perception is, nonetheless, never the unaffective and anaesthetic perception tackled by psychology handbooks, thus fatally confusing experience and experiment. It is only because of a logistic-epistemic strabismus, in fact, that perception is thought-of as ‘if the external world were behind a door and we were in front of it, full of curiosity. Instead, opening an eye is not at all similar to looking through a door lock’ (Piana 1979: 19): it is rather living significant impressions possibly without ascetic and/or reductionistic shortcuts.⁸ That is, to have an experience and not the distancing-constative process that specialised psychology limits itself to, namely not the mere passive-reflective registration of a portion of the visual field by an immobile eye thought of along the model of the camera obscura or the ‘open window’. If it is untrue that ‘we stop seeing when we close our eyes’ (Minkowski 1936: 132), it is precisely because the optical reduction of the perceptive – despite being probably the evolutionary outcome of the weakening of animal olfaction – is probably much rarer than the affectively and synaesthetically engaging perception that interests us here.

b. Atmospheric perception, as we have anticipated, does not concern cohesive, solid, continuous objects mobile only through contact, nor discrete forms and movements, but rather chaotic-multiple situations (see infra 1.6) endowed with their own internal significance⁹ and whose phenomenical efficiency must be radically disjointed from the physical stimulus. Borrowing a term established in aesthetics, philosophical anthropology and hermeneutics, we could therefore identify atmospheric percepts with the ‘significances’,¹⁰ in particular with emotional saliences at least partly cognitively penetrable, in that they derive more from a ‘noticing’ than a purely optical seeing,¹¹ and they are in any case so immediate that they need no deciphering.¹²

The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart, and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked. (Goodman 1968: 7–8)

According to the organic species-specific constitution and the psychic-existential situation, in perceiving the senses select, in fact, as significant (and ipso facto as real), within an ampler repertory of possibilities, something one is motivated by independently from the psycho-physical conditioning.¹³

The physiological processes in the sense organs, in the nerve cells and in the ganglia, do not motivate me even if they condition, in my consciousness, psychophysically, the appearances of sense data, apprehensions, and psychic lived experiences. What I do not ‘know’, what does not stand over against me in my lived experiences, in my representing, thinking and acting, as the represented, perceived, remembered, thought, etc., does not ‘determine’ me as a mind. And what is not intentionally included in my experiences, even if unattended or implicit, does not motivate me, not even unconsciously. (Husserl 1990: 243)

c. The situation, it is true, is intensely perceived on the atmospheric level mostly when it escapes the ordinary pragmatic relationship; like when an unexpected climatic event, impeding our activities, unexpectedly attracts attention over its own autonomous emotional value. Yet, far from being an exceptional event, cause of ineffable losses or unheard-of discoveries, atmospheric perception is largely nothing but one of the variants of ordinary perception, in which ‘the state of perceiving consciousness as directly conditioned by something absolutely foreign to the soul’¹⁴ (Klages 1921: 212–213) is sensed.

We see colours, hear sounds, smell perfumes, taste the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the salted; with touch we sense pressure, the hot, the cold, the wet, the rough, the smooth, the dry; but we do not see our own seeing, hear our own hearing, smell our own smelling, taste our own tasting, touch our own touching. […] Finally, we feel sadness, joy, hope, love, expectation, veneration, hatred, and therefore something that moves the soul, but we do not feel our own feeling […] To live experiences with sentiment means living the attractive force of images […] Our soul mirrors the world, but not…the mirror! (ibid: 290–292)

Such variant is certainly, at times, subversive enough, with respect to the lethal familiarity, to allow for a renewed look on things and places that has something of a rapture, breaking ‘the surface of visual habits’ until ‘from the cracks the forgotten daemonic character of things erupts’ (Böhme 1988: 230), and in which the phenomenological ‘that’ reveals to be irreducible to the cognitive ‘what’.

An inhibition of familiar sensa is very apt to leave us a prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal operations. In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of influences from vague things around us. (Whitehead 2010: 176, my emphasis)

Yet, it is not necessary here to identify perception with impulse,¹⁵given that, after all, it already falls within that common experience that gives us the world, phenomenologically, as it is, and which aetiology follows only afterwards. If, in fact, ‘the phenomenon itself is a bearer of meaning’ (Klages 1921: 254), it is erroneous to ‘intend the thing as if I had here the thing and there the idea, because I instead perceive the thing in its idea. In front of me I do not see two things, but I have in front of my eyes the thing in its idea. Which is why I cannot at all imagine what else the thing could be without its idea’ (Schapp 2004: 141).

d. Perceiving atmospherically is not grasping (presumed) elementary sense-data and, only afterwards or per accidens, states of things,¹⁶ but it is instead being involved by things or, even better, situations. After all, ‘much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves […] In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e listen abstractly’ (Heidegger 1977a: 156). Not only do we always ‘hear the storm whistling in the chimney, […] the three-motored plane, […] the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen [Adler in the original, AN]’ (ibid), but, even when the meaning remains obscure, we do not regress at all to presumed (unaffective) sense-data, because we still refer, physiognomically, to a unit of meaning within a situational background. In fact, ‘to be aware of a fire as merely a set of hues and shapes in motion instead of experiencing the exciting violence of the flames presupposes a very specific, rare and artificial attitude’ (Arnheim 1966: 63); the same goes for perceiving a face as an object instead of ‘its look and its expression’, or Paris as a collection of perceptions instead of the ‘style’ of the perceptions suggested by the city (Merleau-Ponty 2005: 327–328). Atmospheric perception is therefore a holistic and emotional being-in.the-world. ‘Only because one moves between things and has to do with them, only if one is in the world and does not have it before oneself, one can feel […] One is never in a vacuum, but always “with” things’ (Lipps 1977: 77–78), with ‘the desk at which I am now writing […], likewise [with] the flavor of the tobacco I am now inhaling from my pipe, or the noise of the traffic in the street below my window’ (Koffka 1922: 532): in short, with what is now here-for-me, both affectively and corporeally. Atmospheric perception is not explicated, in the final analysis, through a ‘separatistic sensualism’ (Schmitz 1978: 9), nor, following Kant, through the synthesis of an otherwise confused sensorial multiplicity, but always having to do, vice versa, with a ‘matter […] “pregnant” with its form’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 12), with situations that cannot be partitioned into those numerical singularities¹⁷ upon whose constellations only one can build abstractive constructions of prognostic value.¹⁸ In atmospheric perception one is rather affectively and corporeally involved in a situation, for insta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Not to Leave Vagueness (but to Stay in it in the Right Way)
• 1 Atmospheric Perception
• 2 History of the Concept of Atmosphere
• 3 Atmospherology
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index