The Atmospheric "We": Moods and Collective Feelings 978886977334

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“Is there an atmospheric ‘we’? And if so, to what extent does it differ from what one calls, according to the respective disciplines, ‘Zeitgeist’ or ‘style’, ‘climate’ or ‘mentality’, ‘habitus’ or ‘collective imagination’, ‘mood’ or ‘collective emotion’, etc.? I will try to show that the leitmotif of an authentic neo-phenomenological investigation of intersubjective and collective atmospheres […] goes through the dimension of (not only individual) felt bodily resonance that atmospheric feelings authoritatively arouse.”

2. Christian Julmi, Situations and Atmospheres in Organizations: A (New) Phenomenology of Being-in-the-Organization 3. Tonino Griffero, Giampiero Moretti (ed. by), Atmosphere/Atmospheres: Testing a New Paradigm 4. Andreas Rauh, Concerning Astonishing Atmospheres: Aisthesis, Aura, and Atmospheric Portfolio

ATMOSPHERIC SPACES

1. Gernot Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism

THE ATMOSPHERIC “WE”

ATMOSPHERIC SPACES book series directed by Tonino Griffero

TONINO GRIFFERO

Tonino Griffero is Full Professor of Aesthetics at University of “Tor Vergata”, Rome, and is the editor of Percezioni. Estetica & Fenomenologia, Sensibilia, Atmospheric Spaces and the e-journal Lebenswelt. His most recent books are: Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (2014), Quasi-Things. The Paradigm of Atmospheres (2017), Places, Affordances, Atmospheres. A Pathic Aesthetics (2019). Coeditor of Psychopathology and Atmospheres. Neither Inside nor Outside, Cambridge Scholar (2019), and Atmosphere and Aesthetics. A Plural Perspective (2019).

TONINO GRIFFERO

THE ATMOSPHERIC “WE” MOODS AND COLLECTIVE FEELINGS

5. Barbara Wolf, Atmospheres of Learning: How They Affect the Development of Our Children 6. Hermann Schmitz, New Phenomenology: A Brief Introduction 7. Federica Scassillo (ed. by), Resounding Spaces: Approaching Musical Atmospheres

9 788869 773334

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$ 18.99 / £ 26.99 / € 22,00

MIMESIS

Mimesis International Atmospheric Spaces www.mimesisinternational.com

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9. Tadashi Ogawa, Phenomenology of Wind and Atmosphere

ISBN 978-88-6977-333-4

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8. Otto Bollnow, Human Space

What contribution can the atmospherological approach make to the debate on collective feelings? In answering this question, the book provides a brief introduction to the so-called “atmospheric turn”, examines the complex emotional “games” to which atmospheres give rise and the rest-realist background underlying their inclusion in the unprecedented ontological category of quasithings. It then investigates what the power of atmospheric feelings is and how there may be an “atmospheric competence” relating both to the intentional generation of atmospheres and to the ability not to be manipulated by them, thus also addressing the problem of whether collective feelings are atmospheres or moods. It finally explores what kind of “we” a collective atmosphere is based on and applies this perspective both to the notion of “well being” and two oppressive atmospheres like permanent emergency and the uncanny.

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ATMOSPHERIC SPACES n. 10

ATMOSPHERIC SPACES Director: Tonino Griffero (Tor Vergata University – Rome) Coordinator: Marco Tedeschini (Tor Vergata University – Rome) Executive Secretary: Sara Borriello, Serena Massimo (Tor Vergata University – Rome) Committee Members: Niels Albertsen (Aarhus School of Architecture), Jean-François Augoyard (CNRS – Grenoble), Arnold Berleant (Emeritus – Long Island University), Mikkel Bille (Roskilde University), Gernot Böhme (IPPh – Darmstadt), Christian Borch (Copenhagen Business School), Gabor Csepregi (University of SaintBoniface – Winnipeg), Christoph Demmerling (Friedrich Schiller University – Jena), Gianni Francesetti (IPsiG – Turin), Thomas Fuchs (Heidelberg University Hospital), Michael Großheim (Rostock University), Robert Gugutzer (Goethe University – Frankfurt), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University), Jürgen Hasse (Goethe University – Frankfurt), Michael Hauskeller (University of Liverpool), Timothy Ingold (University of Aberdeen), Christian Julmi (University of Hagen), Rainer Kazig (CNRS – Grenoble), Robert J. Kozljanic (Albunea Verlag – Munich; Nietzsche-Forum – Munich), Hilge Landweer (Free University of Berlin), David Le Breton (University of Strasbourg), Juhani Pallasmaa (Aalto University), Alberto PérezGómez (McGill University – Montreal, Quebec), Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster – London), Hermann Schmitz († Emeritus - Kiel University), David Seamon (Kansas State University), Giovanni Stanghellini (Gabriele d’Annunzio University – Chieti; Diego Portales University – Santiago), Shanti Sumartojo (Monash University), Jean-Paul Thibaud (CNRS – Grenoble) Associate Members: Aurosa Alison (Polytechnic University of Milan), Valeria Bizzari (Catholic University of Leuven), Guenda Bernegger (SUPSI – Switzerland), Alessandro Bertinetto (University of Turin), Margit Brunner (University of Adelaide), Barbara Carnevali (EHESS – Paris), Vincenzo Costa (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University – Milan), Federico De Matteis (University of L’Aquila), Mădălina Diaconu (University of Vienna), Elisabetta Di Stefano (University of Palermo), Carsten Friberg (Independent Researcher – Copenhagen), Mildred Galland-Szymkowiak (CNRS – École normale supérieure – Paris), Julian Hanich (University of Groningen), Dehlia Hannah (Arizona State University), Klaske M. Havik (Delft University of Technology), Christiane Heibach (FHNW Basel; University of Regensburg), Maximilian Gregor Hepach (University of Cambridge), Yuho Hisayama (Kobe University), George Home-Cook (Independent Researcher), Veronica Iubei (Heidelberg University), Steffen Kluck (Rostock University), Reinhardt Knodt (Berlin), Joel Krueger (University of Exeter), Wendelin Küpers (Karlshochschule – Karlsruhe), Rita Messori (University of Parma), Eugenio Morello (Polytechnic University of Milan), Werner Müller-Pelzer (Fachhochschule – Dortmund), Barbara Piga (Polytechnic University of Milan), Matthew Pritchard (University of Leeds), Tiziana Proietti (Oklahoma University), Andreas Rauh (University of Würzburg), Friedlind Riedel (Bauhaus University – Weimar), Simon Runkel (Friedrich Schiller University – Jena), Susanne Schmitt (Independent Researcher), Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo), Renata Scognamiglio (Sapienza University – Rome), Antonio Somaini (Sorbonne Nouvelle University), Anette Stenslund (Roskilde University), Thomas Szanto (University of Copenhagen), Juha Torvinen (University of Helsinki), Dylan Trigg (University of Vienna), Silvia Vizzardelli (University of Calabria), Izabela Wieczorek (University of Reading), Barbara Wolf (Kolping Hochschule – Cologne), Penelope Woods (Queen Mary University – London)

What is an “Atmosphere”? According to an aesthetic, phenomenological and ontological view, such a notion can be understood as a sensorial and affective quality widespread in space. It is the particular tone that determines the way one experiences her surroundings. Air, ambiance, aura, climate, environment, genius loci, milieu, mood, numinous, lived space, Stimmung, but also Umwelt, ki, aida, Zwischen, in-between – all these words are names hiding, in fact, the founding idea of atmospheres: a vague ens or power, without visible and discrete boundaries, which we find around us and, resonating in our lived body, even involves us. Studying atmospheres means, thus, a parte subjecti, to analyse (above all) the range of unintentional or involuntary experiences and, in particular, those experiences which emotionally “tonalise” our everyday life. A parte objecti, it means however to learn how atmospheres are intentionally (e.g. artistically, politically, socially, etc.) produced and how we can critically evaluate them, thus avoiding being easily manipulated by such feelings. Atmospheric Spaces is a new book series whose aim is to become a point of reference for a community that works together on this philosophical and transdisciplinary subject and for all those whose research, more broadly, is involved in the so-called “affective turn” of the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Tonino Griffero

THE ATMOSPHERIC “WE” Moods and Collective Feelings

MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL

Copy-editing by Sarah De Sanctis.

© 2021 – Mimesis International www.mimesisinternational.com e-mail: [email protected] Book series: Atmospheric Spaces, n. 10 Isbn: 978886977334 © MIM Edizioni Srl P.I. C.F. 0241937030

CONTENTS

Foreword

9

1. Introduction. Where Do We Stand on Atmospheres?

13

2. Atmospheric Games (With a Little Help from Literature)

29

3. An Ontological Background for Atmospheres and Quasi-things

67

4. What an Atmospheric Affect Can Really Do. Urbanizing the Schmitzean “Province”

85

5. Moods or Atmospheres?

105

6. What Are Atmospheres if Not Extended and Felt-bodily Shared Feelings?

129

7. Well-being as a Collective Atmosphere

151

8. Two Oppressive Atmospheres. Permanent Emergency (Including Covid) and the Uncanny

175

Bibliography

201

Index

225

Foreword

Is this just another book on atmospheres? I must strongly reject this (negative) first impression, as it is still possible to derive many new ideas and fruitful suggestions from a topic I have been dealing with for at least fifteen years. Indeed, it is not only a matter of applying productively, as is to be expected, a philosophical approach to feelings as emotions poured into lived space in the most diverse fields and disciplines, as I have tentatively done elsewhere (psychopathology, theatre, pedagogy, architecture, urban studies, politics). On this level, in fact, research is likely to never end. Rather, I think that the potential of this subject is far from exhausted even from a more strictly theoretical and philosophical point of view. For this reason, the present book aims to extend previous research and to respond to an issue implicit in the reflections developed so far but never adequately investigated until now. That is, my aim is to answer the question of what contribution the atmospherological approach can make to the ageold (sociological, psychological, politological, etc.) debate on collective feelings. So is there an atmospheric “we”? And if so, to what extent does it differ from what one calls, according to the respective disciplines, “Zeitgeist” or “style”, “climate” or “mentality”, “habitus” or “collective imagination”, “mood” or “collective emotion”, etc.? I will try to show that the leitmotif of an authentic neo-phenomenological investigation of intersubjective and collective atmospheres, even of that defined as well-being, goes through the dimension of (not only individual) felt bodily resonance that atmospheric feelings authoritatively arouse. However, since atmospheres could be something new (and perhaps unheard of) for some readers, the book cannot start in medias res. It therefore aims to first provide a brief introduction to the so-called “atmospheric turn” attested in many humanistic disciplines (chapter 1). It then moves on to summarize my own phenomenology of atmospheres and the complex

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The Atmospheric “We”

emotional “games” to which they give rise, finding extensive confirmation of this descriptive phenomenology in numerous literary texts (chapter 2). Subsequently, the book proceeds to briefly present the rest-realist background underlying the inclusion of atmospheres in the unprecedented ontological category of quasi-things (chapter 3). In the following chapter, the book investigates what the power of atmospheric feelings is and how it acts on those who experience them, but also how and whether there may be an “atmospheric competence” relating both to the intentional generation of atmospheres and to the ability not to be manipulated by them (chapter 4). It then addresses the difficult problem of whether collective feelings, which human sciences sometimes presuppose as a fact, are atmospheres or moods—that is, objective or subjective, temporary or long-lasting affective states, etc. (chapter 5). The book then explores what kind of “we” a collective atmosphere is based on and looks for an intermediate solution between reifying objectivity and relativistic subjectivity (chapter 6). Finally, it tries to apply this perspective to the notion of well being, necessarily freed from strictly quantitative and third-person parameters and understood rather as a higher-order atmosphere (chapter 7), and to two oppressive atmospheres like permanent emergency and the uncanny (chapter 8). The chapters of this book are based on texts that have been presented at various conferences and workshops, and which appear here in a revised (expanded, reduced and partly modified) form. I thank the publishers for allowing me to present them here. Chapter 1 is the revised version of the introductive paper for the conference “Resounding spaces. Music and atmospheres” (University of Rome “Tor Vergata” – La Sapienza University of Rome), September 2019, later published (Introductory Remarks. Where Do We Stand on Atmospheres?) in F. Scassillo (ed.). (2020). Resounding Spaces. Approaching Musical Atmospheres. Milan-Udine: Mimesis International (Atmospheric Spaces 7), 11-24. Chapter 2 is a widely modified and extended version of a paper presented at the workshop “Atmosphäre Musik” (November 2014, University of Göttingen), later discussed at the conference “The Embodied Affective Dimension of Collective Intentionality” (May 2017, University of Copenhagen) and “The Aesthetic of Otherness: Meeting at the Boundary in a Desensitized World” (AAGT and EAGT Gestalt Conference at the crossroads of civilisations, September 2016, Taormina). A sketched version

Foreword

11

was published as Atmospheres and Pathic Aesthetics, in M. Spagnuolo Lobb and al. (eds.) (2018). The Aesthetic of Otherness: Meeting at the Boundary in a Desensitized World. Siracusa: Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy Publ., 57-74. Chapter 3 develops a talk given at the Colloque International “L’écho du réel” (Amphithéâtre – Cité de la Musique), February 2019, Paris. A slightly different French version is in press. Chapter 4 is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference “L’usage des ambiances. Une épreuve sensible des situations” (ESAAA/ CRESSON-UMR AAU), September 4-11 2018, Cerisy-La-Salle, and at the conference “Die Macht der Atmosphären” (XXVI Symposion der Gesellschaft für Neue Phänomenologie), April 2018, Rostock, then published in a partially different German version as Was kann eine Gefühlsatmosphäre tun? Atmosphären zwischen Immersion und Emersion. In C. Julmi-B. Wolf (eds.) (2020), Die Macht der Atmosphären. FreiburgMünchen: Alber, 77-96. Chapter 5: is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the meeting “Stimmungen and Atmospheres. First Steps to a New Paradigm” (Sensibilia 12 – Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici – La Sapienza University of Rome), September 2018, Rome, and later published as In a Neo-phenomenological Mood: Stimmungen or Atmospheres? “Studi di estetica” 47 (2019), 2, 121-151. Chapter 6 was developed out of a paper discussed at the conference “Atmospheres of Shared Emotion” (University of Vienna), April 2019. Chapter 7 is the elaborated version of a paper discussed at the conference “Assessing Well-Being: Atmospheres and Capabilities” (University of Rome “Tor Vergata”), February 2019, and then published in a partly different version as Well-being as a Collective Atmosphere. “Lebenswelt” 15 (2019), 46-77. Chapter 8 is unpublished.

1 Introduction Where Do We Stand on Atmospheres?

Edmonde: I need a change of atmosphere, and you are my atmosphere! Raymonde: This is the first time I’ve ever been called an atmosphere! Atmosphere! Atmosphere! Do I look like an atmosphere? Is that so? Alright then: go by yourself to La Varenne. Have a good time fishing and a good atmosphere!1

If we take a look this famous sequence and dialogue it is easy to see that the word “atmosphere”, if applied to humans, sounded pedantic and exotic in the daily vocabulary of the time,2 at least in Arletty’s naive and popular language. The fact that the concept of “atmosphere”, while remaining 1

2

Edmonde: J’ai besoin de changer d’atmosphère, et mon atmosphère, c’est toi. Mme Raymonde: C’est la première fois qu’on me traite d’atmosphère! Atmosphère! Atmosphère! Est ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?  Puisque c’est ça, vas-y tout seul à La Varenne! Bonne pêche et bonne atmosphère! (Marcel Carné, Hôtel du Nord, 1938). See Latour (2003).

The Atmospheric “We”

14

semantically precarious, is instead now fully in force in the scientific field and that atmospherization even appears to have become our common condition is surely a consequence of our times, and especially of the new sensibility spread by the so-called “affective turn” in the humanities. The flourishing discussion on this hybrid and vague idea that has been taking place the past three decades—responsible for a “diffusion” that today is dangerously subject to fashion and a certain abuse—even risks turning it into a meaningless buzzword. Precisely to ensure that the concept of “atmosphere” does not become a mere label and that its unwarranted and casual application does not make it lose any working force, it is necessary to go back to its genuine critical-philosophical potential without underestimating the hybridisation capacity as well as the inevitable (and fruitful) vagueness of a concept that, so to speak, is always “borderline”. 1. The atmospheric turn “There is something in the air”, “I feel like a fish out of water” or “I feel at home”, etc.: these everyday sayings express the qualitative and vague “something-more” of a certain situation, i.e. its atmosphere, in a very precise way, even without being able to define it (let alone rationally and propositionally explain it). Although the use of this term has been metaphorical since the 18th century and designed—along with some forerunners (aura, Stimmung, genius loci)—to cover a body of ideas become particularly significant already a century ago, and especially in the period between the two world wars, it has boomed only recently in the humanities. Never wholly detached from its climatic meaning of immersion in the weather-world, “atmosphere” is a colloquial word meaning that “something more” one feels (senses, perceives…) “in the air”, namely in a certain space or situation. It’s hard to express it better and in a more existentially dramatic way than Sartre: You walk, the moon has just risen, you feel lazy, vacant, a little empty. And suddenly you think: “Something has happened.” No matter what: a slight rustling in the shadow, a thin silhouette crossing the street. But this paltry event is not like the others: suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in the mist and you tell yourself. “Something is beginning” (Sartre 1964, 37).

Introduction

15

Another excellent example, which to my knowledge is never mentioned in the literature about atmospheres, is the way Scheler explains the notion of the environmental experience as lived experience—in (my) terms, as a real peripheral-atmospheric feeling. There belongs to the momentary “milieu” not only the series of objects that I perceive (either through sense or through representation) while I am walking in the street or sitting in my room, but also everything with whose existence or absence, with whose being so or other than so, I practically “reckon ,” e.g., the cars and people that I avoid (when I am lost in thought or when I fix my sight on a man far away). A sailor, for example, is able to “reckon” with an oncoming storm from changes in his milieu without being able to say which specific change (e.g., in the formation of clouds, in temperature, etc.) serves as a sign. Throughout all comprehensions of objects (both in the perception of present and past objects) we possess the ability to “take practical account” of things, which implies an experience of their efficacy and of changes in it that is independent of the perceptual sphere. It is this same “practical accounting” which experientially determines our acting in such a way or otherwise, and which is itself “given” only in such experienced alter-determinations—but not before, as a “reason” for them (Scheler 1973, 140).

This, of course, is the thing and not the word. But rem tene, verba sequentur. In fact, the actual “career”3 of the concept of “atmosphere” definitively began much later and can only be explained by both a) the aestheticisation in advanced capitalist economies4 and b) the interdisciplinary “affective turn” in disciplines increasingly focused more on the vague but expressive qualia of reality (its pathic “how”) than on its quantified materiality or defined semantic value (its gnostic “what”).5 Nonetheless, replacing “knowing that” with “knowing how” is perhaps still not sufficient to explain the surprising ubiquity of the concept. A philosophy of atmospheres needs to give a much more articulated answer to the boom of this concept, claiming that fundamentally there is no state of life where we are not already somehow sentimentally tuned, and therefore that probably no situation is totally deprived of an atmospheric charge. After all, not only do we continuously speak of atmospheres and take this term for granted,  but we are  also  accustomed to  being  able to 3 4 5

I have attempted to offer a more detailed explanation of this boom elsewhere (see Griffero 2019b, 16-29). See especially Böhme (2017c). For the original distinction between gnostic and pathic see Straus (1963).

The Atmospheric “We”

16

describe them and verify their influence on actions—sometimes, through some terminological shifting, even on events of historical and collective significance. A first (linguistic) difficulty is that the word “atmosphere” can either neutrally describe a situation by adding an adjective (tense, relaxed, gloomy, etc.), thus giving a salient account of the quality of everyday life, or implicitly (positively) axiologically refer to a favourable or even harmonious condition of a certain situation when not further qualified (“what an atmosphere!”). This depends both on the  current  linguistic practice in the different implied regional ontologies and on the kind of expectations involved in the situation.6 To give just a simple example: if the atmosphere of a very important political summit is defined as cordial and friendly, this probably means that the representatives involved did not really address the problems at stake or even that the meeting failed completely! 2. A genealogy I will start by saying a few words about the theoretical genealogy of the concept of “atmosphere”.7 The first impulse to a theory of atmospheres undoubtedly came from the observation and treatment of certain mental disorders. The psychiatrist Hubertus Tellenbach (1968) actually conceived of the atmosphere as an essential quality of intersubjectivity, especially generated through olfaction and taste. For him, an oral atmosphere is what gives newborns the necessary trust for a correct development of their personality; also, it provides the psychiatrist with an effective diagnostic tool of psychic diseases whose symptom is a loss or deterioration of olfaction. Tellenbach’s influence was restricted to the psychiatric sphere (and was underestimated at first). And, above all, the renaissance of a feeling-based theoretical stance would be just a trivial revival of an older semantical constellation (aura, Stimmung, etc.) if the new atmospherological approach—as I called it—could not rely on ideas that are a positive and useful provocation against both traditional ontology and common sense. 6 7

The best analysis of the language game in which “atmosphere” plays a role is offered by Rauh (2017, 39-45). For a more detailed but introductory overview see now Riedel (2019) and Griffero (2020).

Introduction

17

Hence the fundamental role of philosophy. In fact, from 1969 on8, on the basis of a wide and challenging anti-reductionist (new)phenomenology of the felt body (Leib)9 (since Schmitz 1965), Hermann Schmitz has considered all feelings as atmospheres. His philosophy, focused on the idea of the present/presence (since Schmitz 1964), should be understood as a self-reflection on the way in which one orientates within one’s environment and on (especially involuntary) life experiences redefined as a felt-bodily communication with all the perceived. It was a revolutionary claim that, in a way, restored the Homeric concept of feelings as demons poured out into a non-localizable space—the prevailing conception before they were introjected from Plato onwards. According to Schmitz, atmospheric feelings are not subjective-internal moods projected outside, but affective powers that discontinuosly but objectively exist outside and that authoritatively fill a certain surfaceless (lived) space. In particular, Schmitz a) downgrades the psyche to an almost always superfluous as well as theoretically unproven artificial construct encompassing an alleged private ineffable inner world (be it the soul, the psyche or, especially today, the brain). He moreover claims that b) thanks to felt-bodily qualities common both to perceived forms and perceivers (motor suggestions, synaesthetic qualities), in principle atmospheres can then be experienced by anyone, c) regardless of whether perceivers merely note them or are so deeply involved in them that they are assured of their personal identity precisely thanks to these absolute subjective-pathic “facts”. This approach10 challenges the tendency of Western culture (ever since Democritus and Plato) to exile into interiority—conceived as a box or a container falsely considered under human control and problematically connected with the outside world—all that by vagueness or complexity falls under the “reductionist razor”, especially outside situative feelings and felt-bodily emotions. This ancient paradigm erroneously suggested that the person is exonerated from the diktat of involuntary affects and only finds security in their inner life.11

8 See at least Schmitz (1969; 1990; 2014). 9 Cf. Schmitz (1965; 1992; 2007); for a recent overview cf. Schmitz (2011). 10 For a synthesis of his neo-phenomenological System see Schmitz (1990; and, as the first traduction into English of one of his books, 2019). 11 It could partially be applied also to new Phenomenology what Sartre’s Roquentin says of himself: “I want no secrets or soul-states, nothing ineffable; I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life” (Sartre 1962, 9).

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This ambitious and externalising approach to feelings as atmospheres was then powerfully developed by the philosopher Gernot Böhme. By mitigating Schmitz’s radicalism a little, since 1995 he has developed an aesthetics (or aisthetics) of atmospheres12 that is still valid today, aimed at overcoming the intellectualism of classical aesthetics and its obsessive focus on the alleged “great” art.13 Based on the extraordinarily rich atmospheric competence of today’s aesthetic work (architecture, interior design, light design, art, sound engineering, scene painting, music, social work, advertising, marketing research, politics, perfume making, nursing, human resource management, psychotherapy, etc.) Böhme claims that atmospheres are almost everywhere. In fact, atmospheres are involved wherever something is being staged through various atmospheric generators (movement impressions, synaesthesia, scenes, social characters, ecstasies of things, etc.), and this is especially true in the late capitalist aesthetic economy, which is increasingly based more on lifestyle or stage-values than on use- and exchange-values. This background, based on the stabilization and widening of the concept of atmosphere in the 1990s, which appeared as a keyword in a number of specialized papers and books, has also helped me—si parva licet—to develop my own atmospherology (which I have worked at from 2010 on) later included into a broader “pathic aesthetics”.14 It is focused both on a) atmospheres (of various kinds: hence my distinction among prototypical, derivative and spurious atmospheres) as supervenient qualia of the lived space, and on b) quasi-things, understood as wholes of affordances that, for their marked expressiveness and intrusiveness, have a real physiognomic “character”. My atmospherological approach aims at better explaining the expressive qualities one finds in the outside world as well as social phenomena such as collective states of mind and feelings. Not least, it aims at developing a more critical discussion of the media-emotional manipulation underlying today’s aestheticisation through an increased atmospheric “competence” (both productive and receptive).

12 Böhme (1995, 2006, 2017a, 2017b). 13 See Böhme (2001). 14 Cf. Griffero (2014a, 2017a, 2019a).

Introduction

19

3. Why now? As mentioned above, the notion of “atmosphere” today appears to be perfectly at home in many scientific fields, especially in all those that have to do with human and not strictly measurable behaviours and habits. Not only aesthetic professions in Böhme’s strict sense, but all human situations and activities are actually somehow influenced by atmospheric feelings. In short, one could say that the atmospheric approach appears to be ever more necessary whenever there is greater emphasis on a) felt-bodily (leiblich) experience than on meanings, b) on emotionally arranging an environment than on narratively representing something, c) on appreciating phenomenal nuances than on quantified phenomena, quantification being exactly the great expedient by which the Western forma mentis aims at statistically predicting future events and thus avoiding any involuntary life experience. In other words: the general challenge of an atmospherological approach is to demonstrate that the notion of atmosphere could be an innovative heuristic approach in all the research areas that, without being “medusized” by an exclusively thingly orientation and by strictly functional parameters, pay more attention to vague “entities” that—while being neither full things nor mere qualia but quasi-things—exert on us a more direct and immediate power than things (in the proper sense). Widespread into a spatial (non-geometric) dimension and constrained by situations, atmospheres tune our surrounding in a quasi-thingly way, affect and involve our lived or felt body through sensible qualities or affordances that, for their marked expressiveness and intrusiveness, have a real physiognomic “character”. But above all: atmospheric feelings are really there and are not just projected from inside out, allegedly giving the “outside” the colour and mood of our (supposedly) very private state of mind. Only this philosophically (ontologically, even metaphysically) radical and salient point really qualifies the novelty of this approach. As has already been said, the concept of “atmosphere” may appear inflated today. A fast-career concept like this always makes intellectuals suspicious and forces philosophers to also reflect on the historical-cultural reasons behind its success. In short: how did we get here and come to even assume the existence of a specific “atmospheric turn”? This, as already mentioned, is obviously part of a broader but—like any alleged

20

The Atmospheric “We”

cultural “turn”—highly contentious “affective turn” in the humanities, which still lacked a reference paradigm and a specific vocabulary for studying emotional life. This turn was born specifically from the ashes of the linguistic one (and its hermeneutic and semiotic ramifications and hyperboles) as well as from the failure of both the deceptive cognitivist primacy in affective life and the omniexplicative model of data processing. Of course, the viability of a theory and the career of an alleged “new” concept do not irrefutably prove its scientific and innovative character. Nonetheless, the fact that certain phenomena previously expressed by a different (or no) word can no longer be called otherwise is perhaps not only a semantic shift but a real change in the overall historical Affektkomplex (to use Leo Spitzer’s term). The inescapable question is then: “where” were atmospheres before they were theoretically “discovered” in philosophy by Hermann Schmitz and in psychiatry by Hubertus Tellenbach? The question sounds rightly realistic, because it excludes both a) the transcendental-constructivist assumption, according to which every “discovered” thing would be simply created and conditioned by the culture (and even the language) of the time, and b) the claim that something never exists, properly speaking, before being consciously perceived. I obviously disagree with both of these theses, if only because an “unfolding” can only occur of a previous “fold” that is not constructed but autonomously offered to experience. Tracing back the career of the term “atmosphere” to a certain Zeitgeist is theoretically problematic for phenomenology—the latter is usually suspicious of a philosophy of culture based on great narratives and therefore implying a (positive or negative) teleology. But it’s impossible to do otherwise. It’s true. In a sense today’s boom of atmospheres appears to be, at least in part, the simple attempt to express the same old thing in different terms, i.e. the omnipresence of basic feelings that, by opening to the world and prestructuring experiences of things and cognitive states (think of Heidegger’s basic moods or Grundstimmungen), influence everyone’s situatedness as well as type and degree of well-being.15

15 See chapter 7.

Introduction

21

Nonetheless, a philosopher is bound to ask why in a certain historical moment it seems legitimate or even necessary, if not to discover, at least to put in the foreground certain experiences and the concepts that best describe them. There are basically two options. 1) The first, very moderate from a philosophical-historical point of view, is that the experience of atmospheres has always existed, but only at a certain point did scholars bring it to light, thereby clarifying a confused semantic sphere and especially building a new field of investigation. 2) The second, theoretically more ambitious, is that this phenomenon, remained only implicit until now, has been made fully possible only by today’s economic-political situation (late-capitalist, image- and information-based economy) and/or by the overcoming of the previous linguistic-interpretative paradigm. Taking this second option, I wish to consider two arguments suggested by two authors that are somewhat peripheral to the “traditional” debate on atmospheres. The first is Peter Sloterdijk’s spherological (not phenomenological) approach,16 which underlines the present need of an (onto)atmospheric explication of current and multifocal forms of immunity from mimetic contagion. According to him, in the nineteenth century the all-encompassing metaphysical monospheres, with their only imagined immunological nature (bubbles and globes), collapsed and were replaced by more chaotic foams. Sloterdijk thus outlines an ontoclimatology that can consciously looks at the milieu and the being-in-the-world only after the ecological crisis and the rediscovery of ephemeral and no longer monothematic Erlebnis- and scene- societies (which are now generally pushed into a levitation atmosphere). He thinks within an anthropogenetic context that is still unfortunately projective (human beings would “create” both their place and atmospheres, developing outside the protective maternal inside environment!) which is therefore a bit incompatible with neo-phenomenological emotional externalism. Nevertheless, his thesis is very interesting: for him, modernity theoretically focuses on atmospheres only when it makes the implicit explicit, i.e. when it becomes aware that the atmosphere (also in the literalclimatic sense) may be manipulated or become unlivable (atmoterrorism, alarmist weather reports and breaking news, etc.). Modernity would thus replace the lifeworld so beloved by phenomenologists with a climatic technique (air-conditioning). One would have to accept this shift without 16 Sloterdijk (2011-2016).

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22

anachronistic longings for a naïve perceptual dimension and for an alleged natural unification of experience, but, on the contrary, one should bravely join the “experimental age” based on “climate control” and on mixing humans and non-humans together. One less known and (for me) more intriguing view of Sloterdijk’s is that today’s attention to atmospheres and lived spaces is part of the attention to the vegetative sphere (one’s moods, skills and even diseases), which is only made possible by a surplus of waking time. This surplus would enable not only luxury and everyday aesthetics but also atmospheres, understood both as lived experiences and as possible objects of analysis. It is interesting to note a difference here: Heidegger’s phenomenology of boredom as a basic Stimmung “conservatively” aimed at overcoming modern levitated life—characterised by the inability to be really moved and triggered by something17—through a new mission. Instead, Sloterdijk rather suggests looking at today’s central role of moods and atmospheres as the unavoidable result of the “comfort greenhouse” underlying the affluent society, of its contagious demand for the superfluous and of a privileged access to “where” and “how” one feels oneself. The boom of atmospheres also goes along with the most recent rediscovery of the central role of moods (Stimmungen) and presentness.18 According to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, today’s relevance of “effects of presence (and, among these, atmospheres and moods)” definitively marks the crisis of “constructivism” as well as of the “linguistic turn”.. As Gumbrecht puts it (2012, 7; 20): All this might have something to do with an everyday mode of being-in-theworld that, for most of us, fuses consciousness and software—one that suspends the experience of presence, so to speak. Perhaps this state of withdrawal has provoked an enhanced need—and an increased desire—for encounters with presence. […] I am interested in the atmospheres and moods that literary works absorb as a form of “life”—an environment with physical substance, which “touches us as if from inside.” The yearning for Stimmung has grown, because many of us—perhaps older people, above all—suffer from existence in an everyday world that often fails to surround and envelop us physically. Yearning for atmosphere and mood is a yearning for presence—perhaps a variant that presupposes a pleasure in dealing with the cultural past.

17 See Heidegger (1995). 18 See chapter 5.

Introduction

23

And it is certainly no coincidence that the central role of a “felt-bodily present/presence” is also the starting point of Schmitz’s whole New Phenomenology. Anyway, rather than seeing the successful career of atmospheres as another great narrative based on the growing evidence of something of which we have long been unaware, I would argue that atmospheres became both a thematically perceived experience and a topic worthy of consideration when, according to the historical-cultural logic of a pendulum movement, something in the “air” changed. In a sense, it is a new atmosphere that led to the boom of atmospheres! To get into some detail: a) utopian philosophies have been replaced, also on the background of the so-called spatial turn, by philosophies more oriented to spatial and temporal presentness; b) genial-subjective arts with their semantic and representational contents have been replaced by a-subjective and more immersive aesthetic experiences; c) lastly, rational social ways of life have been replaced by forms of well-being and community giving new emphasis to pre-reflexive-affective experience in opposition to today’s otherwise dominant social isolation. Paraphrasing Musil (1995, 1259), “periods rich in emotion [or atmosphere] and poor in emotion have succeeded one another”. Which sufficiently proves, by contrast, also the reasons for the failure of the early academic reception, in the 1960s and 1970s, of Tellenbach’s and Schmitz’s forerunner theories and their strong rediscovery today. 4. Rhizomatic proliferation The concept of “atmosphere” has long exceeded the boundaries that were established in its initial phenomenological and psychopathological elaboration. Its vertical conceptualization, aimed at its ontological core and forming the core of my work on the subject, must not, however, underestimate its horizontal proliferation of creative new applications to different areas. The debate on atmospheres today actually covers—and must cover!—a wide range of hardly separable theoretical and applied

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The Atmospheric “We”

issues.19 Philosophy has undoubtedly set the tone, generally understanding an atmosphere more as a sensory-affective engagement with the world than as a perceptually limited object, and has given particular attention to its ontological vagueness, its pre-dualistic and quasi-thingly nature, thus showing the suddenly perceived intertwining of environment and feeling as the real object of promising research fields. But the humanities concretely “apply” the notion of “atmosphere”, as can be expected, on the basis of not entirely convergent ontological assumptions, in an ever increasing number of fields such as (first of all) architecture and human geography (which is not surprising given their common focus on spatial qualia), but also design, pedagogy, psychotherapy, marketing, politics, sociology, ecological and social anthropology—in short, in every field that problematizes the possibility of producing and managing individual or collective emotional states. The relevant impact and feedback of such researches also in terms of the aesthetic-philosophical discussion can certainly not be ignored. I will now give some examples of this application of the concept of “atmosphere” to humanistic fields; despite not being necessarily linked to the philosophical concept of atmosphere,20 they continue to interact with phenomenological directions and thus contribute to keeping the concept vital and productive. The first fields to use the reference to atmospheres were architecture, urban studies and geography. These disciplines aim at clarifying and “measuring”, of course in a way that is not necessarily strictly quantitative, people’s different attachment to places, i.e. how cities and buildings, streets and places, traffic and neighborhoods, etc., pathically modulate the perceivers’ corporeal spaces through some specific “gestures” and directions, thus also affectively influencing their well-being. One could experience the atmospheric power in situ, by observing, walking and having people take questionnaires, preferring experiences in motion 19 For a vast bibliography of philosophical texts on atmospheres (here I would like to mention at least Hauskeller 1995, Andermann & Eberlein 2011, Heibach 2012, Bulka 2015, Julmi 2017 and Rauh 2018) and investigations that, even with very different methodologies, apply the concept in the various fields of human sciences, I have to refer the reader to the final bibliography contained in Griffero (2019b, 49-62). For a sufficiently representative choice of these humanistic approaches cf. Griffero & Tedeschini (2019). 20 Since it is not possible to provide exhaustive bibliographical information here, I will mention, by way of example, only some texts showing this atmospheric application (see fn. 18).

Introduction

25

and unfocused (peripheral) perceptions to the static and frontal vision of buildings, emphasizing first-person overviews from which to derive micrologies that might better explain what it feels like in a given place. In this sense, a successful architectural atmosphere is, in the first place, one that guarantees an attunement with the daily life of those who use it.21 Contemporary art, in turn, seems to now focus on the atmospheres it triggers more than in the past. Asking the viewers to abandon the traditional aesthetic distance and to immerse themselves in the works of art, in fact, it opposes the increasing fictionalisation-virtualisation of our world, also showing in an intensified way what an everyday atmospheric experience already is. It is instead debatable whether art itself is atmospheric. One could say that it is atmospheric when it triggers a resonance experience and not a strictly semantic one, or when it focuses all on the effect of appearance, when it induces a meta-artistic reflection on what art is, or when it shows that it depends in every way on a certain social atmosphere (critics, museums, etc.), when it uses aerial and impalpable materials like air, light, dust, etc. or when, as in any performance, the work is made only by the relationship that is created between the artist or stage and the audience, etc. Atmospheric research in the field of musicology, for example, focuses on the in-betweenness resulting in what one calls the sonic effect, the soundscape: far from only being interested in empty sentimental music or mood music (muzak, that is, superficial or relaxing ambient music), it tries to explain why music exerts a maximally pervasive-affective effect.22 Pedagogy also seems increasingly prepared to acknowledge that an educational relationship has a better outcome when it is based more on (good) atmospheric situations and moods than on abstract methodologies and repetitive-conventional “notions”. And these good syntonicempathetic situations are also helpful in the kind of psychopathology that uses an atmospheric approach for the diagnosis and even treatment of certain disorders.23 Politics and sociology—which are especially interested in supra-individual emotions, in situations and communities based on collective feelings—normally use the concept of atmosphere (or climate) and show that a certain political phase is influenced more by (possibly 21 See especially Zumthor (2006), Hahn (2012), Borch (2014), Hasse (2015, 2017, 2018), Thibaud (2015), Bille & Sørensen (2016), De Matteis et al. (2019). 22 Cf. Mahayni (2002), Rodatz (2010), Schouten (2012), Ulber (2017), Riedel & Torvinen (2020) and Scassillo (2020). 23 Bollnow (1968) and Wolf (2019).

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The Atmospheric “We”

contagious) emotional states than by rational choices, always also wondering if it is possible to make less manipulative and more democratic use of such emotional states.24 Management and organisation studies, advertising and marketing research have long been studying the power of atmospheres in order to learn how to use them effectively and with a deep impact on customer behaviour25. More recently, atmospheres have also been approached by ecological and social anthropology, which are more interested, just to give some examples, in spatial (atmospheric) justice among bodies, in multispecies (also strictly material) experience of places, environments and weather.26 Finally, there is also psychopathology, committed to consider atmospheres as a diagnostic-therapeutic tool but also, since Jaspers, as a specific mode of expression of certain psychic diseases27: the environment is somehow different, not to a gross degree, perception is unaltered in itself but there is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light. A living room which formerly was felt as neutral or friendly now becomes dominated by some indefinable atmosphere (Jaspers 1963, 98).

It follows from all this that the humanities use the notion of atmosphere as a powerful and innovative heuristic device to study situations whenever an invisible but deep affective effect seems far superior to its probable visible cause and permeates a certain spatial situation without being fully reduced to its material reality. Needless to say, on a theoretical level, many problems have not (yet?) found an adequate solution. Let’s take a look at some examples.28 Can an atmosphere be intentionally produced and controlled, or is it groundlessly floating in space and fully independent of humans? Is it a metaphoric-linguistic effect or a real world entity? Is it, as an in-between, the outcome of the subject-object relation, or is it rather its pre-dualistic and unaware background? Is it something we perceive thematically or 24 Landweer (2009), Gugutzer (2012) and Grossheim et al. (2014). 25 For a comprehensive discussion see Julmi (2017). 26 See Ingold (2011, 73-78), Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2014), Schroer & Schmitt (2017), McCormack (2018) and Sumartojo & Pink (2018). 27 Cf. Costa et al. (2014) and Francesetti & Griffero (2019). 28 Some of these problems will be addressed in the following essays that make up this book.

Introduction

27

just the background condition of possibility of any other perception? Is it cognitively penetrable and therefore influenced by knowledge and cultural socialization, or is it a phenomenon that resists any additional notions and cognitive corrections? Is it an “entity” that supervenes on its material generators, or is it fully independent from them? Does it exist only in the first-person experience, therefore being akin to a mood/Stimmung, or can we remember it, even counterfactually design and intersubjectively communicate it to others without altering it? Does its perception change in time, or is it just a first impression? Are there different types of atmosphere, depending, for example, on a) its degree of independence from the perceiver, b) its prevailing generator, c) the more influent sensory channel, d) its synaesthetic character, or even e) the syntactic structure through which one expresses it? Can the traditional aesthetic categories (beauty, sublime, grace, ugly, etc.) be fully converted in atmospheric terms? And so on, thus delighting the innate love for unresolved problems that marks any true philosopher. The debate on atmospheres is indeed addressing these issues (and others). Nonetheless, the philosophy of atmospheres and all these fields of practical-methodological application of the notion suggest but certainly do not fully respond to these many questions. They therefore remain (and in a philosophical sense, they’d better remain) open. Now, an introduction only makes sense if it is sufficiently short and leaves space to more in-depth and focused chapters. It’s therefore time to move on.

2 Atmospheric Games (With a Little Help from Literature)

1. Starting from climatic and personal atmospheres When people reply to the question: “How many things are there in this place?” by merely listing chairs and persons, books and laptops, etc., they are confining themselves to things that are solid, resistant, clearly delimited, and that can be grasped and seen in the daylight and at a foot’s distance.1 They therefore ignore that the world is also, if not primarily, made of the variable and the ephemeral, the fluid and the vague, of “chaotic” phenomena that should not be reductionistically considered the outcome of an epistemic deficit. This is especially true for those who investigate the so-called life-world: in fact, however one considers it,2 it is an unstable pre-reflective entity in which we are constantly qualitatively involved. My neophenomenological atmospherology and pathic aesthetics come exactly from this defense of the lifeworld’s autonomy and priority. My aim is to rehabilitate—hence the term “pathic”—the affective involvement, the nonobvious and very rare ability to let oneself go, to expose oneself (in the right way): in other words, to be, against the post-Enlightenment dogma of subjective autonomy and finalistic action, a means of what happens (cum grano salis, of course) rather than subjects thereof, and resist the temptation to transform everything that is given into something that is actively done.3 This focus on sensible experiences (especially if unintentional) also deeply changes the meaning of “experience” itself4—for example, it 1 2 3

4

See Schapp (1981, 95). In my opinion Lebenswelt is, in summary, the set of everyday aesthesiologicalpragmatic truths legitimated by subjective and collective habitualities. According to this forma mentis, for example, childbirth must be entirely programmed, one’s mental performance always increased, one’s mood brightened as much as possible, one’s aging hopefully stopped and one’s death artificially accelerated or delayed. Cf. Griffero (2019c).

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focuses on presence or presentness/present.5 This goes against the bad infinity allowed by interpretive and constructivist approaches: the latter, indeed, always postpone meaning and, embracing the dualistic prejudice that access to the world needs some (painstakingly researched) reflective medium, underestimate the fact that people already belong to it as long as they live. The defense of presence finds in Saul Bellow a brilliant and passionate advocate.6 Nature only knows one thing, and that’s the present. Present, present, eternal present, like a big, huge, giant wave—colossal, bright and beautiful, full of life and death climbing into the sky, standing in the seas. You must go along with the actual, the Here-and-Now, the glory […] You have to pick out something that’s in the actual, immediate present moment […] And say to yourself hereand-now, here-and-now, here-and-now. “Where am I?” “Here.” “When is it?” “Now.” Take an object or a person. Anybody. “Here and now I see a person.” “Here and now I see a man.” “Here and now I see a man sitting on a chair”[…] You have to narrow it down, one item at a time, and not let your imagination shoot ahead. Be in the present. Grasp the hour, the moment, the instant (Bellow 1976a, 90).

The point is that, as known, Western intellectual culture usually disqualifies this presentism by degrading it to “mere” animal life, which is as officially despised as it is secretly coveted. Indeed, Mars-Jones looks almost with envy at the sensory presentism of the dog Gibson. I loved and admired Gibson more than any person in my life […] He was my totem animal […] Dogs know what the nose knows: this and here and now. That, yonder, tomorrow—none of these carries a smell. Animals can’t show us how to live as they do. With their enclosure in the present they offer examples we’re disqualified from following (Mars-Jones 2008, 15-16).

By emphasizing this presentism, my pathic aesthetics only focuses on how appearances resound in the felt body and on how the meaning we experience is always already sedimented outside (passive synthesis). It turns out that we mostly encounter entities that, unlike things, fully coincide with their felt-bodily situational appearance. This approach also 5 6

See Griffero (2018; 2019, 84-93). I think that the (almost) random literary examples populating this chapter describe normal everyday situations, despite their incisive and elegant style. Literary brilliance and rhetoric should not ever make us forget that the situations described have nothing exceptional about them from a phenomenological-atmospherological point of view.

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means enhancing a non-epistemic ontology based on first impressions (which are usually rejected): something that Benjamin expresses rather well in his praise of ephemerality. What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored (Benjamin 1979, 78).

It goes without saying that the lifeworld’s non-quantifiable and vague entities have no place in an epistemic-objective disenchanted world. Whether they be natural phenomena (twilight, luminosity, darkness, the seasons, the wind, the weather, the hours of the day, the fog, etc.) or relatively artificial ones (a townscape, music, a soundscape, the numinous, a dwelling, charisma, the gaze, shame, etc.), they express themselves as atmospheric quasi-things—in other terms, as affordances that are salient and absolutely certain not despite their being apparent and ephemeral, but precisely because of it.7 Take charisma, for example. As a personal strong atmosphere, one could talk about it at length, of course. Here I have only chosen three literary examples: the first expresses the transient but deeply atmospheric role normally exercised by the face. In this specific case the face belongs to Anny, the woman loved by Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea, a work that we will find several times in this chapter. Anny hardly changes expression; she changes faces; as the actors of antiquity changed masks: suddenly. And each one of the masks is destined to create atmosphere, to give tone to what follows. It appears and stays without modification as she speaks. Then it falls, detached from her (Sartre 1964, 144; my emphasis).

The second example concerns the deep effect triggered by Mexican general Cipriano on the very English Kate in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent: it is an extralinguistic, totally corporeally barbaric charisma lurking beneath the civilized surface of the person—an atmosphere that is both attractive and menacing. 7

See Griffero (2017a).

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He had a good deal of magnetic power. His education had not diminished it. His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness. For this reason, the things he said were hardly interesting at all. Only what he was. He made the air around him seem darker, but richer and fuller. Sometimes his presence was extraordinarily grateful, like a healing of the blood. And sometimes he was an intolerable weight on her. She gasped to get away from him (Lawrence 1995a, 70; my emphasis).

Another Mexican, the mystical politician Ramon—this is the third example, showing a charisma that affects all surroundings—radiates a savage-ancestral but also powerful sensual atmosphere (or aura) on the same European widow Kate, who is feeling increasingly lost in a prerational and bloody Mexico. He was handsome, almost horribly handsome, with his black head poised as it were without weight, above his darkened, smooth neck. A pure sensuality, with a powerful purity of its own, hostile to her sort of purity. With the blue sash round his waist, pressing a fold in the flesh, and the thin linen seeming to gleam with the life of his hips and his thighs, he emanated a fascination almost like a narcotic, asserting his pure, fine sensuality against her. The strange, soft, still sureness of him, as if he sat secure within his own dark aura. And as if this dark aura of his militated against her presence, and against the presence of his wife. He emitted an effluence so powerful, that it seemed to hamper her consciousness, to bind down her limbs. And he was utterly still and quiescent, without desire, soft and unroused, within his own ambiente (ibid, 163-164; three first my emphasis).

There is no trace of the murky and morbid atmosphere emanating from “savages” like Ramon and Cipriano in Herman Melville’s Queequeg. The wild harpooner radiates a bon sauvage atmosphere—both paternalistic and politically incorrect for today’s sensibility. It is a soothing atmosphere, Ishmael tells us, although its perceptive components may be seen in a completely different way by someone else. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me (Melville 1967, 56).

So far we have seen examples of a personal charismatic atmosphere. But perhaps the most usual examples of quasi-thingly atmospheric

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feeling are those related to weather. Think, for example, of the windy atmosphere8 announcing an affective change in an (epistemically) vague but (phenomenologically) certain way. From my bed I sniffed the wind and could smell the weather changing. I just couldn’t decide what exactly was happening. The emotional climate around me was complex and hard to read. There was change on the wind, undoubtedly, but the change didn’t correspond to the workings of a single season. It was as if the trees were shedding their leaves and coming into bud at the same time (MarsJones 2008, 139; my emphasis).

The weather has always been a great paradigm of the phenomenological concept of atmosphere. Let’s see, for example, how (someone else’s!) afternoon can resonate in a real felt-bodily way: It was almost three o’clock when I came out of the Brasserie Vézelise; I felt the afternoon all through my heavy body. Not my afternoon, but theirs, the one a hundred thousand Bouvillois were going to live in common (Sartre 1964, 50; my emphasis)

Another example is about how the twilight expands a temporal experience: this shows an exemplary divergence between clock time and lived time, where the latter even alters the usual way of acting. There are certain evenings in spring when the twilight lasts far longer than the astronomically prescribed period. Then a thin smoky mist sinks over the city and gives it the subdued suspense of evening preceding a holiday. And at the same time it is as if this subdued, pale grey mist had netted so much light that brighter strands remain in it even when it has become quite black and velvety. So these twilights last very long, so long that the proprietors of shops forget to close them (Broch 1947, 25).

The atmospheric power of the hours of the day is so well known that it “colonizes” our ways of saying. However, it also should be said that even a simple variation in light can change an atmosphere completely. This is the effect of a banal passing of clouds on a character so powerfully atmospheric as Maigret. There must have been a passing squall in the sky, some low swift cloud, because all the sunshine reflections were suddenly gone. And, as if a switch 8

Of the wind as a special atmosphere we have dealt elsewhere: see Griffero (2017a, 9-18).

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had been flicked, the atmosphere turned grey and uniform, while the objects acquired a sullen look (Simenon 1967a, 426; my translation).

Sometimes there is a real battle between powerful-invasive, climatic and quasi-thingly atmospheres and deep mnestic-autobiographical ones. Let us read Woolf’s passage, whose literary charm I hope will justify its perhaps excessive length. In it, a deep darkness and then a cheeky night wind, while generating a chaotic and indistinct atmosphere, seem unable to alter the atmosphere that people have deeply experienced. So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say ‘’This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness. Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen seamoistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round comers and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room, questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the tom letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure? So some random light directing them from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs, that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants’ bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which

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some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to (Woolf 1992, 273-274; my emphases).

In other cases, where the anthropization is less deep, the climatic atmosphere gets the better of human beings. In Lawrence’s Mexico, for example, the night has the power to bring the wild conscience and a contagious atmosphere of fear and panic to the surface. A certain nocturnal reptilian-primitive panic well summarizes Mexico’s prevailing atmosphere felt by Lawrence’s female character (Kate). The whole village was in that state of curious, reptile apprehension which comes over dark people. A panic fear, a sense of devilment and horror thick in the night air. When blue morning came they would cheer up. But at night, like clotting blood the air would begin to thicken again. The fear, of course, was communicated from one person to another. Kate was sure that if Juana and her family had not been huddled in reptile terror away at the far end of the house, she herself would have been unafraid. As it was, Juana was like a terrorstruck lizard […] Kate hurried to her house and locked herself in. It is not easy to withstand the panic fear of a black-eyed, semi-barbaric people. The thing communicates itself like some drug on the air, wringing the heart and paralysing the soul with a sense of evil; black, horrible evil. She would lie in her bed in the absolute dark: the electric light was cut off completely, everywhere, at ten o’clock, and primitive darkness reigned. And she could feel the demonish breath of evil moving on the air in waves. […] After dinner, she went to her room, and through the night she could not sleep, but lay listening to the noises of Mexico City, then to the silence and the strange, grisly fear that so often creeps out on to the darkness of a Mexican night. Away inside her, she loathed Mexico City. She even feared it. In the daytime it had a certain spell—but at night, the underneath grisliness and evil came forth (Lawrence 1995a, 117-118, 21; my emphases).

The night that exerts an atmosphere of primitive fear in Mexico is perceived to be almost equally aggressive and menacing, even in its intangibility, by someone clearly psychically disturbed like Roquentin: Night has entered, sweetish, hesitant. No one sees it, but it is there, veiling the lamps: I breathe something opaque in the air: it is night. It is cold (Sartre 1964, 23).

Sometimes the fog is attributed an exquisitely quasi-thingly agency (in a climatic sense as well as by emotionally filling the space), e.g. a material invasiveness that is obviously absurd from a strictly physicalistic point of view: the fog filtered in under the door, it was going to rise slowly and penetrate everything […] Fog had filled the room: not the real fog, that had gone a long

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time ago—but the other, the one the streets were still full of, which came out of the walls and pavements. The inconsistency of inanimate objects! (Sartre 1964, 73, 76; my emphases).

This agency dematerializes the world and obviously triggers a growing sense of unreality in the experiencer, powerfully showing the affective salience of an ontology that is also based on non-strictly-thingly entities. The fog was so thick on the Boulevard de la Redoute that I thought it wise to stick close to the walls of the Caserne; on my right, the headlights of cars chased a misty light before them and it was impossible to see the end of the pavement. There were people around me; I sometimes heard the sound of their steps or the low hum of their voices: but I saw no one. Once, a woman’s face took shape somewhere at the height of my shoulder, but the fog engulfed it immediately; another time someone brushed by me breathing very heavily. I didn’t know where I was going, I was too absorbed: you had to go ahead with caution, feel the ground with the end of your foot and even stretch your hands ahead of you. I got no pleasure from this exercise. Yet I wasn’t thinking about going back, I was caught. Finally, after half an hour, I noticed a bluish vapour in the distance. Using this as a guide, I soon arrived at the edge of a great glow; in the centre, piercing the fog with its lights, I recognized the Café Mably (ibid, 70; my emphases).

It should furthermore be stressed that lifewordly affective (humanartificial or natural-climatic) atmospheres always certify our being-inthe-world better than other traditionally privileged states—including the cogito, which was pathologically overestimated by modernity with wellknown negative consequences. Atmospheres restore to a central position a pathic “to me” (or a perceptological “me”) instead of the “I”—a mineness that precedes egological solidification and the resulting cognitivist dualism. This explains why Maigret finds it very difficult to intersubjectively share the atmosphere that is subjectively experienced (which for a police investigation is obviously a serious problem). He knew that he was only providing a lifeless, schematic picture of reality. Everything he had just said was true, but he hadn’t made people feel the full weight of things, their density, their quivering, their smell. For example, he thought it was indispensable that those who would judge Gaston Meurant should know about the atmosphere of the apartment on Boulevard de Charonne as he had found it (Simenon 1967b, 316; my emphases).

A final remark concerns the transient nature of certain atmospheres. As real quasi-things, they have an intermittent life, so much so that it would make no sense to ask where they are when they are not present yet or when

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they are no longer there. They are felt in this ephemeral way not only by those who perceive them from the outside but also by those who know that they radiate these atmospheres around themselves: the young Minta imagined by Woolf, for example, admits to being unable to explain why her atmospheric radiance happens often, but not always. She knew, directly she came into the room, that the miracle had happened; she wore her golden haze. Sometimes she had it; sometimes not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man looked at her. Yes, to-night she had it, tremendously; she knew that by the way Mr. Ramsay told her not to be a fool. She sat beside him, smiling (Woolf 1992, 251; my emphases).

2. Atmospheric encounters This is not, of course, the place to delve into my general atmospherology. Suffice to say that I understand the atmosphere as an influential and even authoritative affective presence; better: as a feeling poured out into lived space and resonating into felt-bodily processes (the individual’s felt-bodily isles) through affordances (motor suggestions and synaesthetic characters) acting as environmental invitations and not limited to the pragmaticbehavioural and visual kind. Accordingly, an atmosphere is a spatial state of the world rather than a very private psychic state. If its intensity obviously also depends on the subject, its phenomenal apparition is instead something objective, at least when it exerts an undoubted authority. It therefore cannot be explained through social convention and psychological association (which, if anything, come after; and they are certainly not arbitrary) and often produces an efficacious segmentation of life-world reality. Note with what precision Lawrence describes the exclusive atmosphere uniting mother and son and keeping others away. Emily, delighted, began to undress the baby whose hair was like crocus petals. Her fingers trembled with pleasure as she loosed the little tapes. I always remember the inarticulate delight with which she took the child in her hands, when at last his little shirt was removed, and felt his soft white limbs and body. A distinct, glowing atmosphere seemed suddenly to burst out around her and the child, leaving me outside. The moment before she had been very near to me, her eyes searching mine, her spirit clinging timidly about me. Now I was put away, quite alone, neglected, forgotten, outside the glow which surrounded the woman and the baby (Lawrence 1911, 422; my emphases).

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Despite my insistence on the quasi-objectivity of atmospheres, I do not fully embrace the radical neo-phenomenological campaign of desubjectification of all feelings and prefer to admit that there are three different types of atmospheres. There are prototypical atmospheres (objective, external, and unintentional, sometimes lacking a precise name), derivative-relational ones (objective, external and intentionally produced), and even some that are quite spurious in their relatedness (subjective and projective). A semi-projectivistic atmospheric perception is, for example, the driving force behind many of Woolf’s pages. The first example is James Ramsay’s atmosphere heralding a “stark and uncompromising severity” in his mother’s eyes and evidently also in his father. He actually experiences that curious situation in which a certain state of mind contributes to the perception of an external atmosphere (in this case his family’s solid and serene atmosphere), and this in turn seems to miraculously confirm what he is seeing and even helps him understand it better. He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises one’s eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without his distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified him and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his splendid mind (Woolf 1992, 203; my emphasis).

A semi-projectivistic atmosphere, of course, is also the rapture that Mrs. Ramsay’s logical harmony exerts, a bit unexplainably, on Mr. Bankes— as if the atmosphere of a coherent and orderly life-form, here a kind of Madonna-with-Child image, could generate the atmosphere of coherence and order needed for scientific work. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr. Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued (ibid, 214; my emphasis).

Mrs. Ramsay proves to be a magnetic pole of atmospheric radiation also in other cases and to different eyes. For the younger Lily, for example, she exudes an atmosphere of knowledge and wisdom that needs no words.

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Mrs. Ramsay went. For days there hung about her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she wore, to Lily’s eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome (ibid, 217; my emphases).

And Mrs. Ramsay herself indulges in highly projective atmospheric experiences, for example fusing with her landscape and feeling dead things as if they were alive. She looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light for example. […] It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself (ibid, 225-226; my emphasis).

I took quite a bit of space to show that spurious-projective atmospheres cannot be completely excluded from the ontological inventory of atmospheres only because neo-phenomenological externalization tends to underestimate them. Obviously, my own tripartition of atmospheric types also leads to different types of emotional games—all, albeit in different ways, inscribed in a lived and pericorporeal space. This is why atmospherology must account for both phenomenological and ontological experiences: here I will distinguish between these “games” or encounters only for ease of presentation and to find relevant examples of them in the literary sphere. 3. Ingressive-dystonic atmospheres An atmospheric feeling can be antagonistic, overwhelming and refractory to any (more or less) conscious attempt of the perceiver at its projective or cognitive reinterpretation. This is well expressed, as a real textbook case, by our first encounter with Edgar Allan Poe’s melancholy House of Usher […] during the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively

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low in the heavens, [crossing] a singularly dreary tract of country […] as the shades of the evening drew on (Poe, 1850-56, I, 291).

This spatial situation is both meteorologically and emotionally tuned, resulting in a diffused not-strictly-physical situation that, emphasizing the belonging of affective qualities to the things themselves, proves to be exemplary of the entire atmospherological paradigm. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven (ibid, 293; my emphasis).

This spatial atmosphere had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued [since] the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion (ibid.; 305).

This “hanging about”, far from being just a brilliant literary metaphor, perfectly expresses the felt-bodily heaviness and inaction triggered in the experiencer. In my terminology, this kind of ingressive-dystonic-authoritative atmosphere is certainly the prototypical one. It’s based on a synaesthetic (and not only ocular) first and unamendable impression. The scene is immediately formed by the bleak walls […] the vacant eye-like windows […] a few rank sedges […] a few white trunks of decayed trees [hence] an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil (ibid, 291).

The protagonist, already with “the first glimpse of the building,” feels invaded by “a sense of insufferable gloom,” by an atmosphere of “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought”, by something unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate

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or terrible. [In fact he realizes] the futility of all attempts at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom (ibid; 298; my emphasis).

As an affective perception that is cognitively impenetrable and imaginatively unamendable, the atmospheric approach to the House of Usher is obviously first of all a literary suggestion. However, it only intensifies the ordinary experience of standing helpless before a strong spatial atmosphere. The protagonist actually tries to react and deludes himself that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the re-modelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows (ibid, 292).

No effort of the imagination—such as making terror a feeling of the sublime, for example—can overcome the dominant atmosphere. Likewise, a more reflective reasoning based on a reductionist-objectual strategy is not capable of mitigating this irresistible authority. I endeavoured to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm (ibid, 304).

Of course this doesn’t only apply to horror situations but also, and first of all, to every situation that is powerfully affective and involving, for example to the “privileged situations” that “slowly, majestically” come “into people’s lives” in Sartre’s Nausea (Sartre 1964, 148)—indeed, even to the grandeur of death. It was enough just to be in the room of a dying person: death being a privileged situation, something emanated from it and communicated itself to everyone there. A sort of grandeur. When my father died, they took me up to his room to see him for the last time. I was very unhappy going up the stairs,

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but I was also drunk with a sort of religious ecstasy; I was finally entering a privileged situation (ibid, 147).

What is true for privileged affective situations (the impossibility to modify them), however, is also true for an exhausting intellectual atmosphere. See this passage from Lawrence’s Women in Love. The talk was very often political or sociological, and interesting, curiously anarchistic. There was an accumulation of powerful force in the room, powerful and destructive. Everything seemed to be thrown into the melting pot, and it seemed to Ursula they were all witches, helping the pot to bubble. There was an elation and a satisfaction in it all, but it was cruelly exhausting for the newcomers, this ruthless mental pressure, this powerful, consuming, destructive mentality that emanated from Joshua and Hermione and Birkin and dominated the rest (Lawrence 1965, 83; my emphasis).

There are also some situations in which the authority of the dystonic atmosphere is only perceived imaginatively-mnestically, in the case of Lawrence’s Kate through the simple comparison between (only remembered) familiar environmental characteristics and those that are currently being experienced (Mexico’s inexplicable geographicalemotional barbaric heaviness) and to which poor Kate simply succumbs. She climbed up to the flat roofs of the hotel. It was a brilliant morning, and for once, under the blue sky of the distance, Popocatepetl stood aloof, a heavy giant presence under heaven, with a cape of snow. And rolling a long dark roll of smoke like a serpent. Ixtaccihuatl, the White Woman, glittered and seemed near, but the other mountain, Popocatepetl, stood farther back, and in shadow, a pure cone of atmospheric shadow, with glinting flashes of snow. There they were, the two monsters, watching gigantically and terribly over their lofty, bloody cradle of men, the Valley of Mexico. Alien, ponderous, the white-hung mountains seemed to emit a deep purring sound, too deep for the ear to hear, and yet audible on the blood, a sound of dread. There was no soaring or uplift or exaltation, as there is in the snowy mountains of Europe. Rather a ponderous, white-shouldered weight, pressing terribly on the earth, and murmuring like two watchful lions (Lawrence 1995a, 39-40; my emphases).

Another powerful example comes from Charles Dickens’ description of a (physically as well as morally) horrible building. We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal

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sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar—rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides— addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard’s Mixture” (Dickens 2011, 22-23; my emphasis).

It is hard not to be affected by the negative multimodal affordance of this gloomy atmosphere. It is also hard to regard the “emotionally impregnated” space it outlines as the mere subjective projection of an ill-disposed perceiver, or to “reduce” the spatial percept to a constellation of factors that could be perceived in the most diverse ways. As in Poe, in Dickens’ example the authority of the atmospheric space9 is violently imposed over the perceiver, completely reorienting their emotional situation and proving wholly refractory to any relatively conscious attempt at a projective adaptation. An atmosphere that I feel externally—i.e. poured out into the surrounding spatial niche and sometimes even in the entire biosphere (think of the unsettling atmosphere of terrorism or of economic crisis)—is “mine” not because I own it (in the possessive sense of the pronoun), but because it concerns me (in the subjectivising sense of the pronoun). The fact that when cheerful persons meet people wrapped in an atmosphere of serious sadness, they feel the authority of this atmosphere and respect it (not just for reasons of social etiquette), or that even vibrant persons become dull when overwhelmed by a gray morning—all this means that certain atmospheres, triggering a unilaterally antagonistic incorporation (meaning that one of the “partners” of the felt-bodily communication10 is somewhat “sucked in” their partner’s prevailing feltbodily narrowness) colonize the surrounding space more than others. Their relationship with the perceiver is so tangling as not to allow the latter to take any critical position towards the former. One of the best examples of 9 On atmospheres’ authority see Griffero (2014b). 10 Cf. Griffero (2017 b).

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dystonic-ingressive (precisely for this prototypical) atmosphere condensed in outer space is again, unsurprisingly, Sartre’s nausea. I have it, the filth, the Nausea. And this time it is new: it caught me in a café […] The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it […] The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light (Sartre 1964, 18, 19, 26; my emphasis).

On the contrary, the fact that Roquentin realizes that certain feelings are not objective and external (atmospheric), thus satisfying the paradigm of emotional introjection-subjectivation, is as such precisely part of his growing psychological crisis. I used to think that hate or love or death descended on us like tongues of fire on Good Friday. I thought one could radiate hate or death. What a mistake! Yes, I really thought that “Hate” existed, that it came over people and raised them above themselves. Naturally, I am the only one, I am the one who hates, who loves (ibid, 50; my emphases).

I have repeatedly emphasized that atmospheres lead a fleeting and ephemeral quasi-thingly existence. Yet, sometimes an ingressiveprototypical atmosphere condenses in a place to the point of coinciding with the place itself. Even though it is somewhat undecided between attributing the atmosphere to the city or to its inhabitants, Orhan Pamuk’s illustration of Istanbul’s sad atmosphere (hüzün) is very successful. My starting point was the emotion that a child might feel while looking through a steamy window. Now we begin to understand hüzün not as the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together. […] What I am trying to explain is the hüzün of an entire city: of Istanbul. But what I am trying to describe now is not the melancholy of Istanbul but the hüzün in which we see ourselves reflected, the hüzün we absorb with pride and share as a community. To feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün (Pamuk 2011, 114; my emphases).

Another brilliant example comes from Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, where we find again a refined English woman being conquered by a more barbaric atmosphere (also because of its unbearable beauty). This time it is not Mexico but southern Italy, refractory to any civilizing emotional and rational projection.

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At Pescocalascio it was the mysterious influence of the mountains and valleys themselves which seemed always to be annihilating the Englishwoman: nay, not only her, but the very natives themselves […] At first she did not realize. She was only stunned with the strangeness of it all: startled, half-enraptured with the terrific beauty of the place, half-horrified by its savage annihilation of her. But she was stunned. The days went by. It seems there are places which resist us, which have the power to overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every country has its potent negative centres, localities which savagely and triumphantly refuse our living culture (Lawrence 1921, 350; my emphases).

Something similarly contagious and resistant to the perceiver’s expectations is what Lawrence’s Kate feels not only, as we will see, in Mexico City, but also in Mexican country villages: an unbearably numinous atmosphere. It was a place with a strange atmosphere: stony, hard, broken, with round cruel hills and the many-fluted bunches of the organ-cactus behind the old house, and an ancient road trailing past, deep in ancient dust. A touch of mystery and cruelty, the stoniness of fear, a lingering, cruel sacredness (Lawrence 1995a, 83; my emphasis).

As I have already noted, sometimes the percipient is at the center of a conflict between the atmospheres of their memory and the atmospheres of the moment. The resistance to atmospheric aggression thus takes the form of a nostalgic atmosphere (often only idealizing, of course). In this case, Kate’s sweet Ireland is set against Mexico’s cruel and wild harshness (even in a strictly climatic sense). And a terrible, terrible longing for home came over her. To escape from these tropical brilliancies and meaninglessnesses. In Mexico, the wind was a hard draught, the rain was a sluice of water, to be avoided, and the sun hit down on one with hostility, terrific and stunning. Stiff, dry, unreal land, with sunshine beating on it like metal. Or blackness and lightning and crashing violence of rain. No lovely fusion, no communion. No beautiful mingling of sun and mist, no softness in the air, never. Either hard heat or hard chill. Hard, straight lies and zigzags, wounding the breast. No soft, sweet smell of earth. The smell of Mexico, however subtle, suggested violence and things in chemical conflict. And Kate felt herself filled with an anger of resentment (ibid, 191-192; my emphasis).

It’s well known that a kind of voluntary perceptive-categorical “reductionism” is often used to resist the aggression of atmospheres. But in the case of prototypical (ingressive-dystonic) atmospheres this has

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no result, as shown by Roquentin’s vain effort to reduce objects that are menacing and uncanny to everyday things. A real panic took hold of me. I didn’t know where I was going. I ran along the docks, turned into the deserted streets in the Beauvoisis district; the houses watched my flight with their mournful eyes. I repeated with anguish: Where shall I go? where shall I go? Anything can happen. Sometimes, my heart pounding, I made a sudden right-about-turn: what was happening behind my back? Maybe it would start behind me and when I would turn around, suddenly, it would be too late. As long as I could stare at things nothing would happen: I looked at them as much as I could, pavements, houses, gaslights; my eyes went rapidly from one to the other, to catch them unawares, stop them in the midst of their metamorphosis. They didn’t look too natural, but I told myself forcibly: this is a gaslight, this is a drinking fountain, and I tried to reduce them to their everyday aspect by the power of my gaze. Several times I came across barriers in my path: the Café des Bretons, the Bar de la Marine. I stopped, hesitated in front of their pink net curtains: perhaps these snug places had been spared, perhaps they still held a bit of yesterday’s world, isolated, forgotten. But I would have to push the door open and enter. I didn’t dare; I went on. Doors of houses frightened me especially. I was afraid they would open of themselves. I ended by walking in the middle of the street (Sartre 1964, 78; my emphases).

4. Syntonic atmospheres From my point of view, the atmospheres par excellence are the ingressivedystonic ones,  as they best exemplify their externality-objectivity and aggressiveness with respect to the percipients. But there are many other types of atmosphere. For example, a certain atmospheric feeling can find us in tune with it, to the point that we don’t even realize we entered it. This happens when one “feels at home”, perfectly at ease and not disturbed by any emotional dissonance. This type of atmosphere can manifest itself in very different ways, as we shall now see. A happy situation of harmonious resonance may even lead subjects to feel, through their attunement, a sense of gratitude for a world which proves semiotically favorable to them. The melancholy Mr. Ramsay, for example, sometimes inspires in other people profound reverence, and pity, and gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boatloads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it has taken upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone (Woolf 1992, 211; my emphasis).

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This gratitude can sometimes extend oceanically to fragments of memory and everything (even if random and prosaic) in the surroundings, as in the case of Lily’s final and silent lyrical ecstatic feeling of fullness. One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one’s sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and greygreens of flowers: some common feeling which held the whole together (ibid, 322; my emphases).

The same, though of course against the background of an incipient psychic disorder, is true of this public garden for Roquentin. Suddenly, when opening the gate of the public park I got the impression that something was signalling to me. The park was bare and deserted. But…how can I explain? It didn’t have its usual look, it smiled at me. I leaned against the railing for a moment then suddenly realized it was Sunday. It was there—on the trees, on the grass, like a faint smile. It couldn’t be described (Sartre 1964, 40-41; my emphasis).

Usually the affective harmony is direct and excludes any possible doubts. However, sometimes a pleasant but soft atmosphere of positive resonance can also be triggered by the contrast between inside order and outside uncanny. This is the case with the diners at the Ramsays’ house, where the intimate and protective atmosphere hovering over the meal between friends and family is generated precisely by the contrast with a hostile or at least unstable outside world. Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle-light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily. Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there (Woolf 1992, 250-251; my emphases).

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Mrs. Ramsay herself often basks in atmospheres of order and safety (though always threatened by the slightest hint), of human and thingly invariance. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought […] just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose […] from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness […] seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook […] of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would remain. […] Here, she felt […] was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest (ibid., 256; my emphases).

One may also wonder what consequences an attuned-syntonic atmosphere can have on an individual’s life. In this respect, Nietzsche argues that an illusory syntonic atmosphere is absolutely necessary to create something new and great. All living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapour; if they are deprived of this envelope, if a religion, an art, a genius is condemned to revolve as a star without atmosphere, we should no longer be surprised if they quickly wither and grow hard and unfruitful. It is the same with all great things, “which never succeed without some illusion”, as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger. But every nation, too, indeed every human being that wants to become mature requires a similar enveloping illusion, a similar protective and veiling cloud (Nietzsche 2007, 97; my emphases).

It is worth nothing, however, that sometimes a syntonic atmosphere is so in line with one’s mood that it goes unnoticed, until a disturbing element appears. Everything changes, in fact, when something familiar becomes uncanny (as in Poe’s tale). Everything is the same but different: it is the well-known principle of the uncanny. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric

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armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up (Poe 185056, 294; my emphases).

Atmospheric tuning, in some cases, can instead be an essential element of diagnosis and investigation. Sometimes Maigret solves his mysteries thanks to his powerful atmospheric “nose” by experiencing a particular harmony with what he perceives (or even just imagines). And he was left alone once more. He filled the pipe and closed the window, as the air was turning chilly. It took no effort for him to picture the doctor’s villa, the prosecutor’s gloomy house. He who so enjoyed going out and sniffing atmospheres! (Simenon 2015, 65; my emphasis). Something had struck him on coming in, which he tried to define, something about the atmosphere, the arrangement of the furniture, the kind of order that prevailed there and even the smell of the place (Simenon 1976, 15; my emphases).

The large number of quotes that I draw (and could be further drawn) from Simenon, incidentally, should not come as a surprise. Atmospheric perception (as opposed to Sherlock Holmes’ logical deduction and abduction, for example)11 is Maigret’s true method of investigation. Indeed, Simenon himself wrote following an entirely atmospheric method: before choosing his theme, in fact, he needed to find the right atmosphere (a certain season and other details), much like a musical theme. Precisely because of this he’s a master at making us feel a certain atmosphere with a few sober brushstrokes, even though they do not claim to be great literature. This is the case with the splendid opening page of Maigret’s Doubts, which describes a post-holiday calm before the storm. It hardly happens more than once or twice a year at Quai des Orfèvres, and sometimes it is over so quickly that you haven’t time to notice it: all of sudden, after a frantic period in which there is a rapid succession of cases […] All of a sudden there is a dead calm, a void […] The same had been true the previous day […] The same atmosphere prevailed on Tuesday […] It is true that it was more or less the same in the rest of Paris. It was 10 January. After the holidays, people were living their lives in slow motion, with a vague hangover, and the prospect of rents and taxes to be paid. The sky, in harmony with everyone’s minds and moods, was a neutral grey, the same grey, more or less, as the flagstones. It was 11 See Großheim (2010).

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cold, not cold enough to be picturesque or newsworthy, but an irritating cold, nothing more than that, the kind of cold you only noticed after walking in the streets for a certain amount of time. The radiators in the offices were scorching, adding to the thickness of the atmosphere, with occasional gurgles in the pipes and strange noises issuing from the boiler (Simenon 2018, 1; my emphases).

5. Recognized but not felt atmospheres So far I have spoken about dystonic and syntonic atmospheres. Now things get a little complicated, requiring a less obvious theoretical choice. In fact, an atmospheric feeling can sometimes be recognized (as antagonistic or simply different from one’s feelings) without being really experienced in the felt body. One recognizes it, and possibly even describes it to others, without being personally involved (for a wide variety of reasons). In other words, one feels that “there is something in the air” but does not actually experience it. A paradigmatic example, even if it is meant to be ironic, is provided by Charles Dickens: “Are you in pain, dear mother? ‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs Gradgrind, ‘but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it’” (Dickens 1854, 234). This affective externalization—there is an atmosphere of pain that hovers in a certain space—has no corresponding subjective and felt-bodily resonance.12 A really dramatic example comes instead from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Malte. Malte enters an atmosphere of joy spread by a festive crowd and ends up feeling sadder. Faces were full of the light that came from the show-booths, and laughter bubbled from their mouths like matter from open sores […] People stopped me and laughed, and I felt that I should laugh too, but I could not (Rilke 1949, 45; my emphasis).

All atmospheres may be recognized as outside entities without being felt, even anger. “He was angry, but the anger seemed to be not inside him, but rather around him. Nothing was inside him. No light. Nothing” (Strout 2006, 212; my emphasis). The same applies to injustice, here understood precisely as an atmosphere pouring out into one’s surroundings. “I felt a

12 About felt-bodily resonance to atmospheres see Griffero (2016, 2017c and above all 2020b).

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wind smearing sense of injustice inside me, or perhaps more precisely this sense surrounded me, like a cape” (Thirlwell 2015, 210; my emphasis). Nevertheless, an atmospheric perception is never a mere socio-semiotic “reading” of a situation, which would explain this recognition without personal feeling as a purely cognitive-cultural fact. Indeed, only a lowintensity felt-bodily communication, only an incipient and involuntary affective sharing can really explain this softened discrepant atmospheric emotion (without deep involvement). Besides, if individuals could always merely observe the surrounding feelings in a fully disembodied and merely cognitive way, they would unfailingly also be able to neutralise them or get rid of the undesired ones. This low-intensity experience always implies a minimal affective component and could perhaps be explained as a twostage process (first of incorporation and then of excorporation) or even a simultaneous attraction-rejection. Roughly following Hermann Schmitz, one could see this specific kind of atmospheric encounter as a healthy elastic oscillation between, on the one hand, regression to the subjective facts of primitive presence and proto-identitary life (incorporation) and, on the other, an unfolded presence dissolving the subjective-involving perception through a relative ex-centric situative position (excorporation). However, the existence of this grey zone mixing absolutely subjective meanings and fade-neutral ones proves that some atmospheric feelings are entirely resonance-conditioned, i.e. they exist only when they are embodied and shared (without brave people, for example, there can be no real atmosphere of courage), while others remain the same even when they are not shared and thus resonate very weakly: a landscape, for example, may be melancholic in itself and be regarded as such even if the spectator is and remains happy. What matters is to not fully embrace a projectivistic relativism. In fact, if by observing an atmosphere and thinking of it we ipso facto altered or even canceled it, no atmosphere could ever overwhelm and affect us, as instead happens (especially in what I called “prototypical” atmospheres). Still, this subject is so philosophically intricate that I will delve into it later (cf. chapter 4, §3). 6. Atmospheres that give rise to opposition It can also happen that an atmosphere (even a strong one) elicits a resistance in its experiencers that pushes them to change it. Even Maigret, usually immersed in atmospheres that provide him with usable clues

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for his investigations, sometimes reacts violently and needs a change of scenery (atmosphere) in order not to succumb. In a rather similar way, the protagonist of Lawrence’s The Lost Girl feels the need to react, in this case to go out to escape an overwhelming interior atmosphere and indulge in the outside beauty and airiness. Enough of Casa Latina. She would never go there again. She was beginning to feel that, if she lived in this part of the world at all, she must avoid the inside of it. She must never, if she could help it, enter into any interior but her own— neither into house nor church nor even shop or post-office, if she could help it. The moment she went through a door the sense of dark repulsiveness came over her. If she was to save her sanity she must keep to the open air, and avoid any contact with human interiors. When she thought of the insides of the native people she shuddered with repulsion, as in the great, degraded church of Casa Latina. They were horrible. Yet the outside world was so fair (Lawrence 1921, 371; my emphasis).

The atmosphere of Mexico for Lawrence provides further brilliant demonstrations of atmospheres soliciting opposition (successful or unsuccessful, it does not matter). One good example is the menacing and contagious atmosphere of a city. She was afraid more of the repulsiveness than of anything. She had been in many cities of the world, but Mexico had an underlying ugliness, a sort of squalid evil, which made Naples seem debonair in comparison. She was afraid, she dreaded the thought that anything might really touch her in this town, and give her the contagion of its crawling sort of evil. But she knew that the one thing she must do was to keep her head (Lawrence 1995a, 14; my emphasis).

In fact, to Mexico’s barbaric and cruel heavy genius loci, both in a climatic-organic and in a historical-ancestral sense, the english Kate can do nothing but submit. Superficially, Mexico might be all right: with its suburbs of villas, its central fine streets, its thousands of motor-cars, its tennis, and its bridge-parties. The sun shone brilliantly every day, and big bright flowers stood out from the trees. It was a holiday. Until you were alone with it. And then the undertone was like the low, angry, snarling purring of some jaguar spotted with night. There was a ponderous, down-pressing weight upon the spirit: the great folds of the dragon of the Aztecs, the dragon of the Toltecs winding around one and weighing down the soul. And on the bright sunshine was a dark steam of an angry, impotent blood, and the flowers seemed to have their roots in spilt blood. The spirit of place was cruel, down-dragging, destructive (ibid, 40; my emphases).

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Perhaps something came out of the earth, the dragon of the earth, some effluence, some vibration which militated against the very composition of the blood and nerves in human beings. Perhaps it came from the volcanoes. Or perhaps even from the silent, serpent-like dark resistance of those masses of ponderous natives whose blood was principally the old, heavy, resistant Indian blood. Who knows? But something there was, and something very potent. Kate lay on her bed and brooded on her own organic rage. There was nothing to be done! (ibid, 45)13

Faced with this uncanny viscous barbaric heaviness, even felt by a Mexican like Ramon, Kate (like Lawrence?) cannot resist, but is both disgusted and attracted by the earthy roots of elemental life that are entirely lacking in civilised Europe. ‘They pull you down! Mexico pulls you down, the people pull you down like a great weight! But it may be they pull you down as the earth’s pull of gravitation does, that you can balance on your feet. Maybe they draw you down as the earth draws down the roots of a tree, so that it may be clinched deep in soil. Men are still part of the Tree of Life, and the roots go down to the centre of the earth. Loose leaves, and aeroplanes, blow away on the wind, in what they call freedom. But the Tree of Life has fixed, deep, gripping roots. ‘It may be you need to be drawn down, down, till you send roots into the deep places again. Then you can send up the sap and the leaves back to the sky, later. ‘And to me, the men in Mexico are like trees, forests that the white men felled in their coming. But the roots of the trees are deep and alive and forever sending up new shoots. ‘And each new shoot that comes up overthrows a Spanish church or an American factory. And soon the dark forest will rise again, and shake the Spanish buildings from the face of America. ‘All that matters to me are the roots that reach down beyond all destruction. The roots and the life are there. What else it needs is the word, for the forest to begin to rise again. And some man among men must speak the word.’ The strange doom-like sound of the man’s words! But in spite of the sense of doom on her heart, she would not go away yet. She would stay longer in Mexico (ibid, 68; my emphases).

This strong mixture of rejection and desire—in this case for an archaic and sensual primitivism that, according to Lawrence, breaks the voluntaristicegoistic metaphysics of civilized culture imposed by Americanization— shows exactly the authority of an atmosphere that permeates a lived but limited space (a certain country in this case), but also stimulates an ambiguous form of fascinated repulsion.

13 Ibid., p. 45.

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In other cases a simple gesture (like smoking) is enough to break a diffused feeling and to counteract the power of the surrounding atmosphere. This place might have been gay, around 1800, with its pink bricks and houses. Now there is something dry and evil about it, a delicate touch of horror. It comes from that fellow up there on his pedestal [Impétraz] […] He looks. He does not live, but neither is he inanimate. A mute power emanates from him like a wind driving me backwards: Impétraz would like to chase me out of the Cour des Hypotheques. But I shall not leave before I finish this pipe (Sartre 1964, 28; my emphasis).

7. Atmospheres below the threshold It is very frequent to say that a place, a person, an object, etc. is devoid of atmosphere. Provided that one is not referring to rather anonymous and grey atmospheres (which is quite different, of course), it may well happen that an atmosphere does not reach the necessary threshold for sensorialaffective observation, thus causing an embarrassing atmospheric and social inadequacy for oneself and for others. This experience is so ordinary that it does not need literary evidence. Hence the feeling of being a fish out of water or behaving the opposite way to what the present atmosphere would “require”: wandering around in a church as if it were a mall, joking with people in mourning, standing stiffly at a friendly party, etc. means that one has not been involved by their surrounding atmosphere, either because the latter remains in the background or because the percipient is unable to be stimulated by it (for all kinds of reasons). 8. Atmospheres that change over time The authors engaging with atmospheres (including myself) insist very much on atmospheric perception as a first spatial impression, omitting the way in which that perception is articulated, stratified and transformed over time. This gap needs to be filled. In fact, it is clear that an atmosphere may be perceived differently in the course of time. Let’s see some examples of this. Sometimes, an atmospheric feeling changes as soon as someone else arrives in the space in which it hovered up until then.

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When he entered the room he was already smoking. Puffing away at his Marlboro with short, nervous drags. The festive atmosphere of just a short while ago seemed to vanish in that smoke, and the whole room was suddenly tense with anticipation (Auster 1990, 91; my emphasis).

Sometimes this atmospheric change is instead slower. Nashe began to be a little surprised by the lack of talk. He had always associated poker with a kind of freewheeling roughhouse chatter, an exchange of foul-mouthed jokes and friendly insults, but these three were all business, and it wasn’t long before Nashe felt an atmosphere of genuine antagonism insinuate itself into the room. The sounds of the game took over for him, as if everything else had been erased (ibid, 93; my emphasis).

Situations may even change completely and turn into their opposites. A previously comfortable situation, for example, may become disturbing over time. There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and settled itself over the place like a sombre pall, pervasive through the lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until it oppressed their very sleep. Anthony and Gloria grew to hate being there alone. Her bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and delicate, appropriate to her pastelshaded lingerie tossed here and there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper with its rustling curtains (Scott Fitzgerald 2008, 176; my emphasis).

The (apparently) same lived space may also become positive, like when one finds oneself able to appreciate an atmospheric situation that was previously feared, in this case the solitude of one’s home. Lyle was slightly surprised by the degree to which he enjoyed being alone. Everything was put away, all the busy spill of conjugal habits. He walked through the apartment, noting lapsed boundaries, a modification of sight lines and planes. Of course it hadn’t nearly the same warmth. But there was something else, an airy span about the place, the re-distancing of objects about a common point. Things were less abrupt and sundry. There was an evenness of feeling, a radial symmetry involving not so much his body and the rooms through which he passed but an inner presence and its sounding lines, the secret possibilities of self (Delillo 1977, 88; my emphases).

In some cases the change may simply depend on a different perspective on the same physical place due to a change of year or season.

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I went home to Woodside early in September […] It was strange that everything was so different. Nethermere even had changed. Nethermere was no longer a complete, wonderful little world that held us charmed inhabitants. It was a small, insignificant valley lost in the spaces of the earth. The tree that had drooped over the brook with such delightful, romantic grace was a ridiculous thing when I came home after a year of absence in the south. The old symbols were trite and foolish (Lawrence 1911, 406; my emphases).

Sometimes the radical turn may also be due to less radical temporal changes, such as a simple momentary change in brightness: for example, there is serenity if the sky is cloudless but sadness arises as soon as a single cloud appears. As sometimes happens when a cloud falls on a green hillside and gravity descends and there among all the surrounding hills is gloom and sorrow, and it seems as if the hills themselves must ponder the fact of the clouded, the darkened, either in pity, or maliciously rejoicing in her dismay (Woolf 1992, 304; my emphasis).

A really common experience is that the mere perceptual difference in terms of time or distance can remove or give atmospheric charm to a situation (the theorists of aesthetic distance insist on this, of course). In Lily’s case the increasing physical distance between her and Mr. Ramsay reduces his atmospheric charge. So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay. It seemed to be elongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and more remote. He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that blu (ibid., 321; my emphasis).

It almost goes without saying that the following experience can instead confirm the first impression, which thus turns out to be prototypical. The first macabre impression of House Usher, for example—“I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all”—is tragically confirmed at the end of the story, when the protagonist notices with horror “the mighty walls rushing asunder” as “the deep and dank tarn at [his] feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments” (Poe 1850-56, 295, 309; my emphases).

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But it is important to clarify something. Making atmospheres more fluid and distinguishing between three different types, admitting that their perception can qualitatively vary from the very beginning as well as over time—this does not at all justify neglecting the neo-phenomenological antiintrojectionist approach. The intensity of an atmosphere obviously also depends on the subject. This means that in the Lebenswelt an atmosphere is first of all the authoritative object of natural perception, but it is also sometimes filtered through the ideas and evaluations of the perceiver and is even an invitation that, under certain circumstances, can be changed or partly declined. So in most cases, in our everyday life, atmospheres exist in a less objective form (so to speak), as they are placed “between” the two necessary poles of object (or rather, the environmental qualia) and subject (or rather, their felt-body). This flexibility though should not be overestimated to the point of confusing the diversity of affective and felt-bodily reactions to an atmospheric feeling (of the way different perceivers differently “filter” it) with the diversity of the atmosphere perceived, which instead—precisely because it is relatively the same—allows for the actual coexistence (and even the intersubjective communicability) of relatively different resulting moods. In Lawrence’s The Rainbow, for example, the “same” atmosphere of the Lincoln Cathedral is experienced in a very different way by two characters. Both are overcome with wonder and awe and clearly feel the powerful genius loci, but whereas for Will “‘before’ and ‘after’ were folded together, all was contained in oneness” in a “timeless ecstasy”, and the church “was all, this was everything”, Anna is instead “ silenced rather than tuned to the place”, so that Will’s “passion in the cathedral at first awed her, then made her angry”. More precisely, she feels that, compared to the “pillars upwards […] there was the sky outside”, and this open sky was no blue vault, no dark dome hung with many twinkling lamps, but a space where stars were wheeling in freedom, with freedom above them always higher. The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in, and beyond which was nothing, nothing, it was the ultimate confine […] Her soul too was carried forward to the altar, to the threshold of Eternity, in reverence and fear and joy […] But even in the dazed swoon of the cathedral, she claimed another right. The altar was barren, its lights gone out. God burned no more in that bush. It was dead matter lying there. She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the roof. She had always a sense of being roofed in (Lawrence 1995b, 147; my emphases)

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This passage, that could also be cited to demonstrate how a certain deeply involving atmosphere can also elicit an opposite emotional reaction (d), shows that the atmosphere is clearly the “same” (wonder and awe). What changes is that Anna “wanted to get out of this fixed, leaping, forward-travelling movement”, for example by caughting “at little things, which saved her from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite in a great mass, triumphant and flinging its own course” (ibid.). By means of a growing resistance based on indulging on the details, which act here as discrepant and disturbing sub-atmospheres, she maliciously succeeds in “spoiling his passionate intercourse with the cathedral” and destroying the passion he had […] Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter-but dead, dead (ibid, 148; my emphasis).

In this case for both the atmosphere changes over time: for her it does so autonomously and thanks both to discrepant sub-atmospheres and to her increasing need to rebel against a too authoritarian and flagrantly manipulative atmosphere, for him because of the powerful negative atmosphere she radiates on him. But I will come back later also on this point (see chapter 4, §4). 9. Atmospheres as supervenient entities A salient theoretical problem, which unfortunately is not under the philosophical radar, is how much an atmosphere, often defined as a vague “something more” compared to the situation it permeates, can really be independent of the strictly material situational components. I think that atmospheres, somewhat enigmatically, supervene on their material components and certain environmental (also strictly physical-material) conditions, but without being reduced to them. Poe’s protagonist is greatly disturbed by this inscrutability. In fact, to him atmospheres seem a mystery all insoluble [because] while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth (Poe 1850-56, 291-292; the second emphasis is mine).

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Poe also stresses the importance of the objectual elements as well as their expressive qualities. Usher, who turns out to be an externalist (in pectore), refers in fact to “the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls” (ibid, 301; my emphasis). Unfortunately, instead of atmospheric and felt-bodily in-betweenness, he still embraces naive dualism in emphasising “an influence [of] some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion”, or in other words “an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence” (ibid, 297)—whereas it is evident that, for atmospherology, the distinction between physical and affective (in Poe’s terms, moral) is really misplaced. As a “something more” an atmosphere is thus generated by a specific place (or person) and not (or less so) by any other, all other objectual elements being equal. For example, nobody likes to be within the irradiation range of this (apparently normal) woman that arouses Maigret’s suspicion. She may have been a very decent woman, but she exuded a depressing atmosphere which made the very sunlight coming in through the window seem dim and almost gloomy. Everything around her became so dreary, so futile and monotonous that one began to wonder if the street was really there, practically within one’s reach, teeming with life and light, with colours, sounds and smells (Simenon 1976, 190; my emphases).

Borrowing Gernot Bohme’s inspiring notion of the “ecstasy of things”,14 it can be said that the material components of a certain lived space can become ecstatic and thus atmospherically (materially as well as emotionally) impregnate the surrounding environment. In spite of the excessive cleanliness, fat oozed everywhere; it sweated between the tiles, glistened on the red surface of the floor, put a greyish sheen on the stove, and gave a varnished appearance to the edges of the chopping block. In the midst of the ever-rising steam, the continuous evaporation from the three big pots, in which pork was boiling and melting, there was not a single nail from floor to ceiling that was not dripping with grease (Zola 2007, 78).

The ecstaticness (or even agency) of things is well known and skilfully dramatized by Sartre’s Roquentin.

14 See, for example, Böhme (2017b, 37-54).

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Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts (Sartre 1964, 10; my emphasis).

Better yet, when Roquentin talks (almost theoretically) about a root’s ecstatic properties—“the simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart” (ibid, 130)—, he sees in them an “intolerable”, contingent existence, which is as such irreducible to instrumentality, thought or deduction. This root—there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. Oh, how can I put it in words? […] But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain to repeat: “This is a root”—it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was ... below all explanation. Each of its qualities escaped it a little, flowed out of it, half solidified, almost became a thing; each one was In the way in the root and the whole stump now gave me the impression of unwinding itself a little, denying its existence to lose itself in a frenzied excess (ibid, 129-130; some emphases are mine).

Nevertheless, sometimes atmospheres may be so dependent on the perceptual (subjective) form that they concretize themselves even in materials that normally express different moods. A first example, truly antiphenomenological in so far as it shows a cognitively penetrable perception, can be found again in Sartre, Roquentin comes across the pleasant-syntonic atmosphere of the sea surface (“delicate colours, delicate perfumes, souls of spring”) and is affected by the atmosphere suggested by something that is not perceived but only known (or imagined and dramatically interpreted). The true sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls under this thin green film made to deceive human beings. The sylphs all round me have let themselves be taken in: they only see the thin film, which proves the existence of God. I see beneath it! (ibid, 124; my emphasis).

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As evidence of Roquentin’s pathological situation (being atmospherically involved by what is below the sea), one can quote an extraordinarily similar schizophrenic atmosphere ( though applied to the sky) reported by Jaspers. Suddenly the landscape was removed from me by a strange power. In my mind’s eye I thought I saw below the pale blue evening sky a black sky of horrible intensity. Everything became limitless, engulfing… I knew that the autumn landscape was pervaded by a second space, so fine, so invisible, though it was dark, empty, and ghastly (Jaspers 1963, 82; my emphases).

Many other examples can be taken from Pamuk’s Istanbul. The first shows that familiarity can inexplicably turn into empty meaninglessness. Sometimes one’s city can look like an alien place. Streets that seem like home will suddenly change color; I’ll look into the ever-mysterious crowds pressing past me and suddenly think they’ve been there for hundreds of years. With its muddy parks and desolate open spaces, its electricity poles, the billboards plastered over its squares, and its concrete monstrosities, this city, like my soul, is fast becoming an empty—a truly empty—place (Pamuk 2011, 408; my emphasis).

Even thousand of lights and advertising signs, normally pointing to intense life and electric social energy, can instead atmospherically irritate the perceiver’s felt-bodily disposition (in this case eager for recollection and intimacy). The anger brewing up inside me makes me hate the city as much as I hate myself, all the more so when I look at the huge and brilliantly colored letters of signs by which the gentlemen of the city advertise their names, businesses, jobs, professions, and successes. All those professors, doctors, surgeons, certified financial consultants, lawyers admitted to the bar, Happy Döner Shops, Life Groceries, and Black Sea food stores; all those banks, insurance agencies, detergent brands and newspaper names, cinemas and jeans stores; the posters advertising soft drinks; the stores where you can buy drinking water and tickets for soccer pools for the lottery; the stores that announce themselves as licensed retailers of propane gas in signs festooned above their names in huge proud letters—all these give me to know that the rest of the city is as confused and unhappy as I am and that I need to return to a dark corner, to my little room, before the noise and signs pull me under (ibid, 409; my emphasis). I made my way through all these places aimlessly. In the beginning the point was not to have a point, to escape the world in which everyone had to have a job, a desk, an office. But even as I explored the city wall by wall, street by street, I poured my own angry, evil melancholy into it. Even now, if I happen to pass through the same streets and see a ruined neighborhood fountain or a ruined wall

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belonging to a Byzantine church […] that looks somehow older, or when I look down an alley and see the Golden Horn shimmering between the wall of a mosque and an apartment building covered with ugly mosaic tiles, I will remember how troubled I was the first time I looked at this view from the same angle and notice how different the view looks now. It’s not my memory that’s false; the view looked troubled then because I myself was troubled (ibid, 447-448; my emphases).

Sure, Pamuk speaks here in substantially projective terms—“I poured my soul in the city’s streets, and there it still resides” (ibid.)—raising the controversial possibility that an initial intense projective impulse may give way over time to a more permanent environmental atmosphere—“when the loss was still new, I saw my mood reflected everywhere” (ibid.). But it’s important to notice the writer’s choice to evoke the predominant atmosphere: not by directly explaining it but through a long list of examples intended to arouse the mood even in those who know nothing of Istanbul. This shows very clearly that for Pamuk it is the city itself, in its geographicalclimatic-social aspects, that arouses a melancholy atmosphere in those who experience it, regardless of the fact that, by filtering this “same” atmosphere differently (see (f)), they can enjoy it (translating it, like Pamuk, into a brilliant stylistic exercise) or get depressed. Instead, the predominantly projective (in my terms, spurious) character of the atmosphere experienced by the young James Ramsay, also suggested by images of future events, is instead more difficult to deny. He belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any tum in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests (Woolf 1992, 181; my emphasis).

In fact, hearing the words of his mother announcing the possibility of a trip to the lighthouse (“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow”), he transfigures his present by protension. He endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling—all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language (ibid.).

Looking in a different direction now, we are all familiar with the northEuropean use of light for cosiness (hygge in Denmark), that is, an atmosphere

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of comfort and intimacy. Well, even the lit windows in other people’s houses, which are usually an antidote to loneliness and depression,15 can sometimes have the opposite effect. Specifically, the ephemeral existence of other not clearly identified persons can trigger an uncanny and almost terrifying atmosphere. In the months that went before all of this, my own house, my own living room, and along with it, above all, my own presence in that house and in that living room had often frightened me. The fear was directly connected to the existence of so many other people in similar houses and living rooms. Especially in the evening, after dark, when most people were “at home”, this fear would quickly take over. From where I lay on the couch I could see, through the bushes and trees, the light from windows across the street. I rarely saw actual people, but those lit windows betrayed their presence—just as my own lit window betrayed my presence […] I wasn’t afraid of people themselves, of peoples as a species. […] It had to do with the provisional status of all those people in their living rooms, in their houses, their housing blocks, their neatly laid-out neighbourhoods of streets (Koch 2012, 192; my emphases).

10. Reversed atmospheric experiences As I have repeatedly claimed, even if some atmospheres are subjectively projected from the inside onto the outside, the most philosophically instructive (and ontologically subversive) example of atmosphere is a feeling that is objectively widespread in the surrounding space and that for this reason is authoritatively binding. This is also demonstrated by a perhaps more unusual case: when, for example, a beautiful landscape and a lovely sunny day, precisely because of their beauty and relaxing-welcoming irradiation, may sharpen the perceiver’s sadness. This happens not because one is somehow perceiving a sad landscape or day, but precisely because the pleasant view and sunshine are perceived as something alien and deeply irritating. It also may occur that something that usually looks beautiful and promising seems almost macabre. Early in June, when the general revival of life troubles many people, the new roses, even in shop windows, remind them of their own failures, of sterility and death […] Through the slats of the blind he looked instead at the brown rocks of the park, speckled with mica, and at the optimistic leaping green of June. It 15 See Bille (2015).

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would tire soon, as leaves broadened and New York deposited its soot on the summer. It was, however, especially beautiful now, vivid in all particulars […] Beauty is not a human invention (Bellow 1976b, 12; my emphasis).

Likewise, something that normally looks horrible to someone can make someone else (or the same person at a different time) feel at home. His Chicago: massive, clumsy, amorphous, smelling of mud and decay, dog turds; sooty façades, slabs of structural nothing, senselessly ornamented triple porches with huge cement urns for flowers that contained only rotting cigarettes butts and other stained filth; sun parlors under titled cables, rank areaways, gray backstairs, seamed and ruptured concrete from which sprang grass; ponderous four-by-four fences that sheltered growing weeds. And among these spacious, comfortable, dowdy apartments […] Herzog did in fact feel at home (ibid, 259; my emphases).

An equally reversed (hysterical enjoyment of the awful in this case) atmosphere can be found in this passage from Lawrence’s The Lost Girl. She got her cab, she drove off to her destination—and as she drove, she looked out of the window. Horrid, vast, stony, dilapidated, crumbly-stuccoed streets and squares of Islington, grey, grey, greyer by far than Woodhouse, and interminable. How exceedingly sordid and disgusting! But instead of being repelled and heartbroken, Alvina enjoyed it. She felt her trunk rumble on the top of the cab, and still she looked out on the ghastly dilapidated flat facades of Islington, and still she smiled brightly, as if there were some charm in it all. Perhaps for her there was a charm in it all. Perhaps it acted like a tonic on the little devil in her breast. Perhaps if she had seen tufts of snowdrops—it was February—and yew-hedges and cottage windows, she would have broken down. As it was, she just enjoyed it. She enjoyed glimpsing in through uncurtained windows, into sordid rooms where human beings moved as if sordidly unaware. She enjoyed the smell of a toasted bloater, rather burnt. So common! so indescribably common! And she detested bloaters, because of the hairy feel of the spines in her mouth. But to smell them like this, to know that she was in the region of “penny beef-steaks,” gave her a perverse pleasure […] It would be useless to say she was not shocked. She was profoundly and awfully shocked. Her whole state was perhaps largely the result of shock: a sort of play-acting based on hysteria (Lawrence 1921, 39; my emphases).

On the contrary, a normally faded and anonymous city may appear more atmospherically attractive and definitely more sensual in a different climate and season for the felt-bodily disposition of a flaneur. The spring came bravely, even in south London, and the town was filled with magic. I never knew the sumptuous purple of evening till I saw the round

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arc-lamps fill with light, and roll like golden bubbles along the purple dusk of the high road. Everywhere at night the city is filled with the magic of lamps: over the river they pour in golden patches their floating luminous oil on the restless darkness; the bright lamps float in and out of the cavern of London Bridge Station like round shining bees in and out of a black hive; in the suburbs the street lamps glimmer with the brightness of lemons among the trees. I began to love the town. In the mornings I loved to move in the aimless street’s procession, watching the faces come near to me, with the sudden glance of dark eyes, watching the mouths of the women blossom with talk as they passed, watching the subtle movements of the shoulders of men beneath their coats, and the naked warmth of their necks that went glowing along the street. I loved the city intensely for its movement of men and women, the soft, fascinating flow of the limbs of men and women, and the sudden flash of eyes and lips as they pass. Among all the faces of the street my attention roved like a bee which clambers drunkenly among blue flowers. I became intoxicated with the strange nectar which I sipped out of the eyes of the passers-by (Lawrence 1911, 401; my emphases).

This reversed affective correspondence is clearly a form of mixed feltbodily resonance, where the repulsive narrowness objectively felt and the expansive vastness responding to it paradoxically go together. This undoubtedly generates the very common soft affective disorder that many works of art and feelings of nostalgia are based on. Here is an excellent but non-dramatic example of a conflicting atmosphere consisting of a succession of felt-bodily expansion and contraction. On the one hand, we see a) the expanding-freeing motion of the waves and b) their repulsive-threatening fury; on the other, we see a) the impermanence of the sea and b) the stillness of the dunes—four sub-atmospheres that form an intriguing whole. They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. […] They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sail drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness— because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest (Woolf 1992, 194; my emphases).

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Something similar happens in the perception of the atmospheric (better: sub-atmospheric) contrasts offered by a beautiful landscape (the sea seen from the shore). At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty—the sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the moon, and children pelting each other with handfuls of grass, something out of harmony with this jocundity, this serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath. This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook them, to abolish their significance in the landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within. […] Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken (ibid, 279-280; my emphases).

It is precisely because of these sub-atmospheric intrusions that the expected (and somewhat objectively felt) general atmosphere spills into its opposite.16 So far, I have provided a sketched phenomenological description of the possible atmospheric situations that can be generated in the “inbetween” including both the surrounding space and the experiencer. My atmospherology, however, wishes to be consistent with the neophenomenological redefinition of philosophy in terms of “thinking in situations”,17 that is, as a self-reflection regarding the way in which human beings affectively orientate themselves within their environment. This approach goes against traditional ontology, especially through the notion of quasi-thing. And that’s exactly what I need to talk about next.

16 Two of my ideas about the causality and mereological nature of atmospheres— that atmospheres are quasi-things where cause and effect coincide and that the overall atmosphere can be modified, especially over time, by the emergence of initially unnoticed sub-atmospheres—find an interesting analogy, although based on quite a different theoretical perspective, in Ben Anderson’s (2014, 137-161) approach to affective atmospheres as “emergent causality” and to their possible dissonant parts as “minor atmospheres”. 17 Schmitz (2019, 73 ff.).

3 An Ontological Background for Atmospheres and Quasi-things

1. Riling up ontology (atmospherically) Phenomena seem to be solid and resistant, but why should solid and resistant mean real? Phenomena do not show any stable delimitation, but why should the real be stably delimited? Phenomena come and go without leaving a trace, but why should the real leave traces? Phenomena cannot be grasped or weighed, but why should the real be able to be grasped and weighed? [. . .] I do not find any principle by which things should be the real. I do not find any principle by which daylight and a foot’s distance should present us the world as it is. Why shouldn’t twilight and a thousand feet’s distance present us the world more exactly? (Schapp, 1981, 95)

As the early Husserlian Wilhelm Schapp clearly suggests, the variable and the ephemeral, the fluid and the vague are no less “real” phenomena than the permanent. This also implies that one should take into account the challenging chaotic character of what one perceives, rather than reductionistically underestimating it. But this can be done only under two conditions. First one must abandon the overestimated knowledge principle of evolutionary survival (which, by the way, is no ontological argument). Second, one must limit the scope of investigation to the so-called lifeworld, understood as a quite unstable entity that, prior to its logic-linguistic subsumption, is more akin to a painting than a map. As contentious as the notion of “lifeworld” is, it aims at preserving our sensible-qualitative involvement against scientific reductionism, mainly drawing upon its prognostic value. This interest in ordinary (naïve) and especially involuntary sensible experiences, of course, deeply changes the meaning of “experience” itself. This new meaning of experience is mainly based on presence or presentness (see chapter 2, §1), and on how appearances and first impressions resound in the felt body. This requires an ontology that should also recruit quasi-

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things: entities that, unlike things, fully coincide with their felt-bodily actual situational appearance, without being reducible to portionable components of something else (as posited by the Western atomistic-singularistic logic). Whether they be natural phenomena or relatively artificial ones, quasithings—and atmospheres are an example, or perhaps the example par excellence, of quasi-things—demand a different ontology: one for which, among other things, becoming must not be understood as an anomaly of Being and the aesthetological experientia vaga, as such irreducible to an etiologic and genetic approach, can be considered a reliable form of certainty. If the atmospherological approach as such riles up traditional ontology, this is all the more true when one introduces the notion of quasi-thing. Traditional Western ontology, in fact, puts substances (things in themselves) before relations (things for other) and the subject/object distinction before the in-between1 preceding them, thus following the classic hierarchical three-branch system of substance-relation-accident. Similarly, it puts a) being before becoming, b) solid bodies and the central field of vision before what is vague, ephemeral and peripheric, c) single entities2 before situations,3 d) the extensive magnitude before the intensive one, e) reversible relations before unsplittable situations, and f) perception as a distancingconstative and merely ocular process before perception as a deambulatory, peripheric and synaesthetic process. Mislead by this barely sketched legion of prejudices, Western ontology ended up exiling everything that is vague, flowing, atmospheric, etc. into an alleged inner and private world (the soul), in turn conceived as a solid and stratified body (for example as a bundle of perceptions or as an ineffable inner theatre), disdainfully confining all that does not fit into this paradigm to amateur poets and preachers. In an ontology based on dualism, on the primacy of things (as cohesive, solid, continuous objects that are mobile only through contact) and, above all, on the psychic introjection of everything vague and flowing, 1 2 3

As when an unsplittable circumstance, characterised by an intensive magnitude, is not yet transformed into a reversible relation. It’s possible to number things in a room only having already decided what comprehensive genera matter here. Instead, taking up Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology, I would like to understand them as Gestaltic wholes made up of an internally diffuse meaningfulness and a chaotic non-numerical manifoldness, within which not everything (possibly nothing) is singular, i.e. increases a number by 1.

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atmospheres and quasi-things are obviously a stumbling stone. The fatal ontological icing on this cake, however, is the claim that only what we can express through a logical-particular quantification exists, whereas, on the contrary, lifewordly reality at least partially escapes language. Indeed, it is not a set of elementary non-qualitative sense-data to be used epistemically (basically for statistical monitoring and prognosis), but rather a chaotic situation whose only unquestionable evidence comes from how it affects us in our felt-body. Based on this ecological account of atmospheric agency and affective enactivism—according to which, inter alia, feeling atmospheres as quasithings consolidates incipient or only vague emotions—one can question the view that people are primarily surrounded by things devoid of meaning, whose qualities would be nothing but the outcome of brain computation of physical data projected outside. Rather, we are surrounded by atmospheric feelings and quasi-things that are always already affectively connoted. It turns out, therefore, that atmospheres are both the main example of the wider ontological category of quasi-things and the fundamental (radiating) way in which all quasi-things as such, as qualitative-affective affordances, touch and involve the perceiver. Let’s turn to literature once more. Let’s look at the very acute description of demolished houses offered by Rainer Maria Rilke: precisely because of its inventiveness, it could seem a perfect example of idiosyncratic imaginative-poetic projection of an entirely internal state of mind on the external world, which in itself is instead aqualitative and anaffective. Instead, on closer inspection, this passage proves to be an excellent example of ab extra action of quasi-thingly affordances (what Rilke, significantly warning us that nothing has been added, calls “tenacious life”). They are embodied in the ruins under examination (walls, colors, wallpapers, smells and especially the last wall of the demolished houses), from which the poet escapes because he “recognizes” them (meaning they resonate in him with unreasonable emotional strength). Will anyone believe that there are such houses? No. They will say that I’m falsifying. But this time it’s the truth, nothing left out and naturally also nothing added. Where should I get it from? It’s well known that I’m poor. Everyone knows. Houses? But, to be precise, they were houses that no longer existed. Houses that were torn down from top to bottom. What was there was the other houses, the ones that had stood alongside them, tall neighboring houses. They were obviously in danger of collapsing after everything next to them

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had been removed, for a whole framework of long tarred poles was rammed aslant between the ground of the rubble-strewn lot and the exposed wall. I don’t know whether I’ve already said that I mean this wall. But it was, so to speak, not the first wall of the present houses (which nevertheless had to be assumed) but the last one of the earlier ones. You could see their inner side. You could see the walls of rooms on the different storeys, to which the wallpaper was still attached, and here and there the place where the floor or ceiling began. Along the whole wall, next to the walls of the rooms, there still remained a dirtywhite area, and the open rust-stained furrow of the toilet pipe crept through it in unspeakably nauseating movements, soft, like those of a digesting worm. Of the paths taken by the illuminating gas, gray dusty traces were left at the edges of the ceilings, and here and there, quite unexpectedly, they bent round about and came running into the colored wall and into a black hole that had been ruthlessly ripped out. But most unforgettable were the walls themselves. The tenacious life of these rooms refused to let itself be trampled down. It was still there; it clung to the nails that had remained; it stood on the handsbreadth remnant of the floor; it had crept together there among the onsets of the corners where there was still a tiny bit of interior space. You could see that it was in the paint, which it had changed slowly year by year: from blue to an unpleasant green, from green to gray and from yellow to an old decayed white that was now rotting away. But it was also in the fresher places that had been preserved behind mirrors, pictures and cupboards; for it had drawn and redrawn their contours and had also been in these hidden places, with the spiders and the dust, which now lay bare. It was in every streak that had been trashed off; it was in the moist blisters at the lower edge of the wall-hangings; it tossed in the tom-off tatters and it sweated out of all the ugly stains that had been made so long ago. And from these walls, once blue, green, and yellow, which were framed by the tracks of the fractures of the intervening walls that had been destroyed, the breath of this life stood out, the tough, sluggish, musty breath which no wind had yet dispersed. There stood the noondays and the illnesses, and the expirings and the smoke of years and the sweat that breaks out under the armpits and makes the clothes heavy, and the stale breath of the mouths and the fusel-oil smell of fermenting feet. There stood the pungency of urine and the burning of soot and the gray reek of potatoes and the strong oily stench of decaying grease. The sweet lingering aroma of neglected suckling infants was there and the anguished odor of children going to school and the sultriness from beds of pubescent boys. And much had joined this company, coming from below, evaporating upward from the abyss of the streets, and much else had seeped down with the rain, unclean above the towns. And the domestic winds, weak and grown tame, which stay always in the same street, had brought much along with them, and there was much more too coming from no one knows where. But I’ve said, haven’t I, that all the walls had been broken off, up to this last one? Well, I’ve been talking all along about this wall. You’ll say that I stood in front of it for a long time; but I’ll take an oath that I began to run as soon as I recognized the wall. For that’s what’s terrible—that I recognized it. I

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recognize all of it here, and that’s why it goes right into me: it’s at home in me (Rilke 1949, 46 ff.; my emphases).

This quotation (as famous as it is long) is the masterful testimony of a house’s atmosphere felt by Rilke as part of himself, but understood—this is the most important thing for our atmospherological point of view—as a feeling poured out in a certain external space and not a subjective psychicprojective interpretation. It is an ecstasy of things—it is the uncanny that Martin Heidegger4 also captures well when states that what Rilke reads here in his sentences from the exposed wall is not imagined into the wall, but, quite to the contrary, the description is possible only as an interpretation and elucidation of what is ‘actually’ in this wall, which leaps forth from it in our natural comportmental relationship to it (Heidegger 1982, 173; my emphasis).

Quasi-things—in Rilke’s example not so much the houses as their colors and smells—act very powerfully on the perceivers. Of course, embracing a new ontological category like “quasi-thing”5 means prescinding from the pragmatic purposes and the representational and even psychological advantages offered by them (proper things) as in general by any objectification of the elusive. This need to subsume perceptions under genera in order to mitigate the anxiety provoked by the incessant change of qualia is expressed very well by Don Delillo. She was digging to find things, to learn. Objects themselves. Tools, weapons, coins. Maybe objects are consoling. Old ones in particular, earth-textured, made by otherminded men. Objects are what we aren’t, what we can’t extend ourselves to be. Do people make things to define the boundaries of the self? Objects are the limits we desperately need. They show us where we end. They dispel our sadness, temporarily (Delillo 1989, 133; my emphasis). 4

5

“There is not another quotation like it in the Heideggerian corpus. Edifying hymns of gods and of planetary destinies for the Occident- that is the usual fare with Heidegger. Columns on the march, not cheesy feet; fateful sendings and fatalities of being, not city planning. However, razed walls too are a fatality, the ruins that one recognizes and that run one through. Ruins of home, ruins at home. I repeat that I do not know another passage in Heidegger as uncanny as this one” (Farrell Krell 1992, 47). This category (Halbding) first appeared in Schmitz (1978, 116-139), and was partially inspired by Sartre’s pages on pain as a psychic-affective object with its own reality, intermittent time and life, habits and “melodic” developments (Sartre 1978, 335-337): see Griffero (2017a, XVI-XVIII).

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A different and less thingly ontology instead includes the “big and colourful family” (Schmitz 1978, 134) of quasi-things: the wind, gazes, sounds, colours, the night, certain thermal qualities, smells, electric shocks, weight and void, time, and, above all, atmospheric feelings. These are sets of qualia that, for their marked expressiveness, physiognomic “character” and intrusiveness, affect people more than full-fledged things. It is time to overcome the existential narrowness of philosophers who always think in terms of desks and chairs and choose as “concrete” examples only objects of this type. However, this requires going out of the library, leaving the desk (or, if you prefer, the Lucretian topos of a shipwreck with a spectator) and giving due attention to subjective facts, that is, to what really involves us in the first person and about which we can only talk using our own name (though not necessarily a private language). One thus learns to appreciate the life-worldly importance of entities that, as qualitative nuances and fluctuating impressions, are vaguer than the solid, three-dimensional, cohesive, contoured, identified and persistent things prevailing in the usual ontologies. All this—I repeat—paves the way for a rectified and enriched ontological inventory. My inflationary phenomenological-ontological approach, according to which quasi-things occupy a vast territory between mere qualia and full-fledged things, gives due value to all that, despite its vagueness, transience, fluidity and lack of borders, we (unwillingly) experience very frequently. It is then important to say in advance that quasi-things are usually dismissed in two manners: a) by forcedly “thickening” and turning them into things in order to reduce their particular intrusiveness: for example by reducing the wind to air in motion when it blows or still when it dies down6; b) by tracing them back to perceptions so chaotic and decontoured that they end up being considered as something anomalous, if not pathological. These two epistemic strategies quickly show their weakness: after all, we must never forget that if not all that (epistemically) exists appears, all that appears surely (phenomenologically) exists, and, what is more, being perceived, it is also public and intersubjective by principle. But what is a quasi-thing, really? It is neither simply a) the outcome of inaccuracy due to extrafocality or poor attention in normal perception (this would make them quasi-things only de dicto), nor b) the mere higher6

Reducing electric shock to electricity, the weight that drags us down to gravity, the felt pain to its neurobiological causes, etc.

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order context of things that acts as their “reference scheme”; neither c) the product of an extravagant mereological conjunctivism aiming at hypostatizing subsequent appearances (I gladly leave this hyper-artificial way of philosophizing to analytic philosophy!), nor d) the result of an exasperated linguistic conventionalism, according to which every expression of ordinary language should infallibly correspond to a real thing. If these were the cases, a quasi-thing could not be a salient and primary component of the passive synthesis through which something happens to us and felt-bodily involves us. Indeed, it would be not much more significant than the imaginative products explored by thought experiments in analytic ontology. One of the existentially fundamental components of the lifeworld would thus be excluded and our own daily existence would end up being greatly impoverished. Instead of being the heart of a rigorously phenomenal experience of the world, a quasi-thing thus misunderstood would only confirm once more the grotesque idealistic perspective according to which subjects always and only encounter themselves everywhere. This is why, rather than adding my voice to those which exaggerate the importance of an (alleged) augmented reality, I would like to insist here, on the contrary, on the role of an “attenuated reality” (so to speak) in making our everyday life richer and more colourful. 2. Quasi-things: the windy paradigm Of course, there are many ways of treating air as an atmosphere. Smell, not surprisingly, is often considered the atmospheric phenomenon par excellence. Since smell has neither “sides and therefore presentations per profiles (Abschattungen)” (Tellenbach 1968, 28), nor precise and defined edges, angles, faces and colors, it could be argued that smell is the atmosphere itself. Scent is something that, impregnating the lived space, deeply involves us—namely, a pre-dimensional space without surfaces, lines and points. What we smell is also what we “breathe in,” something that penetrates “through all the pores of [our] being” and sometimes “can become unbreathable as much on the physical level as on the moral one.” (Minkowski 1936, 117-118). Saying that an atmosphere is an affective “air” is also consistent with saying that it is a something “more”: something beyond language that remains unspoken in many sensory experiences, even though it is felt and evokes value-laden impressions.

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Nevertheless, the air’s elusiveness—together with its effect on human politics, scientific knowledge, and natural processes—is not what I want to talk about here. I’d rather focus on the atmospheric specificity of the wind, based on its phenomenological-ontological analysis as a quasi-thing. The wind is actually the topic of a highly desirable “aesthetics of air [that] must first render air sensible by being an aesthesis of air” (Horn 2018, 22). More specifically, it is a very good example of an atmospheric quasi-thing; religions have always recognized this, pointing out that it blows where it wishes: “you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8). As something apparently inapparent, the air actually occurs mainly ex negativo, when one suddenly needs it. And yet the wind especially affects us on the affective-bodily level in the form of an atmospheric feeling poured out into pre-dimensional space: that is, as a very concrete experience, significantly both climatic and affective, physically and feltbodily. This is the case, of course, provided that the wind, much like the weather, is duly subtracted to today’s prognostic obsession inscribed in the flood of “weather forecasts”. The wind synthetically testifies to the quality of our emotional involvement—exactly like the Japanese notions of ki or fūdo, understood as pre-dualistic coexistence of self and world.7 It thus provides a first starting point for a long-awaited philosophical climatology (from Montesquieu and Herder on) mainly based on elemental media— something that has never been realized, also for excessive fear of climate determinism. The relative phenomenological inaccessibility of the air certainly ceases to exist when it comes to the wind. Humans have always sought to catch it and exploit its power: indeed, the wind can be experienced thanks to a felt-body resonance even in the absence of optical data as it forcefully hits us. For example, it shows itself not only in an inflated dress or in the bent branches of a tree, in a waving flag or in its effects on the clouds and on water, but also in how it atmospherically and “ecstatically” affects our surroundings. Fully coinciding with its own flow and thus being an event in the proper sense (a “pure act,” in a way), it pervades space with its particular voluminousness, tuning it in this or that way (obviously a breeze is affectively different from a hurricane) and arousing specific motor

7

See especially Watsuji (1961).

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suggestions and synaesthetic affordances that make the wind something irreducible to Heideggerian handiness. Since the wind is always a mediated and thus indirect manifestation, as a Gestalt back-and-forth switch between figure and background, we are required to observe it in a definite context and perspective. This means that the wind cannot be experienced in general or in an abstract way: it is either strong or gentle, still or storm-like in different moments or places. Apparently omnipresent, the wind ignores boundaries, and land-borne borders in particular. But, above all, the wind is irreducible to moving air, contrary to what Western ontology usually claims. Applying what I have defined above as the first of the two reductionist strategies to exile quasithings from a legitimate ontological catalogue, Western thought thickens and turns it into a thing in order to reduce its particular intrusiveness. To better clarify what quasi things are in general, as opposed to this objectifying trend of Western ontology, I will now better detail the quasithingly nature of the wind.8 A. As already mentioned, and like other quasi-things, the wind is not edged, discrete, cohesive, solid, and is therefore hardly penetrable (unlike things). Also, it does not properly possess the spatial sides in which things necessarily manifest themselves and from whose orthoaesthetic coexistence one can usually gather their protensional regularities. Despite lacking thingly spatial sides, quasi-things can condense in a specific way. A dinner atmosphere, for example, can appear as a block of air, as “a solid yellowish back-drop against which all four of them stood out, like figures against the canvas in an old painting” (Simenon 1967c, 56). A slimy urban atmospheric quasi-thing can condense in a similar way. Noise from the streets rose uncertainly tonight, muffled, an underwater density. Air conditioners, buses, taxicabs. Beyond that, something obscure: the non-connotative tone that appeared to seep out of the streets themselves, that was present even when no traffic moved, the quietest sunups. It was some innate disturbance of low frequency in the grain of the physical city, a ghostly roar (Delillo 1977, 148).

8

I reproduce here a partially modified version of the theses contained in Griffero (2017a, 9-14).

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Thus, in the wind we do not perceive a hidden side announcing the others. This means that if a thing can deceive us by having concealed sides— temporarily or eternally hidden inner strata and only apparent qualities—a quasi-thing like the wind never deceives, because it totally coincides with its phenomenal appearance. B. Things have immanent and regular tendencies. An object has a weight and tends to fall; the pages of a book turn yellow; if we don’t lift something it stays on the ground. Because of these immanent dispositions, also proving their compatibility or incompatibility with other bodies, things testify to us their physical-bodily presence. Things have these tendencies even in the absence of interaction (a glass remains frangible even if nobody breaks it), and these characteristics confer to them a future as well as a past revealed by signs, marks, fractures, etc. Instead, because of their relative immateriality, quasi-things do not seem to have actual tendencies or a history. In their atmospheric and quasi-thingly effect, the night, anxiety and the wind, for example, don’t ever get old and don’t show any temporal patina. By virtue of its absolute “presentness”, the wind is not the continuation of something prior, but it is something always new and so radically evenementiel that it does not require a genetic phenomenology and an etiological explanation. C. While things transcend their momentary character—in the sense that they are neither born nor can they die all of a sudden, but instead bear the signs of their own specific history, and one can possess them, portion them, save them, or annihilate them—the wind can appear in a partial form, without this necessarily meaning that it does so through fragments and sides. So, if I can point at a single object made of silver to demonstrate what silver is, in the same way, I can refer to this wind, regardless of its specific present variant, to explain what the wind is in general. And this is because a single wind is not the portion of a larger wind-thing but fully expresses the “character” of its appearance. In the same way that a different tone (warm, metallic, polished, hoarse) does not make a person’s voice (another quasi-thing) a different one, a quasi-thing like the wind has its own distinct identity, which, within certain limits, can be traced back to types, but not to universal-conceptual genera. D. Above all, the wind is (felt as) more immediate and intrusive than things, because it is able to generate inhibiting and sometimes even unbearable motor suggestions. The felt-bodily communication triggered by it can be summed up as an alternation of incorporation and excorporation

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much more intense than that triggered by things. As a “center[…] of incorporation” (Schmitz 1978, 169) able to occupy some surfaceless and lived spaces, as a violent “attractor[…] of our everyday attention,” (Soentgen 1997, 13), it is often more incisive and demanding than things in the strict sense. E. But perhaps the most philosophically intriguing point is that the wind dies down with the same inexplicable immediacy with which it rises. Even if, as we have seen, it has a “character,” i.e. it is this or that particular wind (as we say of other quasi-things, “Here’s my usual pain in the shoulder,” “Here’s the melancholy of an autumn evening,” etc.), it doesn’t have the same continuity of existence as things, which as a rule cannot disappear from a point in space and reappear in another. For this reason, the children’s embarrassing question (“What does the wind do when it isn’t blowing?”), implying a being separate from feeling,9 turns out to be an excellent— though upsetting and disturbing—philosophical question. The normalizing and reifying answer usually given by the adults (“It has died down,” or even “It went to sleep”) disregards its importance. Things that are not perceived, or are lost, etc., still occupy a certain portion of space,10 provided that they are not totally destroyed.Instead, quasi-things like the wind have rather an intermittent life, and it would make no sense to ask where they are when they are not present yet or when they are no longer there. Their intermittence produces a kind of broken biography that in principle cannot be filled (does the wind, or a certain type of wind, have a history?) and is very different from the latency periods normally belonging to things that are temporarily not perceived. To prevent this uncanny experience—to mitigate the anxiety provoked by the incessant change of qualia—standard ontology has no other option than to subsume atmospheric perceptions under genera and to give priority to tangible and well-determined entities. The fact that this disturbing transience is not only the prerogative of natural phenomena but can also be found in artificial entities is clearly demonstrated by Lawrence’s brilliant description of electric light in 9

A question that can be asked of all quasi-things: “What does a voice do when it is not heard?”; “Where is pain when I do not feel it?”; etc. 10 Even when the waves cease to crease it, we still see the water; but when the wind stops, there is no perceptible air left.

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Mexico, which influences, like an uncontrollable daemon, the flow of the Mexican pathicity. The electric light in Sayula was as inconstant as everything else. It would come on at half-past six in the evening, and it might bravely burn till ten at night, when the village went dark with a click. But usually it did no such thing. Often it refused to sputter into being till seven, or half-past, or even eight o›clock. But its worst trick was that of popping out just in the middle of supper, or just when you were writing a letter. All of a sudden, the black Mexican night came down on you with a thud. And then everybody running blindly for matches and candles, with a calling of frightened voices. Why were they always frightened? Then the electric light, like a wounded thing, would try to revive, and a red glow would burn in the bulbs, sinister. All held their breath--was it coming or not? Sometimes it expired for good, sometimes it got its breath back and shone, rather dully, but better than nothing. Once the rainy season had set in, it was hopeless. Night after night it collapsed. And Kate would sit with her weary, fluttering candle, while blue lightning revealed the dark shapes of things in the patio. And half-seen people went swiftly down to Juana›s end of the patio, secretly (Lawrence 1995a, 196-197).

Sometimes it is instead a certain feeling that comes and goes in a quasithingly way: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life? (Sartre 1964, 56).

F. Lastly, following Hermann Schmitz once again, the wind does not have a threefold causality (cause-action-effect) but a twofold one (cause/ action-effect), like all quasi-things. Very briefly, while a book is always a book, which may or may not on the floor and may break a glass if it hits it, the wind—which in a certain sense “is precisely this blowing and nothing else” (Grote 1972, 251)—does not exist before and beyond its blowing. So to speak, it is an aggression without an aggressor (a cause) that may be separated from it as prior to it. In other words, the wind is atmospherically an actual fact (a pure phenomenon) and not a factual fact (the wind as a physical-climatic element). Traditional Western ontology has felt compelled to transform bipolar causality into a tripolar causality, because obviously only if the cause can be separated from its effect (i.e. if a necessary substrate can be separated from its more or less accidental manifestation) can science express its prognosis and operate in a preventive way. This indistinction between cause and action confirms a fortiori that

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the somewhat unexpected appearance of a quasi-thingly configuration is necessarily followed by an involuntary experience, a pathic-atmospheric and felt-bodily involvement that is at least initially uncontrollable. The quasi-thingly characteristics of the wind examined here apply without doubt to every atmospheric experience and not only to elemental atmosphericness. This opens up a long discussion on the general types of resonance triggered by windy atmospheres (narrowness and vastness) and the resulting felt-bodily communication.11 However, before I say something on the way in which this happens, I should clarify what the felt body is.12 1) First of all, the (quasi-thingly) and pre-reflective sphere of the felt body is certainly extended in the pre-dimensional and surfaceless space (unlike the psyche) but is also indivisible and absolutely located (unlike the physical body). 2) Secondly, it can be said that the felt-bodily sphere concerns both what you feel within your body and what you feel in the pericorporeal space (pain, hunger, thirst, pleasure, vigour, relaxation, etc.), yet without any mediation of either the sensory organs or the body schemata. Instead, sensory organs and body-schemata act by virtue of the felt body’s temporary “silence”, which works as a blind spot in relation to all following perceptions. In fact, like the physical body, the lived body is not even noticed whenever a fluid and effective motor spontaneity prevails and makes a spontaneously “ecstatic” orientation possible. 3) Thirdly, the quasi-thingly felt body is the resonance board of atmospheres and other quasi-things. This is made possible thanks to a feltbodily (leiblich) communication with any really salient object or form, starting from what one dwells in (chair, clothes, house), up to the weather, atmospheric feelings and, in general, all the qualia or affordances of the outside, whose intermodal nature has existential and felt-bodily resonances (isomorphism). Highlighting once again the co-belonging of the human being and the environment (including other people), these resonances are an immediate grasping of outside affordances: in short, they are our response to the valences of atmospheric spaces, and at the same time they are an ecstatic extension of the felt body’s own lived directions. According 11 See Griffero (2017b). 12 See Griffero (2017a, 55-67; 2017c).

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to this clearly anti-solipsistic stance, the felt body embodies not only its tools, but also everything that we experience in the pericorporeal space and whose peculiar voluminousness we also sense: the car we drive, the bystander we miraculously avoid on the sidewalk, and so on. 4) Lastly, there is the most challenging point. Unlike the thing-body, which is composed of organs and delimited within cutaneous boundaries, the felt body is a body before or without organs (in a sense, however, that is largely different from Deleuze’s). It consists of multiple felt-bodily isles, whose “absolute” spatiality gives life to indivisibly extended felt-bodily motions. The felt-bodily isles are voluminous but surfaceless quasi-things, which we cannot identify with articulate and discrete anatomical parts, let alone with the increasingly fine-grained particles examined by physics. As they incarnate an existential and symbolic salience which in part is also culturally and historically variable, such isles are sometimes relatively stable (oral cavity, anal zone, chest, back, belly, genitals, soles, etc.), while at other times they can come forward or dissolve—a bit like high and low tides—on the basis of excitement (itch, palpitation, burst of heat, ache, etc.), and yet at other times can be subsumed under general, indivisible and more permanent felt-bodily states (vigour, prostration, pleasure, uneasiness). It is precisely in this sense that our chest, as the felt-bodily isle of emotional involvement, becomes other than the organs thereby located (and a fortiori other than cells, genes, chromosomes, atoms, etc.). Again, it is for this reason that the head to which we often refer by saying that somebody’s head “is in the clouds” or “is full of ideas” becomes other than the brain anatomically understood. Likewise, it’s obvious that when “we feel butterflies in the stomach” because we are in love, the heart-zone becomes other than the heart as an organ, and so on. Normally one experiences the felt body as a “vast, profusely articulate landscape,or even [as] a vast continent”: e.g. as a landscape which obviously cannot be topographically defined and requires almost a meditation practice or, more simply, a finegrained phenomenological perception. Indeed, it needs an autoscopy, in which we could say that—since sentient beings cannot ever feel without also feeling themselves—the perceivers merge with the perceived. Starting from this background perspective, as already mentioned (see chapter 2), resonance can be, at the very least, a) discrepant and b) syntonic. By inhibiting fluid bodily behaviour, the atmospheric discrepancy (when the wind blows against us, when it is strong and harsh) induces an epicritic

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contraction, and gives birth to individual felt-bodily isles of which the subject was previously unaware. But awareness can sometimes lead to their pathological disorganization, or independence. On the other side, by facilitating bodily behaviour, the atmospheric syntony (when the wind favors us, is a sweet breeze or gently refreshes a muggy environment) provides a protopathic felt-bodily state of well-being, which momentarily prevents some particular isles from emerging and even promotes an uncritical fusion with external reality. This is just a taste of how an analysis of the felt-bodily resonance of atmospheres and quasi-things could and “should” be developed. In fact, the phenomenological cases of our encounter with atmospheres and quasithings (what I have called “atmospheric games” or “encounters”) are necessarily much more complicated than this (see chapter 2). Here I only wanted to sketch a phenomenological integration of the traditional ontologic “catalogue” starting from the wind as an emblematic example of quasi-thing. And besides, my approach does not amount to corroborating the universal (onto- and phylogenetic) tendency to reification, whose advantages do not compensate for the loss of the semantic-pathic polyvocity of reality. My double-track aim rather consists in taking relations and events as (quasi-)things while taking many things as less thing-like: in fact, many so called things (a mountain, a road, etc.) are not much more defined than the atmospheric feelings they irradiate—with the significant difference that the atmospheric quasi-thingly repartition depends on a segmentation of what we “encounter” that is not so much artificial (functional) or cognitivesemantic but rather affective and felt-bodily. In short: quasi-things have quality (intensity), extension (non-geometric dimensionality), relation (to other quasi-things and to the perceiver’s states of mind), place (they are here and not there, even if only in the lived space) and time (they occur right now, etc.) 3. Rest-realism The quasi-things I have explored elsewhere (atmospheres, pain, shame, felt-bodily isles, the look or gaze, twilight)13, though ephemeral, can rely on a non-modal and relative intersubjective identity. By virtue of their emotionally intrusiveness, they trigger a deep felt-bodily communication 13 Griffero (2017a).

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with the perceiver, thus creating the emotional space in which they appear and that in various ways they also affect. Now, it is clear that the philosophical approach I embrace does not wish to be paralyzed by physicalism or reductionism—let alone by the craze reducing lifewordly self-awareness to a mere illusion or an epiphenomenon of brain processes, or genetic, hormonal and neuronal data. After all the brain, which I can neither see nor feel, is (phenomenologically) a mere article of faith and certainly not a legitimate argument of (this) phenomenological trend14: I rather explicitly favour an ontological inflationism and a phenomenology engaged with what appears (phenomena) exactly as it appears and in its felt-bodily involving power. If I were asked to comment on the impact of my subject of study on major ontological issues, I could simply say that an atmospherology and phenomenology of quasi-things surely has to avoid both absolute realism (the claim that the world, at least broadly speaking, philo- and ontogenetically exists before human being) and absolute idealism (the claim that the world is a by-product of a human or transcendent representing, imagining or constructing consciousness). Both options, in fact, are vitiated by a misguided singularism (whether the focus lies on single ideas, representations, sense data, solid bodies or genes, atoms, etc.) and especially today by the constellationistic illusion of being able to freely connect all the network knots. I rather think that human beings give an impulse for the development of primitive presence/present into an (also linguistically) articulated presence/present, but do not make this process in a strict sense, being rather the medium of a development that they do not control and which they (pathically-resiliently) face. By avoiding the singularistic mistake underlying both absolute realism and absolute idealism, I content myself with assuming a minimal or rudimentary realism. My rest-realistic assumption,15 in fact, means that objectivity here is only understood as the intersubjective perspective pragmatically needed to make something together on the basis of a given 14 In spite of the gradual cannibalization (of the soul by the psyche, then of the soul by the mind and lastly of the mind by the brain), it still makes sense, freely using Virchow’s joking words, to say “I have dissected thousands of corpses but found no brain in any”, at least as a sense-making subject! 15 Rest-realism means “the minimum of agreement we need to organize a ‘common’ ‘intersubjective’ and then ‘objective’ called world” (Rappe 2012, 49).

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but partially unknown world-matter. Reality, here presupposed only for methodological and epistemological reasons, would never be entirely known to us and should be clearly distinguished from the pure objectivity that results from mathematical facts and is as such, incidentally, alien to our lifeworld. However, the triangulation process usually needed by realism also applies to my rest-realism, as two persons obviously agree about a quasi-thingly and atmospheric effect only if they can somehow point at a quasi-objective affect and name it, thus making identification possible. Without this evident though ultimately indemonstrable minimal invariance, ultimately located in a felt-bodily and affective involuntary process, the very lifeworld experience would obviously be totally impossible. Thanks to subjective facts—that is, phenomena that are certain on the basis not of a definitive logical criterion of evidence but of an involvement whose evidence cannot absolutely be denied or reduced to viability16—one must acknowledge, at least, the existence of a worldmatter preceding any conceptual explanation and whose first salient manifestations are precisely quasi-things rather than things. Demanding a much more foundational realism would be just as naïve as it would be for individuals to say they are feeling completely happy—hence Charles de Gaulle’s famous response to a journalist’s inquiry: ‘‘Mr. President, are you a happy man?’’ ‘‘What sort of a fool do you take me for?’’. Indeed, instead of entering the blind alley of major systems, I prefer to outline that any ontological and lifeworldly repertoire (worthy of the name), and, even more so, a pathic aesthetics like mine, cannot ever do without quasi-things and the affective qualities they generate. Unless, that is, one wants to give carte blanche to a third-person explanation of the lifeworld that ends up reducing it and ignoring its natural self-evidence. Therefore, it is not by arbitrary choice but by necessity that I believe that entia sunt multiplicanda. In fact, even an eliminativist à la Horatio only has to leave his desk and walk out of the laboratory to realize that Ockham’s razor is as presumptuous a tool as it is insufficient (there are more things in heaven and earth…).

16 As claimed instead by constructivism.

4 What an Atmospheric Affect Can Really Do Urbanizing the Schmitzean “Province”

1. Neo-phenomenological “inflationism” My atmospherology is definitely a consequence of the new sensibility spread by the so-called “affective turn” in the humanities. But there are several ways to discuss affect. There are “affect theories”, based on an anonymous ontological process blind to local affect contexts, but also “affect studies”, focused either on the reduction of affects to human-social relationships or on exploring the emotional sphere in order to activistically create better affective relationships. Although my approach partly meets both of those perspectives, it is actually quite different. In fact, for me focusing on atmospheres means looking carefully at how situations and places can produce affects. And I wish to do so by sticking as much as possible to Hermann Schmitz’s descriptive neo-phenomenological stance and without making excessive metaphysical claims but also, at least initially, without reducing the investigation of affects either to collecting quantitative data and statistics or to a continuation of politics with other means. So far there have been attempts not so much at analyzing in depth but rather at merely “translating”1 Schmitz’s challenging and unconventional theory of feelings. This effort to translate it would provide a kind of “northwest passage”, capable both of synthesizing the instances of cognitive and sensory emotivism and of embracing a motivational and intentional theory2 of affectivity as a ubiquitous dimension of existence: for this reason, I also intend to “urbanize Schmitz’s province”, so to speak.3 However, I do not share the hermeneutic côté often implicit in such 1 2 3

Slaby (2008, 342, fn.29). In the non-mentalistic sense of Merleau-Ponty’s “operative intentionality”, of course. In analogy with what Gadamer did when urbanizing Heidegger, according to Habermas.

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urbanizations and summarized in the invitation to move from the letter to the spirit of the original text. For me it is rather a matter of promoting an updating of the neo-phenomenological approach and a problematization of it that do not reduce it to a sort of philosophical idiolect but also, obviously, do not coincide with its dogmatic acceptance. A first step of this urbanization, while pursuing the highest possible fidelity to concrete daily experience, amounts to embracing a real inflationism that is both ontological and phenomenological. It is ontological because it should be able to also include vague entities (which are such de re, not due to epistemic deficits) like quasi-things (see chapter 3) and, among these, atmospheres; it is phenomenological in so far as it should know how to pluralize the typology of atmospheric feelings as well as the forms in which they are perceived (see chapter 2). Now, as we have seen, this wide range of atmospheric feelings (prototypical, derivative-relational and spurious) exist between two extreme poles: groundless quasi-objective moods (comparable to the German Stimmungen) on the one hand and merely projective personal moods on the other. This being clear, one may then wonder what atmospheres can really do. While, in fact, the objects of thought and judgment presuppose the autonomous initiative of the consciousness-bearer and can, so to speak, multiply at will and even be completely made up,4 the perception of an (atmospheric) feeling concerns a restricted and historically invariable number of affects by which a person quite susceptible to them is practically and irresistibly grasped. But what are the power and authority of this (sometimes) irresistible atmospheric affect? This (almost prescriptive) power5 is not only social and/or cultural.6 Consider the ingressive and prototypical atmosphere that you feel when entering a space pervaded by an affect that is completely different from your subjective mood and for this reason exerts an authority over your mood, whether by placing you in an emotionally conflicting situation or by forcing you to either adapt or resist to it. Well, a similar affect can also be produced outside of social scenarios: as I have already noted, when the sky darkens because of a fleeting cloud and turns gloomy, thus tonalizing the surrounding environment in a specific way, it exerts an affective power that cannot be explained as an unconscious projection of a purely subjective 4 5 6

See Haensel (1946, 38-41, 52-53). Schmitz (2008a, 73). As stated by Blume/Demmerling (2007, 126) and Demmerling (2011, 48).

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emotion. Contrary to what is often claimed by sociological approaches to collective emotions, the power and authority of an atmospheric feeling cannot be reduced to the need or desire to correspond to social emotional norms or practices. Even though it certainly has powerful social (inclusive, excluding, etc.) effects, the segmentation of reality generated by the atmospheric experience cannot actually be sufficiently explained by social conventions (even if introjected). Now, a (physicalist and/or culturalist) reductionist approach is obliged to explain the undoubted experience of living in a sentimentally impregnated space as a subjective and at most intersubjective projection on a physical-objective constellation that, in itself,7 is devoid of any affective significance. Such a view would surely stigmatize the neophenomenological perspective, seeing it as an undue theologization, guilty of overestimating the undeniable influence exercised on Schmitz by Rudolf Otto’s conception of the numinous, and as a crypto-metaphysicization of the simply contextual-cultural character of the felt authority. This objection, for me, is seriously inadequate when it comes to prototypical atmospheres: in fact, as quasi-things, they grasp the percipient, who doesn’t really own them. While having an intermittent and quasithingly life, prototypical atmospheric affects are much more involving than social norms, thoughts or even factual evidence.8 Even without any physical coercion, a prototypical atmosphere unfolds a set of environmental affordances9 or, in neo-phenomenological terms, motor suggestions and synaesthetic characters understood as felt-bodily bridge-qualities. The unmissable and precise felt-bodily (and sometimes even physical) resonance of these affordances in the perceiver attests the indisputable authority of that kind of atmosphere.10 Incidentally, in spite of the already mentioned analogy between the prototypical atmosphere and Otto’s idea of the holy as the numinous, it would be really reductive to see atmospherology only as a chapter of theological emotivism. In fact, the numinous is at best just an example of a specifically religious atmosphere—as such, it is only a little more demonic 7 8

Starting from Democritus’ atomistic materialism. Think of the alarmist climate promoted by the new media, especially by breaking news (Milev 2012, 301). Cf. also Schmitz (2003, 315). 9 To use Gibson’s notion (see Gibson 1986). 10 Cf. Schmitz (2008a, 77; 2008b, 8) and Griffero (2014b).

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than that created by the eros,11 by the genius loci12 and perhaps even by the Kantian Gewissen, which works almost as an inner courtroom. All these atmospheres, however, could be called “divine”, not because they refer to transcendence, but because they exercise a serious and absolute authority over those who feel them.13 Indeed, as I have already mentioned, both those who obey them and those who resist them, precisely by doing so, demonstrate their quasi-objective reality. 2. The power and authority of atmospheres What further demonstrates the quasi-objectivity of atmospheres and their different degree of authority is the elementary but emblematic example of contrasting feelings.14 A cheerful person who meets people wrapped in an atmosphere of true and serious sadness will feel the authority of this sadness, will respect it (not just for social etiquette) and, despite not being personally infected by it, will mitigate their own joy,15 whose atmospheric irradiation force is evidently more limited. This clearly means that some atmospheric feelings legitimately claim to colonize the surrounding space more than others.16 In turn, a sad person may feel entitled to abandon themselves to their sadness, to reject any consolatory attempt,17 to punish “with disregard anything that might cheer him up”,18 and even to stigmatize the joy of others, which they evidently perceive as offensive: this further proves the existence (and sometimes coexistence) of atmospheres equipped with different power and authority.19

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

Rappe (1995, 312-323). See Schmitz (1977, 133-134) and Griffero (2019a, 137-159). Schmitz (1977, 91). Schmitz (2003, 47-48; 2008b, 9). One could explain the contrast between atmosphere and individual feeling by distinguishing between perceiving affects of others or collective emotions and understanding a situational significance (Slaby 2008, 341). But how can one also explain the contrast with inanimate situations, such as when a wonderful day makes me sad, if not by assuming that the day’s atmosphere has a higher affective authority than mine? Bollnow (1956, 111) calls it a respectful distance. Schmitz (2008b, 9; 2019, 96). Schmitz (2012, 57). Musil (1995, 1261). For alternative explanations of contrasting feelings see Hauskeller (1995, 23) and Demmerling (2011, 47).

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But it would be a mistake to think that this kind of authority is only exerted by social atmospheres or, at most, by inanimate situations still somehow related to human psychicity (as Tellenbach claims).20 In fact, just like sadness, shame, the ideal of justice, a building, an artistic masterpiece, gratuitous generosity, love, a landscape (even if devoid of human traces), the silence of an autumn morning and even music as an ideal (unreservedly condemning a bad performance, for example!) can very well be emotionally authoritative and binding. And this can happen in a synthonic form, such as when one feels oppressed by a gray and sultry morning, but also in a dystonic form, such as when a beautiful landscape, exactly because of its beauty, sharpens someone’s (already present) sadness (what I called reversed atmospheric perceptions: see chapter 2, § 10). To use Wilhelm Raabe’s literary example, a sad person takes nature’s beauty as mockery, an insult, and starts to loathe all seven days of creation.21 More precisely, a prototypical atmosphere has an absolute authority only when it grasps and, at least initially, generates a relationship so tangling as not to allow the percipient to take any position towards what grabs them and to mobilize the critical reserves provided by their level of personal emancipation.22 When, for example, I break a rule that (for various reasons) I do not feel superior to and am pervaded by an atmosphere of shame,23 this feeling captures me completely and generates a felt-bodily resonance that is totally specific and often rationally uncontrollable. Building on Schmitz’s felt-bodily “alphabet” and theory of felt-bodily communication, one could guess that in such cases there is a unilaterally antagonistic incorporation, due to which one of the partners involved in the felt-bodily communication24 is in a sense “sucked in” their partner’s prevailing feltbodily narrowness. An atmosphere’s authority, of course, also depends on the perceiver’s felt-bodily disposition and biography. However, it is not something completely relative, no more than the same language changes when spoken in a relatively different way by different people. It should 20 21 22 23

Tellenbach (1968, 47-48). Raabe (1873), quoted by Bollnow (1956, 56). Schmitz (2002, 169-170; 2016, 224). Personal shame is deeply atmospheric as a form of affectivity that condemns those who are subject to it in a centripetal form. However, the same also holds for vicarious shame which we feel (non-empathetically) for those who “should” be ashamed, and powerfully acts as an atmospheric and quasi-thingly feeling. For a discussion on this issue see Griffero (2017a, 79-92). 24 Which, as already said, is a specific relationship that lies between a felt body and any of its “encountered” beings, even if inanimate. For a quick overview of Schmitz’s theory of leibliche Kommunikation, see Griffero (2017b).

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be stressed again that a lovely landscape, for example, may even sharpen the sadness of those who are in pain, and not because they perceive it as gloomy and dismal, but precisely because they feel the wonderful place as foreign and irritating or at least inappropriate.25 However, a few caveats are still required here. A) Even if atmospheres are affects permeating a lived and predimensional space, one must never forget the role of the local-metrical space with its boundaries, as exemplified by the fact that sometimes you no longer feel the oppressive atmosphere of a certain room as soon as you leave it and go outside. B) Even if the prototypical atmosphere exerts authority, one must never forget that even a powerful social feeling like charisma, able sometimes to mesmerize large masses, is so fragile that it can be instantly dissolved by a simple faux pas (the king is naked!),26 whose felt-bodily resonance consists in changing the previous antagonistic one-sided incorporation by reversing its direction. In less serious cases, this incorporation becomes alternate and the mimesis of the charismatic person weakens, whereas in the most serious ones, it remains unilateral but turns inside out and the masses slaughter the leaders they previously idolised. C) Finally, I have repeatedly stated that a prototypical atmosphere is cognitively impenetrable. The sadness of a funeral, for example, is not really mitigated by the knowledge that every biological organism must die. One should not forget, for example, that when a beautiful red evening sky turns out to be caused by pollution, it loses its atmospheric beauty (at least a little). So, precise knowledge and location of what generates an atmosphere often triggers a relatively non-affective distancing, just as when one is not really persuaded by a speech whose rhetorical structure is too obvious: a bit like money, also an (atmospheric) affect ceases to function at the very moment when one ceases to believe in it! But things are perhaps more complicated than that, because sometimes a situation radiates an atmosphere despite what one knows (an atmosphere might please and gratify, for example, even if it is only accidental), while at other times it even radiates an atmosphere only if one knows something (an object has an aura, for example, only if one knows that an important person used or owned it, etc.). Therefore, the relationship between the cognitive and the affective, as I had anticipated, is a very contentious issue and can never be 25 For these inverted correspondances cf. also Seel (1996, 101-102). 26 Cf. Böhme (2007, 289-290).

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unilaterally resolved. What can be said is that an atmosphere is not affected by what one knows (for example that its generator is just an illusion) only initially, when one perceives the first and involuntary impression that its appearance suggests. The very next question is: what is the most powerful atmosphere then? Apparently not one that is latent, but one so blatant as to oppose the mood of the percipient who enters the space tonalized by it and re-orientate it emotionally (what I called an ingressive experience in a discrepant atmosphere). When the outside atmosphere instead confirms the perceiver’s emotional protention (what I called a syntonic atmosphere)27 the situation may even appear non-atmospheric, whereas, actually, it is permeated by an impersonal and anonymous (maybe even powerful) atmosphere. Despite his use of a too-generic term like “evaluation”, Carl Gustav Jung is right in saying that “even an ‘indifferent’ sensation possesses a ‘feeling tone’, namely, that of indifference, which again expresses a certain valuation. Hence feeling is also a kind of judging” (Jung 1953, 544). And that is because a situation can never be separated from the atmosphere that necessarily enhances its (also emotional) meaning.28 Apparent non-atmosphericness is thus far from powerless.29 It could be simply due to the failure of a diffused feeling to achieve the perceptual threshold required and to its remaining on the (Gestaltic) background of a different qualitative figure.30 As an intransitive-unfocused condition of perceptions and therefore of more specific transitive-focused feelings, it exercises its power in all its intensity allusively31 rather than through explicit pressure. Sure, if one conceives of them as non-actual and only partially conscious states, atmospheres turn into Stimmungen, i.e. less intense, focused and fleeting 27 For a more detailed phenomenology cf. chapter 2, §§ 3-10. 28 Language, which according to Schmitz is an example of a non-atmospheric shared situation Schmitz (2014, 55; see also 10 and 50), seems to me non-atmospheric only if it is considered abstractly—certainly not when it is emotionally experienced, for example when one hears the sound of one’s own language away from home or when (in literature as well as in ordinary speech) we realize that its expressions are largely untranslatable. As Wigley (1998, 26) says, even “the very rejection of an atmosphere constructs a particular atmosphere”. 29 See also Ratcliffe (2008, 148, 178). 30 About non-thetic function of atmospheres see, for example, Thibaud (2003, 293), Bockemühl (2002, 221) and Minkowski (1936, 234). 31 Think of eroticism or the “porous” connection typical of non-oppressive but deep love: see Schmitz (2008b, 11-12).

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feelings (see chapter 5).32 This is close to what Böhme defines as the quasiobjective “atmospheric” as opposed to the atmosphere in the strict and more localised sense.33 Thus conceived, latent atmospheres are nothing but existential or background feelings whose non-thematic nature should not be confused with an affectless one. The most influential and powerful atmospheres, against all odds, may even be, according to Heidegger, those to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements [Stimmungen] we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all (Heidegger 1995, 68).

If one focuses on the feeling’s progression instead of stopping at the first impression, the most powerful atmospheres might be the mixed ones,34 which by virtue of their non-saturating and long-term effect penetrate deeper and leave room for the perceiver’s probable imaginative additions.35 3. The strange case of atmospheres you recognize without feeling them The question of the power and authority of atmospheres also brings us to consider the well known (and already mentioned: cf. chapter 2, §5) experience36 of objectively recognizing and “registering” an atmosphere without personally feeling it or being felt-bodily involved by it.37 In other words, one must take into account the ontological-phenomenological distinction between a quasi-thingly atmosphere and its (only potential) captivating power. Is the former really a fully non-affective atmosphere, as Schmitz says, and Moritz Geiger explains by drawing a distinction between an observing attitude (betrachtende Einstellung) and an absorbing attitude (aufnehmende Einstellung)?38 Or is it, more simply, a low-intensity

32 This is hardly surprising, since “due to their vastness as atmospheres […] all feelings [are] moods [Stimmungen]” (Schmitz 2016, 237). Cf. also Julmi (2015, 57). 33 See Böhme (2001, 59-62). 34 Mendelssohn (1761, 157). 35 Cf. Julmi (2015, 102). What is love, for example, might at first just seem “an unpleasant and disturbing restlessness” (Schmitz 2003, 53). 36 It is not really a special case as Demmerling instead claims (2011, 50). 37 Schmitz (2016, 241). 38 Geiger (1911, 27f.).

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atmosphere, which for the most diverse reasons is not engaging without being purely informative?39 The low-intensity option has the merit of recognising that a bodily feeling is never “opaque” but always transparently referred to the world of which it highlights some aspects.40 Moreover, it obviously proves that even the most neutral-cognitive observation implies at least a minimal affective component, thus embracing Heidegger’s idea of a continuous albeit not always conscious affective situatedness, where background feelings alone, thanks to their motivational, hedonic and axiologic link to the world,41 enable any specific relationship with the world, with ourselves and with others. Only a low-intensity and at least incipient empathic share of the affective state of others or of a place can explain this strange situation. So, at the end of the day, “when we fight against penetration of an objective feeling, it has already taken hold of us” (Baensch 1924, 9). In point of fact, even sadism42 and Schadenfreude, actually, are such and generate their perverse pleasure only because the subject feels or empathizes with (at least partially), respectively, the pain and sadness of their victims! Now, Schmitz’s dissociation between neutral feeling and felt-bodily involving feeling, proven by the uncertainty concerning the right gesturalpostural conduct (which instead is instinctive in the case of a real and effective felt-bodily resonance), should at least be nuanced.43 Certainly, though, it should not be completely eliminated, if only because, on the one hand, a too-radical dichotomy between experiencing a feeling and feeling as such actually risks reifying the affective too much. On the other hand, the identity between emotional involvement and atmospheric perception risks making inexplicable the distance from feelings (not only as attitudeposition posterior to the initial emotional passivity but sometimes even

39 No perception is ever a mere sociosemiotic “reading” of situation data, but always a somewhat captivating felt-bodily communication. 40 Slaby (2008, 333). 41 Ibid, 182. 42 Ben-Ze’ev (2001, 126). 43 Those who reject Schmitz’s distinction as an exaggeration of a localized phenomenon claim that a feeling (the feeling’s content) and to feel (the act of feeling), which can only be distinguished for heuristic reasons, are actually the same thing. Their only apparent distinction should be explained through the distinction between the only affective and the only perceptual use of an evaluative notion (Slaby 2008, 339-34).

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contemporary to it) which should also be admitted.44 It is much better to narrow down the too-drastic gap between the cognitive and the affective and to assume that the distinction between these two dimensions is always only gradual.45 It follows, as will be better seen hereafter (cf. chapter 5), that every atmospheric perception is merely a possibility46—based on the subject’s felt-bodily disposition and resonance-capability—within an affective continuum47 that finds its extreme (and very rare) cases in emotional “fusion” and neutral distancing. 4. Over time As already mentioned through numerous literary examples (see chapter 2. §8), the affective power of an atmosphere also depends on the too-often unrecognized temporal dynamic of feeling, starting from the way in which atmospheric feelings—especially the “derivative” ones—arise. These feelings are deeply influenced, surely more so than “prototypical” ones, by the changing in-between that “connects” perceiver and percept. The inbetween of derivative atmospheres, incidentally, is very different from that of prototypical atmospheres, which should be antidualistically conceived not as the outcome of two autonomous poles but rather of a relation prior to its relata.48 Precisely because of their in-between, derivative atmospheres raise (otherwise impossible) doubts as to whether one should attribute these feelings more to the subject or the environment.49 If you pay attention to perceptual experience after the first impression,50 you will note that the perceiver, after necessarily adopting the atmosphere at first, is then able to 44 See Slaby (2017, 239-240, 243-244). 45 Slaby (2008, 335-336). 46 For example, according to the felt-bodily dynamic: a cyclothymic person’s oscillation tendency and a schizothymic’s splitting tendency should foster their involvement (this is all the more true in the case of uneasiness: cf. Sonntag 2013, 178), whereas a bathmothymic impulse to compactness would foster the mere statement of what affectively happens. Can a correlation be made between a certain atmosphere and a specific felt-bodily isle? 47 See Slaby (2008, 335-336) and especially Schouten (2011, 203). 48 To define the “in-between“ as a relation between two autonomous beings is, in fact, ontologically quite different from defining it simply as a condition of possibility of their “emergence“. 49 Böhme (1995, 22). 50 Which is a co-action with no reaction time like a jump scare but is irreducible to stimulus-response because it also implies retentions and protentions.

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take their own stance through personal emancipation. One can therefore a) surrender to that feeling, b) constructively embrace its radiating effect, c) oppose this effect, for example by better identifying the objects and places into which the atmospheric feeling condenses (perhaps improperly), or simply escaping from it, or lastly d) specifically mix acceptance and resistance.51 But there’s more, because due to rituals and cultural conventions, a given atmosphere—for a person and even for a society—can also maintain and strengthen52 or reduce and even lose its power. In both cases, this is due to variations of the perceptual field, affected by factors such as the distance of the perceived, the brightness of the environment, the speed with which one approaches the perceived, some scale shift, a change of mood, the unveiling of a sensory illusion, etc. But it is also due, more simply, to the perceiver’s physiological and felt-bodily dispositions. This increase or decrease in power, more generally, also depends on the subject’s sensiblecognitive awareness, that is, on additional and divergent information about the perceived, on further purely idiosyncratic experiences, focusing over time on misleading anchoring points and fields of condensation, etc. Not to mention the perceiver’s sociological and/or variable aesthetic competence in detecting the atmospheric potential of a certain situation. This multifactorial long-term atmospheric change—which has been underestimated until now—could be compared to the feeling of being emotionally involved by a piece of music (a score),53 during which, in fact, one can be engaged by previously overlooked sub-atmospheres which may even be in conflict with the original one. Hence, for example, a sense of disappointment with respect to an affective expectation, the demystification of a manipulative attunement, the setting aside of a trivial emotional cliché, etc. The best solution for me is to make the already suggested three-way distinction of atmospheres even more flexible. In fact, by changing the perspective and felt-bodily incorporation, a prototypical atmosphere may also become a derivativerelational one, such as when, for example, an atmosphere breaks free of its anchoring point (which is the source of its radiation) and materializes into random or at least improper things and situations. Likewise, a 51 Cf. Schmitz (2011, 89, 95; 2014, 86; 2016, 223). 52 Julmi (2015, 196). 53 See Frese (1995) for a very promising view which has not had, to my knowledge, further developments.

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spurious atmosphere may increasingly (albeit deceptively) get rid of its original idiosyncratic attitude and become (almost) as powerful as the prototypical one. I have already stated that making the types and perceptions of atmospheres more flexible and fluid does not at all mean neglecting an anti-introjectionist approach. This flexibility, indeed, should not be overestimated. It is rather the relatively “same” atmosphere that allows for the actual coexistence (and intersubjective communicability)54 of relatively different moods.55 To take just one of my favourite examples: the impressive entrance hall of a major banking institution will express an aggressive atmosphere of power for those who venture there in search of a loan, while expressing, on the contrary, a quiet atmosphere of proud belonging, not even clearly felt, for an employee who has developed a strong esprit de corps. And yet what generates both atmospheric moods (conscious aversion and overwhelming awe or unnoticed sense of wellbeing and pride) is precisely the same spatial-emotional atmospheric quality of intimidating vastness. 5. Atmospheric competence When a person’s narrow-pole absorbs a passive partner within a unilaterally antagonistic incorporation, we talk about charisma. A charismatic pole or person can rely on a power that sounds completely irrational only because it transcends the categories of legal and traditional power. Especially in an era in which a ubiquitous late-capitalistic economy atmospherizes its own power and sphere of influence through a media-economic anonymity56 and a diffused aestheticization based on stage-values, it is necessary to object to those who are opposed to a neophenomenological atmospherology. They see it not only as an undue hypostatization and reification of the affective realm, but also as an emotionalistic stance, an irresponsible arousalism that would end up reducing people to nothing more than blind passengers of freefloating atmospheres.57 54 Böhme (2001, 49). 55 As even Schmitz (2014, 55) recognises. 56 Think of neutral concepts such as “apparatus”, “market”, “governance” and influential acronyms such as SPREAD, PIL, etc. Cf. Heibach (2010, 11), Schmitz (2008b, 15-16), Hennecke (2008, 57-58). 57 Soentgen (1998, 117).

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I don’t want to reply to these points using some late-Romantic and vitalistic cliché, some Frankfurtian critical-theoretical argument, or by advocating the individual’s full capacity for self-determination (which is usually exaggerated by personalistic theories). I believe it is much better to question the meaning and role of the frequently invoked but little explored “atmospheric competence”. It is surely not enough to simply repeat with Bollnow, Heidegger and Schmitz that the perceiver is responsible, after an initial involving phase, for saying yes or no to a Stimmung or atmosphere58 and shaping it by keeping a certain “posture”59 (which somewhat contradicts the previous claim of a deep affective involvement). Nor is it enough to say, drawing on an old Spinozian claim, that one successfully fights against an atmospheric feeling only by opposing a contrary and more powerful mood to it, thus somewhat using a mechanical energetics whose intentional governance contradicts the pathicity elsewhere highlighted. I surely welcome Schmitz’s recent renunciation60 of his earlier too-provocative claim that feelings (and therefore atmospheres) are “no more subjective than highways [...], only less easy to fixate” (Schmitz 1969, 87). However, I believe it is worthwhile to defend the neophenomenological anti-introjectionism against attempts at trivializing this radical depsychologization of the affective sphere. These attempts, indeed, only explain this externalization by means of social reasons and norms,61 cultural practises,62 or even by showing their illusory nature: the latter approach usually relies on a sophisticated or simply improbable (almost Fichtean) projectivist theory, according to which the perceived atmosphere, which just seems to be outside, is nothing more than the result of a previous emotional and unconscious psychic projection that is not felt as arising from the perceiver. Whether the explanation is social, cultural or psychicempathic, in any case it aims at identifying “perceiving atmospheres” with simply “perceiving atmospherically” and reducing affective objectivity to subjective states of mind whose projection has been forgotten.63

58 59 60 61 62

See, for example, Bollnow (1956, 132). Ibid, 154-161. Schmitz (2014, 9). Preusker (2014, 132). If that were the case, feelings would seem to be outside and objective only because they are shared and subject to public discussion by those who instead are deeply influenced by them. 63 Rauh (2012, 252).

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As I have said in previous chapters, I’d rather reject any—even only implicit—hydraulic-projectivistic explanation of outside feelings (at least of derivative atmospheres and especially of prototypical ones) in terms of psychic filling of the extra-psychic world. This is a softer and more academic version of atmospherology64 that is not more true only because it expresses an easily shared view. Instead, I largely adopt the undoubtedly provocative and counterintuitive claim that atmospheric feelings, and of course especially the prototypical ones, are objective and quasi-thingly powers (or even daemons!) which are irreducible both to the model of selfdetermined homo clausus embraced by the bimillenary Western dualism and to the resulting causalistic-prognostic epistemic “obsession”. Now, this compels me to spend a few words explaining the double function of an “atmospheric competence”. A) First of all, this competence is the skill of generating atmospheres, regardless of whether one chooses a hard version of the theory, according to which people can intentionally and consciously produce atmospheres,65 or a softer one, according to which people can only set the generative conditions in which atmospheres may appear.66 The first version faces one issue, namely the fact that when one stages an atmosphere one could certainly end up being governed, like in any other human activity, by a heterogony of ends or by the usual gap between a project and its material implementation. This failure perhaps explains the production of unwanted, side or very volatile atmospheric feelings but surely not their full absence. Instead, the hard version seems unquestionable to me, and indeed many are busy researching and investigating what Böhme, in the awareness of the many professions focused on the planned production of atmospheres, calls “generators” of atmospheres.67 And they do that despite the traditional view which claims, not always consistently, that an intentionally produced atmosphere should be impossible or at least deleterious (which of course doesn’t mean “impossible”).

64 65 66 67

See, for example, Slaby (2008, 339) or Bulka (2015). Böhme (1995, 39). Ibid., 199-200. See also Grossheim/Kluck/Nörenberg (2014, 65). Böhme (2001, 87ff.; 2017b, 92-94: moving impressions, synaesthesia, social characters, etc.).

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According to this view, defended by authoritative thinkers, when producer and user aim, respectively, at creating and experiencing the feelings they want, they 1) produce nothing more than a sentimentalist dilettantism only focused on the feeling experienced (internal concentration) rather than on the axiological qualities inherent in what radiates that feeling (external concentration).68 Moreover, an affective planning 2) would be impossible, because, like Stimmungen, atmospheres belong to a preconscious sphere that is prior to the subject/world dualism and that one therefore cannot produce but only “awaken”.69 Every intentional staging then 3) can result in an instrumental emotional hygiene that is seriously unethical in perverting life’s earnestness (such as when one falls in love with one’s own feeling so as to try it!)70, or, more trivially, gives life to sentimental kitsch and dangerous demagogic situations.71 Finally, planning atmospheric feelings 4) might reveal a fundamentally rhetorical-propagandistic nature, based on a technique of impression (Eindruckstechnik) designed to transform very segmented situations into forcibly impressive ones (Plakatsituationen), as such characterized by accentuated tones and artificial pathic-semantic contours.72 Now let’s take a look at Schmitz’s perspective (4). He is certainly right to remind us that the world of media and advertising generates serial atmospheres and spreads several false illusions. The first illusion is that everything can be produced, even affective life.73 The second illusion is that single things can ecstatically radiate atmospheres right away (as Böhme actually claims and even I admit for the less objective types of atmospheres), thus perpetuating the wrong prejudice of singularism, according to which one first of all encounters (perceives) single objects rather than chaotic-multiple situations. Lastly, the third illusion is that an atmosphere can be perfectly explained in dualistic-informational terms, i.e.

68 Exemplarily in the aesthetic field: see Geiger (1911, 37). Contemplating a landscape only in order to evoke feelings (mere sentimentalism) is completely different from letting oneself go to its values and radiances (Geiger 1928). 69 “All making conscious means destroying, altering in each case, whereas in awakening an attunement we are concerned to let this attunement be as it is, as this attunement” (Heidegger 1995, 65). 70 Lersch (1962, 313). 71 Bollnow (1956, 59, 132, 140, 152-153). 72 Schmitz (1998; 1999a, 242-245, 335; 2002, 169; 2003, 243-261; 2005, 266). 73 It is almost a contradictio in adjecto, given that a feeling is “expression of a reality […] and this reality needs resistance in order to be felt” (Haensel 1946, 127).

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as a message that a transmitter—an aesthetic worker in this case—sends to a receiver clearly separated from themselves. I think, however, that fully accepting Schmitz’s strong argument against the idea that atmospheres can be intentionally produced would mean 1) contradictorily ignoring that the felt-bodily communication—which Schmitz himself regards as pervasive—necessarily also applies to the relationship between aesthetic workers and users. Not to mention that 2) it would also be impossible to justify Schmitz’s claim that in certain privileged closed situations (dwelling, garden, church, tea house, etc.) atmospheres might be “cultivated” in a non-manipulative way. But, above all, fully subscribing to Schmitz’s warning would amount 3) to saying that entire spheres of atmospheres-based social and cultural life are inexplicable and 4) to surreptitiously introducing some normative-axiological parameters74 into a phenomenological approach programmatically supposed to be descriptive. But this requires some further clarifications. First of all, are intentionally produced atmospheres really fake atmospheres (i.e. non-atmospheres) or simply bad atmospheres (because they are manipulative, for example)? The first option counts on a third-person adaequatio parameter, as such very far from a first-person and neophenomenological approach and from the affective sphere in general, where, if really felt, a feeling cannot ever be false or only illusory (compared with what?).75 The second one presupposes an apparent dualism between a manipulative and unethical agent and a culpably manipulated and hetero-managed receiver.76 But this dualism fails to recognize that a certain atmosphere (of fear, for example) could be created by complete political chaos or stem from many different sources, as well as that, given the holistic nature of every situative first-impression, it is enormously difficult to distinguish between subject and object77. Indeed, one should not ignore that the manipulated person is always co-responsible for their seemingly irresistible involvement. Moreover, bad atmospheres, 74 These parameters are, at least, existential (a need for a not-better-defined and controversial authenticity) or aesthetic ones (the rejection of kitsch in the name of not-better-clarified good taste). 75 One can, indeed, have doubts about the object or cause of one’s feeling but not about one’sfeeling as such. On the controversial issue of the authenticity of atmospheres see Griffero (2019a, 45-55). 76 Heibach (2012, 263). 77 Landweer (1999, 145).

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that is, the manipulative ones, can have absolute authority, unfortunately, although they are artificial and one sometimes may ascetically prefer aqualitative atmospheres.78 The important thing is that their intentional design is not overt: no one is ever really involved in feelings which one clearly sees as manipulative. It is obvious from these observations and from what has been said in the previous chapters that my intention is to de-axiologise the notion of atmosphere as far as possible. Which means that an atmosphere is really such as soon as it is felt by someone, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, spontaneous or induced. I’d also like to break the illusion that the affective sphere could be fully transparent (let alone in a cognitive way), that the so-called “suspension of disbelief” could apply outside of the artistic sphere and, lastly, that there are somewhat quantitative (and non-introspective) criteria for affective intensity. B) Now we must also say something about the second meaning of “atmospheric competence” (or intelligence), understood as the ability to feel atmospheres, understand them and possibly distance oneself from them. What has often been referred to as atmospheric “instinct” or “flair” (Tellenbach 1968, 49), here should be understood as a skill that can also be improved through exercise: that is, the ability to critically examine the atmospheres one feels. That would enable us to benefit from a “provisional atmospheric morality” (to paraphrase Descartes). There are three main points that I would like to highlight here. A “good” atmospheric competence should be able, first of all, 1) to distinguish between “toxic” and “benign” atmospheres, while being aware of walking on thin ice, where aisthesis and ethics mingle. It must be pointed out that toxic atmospheres—which, as already said, cannot be reduced to nonatmospheres—are not only those arousing stress and distress but also the dissuasive-sedative ones. Through them, many dispositifs (in Foucault’s sense) aim at defusing any social contradiction with the help both of artificial-conformistic attunements79 and of the inhibiting effects resulting from the alarmist demand, today become obsessive, to regulate every 78 “Houses and rooms are full of perfumes.…The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless.…I am in love with it…I am mad for it to be in contact with me.” (Whitman 1996, 188-189). 79 Schouten (2011, 103).

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fragment of everyday experience, not least through the alibi of privacy and political correctness.80 A good atmospheric competence also consists 2) in accepting the fact that, due to the lack in our post-traditional societies of a paradigmatic place of atmospheric awareness—that is, of a situation that may act as a paradigm of every other atmospheric experience—one should rather learn to have as many different atmospheres as possible and thus to allow the resulting experiences to interact with one another. This could give rise to a wellbeing (see chapter 7) that, exactly as happens in democracy, depends on a division of powers (affective in this case) that relativizes their impact in a beneficial way. Lastly, a good atmospheric competence should 3) favour and foster those atmospheres where, as happens with a trompe l’oeil, an early pathic-immersive step may and should be followed by an emersion phase. In this respect, one could mention the case of protests offering real counter-atmospheres, but above all the case of art. Its atmospheres actually require both immersion and emersion, i.e. are powerfully and influentially contagious without ever being oppressive and coercive—which might sound at least in part like the “the dreamer calling out to himself in the midst of the illusory dream world, but without disturbing it, ‘It is a dream, I will dream on’” (Nietzsche 1876, 25). This combination of distance and involvement81 happens especially in contemporary art:82 unlike populism, which is as such a hypnotic-somnambulistic atmosphere, in fact, the criticalartistic one generates cognitive and affective discontinuities through its provocatory and irritating impact. And these discontinuities always create a critical distance as well as empower whoever deeply experiences them. Provided then that I am not satisfied with the affectus non nisi parendo vincitur solution, I have looked around very carefully, but I do not see other ways of immunizing oneself (always only partially) against today’s pervasive atmospherization. The usual ways proposed to do so are romantic-moralistic or cognitive-naturalistic, but they are naive either way. The former kind overestimates personal freedom and the critical power of merely cognitive skepticism; the latter is unrealistically ascetic in requiring 80 For this critique of our alarmed society see Sloterdijk (2011-2016), especially the third volume (Foams). 81 Prütting (1995, 152) considers this “going with” or “following something” (Mitgehen), this combination of an understand with the belly and an understand with the head, the specific form of aesthetic pleasure. 82 Schouten (2011, 106).

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a big distance from the affective world, thus degrading human beings to neutral observers of life: a view from nowhere that, as a lack of feltbodily resonance, could also become a symptom of a psychopathological crisis. My pathic aesthetics, on the contrary, “subversively” promotes an ontological and phenomenological inflationism that even includes quasithings, and, being moderately critical towards today’s predominant stagevalues, limits itself to proposing a “provisional atmospheric morality” and also applying the atmospherological paradigm to the everyday aesthetic dimension. As Thoreau says, also having in mind a good atmosphericembodied living,83 it is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour” (Thoreau 2000, 85-86; my emphasis).

It cannot do and say much more than that. Wondering about how to manage atmospheres is a bit like asking questions that, in principle, cannot be answered (and what else does philosophy do?).84 It may therefore be appropriate to adopt a duly revised and detheologized version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s “serenity” formula: we need an atmospheric competence that “gives us the serenity to accept the atmospheres that cannot be changed,  courage to change the atmospheres that should be changed (or softened), and the wisdom to know the difference”.

83 See Shusterman (2012, chapter 13). 84 Marquard (1989, 62).

5 Moods or Atmospheres?

1. In the mood for mood Even a silly Broadway song seems to hit the nail on the head when it “explains” that “sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m blue” because “my disposition depends on you”.1 My trick is twofold. On the one hand, I understand “disposition” not as an inner-psychic state, according to the prevailing introjectionist tradition, but as a felt-bodily condition which the outside world’s felt-bodily dimension resonates into. On the other hand, I understand “you” not only, as required by the song, as the lover, but more generally as a spatial and affect-inducing event. This over-interpretation summarises three aspects usually ascribed to a mood (the term used to imperfectly translate the German Stimmung)2 : i.e. reference to the self, integration potential, and communicative effectiveness.3 It especially corroborates the claim that a mood4 is both a person’s building block, though not simply projected outward from them, and an event that exercises power over them and to which they react (even if not automatically). We have often come across the issue of distinguishing (or not) between atmospheres and moods in the previous chapters. Now it’s time to look into it. It is well known that the notion of Stimmung is always disputed4 between philosophies (or art styles) emphasizing the self’s independent creativity or pathologizing it by reducing mood to a transitory temper, and philosophies (or art styles) seeing it as an evidence of the self’s dissolution.5 My joking 1 2 3 4 5

Sometimes I’m happy (sometimes I’m blue) (Youmans/Caesar 1927). From now on I will use Stimmung and moods indifferently, distinguishing between them only in the case of German or English authors. For a good introduction to the modern aesthetic history of Stimmung, see Wellbery (2010, 705). For a brief summary of these diverging trends, see Thomas (2010, 141-143). Let me recall Hermann Bahr’s famous “das Ich ist unrettbar”, but, more generally, the Post-Impressionistic anti-solipsistic trend to attribute a mood directly to a

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over-interpretation of the song, instead, aims at freeing mood, exactly like the atmosphere, from an epistemological as well as a commonsensical introjectionist-hydraulic approach. I wish to avoid here the trend of any Einfühlungsästhetik to psychicize the world as if it were nothing but an unaware echo of a contemplating subject’s soul. I therefore consider moods and atmospheres not as blind states telling us something about the person who feels them, but as felt-bodily resonances inherent to the perceiver while containing “information” about what transcends them.6 As is well known, the success of the word Stimmung marks the resurgence of the Platonic and Pythagorean idea of a universal harmony and an indissoluble unity of man and nature. This makes it possible to talk about one’s own mood as well as the environment’s mood,7 causing great theoretical awkwardness. Nietzsche might be a good example of this oscillation. The twenty-years-old Nietzsche seemed to think that a mood, as a necessary condition for writing (and even more for writing about Stimmungen!), is a transitory state out of our control, something that comes from inner battles but also from an external pressure on the innerworld itself.8 Well, should one agree with this promising transposition of “the scene of understanding Mood to an outside” (Corngold 1990, 72), that paves the way for an interesting emotional externalism? Or should we rather agree with Nietzsche’s later so-called Enlightenment condemnation of those who, despite being no longer able to rely on a transcendent legitimation of the “good mood” needed for action, artificially use Stimmung (and not rationality) as an argument against objections (Nietzsche 2011, 25-26)? And again, should we agree with Nietzsche’s promising externalism9 or rather with his nihilistic genealogy, according to which feelings are only

6 7 8 9

landscape. For Ferdinand Brunetiere (1888, 217), to give just one example, the fact that a landscape expresses a sad or gay mood does not mean that it changes according the individual perceiver’s mood, but that it is such, indipendently of us, thanks to mysterious correspondences between nature and us (quoted in Thomas 2010, 142-3). See Thomas (2011, 228) and Griffero (2016). For an introduction to this issue cf. Spitzer (1963). Given that the soul is made of the same (orat least similar) stuff that events are made of. See Nietzsche (1923). “Our customary mood depends upon the mood in which we manage to maintain our surroundings” (Nietzsche 2011, 183).

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“conclusions from judgments we consider false and from teachings in which we no longer believe” (ibid, 30)10? This huge oscillation is not only due to Nietzsche’s well-known mercurial nature11 but also to a semantic oscillation of Stimmungen between a personal state of mind and an ontological quality of the world. Despite their controversial location (in the subject? In the object? Neither here nor there?) and meaning (are they helpful in understanding the world, or do they make its perception moody, or even “muddy”?),12 moods are certainly a pervasive phenomenon of everyday life. Examples range from the simple cases of being supercilious, anxious, melancholic, bored, sad, irritable, gay, or experiencing a given (party, vernissage, funeral, etc.) mood, etc., to the most unforeseeable ones like, for example, participation meant as hoping to be taken seriously.13 Similarly, when one says that our society is inclined towards an accelerating-technological model (the so-called Silicon Valley paradigm) or to a mystical-fatalistic egotism (the country buen retiro and the yoga paradigm), one is probably trying to determine the major mood of a certain current social sphere, obviously risking generalisation to some extent.14 And this is not only a sociological risk. When, for example, according to the second Heidegger (from Beiträge zur Philosophie on),15 Stimmung ceases to be a phenomenon of being-there16 and becomes a “throw” or “call” of Being able to reveal a historical truth and thus to suggest a new beginning,17 the risk of cancelling every difference is equally serious.

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

“To trust your feeling—that means obeying your grandfather and your grandmother and their grandparents more than the gods in us: our reason and our experience” (ibid, 30). Let us recall that the later Nietzsche talks of affect (in a more materialistic way) rather than of Stimmung. That is why even in non-objective arts like music researchers do not want to make an interpretive-epistemic category of it. Saam (2018). The mood of an illegal immigrant is certainly very different from that of a resident citizen, and the same goes for men and women, etc. See Coriando (2013). Even if it remains something that human beings cannot intentionally produce and control. Thanks to three basic forms: startled dismay, reservedness and deep awe (Heidegger 1999, 11). From another point of view, the historical-cultural shift in relation to mood could be explained as a non-linear trend in which a tilting process reaches a breaking point exceeding the re-elaboration capability.

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Anyway, as a consequence of the seemingly irresistible “affective turn” replacing the linguistic turn in the humanities,18 concepts like atmosphere (as already mentioned, since the 1960s: see chapter 1) and Stimmung/mood (in the last decade) have been recently experiencing a true renaissance.19 They have thus bypassed the long-term censorship carried out by structuralism, critical theory, poststructuralism and gender studies: these theories, in fact, are suspicious towards any presentness. These disciplines are still enslaved to Hegel’s dogma according to which Stimmung is only a relic of romantic inwardness that does not live up to modern secularisation and “demusicalisation” (to use Spitzer’s term)—Stimmung was actually discredited as a kitsch word at least since the 1920s in favour of a growing “coldness” (but what is this if not a mood?). Provided that today we are certainly in the mood for “mood” again, one still has a hard time talking about a concept so metaphorically powerful yet so poorly defined like Stimmung/mood.20 It should be noted that this “return” of Stimmung/mood is not “only” the result of a pendulum swing through which culture from time to time updates certain topics almost only because they were previously marginalised. This renaissance is rather something that a philosophy now increasingly based on affectivity, and a fortiori my pathic aesthetics, cannot underestimate and has to associate with the fact that emotion clearly exceeds Wittgenstein’s verdict about the language borders of “our” world. Far be it from me to reduce Stimmungen/ moods to evaluative judgements or to cerebral-visceral processes, or to “have my own cake and eat it” through a multi-componential perspective that mixes different conceptions together. I side neither with the 19th century psychophysical conception of Stimmung as the opaque outcome of representations and associations, nor with its full aestheticization carried out by a fin-de-siècle poetics (the so-called Stimmungskunst), according to which Stimmung was the primary content21 of every art22 or even a 18 See Wellbery (2010, 733). 19 For Wellbery (ibid, 732-733) the concept of Stimmung has exhausted its (aesthetic) potential because of other theoretical models, trivialising the use and obsolescence of the musical metaphorisation of inner states. This prognosis, lately restated (Wellbery 2011, 165), has proved to be completely wrong. 20 See Bude (2018). 21 “Content”, however, does not necessarily mean “subject”. Painting, for example, could also express Stimmungen through a peculiar way of painting, using colours and what is wrongly disqualified as “only” ornamental elements. See the analysis of Cezanne’s melancholy in Kitschen (2010). 22 For a cursory glance at these historical developments see also Welsh (2011).

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method, no matter what its reference objects are.23 Moreover, even the Brechtian “estrangement effect”, even if vehemently defended against the attunement implied by a Stimmung, perhaps simply employed a different material (gestures, for example) to arouse a Stimmung, although a criticaldialectical one.24 My view—inspired by the anti-introjectionist neo-phenomenological turn, and in some way anticipated by Heidegger’s seminal antisubjectivistic interpretation of Stimmungen25—aims at getting rid of the already mentioned Hegelian prejudice26 and showing that the 200-yearslong history of this concept cannot be summarized, as usual, in terms of an increasing subjectification,27 but as the opposition and overlapping of two different traditions. Indeed, on the one hand, there is the psychological tradition, which turns the Stimmung of the soul from the requisite of aesthetic experience into the very outcome (symbolically-associationistically conceived) of that experience.28 On the other hand, there is the philosophical-idealistic tradition, certainly oriented towards giving more autonomy to the subject. However, even though many are responsible for this revival (literary and musical aesthetics, interdisciplinary research on emotions, etc.), I think that the concept of Stimmung/mood can only play a central role within the cultural debate if it is no longer understood as an expression of subjective inwardness but rather as a particular feeling poured out into our pericorporeal space and (quasithingly and felt-bodily) experienced by us. Put differently, Stimmung/mood can become central again only if it is the focus of a neo-phenomenologicalatmospherological approach able to enhance presentness and the feltbodily dimension in a positive and aesthesiological (not only artistic) way.

23 See for example Reents (2013) and, on the Stimmung of the metropolis, MeyerSickendiek (2013). 24 Simon (2013). 25 An approach opposed to Dilthey’s focus on Erlebnis. For Dilthey’s idea of Stimmung see Henckmann (2007, 57-62). 26 This prejudice explains the massive oblivion of the concept of Stimmung in post-Romantic aesthetics (with the exception of Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Richard Wagner). See Gisbertz (2013). 27 Even the Stimmungskunst, aimed at expressing something universal, even if based not on an experience but on a semiotics (representations, symbols, associations) that is historically variable although socially codified (see Thomas 2011, 218ff.). 28 See Welsh (2011, 151) and Gisbertz (2011, 178).

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2. Something special or only a kitsch effect? Just take a look around: while casting some light, for example, on Pathosformel even politics is now increasingly based on collective emotions. But this emotional contagion is a phenomenon that seems new only due to the technological means it employs; what Spengler deplored in newspapers a century ago also applies today to the Internet, social media, etc.29 As such the Stimmung/mood renaissance turns the semantic vagueness of the term into something positive, thus skillfully capitalising on the surprising fact that we can talk of the mood both of a musical instrument and of a certain weather, both of a landscape and of a particular time of the day, both of a work of art and of a collective life form, etc. Come to think of it, even the Kantian demand for the unconditioned might be no more than a Stimmung.30 Now, I can only envy those who can simply state, for example, that moods are affective states which do not stimulate the relatively specific response tendencies we associate with ‘emotions’. Instead, moods are pervasive and global, having the capability of influencing a broad range of thought processes and behavior (Morris 1989, VII).

This is indeed true, but my aim consists here in muddying the waters a little and giving full play to the “ruminative thinking” (itself a negative mood?) that I consider to be an integral part of every philosophical approach. The least that can be said is, then, is that there is still no overall and stable theoretical framework to guide this research. Two issues need to be briefly mentioned here. A) In an ever more conflict-filled society Stimmung risks appearing as a compensatory-conciliatory expedient resulting in kitsch.31 All this implies acts, products and even persons, given that someone could be said to be a kitsch-person32 when they intentionally create a Stimmung they desire 29 Spengler (1922, 460-463). 30 “Attunement is not a kind of ‘sentimentality’ or ‘edification’—it is an attunement of thought, perhaps the attunement of thought (Denkstimmung schlechthin)” (Fink 2016, 48). 31 Hofmannstahl, for example, talked explicitly (see Arburg 2010, 25) of Harmoniarchie as the artistic mission of reducing complexity (even if only in a momentary way). 32 For Bollnow (1956, 152) people could be kitsch to their roots.

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or willingly let others create one in them.33 One could even define moods and emotions as kitsch affects insofar as they are not directed towards the world, nor are they discharged into actions and work,34 but are inverted (so to speak)—that is, sought and enjoyed for their own sake.35 Gumbrecht is probably right about that: there is no definitive answer to the question of how to avoid dissolving into what Hegel accused of being “the mush of the heart” […]. Nor is there a sure way to guarantee immunity. Concentrating on formal phenomena permits one to avoid the worst, but it is equally important not to attribute absolute qualities—or make existential claims about putative superiority—when encountering atmospheres and moods from the past and other cultures. In addition to the experience of empathy, a measure of sobriety and verbal moderation should accompany the act of reading for Stimmung. In many cases, it is better to gesture toward potential moods instead of describing them in detail (much less celebrating them). (Gumbrecht 2012, 16)

B) Are moods the figured bass of our daily existence or are they rather rare and exceptional experiences like that which Alois Riegl (1929) chooses as the paradigmatic example of modern Stimmungskunst? Riegl’s quietistic scenario is based on aesthetic distance and ascribed to modern painting (especially landscape painting) as a result of the shift from the aptic-proximal paradigm to the optical-distal one.36 It should prove that perceptual distance and naturalistic nomothetic causalism act as a modern form of salvation by enabling contemplation of universal harmony. By virtue of its more monodic than polyphonic nature, the static simultaneity perceived37 would enable the lucky perceiver to see as well ordered, harmonious and quiet at a distance what is instead chaotic, discordant and agitated if seen more closely. Due to prerequisites (Ruhe and Fernsicht) opposed to physicalistic atomism,38 one would feel the real Weltseele aller Dinge. Unfortunately, however, all this is something that one is probably aware of only when it no longer exists. A few years later, Benjamin, although through a very similar description and also under the influence 33 34 35 36

See Giesz (1971, 152) and chapter 4, §5. On this topic see also Anz (2013). Bollnow (1956, 95). Krebs (2018, 239). For a few comments on the formula (taken from Degas) états d’yeux see Gamboni (2010). 37 Becker (2010, 172-3) cleverly (but in a too projectivist way) applies Riegl’s pictorial criteria to Debussy. 38 See Arburg (2010, 13-20).

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of Klages’ theory of ecstasy, would already consider this impossible (loss of aura).39 Things are, however, a bit more complicated, because distance paradoxically sometimes intensifies a Stimmung, as in the case of Riegl’s perceptual distance, but sometimes it completely switches it off, as in the case of the historical-philological distance, diagnosed by Nietzsche as “historical sickness”. Moreover, is this Stimmung (a “subtle thing” for Riegl) only a privileged moment, characterised by a state of grace of a godlike all-encompassing comprehension of all things (as they were before the Fall) and therefore absolutely time- and milieu-conditioned?40 Or is it rather an affect made possible by having an unusual perspective from the mountaintop (leading to forget about daily pressures and to be aware of harmony in nature), but that simply accentuates what could happen in other places and at other times?41 Do common and daily situations really always deserve the name of Stimmung, as if every sunset or Sunday morning aroused the Stimmung of a sunset or a Sunday morning as such? Or is Stimmung rather an axiological term merely corresponding to some rare and deep experiences showing the unmistakable presence of a new quality of the world42? These and other possible questions clearly show the polyvocity of this vague concept. This aspect has encouraged the development of two relevant false myths. 3. Dispelling two myths and a retracing bit of history a) People repeat like a mantra that the word “Stimmung” is strictly untranslatable. It seems to me, on the contrary, that it is being constantly and cautiously translated rather than being absolutely untranslatable.43 Not to mention the fact that declaring something untranslatable necessarily 39 See Recky (2010, 8-11). 40 It is often uncritically repeated (see for example Wedekind 2010, 34) that a Stimmungslandschaft must rely on a distance, exhibit chromatic homogeneity, express atmospheric thickness and actionlessness. 41 Even without necessarily having a positive impact (mood of disturbance and uncertainty). Friedrich’s Stimmungslandschaft, for example, would imply not only sublimitas but also the humilitas that can be easily traced back to the melancholy of God’s creation in the protestant tradition (see ibid, 41-42, 45). 42 For Krebs (2018, 238), for example, we are not always in a mood because we often don’t hang together affectively and fall to pieces. 43 As is happening once again in David (2004).

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means having it already translated (at least mentally) and having somehow compared this translation with the original. It is abstractly true, of course, that, for example, “mood” seems to correspond more to the transient Stimmung (a moody mood) than to the “basic mood” (Grundstimmung). And it is also abstractly true that neither English nor the Romance languages have a full equivalent for a term like this. The latter, in fact, is based on an analogy between music (tuning of instruments) and psychology (being in a mood, attuned with). Above all, it means a state of merging with the world that, being neither only subjective nor only objective, is hard to define for vocabularies that are dualistically organized according to an inner/outer structure. This does not mean, however, that the musical and ontological resonance of the German word as a whole is always fully and necessarily missed in other cultures (think for example of attunement in English, or accordo, intonazione, tonalità in Italian, etc.)—this is also attested by the widespread artistic application of what Stimmung means outside the German-speaking area and yet according to paths which are fully aligned with the German ones. Even if it were true that Stimmung usually embraces three phenomena (harmony, mood and atmosphere), whereas its English and French counterparts only embrace one or two of them,44 Stimmung has nothing to gain from overemphasizing its untranslatability. In other words: one should discuss the issues raised by this concept without counting on any rhetorical and apologetic promotion of ineffability. b) The second myth is about the necessarily harmonious nature of a Stimmung. Saying that every mood expresses the harmony (Übereinstimmung) between inner and outer world sounds like a somewhat forced late-Romantic idea. I am well aware of the semantic history of the term Stimmung, brilliantly reconstructed by Leo Spitzer and dating back to an archaeological and eschatological idea of world harmony,45 as well as of the philosophical, Kantian re-interpretation of the concept as an interplay between the faculties.46 But I continue to believe that the view of 44 See Krebs (2018, 237). 45 Let us recall its basic steps: music of spheres, correspondence between macroand micro-cosm, and in general the traditional repertory of images blending the pagan cosmological harmonicist tradition with Christian mystics, for example Jacob Böhme’s idea of a world as a musical ordered harmony, whose signaturae are musical correspondances-resonances (in a broad sense). 46 Kant’s disinterested pleasure, in fact, is certainly an explicit attack on the psychophysiological theories of resonance in use both before and after Romanticism,

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Stimmung/mood as a holistic-harmonious Erlebnis is no longer the most relevant and useful idea. It is perhaps a cognitivist prejudice to distinguish the philosophical view of Stimmung (Kant) from the earlier psychological (Sulzer)47 or even genetic one (ante litteram)48 as well as the subsequent (artistic) one. The latter, by defending Wirkungsästhetik, turns the soul’s Stimmung from the content of a work of art to the condition of possibility of any successful communication.49 However, it is true that only with Kant did Stimmung start to acquire an eminently aesthetic meaning, even before Schiller interpreted the Kantian free play as a specific aesthetic mood or attunement. But the special harmonious interplay between imagination and understanding, which for Kant makes an aesthetic judgement possible when intuition is not inhibited by concepts, is more a general “disposition towards knowledge” than a real atmospheric tonality.50 And yet, this disposition, acting only “as if” it should produce knowledge, does arouse a feeling of furtherance of life that could also be easily understood in an aesthesiological sense, if it is true that even the Stimmung of a certain knowledge must be communicable in someway.51 So far we have looked at the tradition. Now, however, “it is no longer necessary to associate Stimmung and harmony” (Gumbrecht 2012, 20). In my view, only a preliminary de-axiologization of Stimmung/mood (and, as already said, of atmospheres) can make these concepts really useful today. 4. The many moods of mood: a frustrating taxonomy An established trend defines Stimmungen by negation in order to further prove their conceptless nature.52 Without any illusion of answering every question by simply pontificating on the irreducibility of feelings to precise although in this second case they were more organically based. 47 According to Sulzer—it is worth remembering it—the subject cannot avoid feeling obscure representations act on their own sensations (Welsh 2011, 134ff.). 48 Gisbertz (2011, 190) reminds us that for a physiologist like Ewald Hering (1870) Stimmungen would even express an unconscious memory organically rooted into a plasma passed on from generation to generation. 49 Welsh (2011, 137). 50 Cf. Frey (2011, 81). 51 It should be noted that Friedrich Schlegel would later talk about a “logic” and an intellectual Stimmung that are also necessary to science (see Reents 2011, 123-4). 52 Bulka (2015, 52).

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abstract names, it could be said, in the most general terms possible, that Stimmungen/moods are (a sub-category of) emotions.53 They are not focused on a relatively stable reality but provide a general tone, and maybe for this reason they have an ever changing target.54 But even the usual comparison between moods and emotions55 comes with exceptions and surprises that undermine this taxonomic starting point. a) Duration. As more chronic than acute states, moods would last longer than emotions. Because of their slow appearing and disappearing under the influence of both organic life drives and unforeseen situations,56 they should never be confused with superficial moods.57 And yet, their long duration might simply depend on the fact that their less conceptual nature makes them less subject to control than emotions.58 Moreover, is the fleeting moment atmospherically painted by Monet,59 for example, really less of a Stimmung than the long-lasting landscape physiognomy painted by Seurat? Or do both represent a specific moment, but expressing respectively something transitory and something lasting thanks to different techniques?60 b) Intensity. As less intense affects, made possible by a tacit-intuitive ability (Gespür) “to emotionally consider a hidden and not really visible fact” (Meyer-Sickendiek 2012, 18; 2011), moods are seen as affective disorders only when they are really intense and pervasive, such as when sadness becomes depression for example.61 And yet Heidegger, seeing Stimmung as the ontic side of the more general and ontological Befindlichkeit,62 can rightly claim that the latent Stimmungen (of which one is maybe only aware ex post) are certainly the

53 Prinz (2004, 182-8). 54 Elster (1941, 136). 55 For a good overview (first of all because it is both anglophone and continental) of the most important differences, see Bulka (201, 52-71). 56 Bollnow (1956, 136). 57 They could be seen as the process through which a self becomes insubstantial (Costa 2014,142). 58 See Reisenzein & Siemer (2013, 109, fn. 54). 59 Think of the many canvases dedicated by Monet to Rouen’s Cathedral at different hours of the day and in different climatic conditions. See Mahayni (2002). 60 Thomas (2011, 221-223). 61 Ben-Ze’ev (2001, 89-92). 62 See Kruse (1974, 59, fn.1).

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most powerful ones, i.e. those—to quote a passage already mentioned (see chapter 4, §2 C) that it is worth repeating here— to which we pay no heed at all, the attunements we least observe, those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all, as though we were not attuned in any way at all” (Heidegger1995, 68)63.

c) Ubiquity. Moods look ubiquitous and therefore hard to locate in a spatial-temporal sense.64They are never absent, so much so that not feeling a mood could itself be a mood,65 and even protests “against overvaluations of harmony in works of culture” do belong to “a particular mood or cultural atmosphere” (Gumbrecht 2012, 12). And yet, the fact that a Stimmung’s object can be everything or nothing specific does not seem to rule out the feeling’s specificity. Indeed, this term is often meant as the very rare stationary and harmonious affect resulting from an (anything but ubiquitous) situation like the one in which one affectively keeps it together without falling to pieces.66 d) Unintentionality. Unlike emotions, moods would be unintentional and have an indefinite and not precisely oriented focus (or cause), thus revealing existence as such (existentialist option) or an inside situation rather than a state of the world (subjectivist option). And yet, many examples seem to contradict this claim. There are, actually, specific spaces that are emotionally tonalized even regardless of the perceiver’s viewpoint, affective values that are objectively codified, moods that are linked to specific-transitory objects (pre-exam anxiety, fear of the void, etc.), sometimes resulting from repeated emotional and also intentionally tonalized microexperiences.67 Also, there are moods that are “blind spots” for the one who feels them but are perfectly identified by third parties as affects triggered by certain objects/situations and ruling the person’s social life.68 The mood-inducing object, moreover, could be simply temporarily 63 There might be a difference, however, in terms of attention between high and depressed moods. 64 Fuchs (2013, 24). 65 Bude (2018, 22). 66 Krebs (2018, 238). 67 Parkinson et al. (1996, 21). See also Costa (2014, 129-30, 138) and Morris (1989). Even Heidegger does not seem to rule out that a widespread emotion could actually “become” a mood. 68 See Ciompi, Endert (2011, 27-28).

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out of focus, or it could not be clearly identified just because the mood is indistinguishably triggered by many different but similar objects.69 It should then not be ignored that there is also a primitive unlocalized intentionality “directed at the world at large” or “with alternating objects” without implying a subject-object relationship and for which, significantly, one considers oneself more responsible than for affective disorders and emotions.70 Though apparently unintentional, or intentional in a primitive and pre-dualistic way, moods certainly act as pre-reflexive markers of the resulting situative meaningfulness, thus influencing lived experiences and selectively deciding what and how one should perceive. They act in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy (mood congruence) or, at least, as an empty slot waiting for consonant experiences.71 This substantially contrasts, however, with the experience in which a certain mood, instead of focusing on syntonic situations and forgetting about the discrepant atmospheres, sometimes makes you feel the latter more intensively or at least occasionally makes you like to be places in into unpleasant moods (see chapter 2, §10 and 4, §2). e) Pragmatic uncertainty and dispositionality. It is said that moods, influencing the way of perceiving more than the perceptual content, lead to behavior indirectly rather than directly motivating emotions.72 They would only act (in the afinalistic mood-, present- or thymic-space)73 as orientative “dispositions” to foster (or also inhibit) further perceptions and actions.74 From these background emotions, core affects, etc., different figures can

69 Grossart (1961, 75-76); Reisenzein, Siemer (2013, 108-111). 70 Ben-Ze’ev (2001, 87, 91). 71 See Taylor (1985, 48); Slaby (2008, 176-177). Anyway, if this always happened, no one could ever live moods and atmospheres that are incompatible with their previous mood (as instead is normally the case). 72 Even in a physiognomic way: moods actually “do not have a particular facial expression”. Nor is “there […] an obvious cause-and-effect relationship between our moods and events” (Ben-Ze’ev 2001, 88). 73 At least from Binswanger (1953) and Straus (1963) on. 74 This is well expressed by saying “being in the mood for…” (Lersch 1962, 307). But “disposition” could mean different things: whereas Fuchs (2013, 2526) reminds us of the reductionist (neurobiological) definition of Stimmung in terms of motivating dispositions based on neuromodular and endocrine functions and mediated by transmitters like noradrenalin, serotonin, acetylcholine and dopamine—Vendrell Ferran (2008, 147) explains dispositions not as psychic acts but as ways of being in the world that are possibly influenced by atmospheres and moods.

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(Gestaltically) emerge in the foreground75- even antithetic attitudes such as, for example, fatalism and dissent come from the “same” climate of irritability characterising late-capitalism, no longer justified by the illusion of a relentless economic growth. The fact of detesting Jago and at the same time feeling compassion for Desdemona indeed arises, respectively in the form of tragic hate and tragic compassion, from an overall common (tragic) mood suggested by the work.76 And yet, one of Stimmungskunst’s tricks has always been, the capability of suggesting a certain mood through particular devices (natural or artificial borders and frames) and of precisely specifying the focus, thus placing those moods in the foreground. f) Non-producibility. This very common claim was defended by Heidegger, Kaufmann77 and Bollnow, among others, both before and during Nazism, and therefore cannot be explained (contrary to Schmitz’s case) only as a post-war rejection of the Nazi propaganda’s Stimmungsmache. For Hugo von Hofmannsthal, for example, feelings are neither “outer” nor “inner” ones, which is why one must look outside for oneself.78 The same goes for Emil Staiger, who aims at desubjectifying lyrical poetry: “we are to be found outside ourselves, outside!” (Staiger 1991, 83). The lyrical poet would personally do nothing but let themselves go to an atmospheric flow that, at least initially, is neither external nor internal,79 thus limiting themselves to “evoke” a Stimmung without directly communicating it, but only preparing the perceiver to it. In other words, unlike a situation of conventional solemnity, according to Hofmannstahl and Staiger a real festive mood (or atmosphere) of conviviality cannot be intentionally produced,80 so much so that the more one tries to create a mood, the less one manages to do that. However, in view of this non-producibility and unpredictability, already attributed to atmospheres (see especially 4, §5), it is surely not enough to simply follow 75

76 77 78 79 80

This basic mood (Grundstimmung) would radiate a basic colour (Grundfarbe) that “assimilates” every other impression, obviously only if (Hellpach 1977, 186-187) the mood is intense enough and the outside world adapts enough to it (a low-land cannot in itself radiate violent emotions!). See Strasser (1956, 109-110). “A true Stimmung cannot be spontaneously intended; it rises up and overcomes me from the bottom of reality” (Kaufmann 1960, 114). Hofmannsthal (1924, II, 236). Which anyway, for Staiger, is not the mystical whole but an ephemeral felt-bodily awareness. For this example, see Bollnow (1956, 52-53); see also Krüger (2013).

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Bollnow, Heidegger and Schmitz and maintain that one is responsible, after an initial involving phase, for saying yes or no to a Stimmung or an atmosphere, for example by shaping it by means of a certain “posture”.81 Indeed, this would end up contradicting the previous emphasis on a deep affective involvement. Nor is it enough to say that one successfully fights against a mood only by opposing a contrary and more powerful mood to it, thus somehow using a mechanical-energetic explanation whose intentional governance contradicts the pathicity highlighted elsewhere. And yet, the argument of non-producibility does not prove to be consistent with the widespread and evidently efficient practice of creating, amending or at least optimizing our own mood using drugs and stimulants of various kinds, but also, in a more socially promoted way, simply by travelling, doing sport and enjoying art’s cathartic effect. The media also rely on this possibility of emotional self-determination by human beings as “self-generated animals” (Sloterdijk), counting on Stimmungen which the media stage and percipients wrongly believe to master. Studies on mood-and-mind-management and the so-called “cultural technologies of emotionalisation”82 seem to actually deny the very influential and traditional theory of the non-producibility of moods. The list of exceptions to traditional Stimmungen/moods’ properties could go on. We could point out that they are sometimes more cognitive than emotions,83 or that, more than other affective states, they can be distinguished according to a vertical dimension (depressed or high moods) or a basic polarity (pleasure->activation; displeasure->deactivation)84, and so on. In absence of full agreement about their properties (a-f), their ontological (subjective or objective) status and even their role in art communication (are they qualities of the artist, the work or the spectator?), the only conclusion should be that Stimmungen/moods are no less hard85 to define than emotion as such.86 All this is made even more difficult by the 81 See Bollnow (1956, 132, 154-161). 82 Hörisch (2011) and Anz (2007). 83 “Emotions bias action, whereas moods bias cognition” (Klotz 2011, 206). See Krebs (2018, 238-239). 84 It’s James Russell’s “circumplex model of affect”: see Fuchs (2013, 27-9). 85 Provided that one does not get away by simply breaking down a mood (Carroll 2003) into a somatic and a-cognitive component. 86 “The conflicting results of the research on the meaning of the word ‘emotion,’ as well as on the meaning and the structural dimension of the words which constitute the emotional lexicon of the languages we have studied thus far, lead researchers to think unanimously that it is currently not possible to identify a proper definition

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fact that every discourse on the affective sphere is linguistically, historically and geographically conditioned. In short: even my cursory glance at this taxonomy clearly shows87 that it is very plausible without being completely consistent. As we shall see, it is therefore better to think of the affective dimension as a whole in terms of a smooth continuum,88 maybe depending on the degree of objectual focalization.89 5. Stimmungen and atmospheres If the widespread and plausible distinction between moods and emotions examined so far has proven to be problematic, the distinction between moods and atmospheres is even more difficult. And invoking Heidegger is not of much help here. He says quite bluntly that “an attunement [Stimmung] is in each case already there, so to speak, like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves […] It does not merely seem so, it is so” (Heidegger 1995, 67). He adds that Stimmungen follow each other without an actual relationship or, as in the case of bad moods or dystonia, as a reaction to the previous ones.90 Facilitated in his task by avoiding the intriguing issue of meta-moods91 as well as by the distinction between authentic and inauthentic,92 Heidegger does not seem to have significantly altered his first approach over time. Even if in his Zollikon Seminars he is far from the previous phenomenology of boredom as a basic Stimmung, “conservatively” aimed at overcoming the levitated existence (characterised by the inability to be really moved by something) through a

87 88 89 90 91 92

of ‘emotion,’ or to classify the emotional lexicon of a language” (Galati 2002,143). Some studies even say that it is possible to list ninety definitions of emotion (Kleinginna, Kleinginna 1981). See also Bulka (2015, 69-71). Demmerling, Landweer (2007, 5). Vendrell Ferran (2008, 146-7). I’m not sure that for Heidegger high moods are based on depressed ones as Merker suggests (2008, 643, fn.10). Affective states related to one’s own affective state or someone else’s affective state. See Merker (2008, 646, fn.14). Even applied to thrownness. See Tugendhat (1970, 315ff.). Unfortunately, Bollnow’s criticism of Heidegger, who would consider existence inauthentic (excluding the moment of decision) to favour depressed moods and the individual at the expense of collective life (Bollnow 1956,78-82), often only sounds like optimistically seeing the glass half full.

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new “mission” or “project”, he still says, thanks to an easy loophole, that moods are neither internal or external nor intentionally producible states. The example of the young woman’s joyful encounter with her bridegroom. The joy, the so-called joyous affect, is not triggered by the encounter. When she sees him, she can only be joyful because she already was, and is, prepared for the joyful mode of Da-sein’s attunement.The man she encounters does not cause this joyful attunement as little as he might have triggered her anxiety earlier during times of illness. He, the man, surely did not change, but she, the woman, did. In fact, her whole relationship to the world changed in that she encounters people differently, especially this man, that is, according to this new “disclosedness” [Erschlossenheit]. She has become free for the potentiality-tobe in a joyful attunement. The man does not bring about the joyful attunement, but he fulfills it. The potentiality for the joyful attunement can be, and is, realized through his (the man’s) presence (Heidegger 2001, 66).

In order to avoid exceptions undermining objectivistic and subjectivistic theories—according to which, respectively, one is either fully taken by external moods or external reality is tinged by their personal (and projected) mood93—Heidegger and many others prefer to take refuge in the neither/nor or both/and escamotage.94 They repeat (ad nauseam!) that moods are something “groundless” and “unfounded” (even if ontologically founded),95 but without paying due attention to the difference between the Sunday mood (a something “more” made by silence, slowness, etc.) of which we probably become aware only ex post, and the fact of seeing life through rose-tinted glasses only because, at that particular moment, we are thrilled.

93 Thus eluding Sartre’s either/or: “so a change has taken place during these last few weeks. But where? It is an abstract change without object. Am I the one who has changed? If not, then it is this room, this city and this nature; I must choose” (Sartre 1964, 4). 94 One can say that “one’s feeling is experienced as something that tunes a space and vice versa, something in which one cannot say what genetically comes first or later, what is causing or caused, what is the cause or effect” (Kruse 1974, 61, see also 64), and then try to analytically distinguish, contradictorily, between the impact of attuned spaces on the subject and the impact of one’s mood on the world (ibid, 61-64). Others can rightly claim that “Stimmung is I-feeling and world-feeling at the same time”, an “all-feeling” that is both transubjective and transobjective (Strasser 1956, 115-7), but later, to better explain its dynamic, try to distinguish on the one hand how thymic states tinge reality and on the other hand how the I becomes an echo of external affective situations (ibid, 112). 95 See Lipps (1977, 97-98).

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What we are sure of is, instead, that atmospheres and moods are only a variant of that “yearning for presence” (Gumbrecht 2012, 20)96 which the neo-phenomenological approach contributes to by focusing on the felt body (Leib). Reading for Stimmung cannot mean “deciphering” atmospheres and moods, for they have no fixed signification. Equally little does reading for Stimmungen mean reconstructing or analyzing their historical or cultural genesis. Instead, it means discovering sources of energy in artifacts and giving oneself over to them affectively and bodily—yielding to them and gesturing toward them (Gumbrecht 2012, 18)

Even a philosophically very neutral description of moods like this one does not seem to distinguish between moods and atmospheres. Moods are situated, not just in the trivial sense that they are influenced by events and situations in the world, but in the sense that they are complexly interrelated with the world, in at least three different ways: i) the world provides cultural values and norms that influence how we feel and behave in mood, including how we regulate such feelings and behaviours; ii) the world is also something that we actively manipulate and modify to construct affective niches in which we can undergo moods that would otherwise be out of our unaided organism’s reach; and, finally, iii) sometimes our moods include experiencing aspects of the world as part of ourselves—either of our identity, or of our prereflective bodily self-awareness (Colombetti 2017, 1449).

But lack of consensus also affects the distinction between Stimmungen/ moods and atmospheres. Some simply place moods and atmospheres alongside as stationary and even as combining or alternating forms of the vital feeling97; others see “atmosphere” as an almost objective and spatially widespread felt reality, whereas Stimmung would mean a more subjective emotional state98 or a certain interpretation of the more objective milieu.99 Some link moods to the social-cultural dimension or to the environmental one,100 as if these were two poles of a single Erlebnis;101 others argue that Stimmung usually embraces three phenomena (harmony, mood and 96 See Griffero (2019a, 84-93). 97 Often underlining, unfortunately, their common projective nature (Lersch 1962, 306, 309-310, 314-316). 98 Böhme (2013, 157). 99 Patzelt (2007, 197-198, 203). 100 Hasse (2014, 231). 101 Henckmann (2007, 45).

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atmosphere).102 Some speak of an atmospheric mood, thus meaning a physiological-psychological whole habitus of nature, i.e. the combined effect of air tone and weather-image that becomes landscape.103 Others say that Stimmung is the active-productive aspect of the affective sphere and “atmosphere” is instead the passive-receptive one.104 Moreover, some, with good arguments, place Stimmung in a middle position between atmosphere and subjective feeling (but always closer to one or the other) within an affective space whose poles are environmental affective characters and felt-bodily resonance.105 And the list could certainly go on, showcasing the great and dizzying diversity of opinions on this matter. 6. Schmitz’s version At this stage Hermann Schmitz’s neo-phenomenological version of the issue can no longer be overlooked. Here, however, I would like to focus only on two points. a) First of all the identification of moods and atmospheres. Precisely because the neo-phenomenological approach does not begin with a crucial shift away from our ordinary immersion in the world, it is more interested than others in moods.106 According to Schmitz, all feelings are Stimmungen and atmospheres are Stimmungen, too, even if not all atmospheres are feelings.107 More precisely, atmospheres would be Stimmungen, or at least their spatial carriers understood as feelings covering a non-geometrical spatial extension.108 He then distinguishes between pure feelings— (fulfillment/despair, nostalgia, or the spring mood), which, unlike commotions (always directed from narrowness to vastness), lack a precise

102 Krebs (2018, 237). 103 See Hellpach (1946, 63-64). Thus significantly showing that a widespread naturemood such as, for example, “emptiness”, is not metaphorical at all, because it is not caused by the failure of human intentions or by an axiological nihilism. For an atmospherological and non-metaphorical interpretation of existential emptiness see Griffero (2014c). 104 Meyer, Wedelstaedt (2018, 234). 105 Fuchs (2013). 106 For a survey on some examples of different mood-induced philosophies see Kenaan, Ferber (2011). 107 Schmitz (1969, 244). 108 Ibid, 259.

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orientation109—and other directional feelings-moods, whose extension is, however, based on the kind of extension which is typical of pure feelings.110 To simplify a little Schmitz’s veritable “hand-to-hand combat” with the affective sphere, we may say that he does not only distinguish among pure moods, pure arousals and intentional feelings (all with their fluid crossborder areas) but, above all, he brings to light a felt-bodily alphabet. The “letters”of this alphabet, which can be combined with each other, are: 1) extension (filled or empty);111 2) depth and superficiality (in varying degrees); 3) directionality (unilateral or all-round, irreversible or reversible in a centripetal or centrifugal way); 4) centering into a condensation sphere and an anchoring point; 5) full centering, needing only a condensation sphere or also an anchoring point, or incomplete centering;112 6) quietness or commotion.113 A single example can dispel the suspicion that all these distinctions, based almost for every feeling on three scales (full/empty, deep/superficial, uplifting/depressing) are redundant: for Schmitz a true resigned sadness, for example, is a special kind of sadness since it is quiet, unilaterally depressing and groundless (unlike melancholy and normal sadness, directed downwards), deep, filled and mostly entirely centered through a sphere of condensation and an anchoring point, but not oriented in every direction. The pure mood of total fulfillness, without being uplifting like joy, is instead a dense, non-directional and non-qualitative fullness and quietness, and so on. b) The second point I would like to focus on is that according to Schmitz atmospheres and moods are unintentional states. Following a Gestaltpsychological suggestion114 he explains the apparent intentionality of many (not all) feelings by showing that what appears to be their object is, 109 They are therefore groundless in this technical sense and show a full or empty extension in the vastness. 110 “Pure Stimmungen come through all feelings” and “form the original layer, the ground or background of feelings” (Schmitz 1969, 263). 111 Even if an extension could be felt as a full atmosphere at a certain level but as an empty atmosphere at a different and higher level (ibid, 262). 112 Although inspired by other completely different theoretical approaches, this solution might also be compared to Helm’s one (Helm 2001) between target, formal object and focus. In this sense, one might say that in front of a certain atmosphere, of a threatening weather for example, the weather as such is the target of my atmospheric emotion, which I evaluate as menacing (formal object) and involving many other unrerlated aspects of my day (focus). 113 See Schmitz (1969, 351-352). 114 Provided by Metzger (1941, 178-183).

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according to the ground/foreground logic, rather only the point, misleading or not,115 “in which this feeling, as a chaotic and atmospherically effused field, is centred [. . .] thanks to a certain harmony of its proper stimulations” (Schmitz 1969, 311). Just as one usually does not look directly at the sun but only at the things illuminated by it, one often confuses an even occasional condensation point of a feeling with its intentional object: within the atmosphere of, say, the “fear of the dentist”, it might be necessary to distinguish between the sphere of the condensation (the dentist, their tools, the office, the personnel, the whole practice perceived and feared by the patient) and its anchoring point—the real generative location—that is, the pain caused by the dentist’s practice, which paradoxically decreases when one actually experiences it instead of expecting it. Feelings act as storage centers of a more widespread atmospheric irradiation116 of culturally stratified feelings. Also for this reason they permeate a certain sphere of condensation without a true, identifiable, anchoring point (eventually identified only in a second and little more cognitive phase) and therefore have an only apparent intentional object. Given all this, in a sense, feelings are for Schmitz exactly the same as Stimmungen.117 In this way, just as when a pre-Gestalt line fails to reach a final Gestalt one, moods and atmospheres could be considered as good examples of the fact that a holistic affective situation sustains the potentially subsequent judgement.118 This explanation of apparent intentionality in

115 In the sad light of the city abandoned by one’s lover, for example, “it is not the city the object of this sadness but the fact that that person abandoned the city” (Geiger 1911,168), thus coloring it in a peculiar way. For Metzger (194, 230) it is not unusual to find the anchoring point even “at the opposite end of the condensation area”. I have dealt with Schmitz’s critique of the phenomenological overestimation of intentionality elsewhere (see for example Griffero 2019a, 45-55 and chapter 4, §5). 116 Schmitz (1969, 322). 117 However, to deny (ibid, 319) that the ditched lover’s sadness is primarily caused not by the abandonment (anchoring point) but rather by the sad sensations provided by the environment (sphere of condensation) which remind them of the abandonment seems, maybe, to shift away from a rigorously phenomenological first-person perspective to a third-person causal-genetic one. 118 It is (so to speak) the non-pathological variant of the vaguely widespread atmospherization characterising schizophrenia in its initial stage. See Conrad (1958, 43ff.) for the typical pre-delusional schizophrenic atmosphere (trema, apophany or Aha-Erlebnis, anastrophe, apocalypse). See also Ratcliffe (2008; 2013).

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terms of centering/condensing may not be exhaustive,119 but certainly best outlines the very common experience of vaguely and holistically feeling atmospheric affordances without managing to focus on a single element of them. Without being as insatiable as Mozart’s Don Giovanni, is it not true that one does not love a person as such but rather (or also) the situation that they temporarily, accidentally and often even inexplicably condense?120 7. The continuum shall remain fluid In conclusion, I wish to make two suggestions to partially answer our general thoughts on moods. a) First of all it could be said that any distinction among moods, emotions and atmospheres seems unable to convincingly explain the circularity we experience. If a mood spatially objectifies itself into an atmosphere (and even an emotion, thanks to a more precise point of crystallisation), that mood, however, could in turn be generated by a previous (somewhat preformatted) atmosphere (triggered, perhaps, even by repeated emotions of the “same” type).121 Similarly, if an atmosphere subjectifies itself into a mood, for example by losing its thematic reference when entering personal involvement,122 it is likely that one could not perceive that atmosphere without a moody (pre-formatted) background. Well, this focusing-blurring alternation between emotions, moods and atmospheres is for me nothing but a specification of the more general intertwining among different affects, underlying Musil’s idea that “there was neither an entirely specific nor an entirely nonspecific emotion” (Musil 1995, 1307).123 In other words, 119 Is it possible, for example, that the same “object” is both the anchoring point and the condensation area, as the case of “true” love for Schmitz (1980, 275; 1990, 302)? 120 Something that “flares up inexplicably within the feeling’s space of vastness” (Schmitz 1969, 322). It also applies to situations in which an anguishing object is nothing but the crystallized occasion for a more general anguish (Bollnow 1956, 38). 121 See Bollnow (1956, 36-37, 107). A frustrated anger, for example, can generate a mood of resentment, which can consolidate into a character trait, i.e. into a resentful person (Goldie 2009, 150-1). 122 Tellenbach (1968) claims something similar by distinguishing between the atmosphere’s impersonal reality and Stimmung as unity of I-feeling and world. 123 If an emotion (in a strict sense) is like “a creature with grasping arms”, a mood instead “changes the world in the same way the sky changes its colours without desire or self, and in this form objects and actions change like the clouds” (Musil 1995,1306).

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an expression shapes and consolidates a mood into an emotion (without bringing it to an end)124 and an emotion “may blur out of focus into nonspecific form, continuing to colour your way of thinking of and feeling towards the world”125, thus continuing “to resonate in some non-specific way in your psyche” (Goldie 2009,148-9). Well, in the same way, a mood could become (spatially) more focused and thus turn into an atmosphere, whereas an atmosphere could in turn blur out of focus and turn into a mood. What is atmospherologically important (especially in the case of prototypical atmospheres, as we know) is not to conceive this fluid temporal process of backgrounding and foregrounding126 as something entirely depending on the subject’s affective state.127 b) It is certainly true that moods have increasingly acquired a spatial meaning throughout the twentieth century (from Binswanger on),128 especially through a combination of Eduard von Hartmann’s concept of “situation lyrics” and Schmitz’s theory of situation as a multiple-chaotic whole with internally diffuse meaning.129 Although moods and atmospheres certainly share a felt-bodily protopathic nature (unlike the more epicritic emotions)—that is, they are felt in a diffuse and not acute way—I would suggest to speak more precisely of atmosphere only when a feeling 1) belongs, unlike more floating moods, to a certain (pre-dimensional) space, even to a local space in the case of spurious atmospheres,130 and 2) has a status so objective-external for the perceiver’s first-person perspective as to violently oppose the percipient’s previous mood. 124 As soon as it arouses it, it becomes salient (Frijda 1993). 125 “There is no ‘mood’ that does not include specific emotions that form and dissolve again; and there is no specific emotion that, at least where it can be said to ‘radiate’, ‘seize’, ‘operate out of itself’, ‘extend itself’ or operate on the world ‘directly’, without an external emotion, does not allow the characteristics of the non-specific emotion to peer through” (Musil 1995, 1307). 126 For an application of this dialectics to poetics, even to abstract texts and their fundamental mood (“feeling of rightness”), see Jacobs, Lüdtke, Meyer-Sickendiek (2013). Meyer-Sickendiek (2012, 76, 84) suggests to think of the mood field as a “reversibile image” depending on the prevalence, for various reasons, of the emotion-side, the mood-side or the atmosphere-side. 127 See Bulka’s (2015, 319) right objection to Goldie (2009, 148). 128 See Wellbery (2011, 157). Significantly, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the musicologist Hans-Georg Nägeli could still attribute affects to spatial arts and moods to temporal arts (see Klotz 2011, 199). 129 Meyer-Sickendiek (2012, 38). 130 Unlike what Schmitz thinks. For my already mentioned distinction among different kinds of atmospheres and atmospheric spaces see Griffero (2014a, 3647; 2017a, 27-31).

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In short: one cannot deny that Stimmungen/moods have a mysterious nature, as Schnitzler brilliantly claims: “I know the streets, the buildings, I understand the dialect the Viennes speaks, I can see the types of people and social circles, I know about promenading on the Ring, amusements in the Prater, music in Hofburg palace—but what gives these things their savour? Why is it that we are often pervaded by the city’s soul, in all its poignant intensity, on a solitary walk in the Prater, or on the old square in front of the Minoritenkirche or at a word from a sweet Viennese girl, that’s what I want to know!”. “Well, yes”, said Hans, “the mystery of the mood [Stimmung]!” (Schnitzler 2002, 183f.).

It would however be wrong, even in a philosophical context so open to the vagueness and inexplicability of affective life like the atmospherological one131, to be satisfied with mysteries like the one emphatically proclaimed by Schnitzler. This would in fact mean following a kind of lazy thinking whose traces one may often find in Romantic metaphors, like for example the anti-egoic Aeolian harp. This wooden box is indeed ruled by the wind’s whims rather than by human intentions, but, to stick to the metaphor, one should still explain how to build an Aeolian harp in such a way that nature can find an adequate and effective sounding board in it. However, here there are no guarantees of success, given that sometimes nature finds an insuperable obstacle in a person’s dispositional mood. As Hamlet points out to Guildenstern: You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me (Hamlet, act III, scene 2).

131 Heidegger (2017, 163).

6 What Are Atmospheres if Not Extended and Felt-bodily Shared Feelings?

1. Atmospheres as shared feelings There is no need to point out how puzzling this topic is. Especially once the transcendental, non-conceptual universality that Kant attributed to feelings such as that of the beautiful has become unsustainable. In fact, how can one be sure that this over-intellectualized delight, as Kant would assume, is so independent of personal interest (in the broad sense) as to be universally presupposed in equally free and uninterested people? Even a relic like the Kantian transcendental argument can still, however, be instructive. Indeed, it suggests that sharing feelings should not be based on empirical-statistical evidence or on their propagation through chain reactions, but simply on acknowledging an affective “we” that is irreducible to empirical-social intersubjectivity. The mentioned “affective turn”—powered today by the obvious yet theoretically long-neglected consideration that humans do more than think and reason in a logical way—leads to recognise that feelings, while also depending on biological and even intracranial systems, don’t consist primarily of inner and private states or processes.1 Hence the current tendency to promote the idea that, especially within our very stratified and post-conventional society, humans can feel “with” others exactly as they can share beliefs and intentions: this idea obviously goes against the traditional theoretical but also commonsensical view of affective individualism,2 according to which feelings are necessarily “internal” to an individual. 1 2

Rightly emphasizing their unconscious, automatic and involuntary aspects, in fact, does not mean (contrary to what Krueger 2014, 158 says) that they are necessarily intrapsychic-individual states. A view that is ontological (feelings are necessarily somebody’s feelings), epistemological (only individuals have a first-person authority regarding their affective life) and physical (see Schmid 2009).

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For my atmospherology and, in general, for every atmospheric approach, the question of collective feelings seems a self-evident implication and, at the same time, a real “elephant in the room”. In fact, it could even be said that atmospheres,3 provided that they are conceived as feelings pervading and tonalizing a certain space, are something shared by definition.4 It is quite clear that by saying, for example, that a certain room is oppressive or relaxing, or that (as in an old popular song) “love is in the air, everywhere I look around”, we are implicitly acknowledging that a certain feeling, instead of being groundless like Stimmungen or just quick-intentional like emotions, is now poured out into a (lived) space5 and exactly for this reason is quasi-objectively experienced in its authority by everyone entering (or staying in) that space.6 Like any “true” perceived,7 an atmosphere imposes its presence in public as a shared “object”. But this is too simple and needs further investigation. The first thing to notice is the very ambiguity of the notion of shared feeling. Suffice to read8 phrases like “we know just what someone is feeling”, “we feel for someone”, “we feel with them”, “we empathize”, “we imagine how they feel”, “we put ourselves in their shoes”, “we sympathize”, “we resonate with their feelings”, “our heart goes out to them”, etc. First of all, it is not at all clear whether, for example, a subjective-projective feeling (what I call a spurious atmosphere) can be shared in the same way as a real environmental feeling, whether a distinction should be made between more or less sharable feelings (respectively, shame or pride), and whether 3

4

5

6 7 8

Provided, however, that “atmosphere” is not regarded merely as a misleading metaphor (as Schmid 2014, 10 claims), which downplays its necessary felt-bodily nature. The fact that something that does not have a parallel and fully equivalent literal sphere cannot, strictly speaking, be called metaphorical. Even for Trigg (2020) atmosphere, as it is diffused through the surrounding world and grasped in an interaffective way, can contribute (also critically) to cases of shared emotion by generating a sense of mutual self-other awareness and an adjoining sense of (active and passive) integrative togetherness. Maybe it’s impossible to describe a feeling in non-spatial terms. Atmospheres, however, only refer to the “absolute” (lived, pre-dimensional, anisotropic) space (Griffero 2014d) to which subjects participate thanks to their felt body, i.e. their facing “pathically” cross-modal “ecological” suggestions. We have seen many times that an atmosphere (especially if prototypical) is characterised by having authority (in principle) and trying to occupy a certain space (see Griffero 2014b). Taking up Schmitz’s contentious distinction, this is certainly true, more for the widely spread atmospheres of feeling than for the body-related ones. Cf. Wiesing (2014, 120 ff.). See Goldie (2009, 176).

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a feeling could be really shared without a supra-individual subject as well as a structure that, due to its vagueness and longer duration, does not afford the fast way to think and act provided by emotions.9 Nevertheless, everyday experience offers many examples of situations10 in which people gathered in a certain place collectively and sometimes involuntarily express their shared feeling by shouting, chanting, gesturing, etc. What’s more: our entire affective life, namely what we feel as well as how we come to feel, is essentially scaffolded by collective atmospheric situations, just as the affective development of newborns is scaffolded by familiar atmospheres optimized or regulated by their caregivers.11 This means that someone’s endogenous “subjective facts” (to use a neophenomenological notion)—which result from their first-personal and felt-bodily resonances and can only be referred to by using one’s own name—are even if not mainly exogenously determined by synchronic and diachronic external atmospheric feelings. However, seeing this atmospheric “we-space” as a set of feelings extended beyond the confines of someone’s physical body and resulting from continuously updated transactions between the self and others (even if only imagined or forecasted)12 or the self and natural-artificial devices would be not a really groundbreaking stance. Indeed, speaking of a shared intercorporeality (à la Merleau-Ponty), without ever specifying the grammar and syntax of a far-from-obvious feltbodily alphabet, is little more than a metaphorical description of intent.13 Anyway, atmospheres are not only external tools like the affordances of music and venues, the expressions and behaviors of individuals or groups, rituals, habits, and other people’s feelings. They also certainly function both as scaffolds of affective experiences that would not be possible without them14 and as actions that help solidify hitherto only inchoative emotional 9 10 11 12 13

14

An atmosphere, in fact, doesn’t usually function (unlike emotions) as a “fast track […] to ownership, mental unity, relevance and commitment” (Schmid 2014, 8). Increasingly studied at least since Émile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”. As is known since Hubertus Tellenbach’s seminal book on atmospheres (Tellenbach 1968). See Krueger (2014, 163, 165, fn.9). Even if Schmitz (1999b, 280) considers it reductive to describe New Phenomenology as a philosophy of the felt body (Leiblichkeit), he achieves a real Copernican revolution when he aims at conceiving of affective life and life tout court in a new (felt-bodily involving) experiential way. Would romantic love synchronically exist if Romantic emotional and artistic culture had not existed and thus provided the necessary diachronic scaffolding?

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experiences, sometimes establishing some sort of socio-normative affective appropriateness.15 Nevertheless, they are, at least in the case of what I call “prototypical atmosphere”, ontologically more than simple “tools for feeling” (Slaby 2014, 43), since they are feelings that are literally spread out in space and in most emblematic cases act as quasi-things (cf. chapter 3), felt-bodily involving individuals and groups and resisting any person’s effort to change or neutralise them. The atmospheric externalism is therefore more radical than the so-called environmental and social emotion-externalism.16 Precisely because of their relative independence from whether and how they are perceived, atmospheres seem perfectly entitled to reclaim a leading role in the current debate on shared feelings. We must not forget, however, that atmosphere sharing is only made possible by ubiquitous felt-bodily communication.17 In fact, as a sounding board for atmospheres, our felt body makes it possible to think of every perception as a felt-bodily communication based on a certain relationship between incorporation and excorporation. It communicates with extraorganismic Gestalten (animate or inanimate) and their affordances, more specifically their motor suggestions and synaesthetic characters. This kind of communication, not confined to the physical body18 and therefore fully engaged with the external world, explains how and why an atmosphere can be collective and shared better than referring to a generic common humanity. Assuming that the only existing bodies are the physical and individual ones would actually underlie an only individualist approach to affects and would obviously make absurd to speak of shared feelings. Indeed, the felt-bodily dynamic underlying experience or perception gives life to a peculiar ad-hoc felt body each time, thus providing the fundamental form of world-disclosure that Heidegger assigned to (unfortunately too unbodied) Stimmungen.19 Since, however, individuals feel and realize an 15 See Slaby (2014, 40). 16 Social emotion-externalism is promoted, for example, by Léon, Szanto, Zahavi (2017). 17 See Schmitz (2011, 29-53) and Griffero (2017b, 2017c). 18 It is obvious that “grief is not localized in the body, as if one’s grief were felt in one’s left leg” (Schmid 2009, 72). However, it certainly resonates (like heaviness or the haze, for example) in the felt body. 19 “But being affected by the unserviceable, resistant, and threatening character of things at hand is ontologically possible only because being-in as such is existentially determined beforehand in such a way that what it encounters in the world can matter to it in this way. This mattering to it is grounded in attunement, and as attunement it has disclosed the world, for example, as something by

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atmospheric feeling only in their own lived bodies, the assumption of an ad-hoc collective felt body does not involve the assumption of a collective ontological subject. Atmospherologically speaking, in fact, the collective subject gives way to an atmospheric quasi-thing that is, at least initially, relatively independent from participating subjects. 2. Doubts: their name is Legion This context gives rise to many doubts. Let me give you four examples. a) The first question concerns the semantic ambiguity of the term “sharing” itself. Obviously, sharing guilt is not like sharing a cab, and even less like sharing a cake cut in equal pieces.20 Applied to atmospheres, this notion is largely dependent on their “soft” or “hard” conception. Indeed, the soft idea states that a shared atmosphere may result from overlapping the private feelings of individuals that are experiencing a similar situation and are mutually aware of this sharing (this covers, in a certain sense, the moderate, weak and strong sharing established by Mikko Salmela).21 Instead, the hard one asserts that what is collectively experienced is a numerically single feeling.22 Both options reject the individualism and introjectionism that compromise most approaches to feelings, but do so starting from very different ontological-phenomenological assumptions. which it can be threatened. Only something which is the attunement of fearing, or fearlessness, can discover things at hand in the surrounding world as being threatening. The moodedness of attunement constitutes existentially the openness to world of Dasein.” (Heidegger 1996, 129). On the controversial relationship between Stimmungen and atmosphere see chapter 5. 20 “Whereas we have a clear sense of the way in which a token of a physical object gets shared—in which case sharing always involves some form of distribution— this image is ill-suited to serve as a model for understanding sharing in the domain of affective experiences, and most likely mental states in general” (Thonhauser 2018, 1006). 21 Following Salmela, in fact, we have three options: a) a moderate sharing, when individuals affectively evaluate an event similarly from the perspective of their identitary shared concern (the joy for a goal scored by one’s team), b) a weak sharing (the shared atmosphere of solemnity of a certain building), and c) a strong sharing, based on individuals’ collective commitment to a concern as a group (the atmosphere of victory for players of a sports team). 22 “In order to be able to draw a distinction between parallel individual emotions and shared emotions, it is sensible to say that a genuinely shared emotion requires that we share the same emotion; we do not feel it as mine and yours, but as ours” (Thonhauser 2018, 999).

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b) The second issue is the notion of “intentional”. Whilst today’s debate on collective emotions doesn’t give up this concept, a neo-phenomenological atmospherology considers it overestimated and misleading. What appears to be affectively intentional could be actually reinterpreted, according to Schmitz, in terms of Gestalt psychology—namely by identifying within feelings a sphere of condensation, where their characteristic features are gathered, and an anchoring point, from which they issue forth as a Gestalt (see chapter 5, §6). c) The third problem is that of the spreading degree of a shared feeling. Many scholars underline that having collective feelings does not mean attributing them to a group personhood, and that implying a corporate emotional and moral sensibility does not mean considering group members as embodied agents.23 This caveat applies all the more to atmospheres as feltbodily resonating feelings.24 On the other hand, if a shared (atmospheric) feeling were realized for one group member if and only if it’s realized among all group members, there would be no shared atmospheres. They certainly are a “we” feeling, but not in the strictly quantitative sense25 of shared intentions. d) The fourth issue is perhaps the source of all these doubts. Whilst it’s difficult to find someone openly denying the very idea of sharing feelings (or atmospheres), of a group of individuals interpreting their feelings as anonymous and a-personal rather than as their own private ones, it’s significantly harder to take a stance regarding Hans Bernhard Schmid’s intriguing idea of the numerical identity of certain feelings. It’s true that Schmid tries to mitigate the idea that “shared feelings are conscious experiences whose subjective aspect is not singular (‘for me’) but plural (‘for us’)” (Schmid 2014, 9) through the caveat that “the numerical identity of the feeling does not preclude difference, but the difference here is one between aspects of one feeling rather than one between numerically different feelings” (Schmid 2009, 82). Nevertheless, in my view, the identity of an atmospheric feeling should be considered as a type-identity rather than as a token-identity.26 23 24 25 26

Cf. Szanto (2016, 270). Griffero (2017c, 2020b). See Salmela (2012, 8) and Sánchez Guerrero (2011). For this distinction see Schmid (2009, 69, 77).

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Schmid’s ambitious double-sided approach to different feelings not as parallel individual emotions or group-based emotions but as aspects of one shared feeling would also be convincing, were it not for the “numerical identity of the feeling itself”. Objections of various nature undoubtedly come to mind here. d1) Firstly, sharing an atmosphere might end up modifying it: sometimes reducing its qualitative impact (a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved) and other times strengthening it (a joy shared is often a joy doubled),27 and this fact undermines (or at least modifies) the alleged initial numerical identity. d2) Secondly, talking about a “numerically identical atmosphere” would lump feelings together with “objects” or “meanings”. A shared atmosphere detached from the quality, intensity and effect of its perception sounds too much like Fregean “reference”, but a feeling is totally different from the truth value of a sentence. I know that these two minor objections only touch on Schmid’s suggestion. So, in order to defend the argument that people only live a form of I-atmospheric feeling, I must now go into a little more detail regarding atmospheres. A full-fledged (for me prototypical) atmosphere is an initial phenomenal-affective state of undifferentiation,28 i.e. an inbetween conceived not as the result of an interaction of fixed and stable components (the self and the environment) but as a relation preceding the relata.29 Concerning the differentiation of feelings, one could follow Schmitz30 and drastically argue that a not-perfectly-identical atmospheric feeling in two different people does not prove the subjectivity and privacy of the atmosphere; it would be like saying that if one person opens an umbrella and another walks in the rain, it means that the rain is subjective. However, instead of embracing such a radical objectification—which is often very healthy precisely because of its polemic scope31—I would prefer the phenomenological model of the epoché to that of the hermeneutical 27 See Konzelman (2009, 83). 28 This happens not only in early infancy, as suggested both by Krueger (2013, 2014), while developing Merleau-Ponty’s idea, and by Scheler, convinced that infectiousness atrophizes when one gets older. If that were the case, only in childhood would one be able to have a real atmospheric experience (which is simply false). 29 Which Schmid (2005, 138) should perhaps admit, given his idea of an emotional sharing preceding any distinction between the experiencers. 30 Schmitz (1969, 216). 31 After all, it is precisely unusual philosophical ideas that shed some light on why we conceive of matters the way we normally do (Schmid 2009, 88).

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circle. Which amounts to saying that a shared atmospheric-external feeling is a spatialized feeling whose type (not token) precedes the emergence of self and other and only defines a limited horizon within the obviously much wider emotional life of different people.32 As a real we-experience it acts as a framework, without forbidding relatively different token-atmospheric feelings and, as a consequence, different ontologically individuating subjective facts.33 After all, it makes no sense to speak of sharing if this does not involve different persons.34 The idea that different felt-bodily dispositions simply filter a certain atmosphere in different ways, though, should not imply that there are countless coexisting atmospheres that float in the same “air” or shared mood-space without being properly rooted in specific situational affordances. However, the risk no longer applies when stating that this first-person filtering takes place not among many atmospheric feelings but within a predominant atmosphere that can be defined as the “same” (fragile) atmosphere precisely for this reason. Fortunately or unfortunately, the issue of sharing atmospheres is the sort of matter in which examples have nothing to envy to theoretical argumentations. I therefore would like to offer some problematic examples. Sharing a numerically identical object like a cab doesn’t exclude that its atmosphere could be felt in a relatively different way by different individuals, for example depending on whether they are regular users or not, will be reimbursed or not, etc. Similarly, sharing an apartment doesn’t mean that the roommates inhabit all its interiors at the same time and experience the same feelings. The form of sharing exemplified here, which is material and relatively more external to persons’ felt body, is only conventional and has little to do with sharing a feeling, which must always include the felt-bodily and relatively different fine-grained qualities that one experiences. Nor is it enough to constitute a coupled system. Even in the extreme example of a rapist and their victim, they certainly exist within a shared 32 Schmid (2009, 80) would define it an only partial fusion. 33 As Slaby (2014, 34) rightly claims in a precisely (although perhaps unintended) neo-phenomenological way: “take a person’s emotionality away, and there’s nothing left that deserves to be called ‘self’”. This also applies to certain involving thoughts that precisely for this reason should be considered more affective than cognitive thoughts. 34 Schmid himself (2009, 80; 2014, 12) admits a dependence on a wide array of circumstances.

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atmosphere but do not have a numerically identical feeling, the former being involved by sexual domination and the latter by terror (as happens even in the consensual context of a sadomasochist couple). As is well known, Christmas is an influential atmospheric field35 able to trigger different reactions among different individuals: excitement among the children waiting for gifts but also nervousness and even depression for adults forced to extenuating family reunions, excessive lunches, etc.36 The children’s joy can certainly be co-felt by adults, but only through a minor participation that is also witnessed, in fact, by the uncertainty of their own felt-bodily behaviour. To make a different example, 09/11 obviously elicited an atmosphere of sadness and anger in American society, while it aroused an atmosphere of joy and pride among al-Qa’ida soldiers. As already mentioned in relation to my favorite example of the imposing entrance hall of a major banking institution, whose atmosphere can arouse fear or pride (cf. chapter 4, §4), what generates these opposing feelings in these cases is precisely the “same” (but not numerically identical) spatial-emotional atmosphere of vastness and solemnity (also based on the architectural qualities of the space). Another example is that of four components of a successful musical performance like the composer, the stage manager, the musician and a member of the audience: they always share a collective joyous atmosphere in a somewhat different manner, according for example to their concerns and role differentiation.37 Even Scheler’s famous example of two parents’ shared grief beside their dead child is far from obvious. Two parents stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the ‘same’ sorrow, the ‘same’ anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also, and moreover that they both know that they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common. A’s sorrow is in no way an ‘external’ matter for B here, as it is e.g. for their friend, C, who joins them and commiserates ‘with them’ or ‘upon their sorrow.’ On the contrary, they feel it together, in the sense that they feel and experience in common, not only the same value-situation, but 35 For De Rivera (2014, 236-238) even the prison’s emotional climate, arousing obviously different feelings in guards and prisoners, would be their common climate! 36 How many Hollywood movies have we seen in which family anniversaries become tragedies or at least traumatic showdowns? 37 Salmela (2012, 6).

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also the same keenness of emotion in regard to it. The sorrow, as value content, and the grief, as characterizing the functional relation thereto, are here one and identical (Scheler 1954, 12 f.).

Despite the (synchronic) bodily and (diachronic) narrative intimacy strategically utilized to show their mutual attunement, made of marital love and life, biological relation, parental love, and even physical closeness,38 it cannot be ruled out that their sorrow also depends on (and is somewhat modified by) their empathizing, their attempt to reduce the other’s sorrow and probably “lean on” the other. Furthermore, other factors such as a weaker commitment to care-giving, their loving each other less than before, their having experienced and known death in different times and ways, etc., might then further increase the distinction between the shared (type-feeling) atmosphere of grief and their current, somewhat different, atmospheric sorrow (token-feeling). But things can perhaps be even much more complicated than that. Indeed, as already said (cf. especially chapter 4, §3), an atmosphere a) can occupy a certain space (and be third-personally perceived) without being really shared neither by those who radiate it, nor by those who perceive it, and can therefore be a very intriguing kind of non-felt feeling.39 It can b) be shared by those who radiate it but not by its perceivers (who may be focusing on something else), c) be shared by the perceivers but not by those who are radiating it, as in the emblematic case of vicarious shame or unrequited love),40 or d) be shared by all of them, as in the case of the deliberate (and successful) creation of a cheerful party atmosphere. Nevertheless, I wish to put these further complications aside and aim at merely expressing my view. The quasi-objective atmospheric feeling that is situationally encountered and shared (at least in a homogenous culture)41 affects those who experience it as a paradigmatic prefiguration, as “the atmospheric” or the “fundamental tone” (Böhme 2001, 59-71) that paves the way to all the somewhat idiosyncratic felt-bodily resonances it can trigger among the subjects. This leads to a participatory sharing condensed in objective-subjective hybrid instantiations that, unlike what 38 39 40 41

See Krueger (2016, 270 ff.). Cf. Schmitz (1969, 137). Goldie (2009, 193-194). An objection that is not irrelevant, I know, and should be discussed more thoroughly.

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happens when you share a cake (whose pieces become smaller and end), do not diminish but even strengthen the shared atmosphere if we share it with more people.42 In other words, the same type-atmosphere43extends across multiple individuals, who felt-bodily have relatively different token-atmospheric experiences, an integral-qualitative part of which might also result from the fact that they are non-thematically affected by the relationship they have with each other.44 The atmospheric we-experience is nothing but a well balanced condition of similarity and difference. What really makes an atmosphere a shared feeling is not its completely shared resonance but its objective-external nature. The problem is whether this necessarily implies the co-presence (physical or at least digital) of individuals in the same (lived) space. The undoubted fact that people can automatically-unconsciously mimic45 the feelings and even diseases46 of others, and synchronize with them, easily explains why atmospherological studies are often wrongly confused with those about contagion and sometimes are even tempted to predict the social spreading of atmospheres. However, a comprehensive explanation of shared atmospheres cannot be achieved by putting individuals first. It’s not enough to invoke a “contagion” (whatever that means) and it cannot simply be said that “emotions can be infectious—they can be ‘caught’ like colds” (Goldie 2009, 189), thus misunderstanding contagion in the medical sense. In fact, the person who is atmospherically infected might even be alone (and where does the contagion come from, then?) and has more than just merely imitated feelings. The atmosphere of a building or a landscape may be collectively felt, of course, and thus have a special qualitative nuance, even when we feel it on our own, i.e. without necessarily having others as co-perceivers and/or as perceived. Furthermore, while the contagion is supposed to be transcultural, an atmosphere is mostly involving within limited socio-

42 See Thonhauser (2018, 1005). 43 Which corresponds (in hermeneutics) to meaning and not significance (contra Sánchez Guerrero 2011, 267). 44 See Zahavi (2014, 117). As regards the feelings we deeply share with persons we haven’t seen in a long time, it is largely an illusion due to the nostalgic prominence of a very short part of our past life. 45 Through facial, vocal, postural mimicry and related feedback (Hatfield et al. 2014). 46 For example: fear, panic, joy, mania, anger, depression, embarrassment, patriotism, hatred, political and religious enthusiasm, but also allergies, obesity, smoking, sleep problems, etc.

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cultural configurations,47 and above all the contagious effect can hardly be seen as a feeling that individuals have of their own (in the proper sense).48 This seems to make the contagion theory and the over-inflated hypothesis of mirror neurons entirely superfluous, but leaves open the more metaphysical issue of whether a shared atmosphere necessarily implies that people thinkimagine what others could feel in the same situation.49 Since an atmosphere is neither constituted through the experience of coattenders50 nor resulting from the mere summation, aggregation and even co-regulation51 of their individual feelings—which at best contributes to it—, it can be only partly explained through empathy. Indeed, empathy maintains a difference between self- and other-experience—a distinction indispensable for it to be legitimate to speak of empathy—, generates only a weakened feeling and non-spontaneous and therefore partially inadequate expressions in the empathetic person52, and can even be used to deceive others.53 The same can be said for sympathy, as I can sympathize with somebody else’s atmosphere without personally sharing their feeling: for instance I feel (vicarious) shame for someone who “should” be embarrassed but is not and therefore is not experiencing the same feeling.54 3. What does atmospherological phenomenology have to say about this? Of course, accepting the idea that a shared atmosphere is only a typeshared feeling means embracing the neo-phenomenological distinction—a real joy and torment for this perspective—between the atmospheric 47 León et al. (2017, 4, fn.3). It is the context of “shared cognitive and conative attitudes” (Schmid 2009, 80). 48 Zahavi (2015). 49 But can we really imagine, for example, the atmosphere of a kabuki show for Japanese person as we can picture the atmosphere of a rock or jazz concert for Westerners? 50 Even if the co-presence certainly makes it harder to objectify this kind of atmosphere (Böhme 2007, 281). 51 Nor shall it suffice to call for the simple joint (moral, ritual, normative) commitment, as Gilbert (2014, 23) claims, understanding a collective emotion as a cognitive state, that is, as a collective belief (or even rule) made by an evaluative judgment accompanied by a joint intention to the action. 52 See Schmitz (1969, 141) and Landweer (2016, 165-166). 53 For example: my empathically understanding that you love your wife is quite different from loving her myself! (Zahavi 2014, 150). 54 On vicarious shame as a quasi-thingly atmosphere see Griffero (2017a, 79-92).

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feeling as such, somehow related to a highly idealized extension of the “we”, and the affective involvement it triggers.55 This distinction always raises a deluge of criticisms for its alleged reification, but I believe it is continuously confirmed by our everyday experience of atmospheres that we cannot resist (or change) and are even ashamed of not being able to resist (or change). In fact, as already said (see chapter 2, §§3-4), atmospheres can be emotionally authoritative and binding both in a direct-dystonic form, such as when a person in a good mood feels oppressed by a gray and sultry morning and attributes the same feeling to others, but also, in a more intriguing case, in a inverted form, such as when a beautiful landscape, precisely because of its beauty, sharpens someone’s (existing) sadness. Being sure of feeling something not strictly personal but rooted instead in the objective situation, individuals consider the experienced atmosphere as a weak or moderate collective feeling that is different from their subjective mood—which seems to me to fulfill the two requirements required to speak of a genuinely shared atmospheric feeling (plurality requirement and sense of togetherness)56—and that for this reason exerts an authority over them, whether they decide to adapt to it or resist it. This atmospheric/atmosphere detachability—to use Gernot Böhme’s distinction between the atmosphere before it involves us and the atmosphere once it touches us directly—is further proved by the fact that individuals can recognise and describe an atmosphere, thus adopting an observing point of view, without personally feeling involved, i.e. without an experiencing point of view (see chapter 4, §3). Given that only a lowintensity and incipient sharing of other people’s atmospheric feelings57 can really explain and justify this kind of uninvolving perception, it is an excellent example of individuals recognizing and therefore weakly sharing a feeling without being fully involved in it. This recognising without really sharing obviously happens in an involuntary way, because if individuals could always merely observe the environing feelings they would have an infallible tool to neutralise and even get rid of the undesired ones.58

55 Schmitz (1964, 144; 1969, 87, 96). 56 As requested by Thonhauser (2018). 57 Which does not necessarily imply normative (postulating that others follow social-ruled thoughts and feelings) or naturalistic assumptions (postulating that others’ affective states are fully subject to natural laws). 58 As Schmitz (1969, 150), despite certain hesitations, claims.

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That an atmosphere is shared59 means that its affective widespread quality identifies and distinguishes a situation from the other, leading to what is salient or not, possible or not. That is why every discussion on collective atmospheres also requires an in-depth examination of the possible types of situations. Using again Hermann Schmitz’s classification, it could be said that a situation is present or long-standing, impressive or segmented, deeply rooted or only inclusive, and that there are, as a consequence, different forms of atmosphere sharing, whose binding power depends both on the felt-bodily disposition or attitude60 of the people involved and on the degree of the atmosphere’s situational rootedness. To give just one example: some atmospheric feelings remain the same even when they are rejected and not shared (a landscape, for example, may be melancholic as such even if the spectator is happy), and other, more resonance-conditioned, exist only when they are embodied and shared (without brave people, for example, there can be no proper atmosphere of courage). 4. Atmospheres, climates and cultures We must bear in mind, however, that current language often uses “atmosphere” to also mean a socio-historical collective mood. Joseph De Rivera (1992), for example, suggests distinguishing between three types of collective affective states, which in a certain sense are objective, insofar as they provide an identity to society and govern the interaction between its members. They are a) transitory emotional atmospheres as short-term, situation-related affective group experiences focused on a particular event; b) intersubjective-social emotional climates reflecting longer-term sociopolitical conditions; c) broad affective cultures. This sociological differentiation should not be underestimated just because it is rather too simple. It reminds me of my own already-mentioned inflationary distinction, based on increasing objectivity and authority, 59 Unlike what Schmitz thinks (2014, 50, 55). 60 “Attitude” is a concept (Haltung) borrowed from Bollnow (1956) and Schmitz (Fassung). It means a “comprehensive overall shaping”, “a kind of disposition to share the moods of others or to distance oneself, how to share [them] and to which degree”, what “determines the personal quality of being attuned” (Trčka 2017, 1654, 1656): in short, an interaffective schema but (in my approach) on a felt-bodily level. This means that we are bodily connected to others in such a way that we immediately affect them, and they immediately affect us.

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between spurious, derivative-relational and prototypical atmospheres, albeit with some differences I intend to focus on. A) Firstly, I call atmospheres the long-lasting, more pervasive and unthematic states that De Rivera instead calls climate and culture (derivative atmospheres), but also those resulting from a subjective projection (spurious atmospheres) and above all the feelings that are independent of humans and come out of the blue (prototypical atmospheres). B) Secondly, people can be grasped by (and share) atmospheres even where they are much less aware of them than De Rivera assumes.61 After all, it is well known that numbness, vagueness and twilightness, precisely by precluding a clear separation from the environment, seem to strongly improve the atmospheric experience.62 The very fact that De Rivera’s “emotional climate” is not really independent of local-temporary group atmospheres and from historicalnational affective culture clearly demonstrates that the term “atmosphere” can legitimately cover the whole field of collective feelings. In my view, it also does justice to what Schmitz calls “historic climate” and “style”, referring to the sedimentation of pre-atmospheric felt-bodily basic moods that in turn help select the atmospheric components of a culture.63 The surprising correspondence between the trumpet sound in baroque music and an agile felt-bodily disposition, for Schmitz, testifies to such a feltbodily-shared atmospheric culture. Nevertheless, once again doubts become legion here. What is, for example, the current Italian atmosphere, understood as an historic climate? At first glance it’s easy to answer by talking about instability, distrust of institutions, populism, mistrust of the future, paranoid need of identity, etc. But this also applies to other countries and it’s difficult, of course, to conclusively establish how many individuals (including maybe imaginary ones) and what time-frame a collective atmosphere has to involve. Aggregate macro-studies do not secure a successful outcome, since people responding to questionnaires might be afraid or ashamed of saying what they really feel, or simply say what they believe the researcher wants to hear. The risk is, furthermore, that of adopting different standards of comparison, confusing aspirations (what people would like to happen), entitlements (what has to happen) and observations (what happens), 61 Schmid (2014, 6) speaks of pre-reflective self-awareness. 62 On atmospheres’ (perhaps) essential twilightness see Griffero (2017a, 103-112). 63 See Schmitz (1966; 1992, 317-331). On the not-always-clear relationship between atmosphere and collective basic mood in Schmitz see Trčka (2011, 191).

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temporary and more lasting moods, personal or even strictly characterial feelings and collective ones. Needless to say, then, that quantitative studies often underestimate that people of different neighborhoods, regions, social classes, families, ages, etc., may perceive their time quite differently, and that it is far from clear how a collective atmosphere is temporally and geographically extended.64 Do responses to a questionnaire reflect the way individuals feel in their environment or simply how they think the majority of other people are feeling? What’s the shared atmosphere of a community, the feeling that its people express (a quiet never-changing life, for example), or that which they dream of (a more innovative life)? Is it what people feel at home or what they feel, by contrast, when they are talking to strangers or spend some time abroad and unexpectedly realize (and appreciate) the state of well-being they unwittingly enjoyed at home? Or, again, is it a feeling in act (the distrust of the current government, for example) or the long-standing one (the confidence in the democratic reliability of their own country)? Lastly—but the list could go on, of course even the feeling of being lonely and distrustful of any collective dimension can be shared. What one experiences here is, in a paradoxical but philosophically evocative way, an atmosphere that is shared but made of non-shared feelings, which, incidentally, can sometimes even reinforce social cohesion and positive affect within a smaller social group.65 5. Atmosphere management What about politics, then? A society unable to support the necessary (positive or at least negative) shared atmosphere eventually disintegrates, but there is an obvious difference between an authoritarian-vertical integration (patriarchal authoritarian atmosphere) and a more democratichorizontal one (fratriarchal atmosphere).66 In any case, every integration aimed at maintaining, refreshing and strengthening social bonds, of course,

64 Pierre Bourdieu’s more socio-political notion of “habitus” and John Searle’s more mental-conventionalistic one of background are of little use here. 65 Rimé (2007, 310) rightly also reminds us that sometimes social sharing interactions (in the case, for example, of severe illness) do not bring interactants closer to one another at all. 66 See Denison (1928).

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comes with a cost,67 and unfortunately De Rivera’s appeal to “caring communities that are open to others” (2014, 229)68 is too generic to be politically useful. The key issue of the ethical responsibility and political management of atmospheres deserves a deeper debate and it cannot be pursued further here.69 After all, it is not even so certain that governmental policies have more responsibility for the emotional life of individuals than the expressive qualities of their environment, or that people are really able to intentionally generate atmospheres. I clarified elsewhere (see chapter 4, §5a) why one can legitimately get suspicious about affective-atmospheric voluntary planning. In fact—to summarize this point—designing atmospheres intentionally a) might only produce a sentimentalist and naïve (kitsch) situation (Geiger); b) may be flat out impossible, because atmospheres belong to a preconscious sphere that is prior to the subject/world dualism (Heidegger, Bollnow); finally c) might lead to an instrumental-unethical and only demagogic kind of emotional hygiene (Bollnow and Schmitz). Nevertheless, daily experience tells us something less ethically dangerous. When, for example, I go back home and, after lowering the lights and closing the blinds, I let myself go and enjoy my favourite music, I am certainly able to generate the desired atmosphere through a specific affective-environmental niche.70 Planning a certain environment— certainly made of things (a book, an armchair, a cup of tea, alone or with friends), practices, but above all a very particular light (dimmed, diffused, warm)—is what the Danes call hygge. By this term, which has almost become a national symbol with a double value (descriptive and normative), they mean a situation of safety, familiarity, intimacy, relaxation—in a word, well-being experienced in the moment thanks to the temporary interruption of the normally anxiogenic time flow.71 If no atmosphere could be voluntarily designed, no Dane could ever experience hygge, nor 67 For example: the authoritarian-vertical integration minimizes the ego and sacralizes obedience to authority, whilst the democratic-horizontal one maximizes competition and develops totally invented and necessarily populistic emotions. 68 See also De Rivera (1992), De Rivera, Páez (2007) and Páez, D., Espinosa, A., Bobowick, M. (2013). 69 For a few words on the subject (can democracy count on a given atmosphere?) see Griffero (2019a, 159-166). 70 An environmental tool like music can function both as an instigator and as a container of feelings (DeNora 2000, 57). 71 Mikkel Bille’s research (2019) focuses on this exquisitely atmospheric notion.

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could a work of art or a show, a rally or a popular demonstration ever be atmospherically effective—which is obviously absurd. Maybe what can be said is—and it’s quite different—that one can only stage derivative and spurious atmospheres, not prototypical ones. It is clear, for example, that I cannot, just by desiring it, generate the Christmas atmosphere in the heat wave of August and without all that it entails (the narrative, social and environmental setting made up of decorations, lights, cold, Santa Claus, perhaps snow, etc.). In addition, although an intentional atmosphere management is generally possible—as Gernot Böhme rightly says when talking about aesthetic workers (in a broad sense) and generators of atmosphere like characters, synaesthesia, social characters, etc.72—it is always made difficult by their lingering nature. Unlike a rapidly vanishing state like an emotion, the atmosphere of a person and even a society can eventually maintain and strengthen, or conversely reduce and even lose its power due to many factors.73 As soon as we introduce the time variable (see chapter 2, §8), speaking of long-term shared atmospheric feelings becomes more difficult. Atmospheric feelings, in fact, are interwoven with one another over time, reveal possibly conflicting sub-atmospheres within them, etc.74 Let’s now return to the atmosphere of the bank we mentioned above. The initial shyness and anxiety of individuals hoping for a loan might, for example, turn into pride (of being among those the bank can trust), compassion (for those, instead, the bank does not help), esteem (for kinder employees than expected), admiration (for the advanced digitalisation of financial transactions), satisfaction (for obtaining the loan), etc., or at least merge with them. Given this time variable, one simply doesn’t know if the 72 See Böhme (2017b, 92-94). 73 There can be variations in the perceptual field (distance of the perceived, brightness of the environment, speed with which one approaches the perceived, scale shift, change of mood, unveiling of a sensory illusion, a new perceiver’s physiological and felt-bodily conditions as well sensible-cognitive awareness, additional and divergent information altering the affective impact, shifting of attentional focusing, purely idiosyncratic experiences, response modulation influencing the initial behavioral response, effort to minimize or change the affective impact, etc.). Not to mention the perceiver’s variable sociological and/or aesthetic competence in detecting the atmospheric potential of a certain situation. 74 No matter what the poet says: “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions” (Hawthorne 2012, 195).

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shared atmosphere is that triggered by the first impression of environmental expressive qualities and affordances which paradigmatically seeps in the subsequent life of the involved person75 (this may seem unimportant, but however great the power of a projective-constructionist feeling, a major banking institution could not atmospherically be what it really is if it were a shack or a small and poor apartment on the second floor…). Likewise, one doesn’t know if instead the atmosphere is the following one, arising out of a changing mood or a blend of not-always-coherent feelings. What is important for my own atmospherology is that even when individuals reject or hybridize the feeling elicited by the first impression, they are still rejecting or hybridizing the initially felt and type-shared atmosphere. At this stage, one could also raise the objection of the so-called affect theorists. They would claim that a shared atmospheric feeling is neither a feeling nor an emotion but rather an affect, meaning by this a pre-personal and nonconscious, formless and pre-linguistic, meaningless and corporeal potential of intensity. In truth, a neo-phenomenological atmospherology has no trouble defining the felt-bodily resonance to atmospheres as a form of subpersonal bodily thinking and explaining it, according to Schmitz’s felt-bodily “economy” and “alphabet”, as an endless modification of the contraction-expansion relationship. And it would also have no trouble to consider atmospheres irreducible to the physical-bodily conscience and to the post-hoc rumination (maybe also conventional and ideological) of mind and language. However, this does not necessarily mean that an atmosphere is an unpredictable and indeterminate cosmic entity that is hardly distinguishable from matter movements and involves individuals without any regard to its content.76 In political terms, which are notoriously the most burning consequences of new affect theories, an atmosphere contains its own meanings and expresses them through its immanent affordances. Conclusion I certainly raised here more (also political, sociological, etc.) issues than I could ever solve. In order to avoid being surprised by the not-perfectly75 Which one conforms to or even “capitalizes” on: as is well known, the memory of a good atmosphere can affect the way one appraises one’s situations in the following days, weeks, etc. 76 So that when people have different affective responses, they don’t disagree, they just are different (Leys, 2011, 452).

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rational behaviour of communities (thus closing the stable door after the horse has bolted), I would like to highlight the widespread influence of atmospheres on the private and collective climate. My differentiation between three kinds of atmosphere, furthermore, aims at accounting for the extent of atmospheric experiences and at identifying ongoing but (ontologically and phenomenologically) different transactions with the world. These three kinds also imply different types and grades of emotional sharing, from the most shared prototypical atmospheres down to idiosyncratic spurious ones, as well as the temporary dominance of one of the two felt-bodily poles, in a continuum that goes from the more external atmosphere down to the projective-subjective one. But the way in which atmospheric feelings can be shared through felt-bodily processes is still an open issue and speaking of “sensitive communication and certainty”77 is just a first step. This is not only because the paradoxical but far-from-impossible situation in which “I feel something I don’t share” should be explained, but also because an entirely shared atmosphere seems to be a pretty rare experience within the logic of felt-bodily communication78: only one of its forms, the solidaristic incorporation, makes sharing and reciprocity possible through a collective type-shared atmosphere generating a collective felt body. All other forms of felt-bodily communication actually imply a felt-bodily understanding of others and a coordinated coupling that implies, just like dance and sport, a shared structure equality but also (partially or even fully) different feltbodily feelings. 79 In conclusion—although it may seem that the mountain has brought forth a mouse—my angle on the issue is that one can feel the same typeatmosphere but not really feel the token-atmospheric feeling as it is for others. Needless to say that a detailed (for example socio-statistic) analysis designed to remove the structural vagueness of atmospheres seems altogether out-of-place here. Being of the same nationality and age 77 See Gugutzer (2012, 64-67). 78 See Griffero (2017b, 2020b). 79 For an investigation based on similar neo-phenomenologic assumptions, according to which a shared feeling depends on a felt-bodily co-presence of the affected persons (felt-bodily or corporeal simultaneous resonance and communication or interaction) see Landweer (2016). Her promising proposal of bringing the evidence of “us” back to a second-person perspective would entail a longer discussion, which cannot be undertaken here.

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etc., for example, is not enough to understand and predict the felt-bodily resonance of which a spatial we-feeling is capable.80 Nor can this sharing be proven by directly asking people about their atmospheric feeling, since this could be too subtle and nuanced to be put in words, or, as is wellknown, they would likely not answer in complete honesty or perhaps simply repeat commonplaces. After all, every too-analytic-quantitative enquiry of our involuntary atmospheric experience is doomed to fail, if only for the fact that the scientific method—to put it with the necessary cynicism—is “the institutionalized maintenance of sangfroid in the face of surprise”(Massumi 2002, 233). However, is an experience without surprises still a real experience?

80 See Grossheim et al. (2014, 16).

7 Well-being as a Collective Atmosphere

1. Between the devil (objectivism) and the deep blue sea (subjectivism) Let’s begin under Adorno’s protective wing: We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer (Adorno 2005, 49).

As suggestive as this quotation may be, here Adorno says something inexact (to say the least): he puts wind in the sails of an entirely perceptual subjectivism, thus underestimating the relatively invariant affectiveexpressive qualities of phenomenal reality—in this case of the wind, as an outstanding example of quasi-thing.1 Without simply being either an accidental property of things or a stable and permanent object, in fact, the wind felt-bodily involves our everyday life more and deeper than things in the strict sense. The issue of happiness raised by Adorno, however, is no more problematic than the seemingly less ambitious one of wellbeing. Indeed, although it’s gaining increasing momentum as a core topic of humanistic research, the least that can be said is that well-being is a multifold and very controversial construct. What does actually constitute well-being? Can the complexity of human behaviour really be captured through a simplified paradigm like that? Does the current state of the art in well-being studies allow for a unified perspective? Instead of fully answering these preliminary questions I’d first like to say that well-being should be of fundamental importance to a philosophy like New Phenomenology, which is focused on emotional life and on how individuals feel in their environment. Nevertheless, this topic is surprisingly not at the 1

See Griffero (2017a, 9-14) and chapter 3, §2.

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heart of this new research paradigm. One might think that this is because New Phenomenology considers individual well-being as something that falls outside the sphere of scientific inquiry, whereby it declares the relentless decline of any introspectionist psychology. However, this is certainly not the case. A subjective appraisal of well-being may be considered to be objectively wrong because of its inaccuracy, instability and incomparability as well as because it does not produce the exact data that would be of use to policymakers. However, for New Phenomenology, this is definitely not an argument against the central phenomenological role of subjectivequalitative facts. Indeed, a neo-phenomenological and, as we already know, an atmospherological approach is mainly based on a first-person perspective and therefore perfectly entitled to consider subjective well-being as the starting point for a (non-quantitative) philosophical reflection. However, this approach succeeds in doing so without embracing any introjectionist assumption, i.e. without completely reducing the subject to an alleged inner and ineffable psychic world. After all, the boom of the notion of atmosphere in philosophy and in the humanities (see chapter 1) as well as the renewed success of the notion of Stimmung (ses chapter 5) and the propagation, so to speak, of a Stimmung for the concept of Stimmung itself,2 must obviously be framed within an explanation according to which sentiment (in its various nuances) exceeds Wittgenstein’s verdict on the linguistic borders of the world—an explanation of the human orientation in the world that is no longer exclusively based on reason or language. So let’s go step by step in approaching well-being. As usual, it’s best to start from the dichotomization into objective and subjective, a buzzword that afflicts any theory of well-being.3 On the one hand there are objective theories of well-being. These are grounded on the assumption that the affective-cognitive condition can be described either through behaviours and activities contributing to shaping the good life in accordance with shared values, moral principles, and universal features of “human nature”, or through economic data that can be collected and accurately measured. Both approaches believe that well-being depends on such objective issues such as whether a thing or an activity satisfies human needs and realises human nature, etc., or whether the economic situation of a person or a community has really improved. It is therefore quite normal that objective 2 3

Bude (2018). See Fletcher (2016).

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theories provide a list of things and activities or statistical and economic data they consider to be good for a person. This takes it for granted that something could be good for a person even if that person does not regard it favourably, i.e. that well-being (even if only as a capability parameter) has to be regarded as good 1) intersubjectively or (2) in a (stronger) realistcorrespondentist sense. Unfortunately, several studies contradict both these assumptions, showing very uncertain relationships, for example, between the position of a country in the Human Development Index ranking and the level of subjective well-being reported by its citizens. Two special variants of this objective approach are represented by supernaturalists and objectivist naturalists. For the former, an encompassing atmosphere of well-being, one that proves that our lives are not random or accidental, is only possible in a cosmos that is “teleologically structured” by God (or some other entity beyond the natural world). For the latter, instead, our lives are meaningful to the extent that we engage with objective values (the true, the good, or the beautiful, to use traditional terms) and our actions affect the realization of these impersonal values, without any supernatural entities being involved. Both obviously reject the utilitarian approach, according to which an action’s meaning is proportional to its contribution to welfare. Conversely, subjective theories identify well-being with the fulfilment of subjectively perceived desires and aspirations and assess it based on our attitudes of favour and disfavour. Thus, to know if a person is in a state of well-being or not, they must be consulted, asked what their preferences are and what their favour is for. In short, well-being here would entirely depend on the degree to which one subjectively endorses what one does, whatever it is. Hence the usual paralysis that comes with dualism: on the one side it’s difficult to explain how well-being can be given in the absence of subjective satisfaction; on the other it’s hard to accept that any activity whatsoever may enhance well-being, so long as the subject is pleased about it (the fact that, for example, Sisyphus might love pushing a rock up the hill until it rolls down, and want to do nothing else, is an implausible exception, because a subjective endorsement implies taking pride in what one does). From the point of view of atmospherology, according to which feelings are more outside than inside, it’s all about not reducing the whole reasoning exclusively to a first- or third-person perspective. To conceive of wellbeing as an atmosphere or, better, as a higher-order atmosphere involves exactly the attempt to gain relative objectivity without losing the value

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of “subjective facts” for a person. The point is not simply to claim the importance of a mix of first-personal attitudes (pride in what we’ve done, satisfaction with and even excitement about what we’re doing, confident hope for the future) or to repeat something self-evident—well-being arises from “actively engaging in projects of objective worth” (Wolf 2010, 26) or is experienced when “subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 1997, 221). Rather, it is a matter of stressing that well-being depends above all on how we live in our lived spatial environment. Which is why I believe that a pathic and atmospheric aesthetics may also legitimately include the issue of well-being in its sphere of competence. Many researchers think they’re getting away with the paralysing dualism by saying that objective and subjective dimensions have to be combined in any evaluation of well-being. This idea does certainly make sense. However, my suggestion is a bit different, and consists in avoiding both the objectivistic quantitative approach, completely dependent on the idea that the world can be reliably evaluated in the third person, and the subjectivistic one, completely dependent on the introjectionisticconstructionist idea that the world can only be viewed and created subjectively in its meaning and value. To do so, I’m going to fully use the heuristic potential of the aesthetic and neophenomenological notion of atmosphere as a feeling poured out into a certain lived, pre-dimensional space, i.e. as a shared feeling that, while being the same for all those who experience it, probably triggers relatively different subjective feelings. I believe that this approach can provide a deeper insight into the multiple phenomenological dimensions of well-being, in order to avoid the many oversimplified and reductionist perspectives that prove unable to see how eudaimonic and hedonic happiness are two correlated constructs and how well-being also depends on cultural and situational constraints. In short: my approach to well-being as a special, higher-order atmosphere does not necessarily have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea, being actually able to reject the strictly objective theories, the strictly subjectiveintrojectionist ones, and the reductionism they both inevitably entail. 2. What if well-being is an atmosphere? As already mentioned, my working hypothesis is that well-being can be defined as a very special atmospheric feeling, a deep mood that is both personal and collective (with all the problems entailed by the possible

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interaction or conflict of these two different dimensions). The legitimacy of this aesthetic (or, better, aesthesiological) and phenomenological assumption obviously relies on a definition of the phenomenon that does not focus, as far as possible, on its economic, psychological, medical and legal aspects, but that instead interprets the notion in terms of vital feeling. From this perspective, well-being is a feeling, certainly more stable and enduring than other simple feelings and, a fortiori, than emotions. Precisely because of its low affective intensity, it also can be compared to what the philosophical tradition calls Stimmung or mood (see chapter 5). Let’s try to make this a little bit clearer. Speaking of well-being in an atmospheric way does not only mean claiming that a mood may be a general indicator of well-being and thus probably provide a function in terms of self-regulation; rather, it means stating that well-being itself can be considered a (more or less positive) Stimmung or, if you will, a kind of composite atmosphere. When, for example, one makes the generic sweeping statement that people in our society are inclined to an accelerationist-urban-technological optimism or to a slow-rural-organic lifestyle, one is undoubtedly trying to establish, although with difficulty and a high rate of generality, what the prevailing Stimmung is and what kind and degree of well-being it implies. If we accepted De Rivera’s classification (see chapter 6, §4)), wellbeing should coincide with the intersubjective-social emotional climates that reflect longer-term sociopolitical conditions. In my view, well-being does not coincide with any single atmosphere, being rather the result, the condensation if you prefer, of different more localized and transitory atmospheric feelings. More precisely, taking up here my distinction between prototypical, derivative-relational and spurious-idiosyncratic atmospheres, I propose to assimilate well-being to the prototypical ones, which are objective, external and whose origin is and remains largely obscure. The greater spatial pervasiveness and temporal extension of well-being make it not just a composite atmosphere but a real higher-order atmosphere. It is clear then that a single atmosphere, especially in the course of a diachronic perception, can both let (attuned or dystonic) sub-atmospheres emerge, and be subsumed in an higher-order atmosphere—an idea that has not at all been discussed so far and that certainly deserves deeper thought. Conceived as a higher-order atmosphere, well-being is an evaluation (in a non-cognitive sense, obviously) devoid of any real focus and yet able to

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induce a certain, also more atmospherically localized, perception of one’s situation; in other terms, your well-being lets you decide what you perceive or experience and how you perceive or experience it (sometimes even prejudicially or in a conformist way, just think of the “spiral of silence”4), and it’s a precondition for you to be able to run risks or to wish to take your time to observe something carefully, instead of seeking distractions, etc. Here one can hardly avoid a certain degree of hermeneutical partswhole circularity, because on the one hand well-being probably results from the accumulation of momentary atmospheric situations connoted in a certain way and finally condensed into a holistic overall feeling without a real intentional object, while, on the other, those occasional atmospheric situations in turn are already tonalized in a certain way and therefore experienced on the background of some Stimmung (i.e. of a certain degree of alleged well-being). Due to (or thanks to) this affective circularity between single atmospheres and well-being as a higher-order atmosphere or Stimmung, it can be said that what we experience on the background of a mostly tacit Stimmung—which determines both what worldly entities we encounter and especially how we do so, what sort of mood we are in—in turn contributes, at least imperceptibly, to the modification of the overall Stimmung itself. It is not necessary to agree with the primacy that Heidegger assigns to the Stimmung of anguish and deep boredom, every objectification-focus of which would be nothing more than a form of repression and therefore an inauthentic affective situation (Befindlichkeit), in order to accept the idea that, like every Stimmung, well-being also provides pre-theoretical evidence and certainty to our being-in-the-world. In short—and it is not at all a contradiction—well-being is therefore both an atmospheric premise and an atmospheric result. It acts as a background, from which various figures and even antithetical orientations can emerge. This is the case of both dissidence and fatalism with regards to capitalism, now free from the illusion of perennial growth: those are two affective and well-being-related reactions to the same higher-order atmosphere that we could call “irritability” of affluent societies. Just as any other Stimmung, moreover, well-being can never truly be absent: it is always there, even 4

According to which if we think that our opinion is different from the perceived majority opinion (atmospherically felt), we are more likely to remain silent about what we think.

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if unconsciously. Just as silence necessarily implies a certain kind of communication, not feeling any Stimmung is in turn a Stimmung,5 and not feeling well-being means probably feeling a certain (very low, clearly) degree of situational well-being. In this context, well-being might also be considered as an existential feeling, that is,6 as a feeling of bodily state and at the same time as a way of experiencing things outside the body. By the way, whether one calls it an existential feeling or a higher-order atmosphere, well-being is still a (relatively conscious) “affective” state that prefigures all ways of finding oneself in the world and thus provides an orientation through which experience as a whole is structured. What is decisive for an atmospherological approach, however, is that even those who, when asked about their well-being, answer, for example, “I feel strange or confused”, are not just saying something about themselves but something prepropositional about the world as such.7 In other words, for them “everything feels strange or confused”: a feeling of ill-being that further strengthens the (evidently low) type of well-being they feel. Nevertheless, more than detailing this pre-articulate atmospheric sphere, it is now worth further problematizing my suggestion (i.e. the atmospheric nature of well-being), by bringing to light many of the doubts that weigh both on the notion of well-being as such and on its explanation in atmospheric terms. 3. A quicksand of doubts a) In praise of “indirectness” The first unavoidable question is whether and how well-being, also as an atmosphere, can be investigated and verified. Provided that every object requires its own specific method of investigation, what might be the most suitable one in this case? Being an integral part of our daily lives, can 5 6 7

As already mentioned, see Bude (2018). As Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) reminds us. “Belonging to the world is a pre-articulate, practical orientation and any attempt to reconstruct it in propositional terms is an over-intellectualisation of something that is presupposed by propositional thought” (ibid., 178).

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well-being as an atmosphere be really empirically objectified and studied? My suggestion is to re-evaluate the scientific value of “impressions”, and especially of the first ones, since they are caused by involuntary and certainly unintentional vital experiences. Being soft facts (tranquillity, trust, community, natural beauty, etc.)8, impressions are in this context more revealing than alleged hard facts such as the economic situation, demographic problems, unemployment, physical fitness, etc., and this is so not despite but precisely by virtue of their axiological impenetrability (if one can say so). But here we immediately stumble upon a mountain of doubts. It is the same paradox as that resulting from the conceptualization of happiness and the (already considered) question of the producibility of atmospheres, resulting in a performative fallacy. It can be summarised in the following formula: “to achieve well-being, forget about it”. Only in this way, with any luck, will well-being come: that is, as a by-product of pursuing meaningful activities and relationships. If one is reasonably successful in those activities, well-being may follow. This very widespread paradox brings to light the fact that pursuing well-being directly and deliberately is self-defeating or otherwise very problematic. Focusing our attention on our well-being through excessive critical scrutiny of our feelings actually erodes our well-being, as we feel that it is always insufficient or does not live up to our expectations or our imagination.9 Kant, for example, reminds us that “the more a cultivated reason purposely occupies itself with wellbeing, so much the further does one get away from true well-being” (Kant 1996, 51). To clarify: well-being needs indirectness rather than excessive self-seeking and self-preoccupation, because it cannot be pursued directly but only through other things that in turn must be sought not as means but for their own sake. This paradox also challenges the widely held belief that obtaining certain things and specific results will automatically increase our well-being, and valorises, on the contrary, the idea that well-being has less to do with acquiring what we seek than with the journey we embark on by seeking it. It’s well known that sometimes “anticipation is better than realization”, or, put in my terms, that protention is sometimes more atmospheric than 8 9

See Grossheim, Kluck, Nörenberg (2014). Many thinkers (including John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick and Immanuel Kant) agree on this point, though of course with partly different arguments.

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realization. This suggests that well-being comes from positive attitudes concerning the future, such as hope, faith, and optimism: that is, not from getting what we hope for, but rather from the impact of these futureoriented attitudes and their positive thoughts on the present. Moreover, this paradox also problematizes any question explicitly aimed at verifying the well-being of an individual and/or a community. This casts an equivocal light on the statistical tools normally used in sociological surveys (questionnaires and interviews). It actually seems that sincere answers about one’s well-being only emerge when one is not expressly asked about it. As I’ve already mentioned, thetical questioning about wellbeing immediately evokes relatively misleading theoretical constructs in both the questioner and the respondent. It is therefore preferable to resort to indirect questions, from the answers to which one can then infer something about the central question. This is an oblique method, if you will, which does not start from definitions but from how one feels here and now, and consists above all in avoiding strictly quantitative methodologies obsessed with omnipresent diagrams and tables. In conclusion, it goes beyond the examination carried out by strictly statistical questionnaires and does not ask direct questions about one’s level of well-being. From my point of view, a neo-phenomenological and atmospherological approach to well-being avoids all the strictly socioeconomic indicators that best represent development, preferring to focus (albeit indirectly) on the identification of subjective feelings—in a way, on what it is like to be me or you. In response to those who believe, for example, that the quality of political life might be measured by simply asking people how much they trust each other and their government, it can be argued that there is no clear empirical evidence of a positive relationship between governmental policy performance and citizens’ political trust and participation—let alone their felt-bodily (individual and collective) resonance, which, after all, is what matters most in an atmospherological conception of well-being. In summary: it does not seem possible to pursue well-being directly, nor does it seem possible to investigate its degree directly. And there’s more: indeed, many other problems quickly come up. b) How widespread is well-being? Let’s assume that well-being is a higher-order atmosphere. This view entails other problems, the first of which—actually applicable to any atmosphere deemed sufficiently shared—is to establish how widespread it

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is, i.e. what its spatial and temporal boundaries are. Despite the constitutive vagueness of the theme under investigation, a phenomenological orientation cannot fail to ask such a question if it aims at achieving some precision, for example if it wishes to go beyond the (albeit correct) assertion of the holistic and, so to speak, Gestaltic character of well-being, thus understood as a whole irreducible to its individual components. And this question needs an ontological-methodological reflection to be answered. I will come back to this point. For now it is enough to ask if, for example, it is legitimate to talk about different affective zones and climates even if they are simultaneous and neighbouring. The problem becomes more complicated when the question concerns the atmospheric well-being of a historical period and/or a community, because one runs the risk of levelling out disparate emotional tones: think of the very different Stimmungen affecting an immigrant or a resident, a man or a woman, an “apocalyptic” or an “integrated” intellectual (Eco 2000, 17-35), a permanent or a precarious worker, etc. c) What about its intensity? Does well-being necessarily certify an increase in the intensity with which one experiences what happens? The question makes sense, because it does not seem at all irrational to prefer a life that steadily delivers medium pleasures over a life of wild oscillations (i.e., a series of intense pleasures and intense pains), even if this second life features a greater amount of pleasure overall. Yet some prefer the so-called “James Dean effect”10 and think that a triumphal life is better than years of positive but mediocre value. One could rightly suggest that those who believe in the James Dean effect are misled by their aesthetic intuitions from the outside, because “Dean’s actual life makes for a better story than the imagined longer life, but this clearly has nothing to do with whether it is a better life for him” (Bradley 2009, 160). Another objection is that prejudice in favour of the James Dean effect gives too much importance to the last phase of one’s experience (end) or to its emotionally strongest part (peak), rather than to the whole of one’s experiences, thereby uncritically repeating the well-known but misleading feeling that the value of later-occurring goods is greater than that of 10 Diener, Wirtz, Oishi (2001, 157).

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previous ones. Here’s an example that seems very telling to me: common sense tells us that our well-being would soar permanently if we won a multimillion-dollar lottery, and it would sink irreversibly if we lost our sight. Nevertheless, it seems proven that these emotional highs and lows do occur, but only for a short time and that, in tune with our range of happiness, within a year from these events, levels of happiness and therefore of wellbeing usually return to about where they were before.11 d) Doubts about the comparison and development of well-being over time One may also wonder whether well-being is immediately atmospherically felt, through a sort of special self-reflection evidently endowed with transparency, or whether it becomes perceptible only ex post, that is, if examined at a certain distance and only by comparing one’s current situation with the previous one (be it one’s own or the general one). This comparison cannot actually be avoided, because when we experience something we also always seek justification in the eyes of others, also compared with their experiences or our other ones. This powerful conditioning is inherent in human nature, but it has intensified in the postmodern world, where belief in objectively defensible values is either at risk or has evaporated altogether. This is consistent with the widespread psychological finding that our well-being (or our unhappiness), for example that which we draw from consumption of goods, depends primarily on the comparison with the consumption standards of other people. In other words, well-being as a composite atmosphere depends, both in the experience we have of it and in expressing it in a propositional form if asked about it, is highly conditioned by this sort of “negative externality”—which in turn, of course, is atmospherically perceived. However, the relationship between well-being and temporality is more complex than that. In fact, it is reasonable to think that an atmosphere of well-being is perceived only in the presence of a historical course perceived as an improvement with respect to the past or to other people.12 The problem actually affects every atmospheric perception. Although the perception of well-being as an atmosphere is linked to the immediacy of the here and now, of a certain lived space and a certain presentness, one cannot ignore 11 See Brickman, Coates, Janoff-Bulman (1978). 12 People with chronic diseases or disabilities often perceive themselves as ordinary men and women coping with extraordinary circumstances and, as a consequence, report good levels of well-being (Delle Fave 2013, 9-10).

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that it also has its own temporal dynamics, so much so that shifts in our attitudes and experiences can alter our assessments of when and to what extent we were well during other periods of our lives. By living longer and more deeply, we could indeed acquire a wider range of comparisons to use in assessing our lives. This means that our attitudes can shift, so that it makes sense to say, for example, “I thought I could never be happier than I was in my youth, but now I know that was an illusion”. It should not be underestimated, as evidence of the key role of our first atmospheric impressions, that even in this case the alleged happy atmosphere lived in youth does not cease to be such, at least insofar as it acts as a paradigm of the following affective experiences (see chapter 2, §8). Therefore, our conception of atmospheric well-being has to be dynamic rather than static. Another well-known mental “cramp” related to temporality is that processes that go from bad to good are considered to be better and preferable than processes that go from good to good, and obviously than those going from good to bad. This is what research has called “treadmills”. A lot of money simply feeds a “hedonic treadmill”: the more we buy and have, the more we want. Testifying to our continuous adaptation to circumstances, this means that economic growth only satisfies us for some time, because with a growing availability come greater desires, so that we return to our previous state of dissatisfaction (think of the distinction between needs and desires).13 So, when somebody says that governments should aim at maximizing their citizens’ consumerist happiness and well-being, they are forgetting the risks of reducing policies to products, which would end up generating in citizens a spiral of progressively rising expectations that in principle would be impossible to fulfil. Finally, one can’t forget the fundamental gap concerning the relationship between momentary experiences of well-being and long-lasting wellbeing. Hence the need a) to not mistake potential well-being with the actual state of well-being; b) to pay attention to the fact that small doses of well-being do not necessarily add up to greater well-being; and finally c) to acknowledge that the well-being based on momentary pleasurable experiences, which come from satisfying homeostatic needs such as hunger, sex, and bodily comfort, is quite different from a well-being based on longer-term enjoyable experiences, that is, on good feelings that people 13 See Böhme (2017c, 9-42) for the specific atmosphere permeating the so-called aesthetic capitalism. For a discussion of this point with Böhme on this point see Griffero (2019d).

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experience when, with time and effort, they do or become something that goes beyond what they were. These are just some examples of the difficulties faced by an analysis of well-being based on a time paradigm. Indeed, even the most quantitative theories add further difficulties. In macroeconomic terms, the paradox of economic growth, for example, is well known: average incomes in Western democracies have doubled over the last fifty years, but levels of happiness seem to have remained virtually unchanged. I am a long way from the Miserism International with which many philosophers are affiliated,14 but I don’t think it’s wrong to assume that excessive concern for safety, comfort, and material well-being ends up being detrimental to optimal development. In other words: money contributes to well-being less than we usually believe. It immediately and powerfully increases people’s wellbeing by rescuing them from poverty, but thereafter it contributes little to it. Which partly explains the surprising fact that “we tend to misuse money once we have it, thus becoming caught up in endless routines of getting and spending, rather than building wealth to increase freedom and peace of mind” (Martin 2013, 38). e) Consistency and continuity of well-being The concept of well-being as a higher-order atmosphere may assume peculiar relevance if understood as a balance rather than as the maximization of positive affect. The problem arises especially when well-being is identified with meaningfulness, that is, with what one could define as a life rich in purpose and direction, pride and self-esteem, fulfilment and depth, autonomy and maybe joy on the part of the agent, and—which is far from secondary—admiration and inspiration on the part of others. Nevertheless, the degree of meaningfulness of one’s life is always determined not only by the objective value of the projects and the degree to which the agent is suited to and engaged by them, but also by the degree to which these projects add up to a balanced and coherent whole. As we are reminded,15 the value of a series of achievements is enhanced when these achievements complement and build on one another and thus give well-being a “progressive” shape by which earlier activities positively inform the later ones.

14 And which is well mocked by Sloterdijk (2016). 15 For example by Kauppinen (2012, 368).

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4. The pathic way to well-being As already mentioned, one of the main questions is whether well-being can only be pursued indirectly as the by-product of meaningful activities and relationships, and can therefore only be recognised indirectly as the by-product of reflections (and questions) about something else. The pathic solution I’m suggesting involves two options. The first one goes by the name of “flow”. 1) Referring to the metaphor of a current that carries one along effortlessly, adopting the flow means16 focusing on the process of living well (eudaimonic approach) rather than on the outcomes of this process (hedonic approach). It implies engaging in valued activities and experiences that challenge us, while providing immediate and positive feedback, regardless of whether episodic pleasures are involved. This intense experiential involvement in moment-to-moment activity shows three additional subjective characteristics: a) a loss of self-consciousness, since attentional resources are fully invested in the task at hand; b) a lack of anxiety about losing control, which makes daily life tiring; lastly c) an altered sense of time, since, in the flow, the moment-to-moment activity does not allow one to focus on the experience of duration,17 so time appears to be passing quickly or faster than normal. According to these features, well-being could consist in the atmosphere which these flow-experiences, relatively rare in everyday life, are immersed in. Everything seems to be able to produce a flow, as soon as clear proximal goals structure one’s experience effectively, providing both a balance between perceived (not necessarily present) challenges and perceived (not necessarily present) skills—neither overmatching nor underutilizing them—and immediate feedback about the progress that is being made. Relative unawareness and full dedication to what is being pursued leave the individual with little doubt about what to do next. Thus, well-being as a higher-order atmosphere might be a condition that allows us to live as many flow-experiences as possible, that is, activities that promote an intrinsically rewarding experiential involvement and, for this very reason, depend more on motivations and processes than on functional terms and outcomes. In fact, a real atmospheric crisis can occur in a person 16 See Csikszentmihalyi (2014). 17 Friedman (1990).

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or in a society, when they or it fail to find enjoyment in a productive life and need both increasingly elaborate means of control and repression, and artificial stimulations to be productive. In my view, activities that are so wasteful and disruptive as to interrupt the flow or make it impossible both contribute to, and follow from, the generation of wider toxic atmospheres. Consequently, the higher-order atmosphere of well-being should consist in complete absorption in what one is doing, being and allowing for an autotelic activity that is never dictated by a pre-existing intentional structure located within the person (a drive) or in the environment (a tradition or script), i.e. rewarding in and of itself to such an extent that the end goal is just an excuse for the process itself. Atmospheric well-being would therefore be recognizable by its acting as a facilitating framework that pushes one to do things for their own sake. Nevertheless, to avoid any temptation to fall into a melioristic pragmatism, it must be stressed that attention and deliberate planning don’t play a key role in the flow and that this kind of experience should be understood in a more pathic and (in a broad sense) passive key. The widespread trend towards constructionism of many flow theorists must also be avoided. Indeed, it’s not true that one can find a flow in almost any activity (working at a cash register or washing clothes, for example!) and find instead pleasant activities (going to the cinema or playing football) boring and anxiogenic, as if only subjective challenges and skills, and not objective ones, could really influence the quality of one’s experience. Atmospheres (including that of well-being) are quasi-objective. They are pervasively present in the lived space outside individuals, and act as quasi-things, felt-bodily involving individuals and groups and sometimes even resisting their effort to change or neutralise them: all this helps defeat any radical constructivism, according to which all feelings only exist within individuals and are therefore at their disposal, so much so that when people perceive them in their environment it would be only because they have first unconsciously projected them outside. All this also helps show that self-consciousness does not at all coincide with felt-bodily non-affectivity. Being at times conservative and at other times expansive, well-being, atmospherically understood, is actually a comprehensive affective situation making life better and more fluid even from a felt-bodily point of view—thus avoiding, for example, the wish to be elsewhere and to do something else. 2) On the basis of a felt-bodily approach to the philosophy of atmospheres I can say that an individual’s flow is the resonance of a more general

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atmosphere of well-being that still needs to be investigated. However, in order to better understand this pathic approach to well-being it is necessary to keep in mind that this resonance sometimes consists in accepting, rather than in fully resolving, conflicts. In smell-the-roses moments, for example, affirmation and keeping things the way they are seem to be the simplest of things, for in these cases goodness and beauty seem to be everywhere if only we are attuned to them. As Epictetus teaches: “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well” (Epictetus 1983, 13). The paradox of a felt-bodily submission is that, as is well known, surrendering to what happens and losing control can liberate us in ways that contribute to well-being. As Frankfurt (1989, 89) put it, “a person may be enhanced and liberated through being seized, made captive, and overcome” by an object, because they are “guided by its characteristics rather than primarily by [their] own”. The pathic concept of well-being I have sketched here, according to which persons are at their best when they “have lost or escaped from [themselves]” (ibid.), obviously sharply conflicts with the post-Enlightenment belief that the autonomy and arbitrariness of the individual, considered as such to be positive qualities, are increased by multiplying the number of options. We know from experience that multiplying options sometimes lessens our happiness by ruining the atmosphere of well-being: too many choices can be burdensome, because they place responsibility (and potentially blame) on us, but also because evaluating options takes time and adds complexity and confusion. We are sometimes actually more satisfied when our decisions are not so easily reversible and, committing in a spirit of permanence, we do not feel free to walk away at any time. I know this may sound like an old wife’s tale, regressive if not masochistic, but I think it’s worth repeating that, except in extreme cases, we really feel atmospheric well-being only when we grapple with sufficient options to avoid boredom, but also let ourselves go to what happens and (in a sense) let decisions be made for us. Is it really so irrational and regressive to think that we probably already have everything we need to experience well-being, and must only change our attitudes? To focus on what we already have and on our present instead of pursuing happiness outside ourselves and in the future: this is the first aspect, controversial but stimulating after centuries of hyper-rationalism and life-design delirium, of a pathic way to well-being. Nevertheless, what better qualifies this approach and takes it beyond a stoic mood, as already mentioned, is the effort to root well-being as an

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atmosphere or historical climate (in a non-metaphorical sense) in some felt-bodily disposition. This is the witness and the filter, subjective but also collective when it takes the form of a felt-bodily “style”, of that atmosphere. Therefore, well-being presents itself as an atmosphere experienced by the felt body, without coming exclusively from it (being at most favoured by it). It only ceases to be latent in particular cases, expressing itself externally in a specific way: consider the emblematic case of art. Just as the sound of a trumpet in baroque music seems to felt-bodily correspond to a certain corporeal tonality of that historical period (brilliance and agility), so the degree of well-being of a historical era could be seen in the kind of feltbodily communication (see chapter 6, §4) that individuals of that period established with others and with things. Members of a certain community might not feel exactly the same thing, but at least share a certain “style” of feeling, an affective and cognitive aftertaste that does not necessarily coincide with their entire individual biography. Since there is no collective organ of common feeling, they are perhaps only made aware of this style by the feedback of the cultural products of that time. In other terms, they only realize how they are feeling as a community through the style of their lives and work and/or when differences and conflicts emerge. Leaving aside the controversial question of whether such felt-bodily affectivity is experienced in an individual way and later extended to others or is experienced as something collective and shared from the beginning— obviously an atmospheric approach leans towards the second option—, my thesis is that collective well-being is an atmospheric feeling or a higher-order atmosphere that synthesizes a historical climate. It provides individuals with an overall existential style that is also expressed in their overall feltbodily state and attitude. One obviously has to go beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological “habitus” as the mere reflection of a certain social position, as well as beyond John Searle’s analytical idea of an implicit background to linguistic-social action as a merely conventional and mental-individualistic state. The concept of atmosphere or emotional climate, I think, is able both to recognize and enhance the right autonomy of the affective sphere and to focus on the atmosphere of well-being understood as a collective phenomenon. For this very reason, the concept of atmosphere, especially if applied to a repeated and longer-term non-temporary state, acting therefore as an higher-order atmosphere, borders with that of “situation”. In fact, a collective atmosphere is shared because its widespread affective quality identifies and distinguishes one situation from the other, leading those who

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are inside it to what is salient or not, possible or not, etc. That is why every discussion on the collective atmosphere of well-being also requires an in-depth examination of the possible types of situation. Using Hermann Schmitz’s broad classification (see chapter 6, §3), unlike the atmospheric feelings that remain the same even when they are rejected and not shared, others are so resonance-conditioned that they exist only when they are embodied and shared: without people who are feeling well, for example, there can be no atmosphere of well-being, exactly as without brave people there can be no atmosphere of courage. Nevertheless, it’s clear that there is a big difference between the transient atmosphere of well-being that, for example, I am experiencing this morning in my neighbourhood and the atmosphere of well-being that surrounds me in the long run and that, encouraging or depressing me, distinguishes an area, a city, a country and even a historical period. In order to better understand well-being as a pervasive and durable emotional phenomenon, Joseph De Rivera’s mentioned distinction among three types of collective affective states may also be useful.18 He distinguishes between a) transitory emotional atmospheres as short-term, situation-related affective group experiences focused on a particular common event (a funeral, a collective situation, a party, etc.), b) intersubjective-social emotional climates reflecting longerterm socio-political conditions and also referring to how the people of a given society emotionally relate to one another (for example taking care of one another etc.), and lastly c) broad affective cultures, that is, long-lasting situations. These collective states influence emotional atmospheres but are also influenced by them. Similarly, one could say that a certain individual and momentary atmospheric well-being (even as a spurious atmosphere) interacts, in ways to be investigated, with a certain atmospheric wellbeing understood as a more extended climate in time and space (derivative atmosphere), as well as with a certain affective culture characterized by its own level of well-being (prototypical atmosphere). In short: a certain degree and quality of collective and long-term well-being summarizes and condensates in an overall state the well-being quality of localized emotional climates and even idiosyncratic-temporary atmospheres. Thus differentiated, well-being as an atmosphere proves to be, in a sense, both an outcome (as a higher-order atmosphere) and a premise (as a single atmosphere or its occurring again) of our everyday affective life.

18 See De Rivera (2012).

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Let me offer an example that brings to light all the difficulties entailed by applying this theoretical construct. At first glance, it is very easy to say that, for example, a community dominated by fear of the future, whose perceived wellbeing is consequently rather low, certainly “breathes” a negative atmosphere (as an emotional climate and even as a broad affective culture), which in turn crystallizes in multiple points of condensation, more or less justified and predictable, of temporary or longer duration. But what is really responsible for the atmospheric (poor) well-being of this community? This question is hard to answer, but what’s certain is that if well-being comes from some basic human emotions, it makes little sense to look for its cause in specific political, economic, cultural, etc. situations. In fact, nobody can confidently claim either that politics generates a collective mood and is therefore responsible for it, or that politics is just a reflection of a previous affective culture and simply uses it for its own purposes, for example by enhancing atmospheres within which the leadership’s initiative is readily accepted, etc. We have already seen how difficult it is to assess, for example, the atmospheric well-being of Italians today (see chapter 6, §4). This very question—what is Italy’s well-being like as a higher-order atmosphere or historical climate?—shows all its ambiguity and complexity. Instability, distrust, etc. are not so specific as not to apply to other countries, and it’s very difficult to conclusively establish how much this atmosphere of wellbeing is extended in space and time. Most people, for example, seem to find relatively few connections between their personal situation and the national one, being rather influenced by the atmosphere of their home or of the media. Similarly, optimists and pessimists, the elite and members of a minority group, people of different professional or health status, etc, may well perceive their atmospheric well-being differently. Aggregate macro-studies are not of much help, since the answers, for various reasons, may be misleading. Does it make sense, for example, to rely on the usual method that tries to measure the tension between ideal and real, provided that a utopian person, for instance, tries to bring these two dimensions together? As already mentioned, even the feeling of being lonely and distrustful of any collective dimension, which seems to be obviously contrary to well-being, can instead be shared and sometimes unexpectedly engender a certain level of well-being, for example by reinforcing the social cohesion and positive affect within a smaller social group that feels different from, and better than, the rest of the population. As you can easily see, looking into well-being as a higher-order atmosphere is like walking on quicksand. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean

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that it is superfluous to keep asking what well-being is and how to feel it, or that one must entirely rely on seemingly resolutive quantitative tools. The situation is therefore difficult but not desperate, because in our everyday perceptual and affective life we surely and continuously experience affective fields, which are almost never totally subjective and are often reinforced by a common narrative and physical setting. To a shared atmospheric wellbeing different individuals can obviously react with relatively different— sometimes even antithetic—individual emotions, yet they are still all reacting, more than it may seem, to (filtering) a common affective field that is poured out in their lived space and time. As already said, well-being as a higher-order atmosphere is the relatively enduring affective quality of the overall environment but also the temporary affective quality of an individual. As regards the objection about the vagueness that allegedly invalidates any atmospheric consideration, one can answer that vagueness is consubstantial to any atmospheric perception and it would therefore be grotesque to delude oneself into eliminating it by means of a rigorous quantitative method. The atmospherological approach can only be as scientific as its object of investigation, and must not at all ape the naturalistic-scientific method. An experience based on the elimination of surprise is something totally unrelated to a pathic aesthetics, which instead revolves around involuntary and first-personal life experience. A completely unsurprising experience, indeed, perhaps is not even a real experience. 5. Meaningless affect: political doubts Finally, a few words must be spent on the foreseeable objection that would be raised by the so-called affect theorists. As already noted, they would probably claim that a shared atmospheric feeling, and therefore also wellbeing as I understand it, is neither a feeling nor an emotion but rather an affect, meaning by this a pre-personal and unconscious, formless and pre-linguistic, meaningless and corporeal potential of intensity. Although the felt-bodily resonance to an atmosphere could certainly be a form of subpersonal bodily thinking, and atmospheres could prove to be irreducible to the physical-bodily conscience and to the post-hoc mental-linguistic rumination, the atmosphere of well-being is not a cosmic-material entity devoid of any content. A good political or well-being atmosphere, therefore, depends not only on personal taste and/or a certain degree of intensity, but rather appeals

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to quasi-normative criteria that should be able to limit, as far as possible, both toxic and manipulative atmospheres and the emotional climates whose undeniable intensity does not necessarily imply a high level of wellbeing. In short: when trying to establish what an atmosphere of well-being is, one cannot be content with simply setting against some manipulated atmospheres other more intense but equally manipulated ones. Paradoxically, today even neurosciences underline that affect is independent of signification and meaning. Indeed, it has long been accepted that there is a gap between the subject’s affect and their cognition or appraisal, which comes “too late” for reasons, beliefs, intentions, and meanings to play the role usually accorded to them in action and behaviour. The consciousness-independence of action and behaviour, however, does not mean that the brain must be considered the privileged site of affective phenomena and that felt-bodily and even physical processes taking place outside the brain should be reduced to mere background conditions. Furthermore, it’s by no means necessary to fully accept Benjamin Libet’s influential but very controversial19 thesis—according to which the conscious mind intervenes with a half-second delay (compared to bodily-neural processes) to play the role usually attributed to it in human behaviour—in order to admit, quite rightly, that free will consists not so much in initiating intentions as in responding to them after they arise. A neo-phenomenological philosophy of atmospheres certainly shares the goal of shifting the attention away from meaning or “ideology” and onto the subject’s sub-personal material-affective responses. It knows only too well (like rhetoric and pragmatist linguistics) that philosophy, science and even common sense have overvalued the role of reason and rationality in (at least) politics, ethics, and aesthetics, thus disembodying the ways in which people think and act, and underestimating the fact that the conscious meaning of a message is often of less importance than its non-conscious affective resonances. But to say, on the basis of a misunderstood pluralism, that different intensities of affect can influence and transform individuals 19 Libet (2004) imposes an artificial requirement when he asks his subjects to pay conscious attention to their movements. These experimental movements are part of an overall intentional situation that includes the subjects’ willingness to participate in the experiment (exactly like skilled pianists intend to play the music even if they may be unaware of all the single movements their fingers must make during a performance) and their knowing what actions they were expected to perform.

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for better or worse without regard to the content of said affect, and that democracy is consequently not a normative value but just a personal taste, is really unacceptable. Not all subliminal inclinations are the fruit of fraudulent manipulations, just as not all affective intensities are equal and equally desirable, otherwise it would be unimaginable how a political activist might strategically intervene in a particular situation and, what’s worse, democracy would be a political system that somehow draws on the same media resources as those used by totalitarian regimes. What atmospherology is interested in, therefore, is not venturing into this Heraclitean metaphysics of affect, but rather phenomenologically delving into different ways of generating atmospheres and different people’s felt-bodily affective reactions to them. Sure, today’s renewed debate on Stimmungen and the very fact that so many scholars in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly fascinated by the idea that political decision is itself produced by a series of non-human or pre-subjective forces and intensities could also be considered a mere compensatory-conciliatory expedient, that is, an exquisitely kitsch alibi to underestimate our split and conflictual society. To dispel that suspicion, today’s affective turn and atmospherology ought to include a higher rate of criticism and not simply repeat that human beings are bodily creatures imbued with subliminalinhuman affective intensities that unconsciously condition their beliefs. Even the affect theorists’ recent efforts to avoid a crude reductionism by distancing themselves from genetics and determinism is doomed to failure, both because they end up in naturalism anyway, albeit based on a dynamic and non-deterministic biology, and because they throw the baby out with the bathwater by resorting to an all-embracing impersonal affect as a deus ex machina that solves every open question. The fact that emotion or feeling (in the strict sense) is a subjectivepersonal but felt-bodily (and not socio-linguistic) subliminal filtering of an impersonal affect does not imply that one should neither consider the mind, as affect theorists do, as a purely disembodied consciousness (hence a new dualism), nor simply take impersonal intensities as a new (Kantian) transcendental apparatus. Nigel Thrift (2004, 64) is then certainly right in reminding us that “political attitudes and statements are partly conditioned by intense autonomic bodily reactions that do not simply reproduce the trace of a political intention and cannot be wholly recuperated within an ideological regime of truth”. Nevertheless, in order to avoid any excessive

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irresponsible non-normative drift, I’d like to underline again (see chapter 4, §5) a few critical remarks about what I mean by “atmospheric competence”. In my view, a “good” atmospheric competence should be able, first of all, 1) to distinguish between “toxic” and “benign” atmospheres, 2) to accept the fact that, given that there is no undisputed privileged place for awareness, the best option is to learn to experience very different atmospheric experiences interacting with each other (a division of affective powers, so to speak), 3) to favour and foster the atmospheres in which an early pathic-immersive stage may and should be followed by a stage which will necessarily be emergent (regardless of whether the critical distance is made possible by the atmosphere itself or by the degree of experiencer’s emancipation). I don’t see any other ways to at least partly immunize oneself against today’s widespread atmospherization. The ways that are usually outlined are too naïve- nostalgic or too cognitive-ascetic and escape from any indepth reflection on the complicated and unsolved issue of the relationship between the affective and the cognitive realm. Of course, it would be very easy and liberating to resolve the issue of well-being once and for all by emphatically saying “I don’t care about truth. I want happiness”, or, following Bachelard’s rejection of existentialist gnosticism, by simply taking comfort in the fact that “Being starts with well-being” (Bachelard 1994, 104). Indeed, even if this were true and convincing (which it isn’t), it would still be necessary to explain what “happiness” means: a “vast program” that, after all, is no easier to solve than well-being.

8 Two Oppressive Atmospheres Permanent Emergency (Including Covid) and the Uncanny

Despite the cliché that atmospheres are ineffable states oscillating between presence and absence, I will try, as I have done elsewhere, to specify phenomenologically and ontologically what an atmosphere is. In particular, I am interested in the atmosphere of well-being (chapter 7) and in two different but similarly oppressive atmospheres: that of a permanent emergency and that of the uncanny. First it should be stressed, however, that we-feeling has been traditionally explained in unsustainable ways (see chapter 6), first of all through the metaphor of emotional contagion and the so-called “membrane model”. Although this model (and its latest trendy variant based on mirror neurons) continues to influence how we see any phenomenon of propagating replication (today especially the viral logic of media and social networks),1 it presents several flaws: it is too reductionistic in its biologistic nuance,2 it doesn’t work in cases of solitary (therefore non-mimetic) atmospheric perception, and it fails to explain a feeling that individuals have of their own (in the proper sense).3 Another inadequate explanation consists in taking affective-atmospheric intersubjectivity as an inferential (or projective-simulative process encapsulated in the brain (the so-called “Theory Theory”), since “our” collective atmospheres go beyond any internalist-representational and third-person approach and need instead an enactive-embodied concept of dynamic interaction among persons (physical and felt-bodily resonance, affect attunement, coordination of gestures, facial and vocal expression perceived as such and others).4 An atmosphere of permanent emergency, therefore, is based neither on a merely coincidental (but necessary) joint 1 2 3 4

Nixon-Servitje (2016). See the incomprehensibly overestimated book by Brennan (2004). Zahavi (2015). For a critique of internalism, which posits an inner world that excludes any immediate perception and real (circular) interaction, disembodied subjects and too static brain mechanisms (in fact, the mirror neuron system can only function

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attention nor on a one-way influence like empathy5 or imitative sympathy;6 neither on a mutual influence7 nor on a purely epistemic influence.8 Finally, an atmosphere of permanent emergency is not even based on a (perhaps revised) form of contagion,9 whether in the sense of Le Bon’s unidirectional-iconic hypnotism (individual->crowd)10 or in that of Tarde’s imitative hypnotism, maybe understood as an “hypnotic draw of the events of the market itself” (Sampson 2012, 168). Now, a collective-shared feeling is a peculiar form of intercorporealityinteraffectivity, i.e. of a non-mentalising interaction between perceiver and perceived (animated or not) based, in the best cases, on a mutual incorporation. That being the case, what exactly is an atmosphere of permanent emergency? Certainly it is also an “emergent” feeling,11 where it’s hard to separate the causes from the effects. This is what Anderson (2014, 156), call “emergent causality”, meaning that one cannot ever be sure of the character of an atmosphere before registering its bodily effects. I’d like (see chapter 3) to call it “quasi-thingly bipolar causality”, meaning that here cause and action coincide. I’ll now try to examine the atmosphere when embedded in a context of embodied and meaningful interactions) see FuchsDe Jaegher (2009). 5 The empathized person might actually not even be aware of the existence of the empathizing individual, so empathy does not necessarily result in similar affective states. 6 An imitation-based influence does not exclude but, on the contrary, implies partially different emotions. 7 The outcome of persons communicating in a harmonious way, in fact, can even be mutual estrangement. 8 First of all because a collective mental belief does not need to involve emotions and felt-bodily resonances. 9 “A process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes” (Schoenewolf 1990, 50). 10 “Le Bon understood democratic crowd contagion to be guided by a dangerous unified mental inclination toward images that could subordinate freewill, pervert truth, and provoke revolutionary acts of violence. It was in fact the mass hallucination of such images through the unconscious crowd that became the mechanism of Le Bon’s hypnotic contagion” (Sampson 2012, 162). 11 Here I freely follow De Sousa’s (2014) emergentism, according to which it is not possible to predict the nature of a collective feeling on the basis of the properties of its constituents. This applies even more to atmospheres, since their “material” components can condition, without ever fully determining, specific atmospheric effects. This means that atmospheres are so singular and ephemeral as to supervene on (and therefore to exceed) their (always somewhat conventional) generators. For this non-deterministic meaning of “condition” see Anderson (2014, 161)

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of permanent emergency (today due to COVID-19)—a threat obviously aggravated by the trauma of its recurrence. I shall do so while being well aware that the mutual causation reverberations it implies can also become indefinitely complex and their outcome may even be unpredictable. 1. Terror in the air Some of today’s ordinary emergencies and pervasive catastrophism (from climate change to terrorism and transspecies epidemics) are not properly perceivable or measurable, much like the air.12 Provided that talking about atmosphere without perceiving phenomena always proves to be problematic, the pandemic atmosphere is really a strange combination of a completely involuntary natural atmosphere (virus transmission), a partly involuntary social atmosphere (relationship between people but also between people and things or the environment) and often a fully intentional, even “toxic” media atmosphere (emotional manipulation in a positive or negative sense).13 It is precisely on this deficient phenomenalisation of the situation that the implausible no-mask movement usually counts—how can something be so dangerous if it escapes any sensory perception?— thereby spreading an obscurantism that is nothing but the other side of a prior naive scientism. The pandemic atmosphere also brings out a crucial point of the affective condition of the twentieth century, which was already brilliantly predicted by Peter Sloterdijk. For him, the discovery of air as a philosophical, political, ecological matter and its use as a medium for the manipulation and control of the atmosphere (also in the literal sense) would be the most remarkable sign of the modern artificial environments. It all began on 22 April 1915 (the Battle of Ypres in World War I), with the use of toxic (chlorine) gas14 12 Even when the air threat has a physical cause, the resulting emergency atmosphere might be not visible, as in the case of the ash clouds caused by the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, threatening flights. Cf. Metten (2010) also for an introduction to the linguistic analysis of the communication of collective atmospheres. 13 However, it is legitimate to question the excessively dualistic meaning of the notion of ‘manipulation’ (distinguishing too rigidly between manipulator and manipulated). Indeed: is there such a thing as a docile subjectivity falling under the hypnotic influence of an ever more media-saturated urban landscape? 14 Sloterdijk’s thesis (2016) is powerful and suggestive even though it may be historically inaccurate, as he forgets pre-modern anticipations of bioterrorism such as the Greek theory of the miasma and episodes of water poisoning or the

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to menace not the enemies’ bodies but their space or atmosphere as a living condition. The awareness that terror might now come from the air would symbolize the typically modern tendency to make the implicit explicit— here the air as a threatened vital immunizing sphere. This event would thus mark the beginning of “atmoterrorism”, based on the threat of unbreathable space and impossible to attribute to a specific agent (unless by blaming the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism and even carbon...). The discovery of being completely dependent on “air conditioning”, rapidly exploited in its metaphorical sense by any regime propaganda committed to designing huge mass events and impressions engineering,15 becomes particularly relevant in the current pandemic (even more so than in the case of Chernobyl, which is similar in many ways).16 Unfortunately, we all realize that we are extremely porous to the environment, i.e. that our sphere17 or inner atmosphere18 proves to be devoid of immunizing power against the aggression of a global outside enemy. And only “conspiracy” theories consider this enemy as a simulacrum artificially constructed by distressing media atmospheres acting as software compared to hardware (supranational and anonymous financial and economic processes). 2. Hope in sub-atmospheres In an atmosphere of permanent emergency, now become a transcendental cognitive-affective bubble providing an emotional imprinting or an

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Christian interpretation of earthquakes as a sign (divine atmoterrorism!) (Usher 2019). Instructions for the 1917 front suggested constant use of masks. But what mask do we really need to protect ourselves from the spectacular media catastrophe, from “the mental effects of storage [that] are organized on the basis of atmospheric threatening environments, media fictions of friend/enemy and the business of fear of an expanding industry of fear” (Milev 2012, 302)? “We sense the invisible by means of the atmospheres that are co-determined by it—comparable to the situation in the 1980s when insights gained from the discourse on nuclear power (the non-noticeable nuclear radiation as opposed to the clearly noticeable nuclear threat) brought the atmospheric phenomenon to the center of phenomenological debates revolving around ecological aesthetics of nature.” (Rauh 2020, 95) That is today, according to Sloterdijk, no longer a bubble or a globe but a foam. See Laermans (2015, 115).

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affective logic,19 the future is unpredictable20 or completely lost. One lives the endless time of a present “saturated with a sort of restlessness” (Anderson 2014, 129), whose most obvious symptom is phobic flight and social withdrawal. Given that it is hardly possible to voluntarily create contrary atmospheres, the only hope comes from the periphery of this logic, from the blind spots that, relatively uncontrolled by the predominant affective core, might arouse new and conflicting atmospheric feelings. In fact, if it is true that prototypical atmospheres seem irreducible to a series of interacting component parts, sometimes, when one experiences derivative or spurious atmospheres, they exhibit an internal articulation which must be taken into account and, as a result, can take the form of a kaleidoscopic affective situation. Just as the predominant emotional quality of a feeling can conceal secondary (even opposite) feelings (traces of hatred even in love!), the permanent emergency atmosphere can show inner sub-feelings of hope that give a specific tone to the entire emotional state. As regards the atmosphere of permanent emergency, this can occur in two ways. The first is when a) the predominant atmosphere of a nonlocalisable insecurity coexists with more objective and less pervasive emotions (fear of the concrete effects of the virus, for example) and thus becomes permanently or occasionally something else (an emotion of fear). The second is when b) the predominant atmosphere of emergency find remedies in sub-atmospheres21 (or minor atmospheres22) that are almost opposite in character. For example, a culture of fear spread by power apparatuses may arouse not only the need for protection and decisionmaking but also an atmosphere of deep solidarity among the opponents of the regime. In the same way, the predominant atmosphere of pandemic emergency may arouse in large sections of the population a previously unknown solidarity (in the best cases), or a search for the scapegoat (in the worst ones). The less reactionary version of this consists in a latent atmosphere of resentment (possibly manageable in a political way) directed towards those who can enjoy privileged isolation in holiday locations or at least are not forced to constantly work under the risk of contagion.

19 Cf. Ciompi, Endert (2011, 12-44). 20 A narrowing of desires and expectations that even the paralysis of births seems to certify. 21 This means that an atmosphere is always already angled (Ahmed 2007-2008, 126) but not that the atmosphere as such is totally relative depending on the experiencer’s state. 22 Anderson (2014, 142, 152).

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3. Non-intentional emergency Therefore, the collective atmospheric-affective condition of permanent emergency surrounds and envelops the people of a certain historical period—one could perhaps call it, following Ratcliffe, an existential feeling23—but is felt individually. In this second sense, it is the quality of the “aboutness” that is decisive. In the most orthodox phenomenology, this aboutness is identified in an intentional object, whereas from a neophenomenological point of view the atmosphere is rather captured by a pre-reflective and relatively non-directional “operative intentionality” (Merleau Ponty)24 for which perhaps it is not even appropriate to speak of proper intentionality. The fact that the enemy today is identifiable with the virus does not take away the fact that the emergency is temporally and spatially so indeterminate that it turns fear into real anguish. While an acute emergency, referring to the formal object of a precise feeling, is paralyzing, a permanent emergency calls for further resonances due to its indeterminate significance. In our case, for example, the fear of the virus (the formal object, which is somehow anthropomorphized-personalized) gives way to the fear of its impact on my life (significance).25 Now, it is already doubtful whether a normal atmospheric perception can be explained in an intentional way,26 because what appears to be the intentional object proves to be rather just an occasional condensation area with respect to the real anchoring point. In the same way, an atmosphere of a stable emergency, just like that of anguish, seems completely irreducible to any intentional directionality. This is not only because, in anxiety and emergency, what is first a condensation area can later become an anchoring point, or because they have in principle several focal points at the same time.27 Rather, it is because they do not seem to have any real anchoring points until they can be transformed into fear thanks precisely to the identification of some determined anchorage points (which proves that Bauman’s liquid 23 See Ratcliffe (2008). 24 “We find ourselves in the midst of an affective atmosphere, and thereby caught up within a series of meanings which are not of our own making, before the atmosphere is localised as belonging to specific objects and situations” (Trigg 2020, 2). 25 A distinction similar to Schmitz’s one (anchor point/condensation zone). 26 That is, according to the dogma that every psychic act is intentional. See Griffero (2019a, 45-55). 27 As Micali (2015, 233-234) claims.

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fear is rather anguish).28 This is what usually happens when, by breaking the intrinsic visualization limits of certain distressing but imperceptible emergency situations, someone manages to spread an image of them, a sort of phenomenal surrogate possibly disturbing enough to arouse apocalyptic fear: this is the case of the effective media image of the ozone hole in relation to global warming. The latter instance was a sort of positive-educational side of the unfortunately more frequent negative tendency, especially in cases of collective psychosis, to undue visualizations of shadowy figures.29 This neo-phenomenological criticism of affective intentionality could make one think that I consider a collective atmosphere as something anonymous and impersonal. It is therefore legitimate to ask oneself what density, quantity and kind of interaction is produced in the case of an atmosphere as a collective feeling. As for the emergency atmosphere, it is clearly unlike the one produced, for example, in a strike parade. There, as is well known (also from the frequent negative consequences of the herd mentality), the synchronicity provided by slogans and marching steps ends up homogenizing and anonymizing the contribution provided by personal expression and individual behavior (of course except for those who can participate with reserve and perceive the collective feeling “at a distance”, without a real felt-bodily resonance). Well, if there is no reason of principle not to define an homogeneous-anonymous emotional space as atmospheric, it is certainly true that only a plural emotional space is atmospheric in the strong sense.30 This is based on a real felt-bodily interactive sociability, on an affective attunement consisting more of dynamic balance than static homogeneity. In a plural emotional space, individual expression does not degenerate into individualism precisely because it is aroused by the same shared type-atmospheric feeling.31 But what specific type of felt-bodily communication underlines this shared atmospheric feeling? 28 What “is at its most fearsome when it is diffuse, scattered, unclear, unattached, unanchored, free floating, with no clear address or cause” (Bauman 2006, 2) is a basic mood (or atmosphere) more than a single feeling (fear). 29 As in the case of the so-called “phantom anesthetist” whom the residents of Mattoon (Illinois) in September 1944 considered responsible for dozens of gas attacks (later revealed to be imaginary). See Bartholomew, Victor (2004). 30 Using here a distinction proposed by Trčka (2016). 31 “What is needed is a broad overlap of perspectives, which allows for a variation of (i) an atmosphere’s material emanations, and, (ii) a variation of affective expressions, with both material emanations and affective expressions participating in the overall unity (or style) of an atmosphere. Thus, just as an affective atmosphere can be articulated in a broad range of specific objects (without being reducible to specific things), so it can also be felt experientially

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4. Situational and felt-bodily resonances a) Situation. However, in order to specify the neo-phenomenological approach to the emergency atmosphere I need to introduce two fundamental concepts. The first is that of “situation”, understood here as a totality cohesive in itself and specifically profiled with respect to its outside. A situation is also constituted of internally diffused meaningfulness made of states of things (the pandemic), programs (to contain the pandemic) and problems (how to behave in private and in public), which as such can be hardly identified individually.32 Based on Schmitz’s distinction between situations (common or personal, ongoing or stratified over time, rooted or inclusive), the pandemic emergency atmosphere is certainly a common situation that runs the risk of becoming also stratified and inclusive, so pervasive that it can be neither forgotten (aren’t you a bit irritated by the normal physical contacts between actors in a movie?) nor ascribed to something to blame: it would be absurd, a sign of obsession with the “legibility of the world”, to look for a precise cause of what is happening in order not to accept its mere contingency.33 In the absence of face-to-face contact, the pandemic situation is influenced by the media even more than before—it’s hard to say whether in a largely supportive way (the abused slogan “everything will be alright!”), or in an antagonistic fashion (“every man for himself!”). This atmosphere is now turning into a long-lasting and sedimented mood, of which the individuals’ felt-bodily resonance is both the condition and the outcome. It is not sufficiently clear that positive feelings are enhanced by becoming collective while negative ones, like the emergency we-feeling, instead and expressively in a range of ways (without being reducible to those specific modes of expression)” (Trigg 2020, 4). This approach can be widely shared even if it excessively detaches an atmosphere from the single objects and situations in which it can condense, which are not infinite and arbitrary—after all, neither are the potential feelings of resonance. Besides, if an atmosphere is not a cause in the traditional sense (as Trigg rightly underlines), it is however, as already mentioned, a cause identical to the action (causal quasi-thingly bipolarism). 32 See Kammler/Kluck (2015). 33 “If we search for such a hidden message, we remain premodern: we treat our universe as a partner in communication. Even if our very survival is threatened, there is something reassuring in the fact that we are punished, the universe (or even Somebody-out-there) is engaging with us. We matter in some profound way. The really difficult thing to accept is the fact that the ongoing epidemic is a result of natural contingency at its purest, that it just happened and hides no deeper meaning. In the larger order of things, we are just a species with no special importance” (Žižek 2020, 14).

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weaken, relativize and become more manageable, as certainly happens for collective shame, for example, which is notoriously less intense and burning than individual one. Nor is it clear if the increasing positivity to COVID of public figures could come as a “consolation” and induce fatalism or generate further and even greater worries. b) Felt-bodily communication. The second necessary neophenomenological concept needed here after “situation” is that of “felt body”. Precisely because the pandemic atmosphere is now a mood that relates us to the world in a pervasive way, its sharing must be also investigated in its felt-bodily dimension. This obviously applies differently for those who merely “witness” what is happening and for those who instead are directly involved as patients or health professionals. For the latter, anguish may even turn from anguish “for nothing” (as the tradition from Kierkegaard to Heidegger says), obsessively in search for an object on which to project itself, into a less pervasive and therefore more manageable fear.34 Indeed, dealing professionally with the virus may no longer incorporate the whole sphere in which one passively leads one’s life and the virus thus loses its unlimited hypnotic power.35 Unable to project their anxiety onto a determined intentional object that could be sensorially perceived, simple witnesses, instead, feel their body (the physical and, even more so, the felt one) being subjected to unavoidable passivity and a severe hypochondriac form of suffocating (social and private) narrowness.36 34 “Subjects in the fear condition spent considerably more time in group interaction relevant to the situation they were facing than did subjects in the anxiety and ambiguity conditions. In addition, measured cohesiveness in the fear groups was higher […] Emotions resulting from specific and identifiable external agents tend to produce affiliative motivation and collective coping, whereas those emotions having no clear environmental referent (and that may, therefore, seem less ‘rational’ or reality-based to subjects) do not” (Morris et al. 1976, 678). 35 In the case of the permanent emergency atmosphere, reactions are less acute and more indeterminate than those triggered by fear. There are no diseases due to sympathicotonic vegetative excitation (palpitations, perspiration, hyperventilation) and somatic aggression (trembling, fainting, coughing, nausea, gastrointestinal distress, vomiting, skin rashes, convulsions, or even pain from cramped muscles associated with general muscular tension), nor is there increased sensory attention. 36 “Avoid touching things which may be (invisibly) dirty, do not touch hooks, do not sit on public toilets or on benches in public places, avoid embracing others or shaking their hands . . . and be especially careful about how you control your own body and your spontaneous gestures: do not touch your nose or rub your eyes—in short, do not play with yourself” (Žižek 2020, 43).

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Examining collective affectivity apart from the phenomenology of acts and its dogmatic pan-intentionalism, the concept of “felt-bodily communication” can be particularly helpful. In fact, it means that every perception forms an ad hoc comprehensive felt-bodily unit with the (animate or not) perceived thanks both to motor suggestions and to synaesthetic properties acting as bridge-qualities between the two poles.37 Pedestrians on a sidewalk can miss each other without thinking too much about it or measuring their mutual distance: they simply co-act without any reaction time (i.e. without there being a gap between perception and reaction) and form temporary units that are felt clearly only when they fail (i.e. two people bump into each other). In the same way, the feltbodily communication/interaction aroused by the COVID atmosphere forms solidary (or unipolar)38 units that neither exclude a hierarchical articulation (between virologists and simple commentators, for example) nor presuppose full awareness of said hierarchy. The impulse given to all those involved by this shared atmospheric (albeit indeterminate) focus does not need to be experienced by all at once and in the same way. Two dancing partners certainly engage in a solidary bodily communication even if one of the two leads and the other follows; the musicians of an orchestra play together despite the diversity of scores and instruments. In the same way, the unipolar interaction among different individuals and based on a coordinate but involuntary way of feeling, i.e. on fine tuning entailing an energetic increase, also implies apparently quite different reactions and expressions (in terms of personality and role).39 Although we are all stressed by the pandemic, for example, young people are certainly less so than the elderly, healthy people less so than those with comorbidity, those who can afford a period of isolation less so than those who deal with crowds of people every day, fatalists less so than those who believe they can control every aspect of their existence, etc. But it is worth noting that even those who distance themselves from the collective pandemic feeling still share it, at least partially, precisely insofar as they try to react and resist it. The only necessary condition to describe this emergency atmosphere as a collective feeling is the conscious felt-bodily co-presence—even exceeding the sensory perception—of the individuals who make up the 37 See Schmitz (2011, 29-53) and Griffero (2016a, 2016b). 38 According to Landweer’s vocabulary (2015, 2016, 155, fn. 28). 39 Individual differences in the felt-bodily resonance of emergency are a result of people’s prior anxiety levels, their disposition toward critical thinking about non-directly perceivable emergencies, and now also their particular location in a communication network where talk of an emergency soon finds consensus.

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group. This way they can experience the attitude of things and other people40 through their own, i.e. through an incorporation that is not restricted to whatever is near their skin but extended to any object and form they might be interacting with. This felt-bodily co-presence urges us to perceive the world’s affordances with a tone that makes a range of possible actions possible or impossible. It is not true that the affordances of other bodies are now missing and the world is therefore disembodied.41 The temporary pandemic suspension of the body, for those at an age in which bodily-sexual relations are unavoidable rites of passage, does not cancel all affordances but only accentuates negative ones, because other bodies (and even all the objects in which the virus could survive) are perceived with greater intensity, inducing almost intolerable felt-bodily reconfigurations. Our atmospheric-emotional agenda is not so much missing as severely impoverished and changed in character (except in the rare cases where the lockdown helps one rediscover ex contrario the fascination of one’s prior extroverted life). c) Spatial narrowness. I must now examine the relationship between lived or affective space (Stimmungsraum) and felt-bodily communication. The first thing to say is that COVID certainly does not develop a unilateral incorporating co-presence, as occurs when a tennis player incorporatesanticipates the ball’s trajectory (even if some decentered hypnotic fascination cannot be entirely excluded: think of the much awaited tragic statistics of the pandemic in the daily bulletin). Rather, COVID results in a narrowness shown first of all by our felt-bodily withdrawal from the common-intercorporeal lived space. Dramatically emptied, this space results in an oxymoronic “collective-shared” isolation (a “negative” cohesion, so to speak)42 whose felt-bodily resonance—whether it is more or less paralyzed, more or less physically localized (chest, cervical and intestinal area, etc.)—primarily expresses itself in dodging other people and falling silent, being still or even moving blindly. This resonance, resulting from a tacit (background) perception permeating a certain 40 “Suggestion need not refer to human interaction but can instead describe a sociality which is built on the relationship between humans and objects. Rather than a hypnotizing subject, that is, we may identify a hypnotizing object, tendency etc.” (Borch 2005, 19; see also 2014). 41 As Fugali (2020, 84) claims. 42 Which totalitarianism could rely on, for example by spreading an atmosphere of anguish made of the isolation of subordinates, or an atmosphere of that mutual distrust that inhibited any political engagement (to the benefit of the regime).

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space, is also continuously strengthened by perceiving other people’s fear or anguish (different in quality and intensity) pre-reflectively,43 that is, without needing to be objectively-statistically proved or causalisticindirectly communicated. The lived space thus loses its usual and reassuring affordances and becomes a distressing environment, also consisting of present-at-hand objects that are no longer the guiding lights of our actions and rather become threatening entities as soon as they are touched by anyone other than us. This applies in particular to public objects, to any densely populated urban environment, and even to the simple act of “being outside”, as it is impossible to tell when and where you are further away from (or closer to) the virus. The “good old” outer reality is actually still here, with its streets, shops, restaurants, cinemas and theaters: it’s just that they all closed, we can’t enjoy them any longer and, more generally, our usual fluid and pre-reflective urban directionality seems more and more uncertain. Even beautiful spring weather with its usual centrifugal-expansive resonance in us, which stood in striking contrast with the health crisis during the first pandemic wave, can’t deceive us about the healthiness of being outside. Our homes, especially when we are told that family members may infect us, are no longer a zone of immunity demarcated against intruders and other calamities. They become areas exposed to a plague44 and claustrophobic situations populated by nightmares, anguish and loneliness,45 places that stand no chance against an enemy that defies any hopes of control, corrodes internal integrity, and ignores the borders that usually define and defend identity. Even the injunction to stay at home, which had a protective and de-distressing effect at the beginning of the pandemic, sounds depressive when the emergency appears to continue indefinitely, and seems overtly paradoxical if home must be regularly sterilised.46 The normal intracorporeal oscillation between narrowness and vastness, continuous centering and decentering, is here almost entirely lost. Like anguishanxiety, a permanent emergency arouses a combination of contraction and 43 Rather than knowingly, as instead happens in the presence of emotional-expressive cultures that are foreign to me. 44 Contagion, in fact, requires contact, absorption and the breaking of a boundary, thus connoting both a process (transmission) and a substantial, self-replicating agent (the virus). See also Barsade (2002). 45 It also applies to the “open space”, now transformed from a place conceived (somewhat hypocritically) as propitious to work interaction to a place particularly exposed to contagion. 46 This cannot be relativized with the obvious observation that at home we coexist everyday with thousands of bacteria and fungi without worrying about it.

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impulse to (stopped) flight,47 which may increase tension almost to the point of paralysis. The dominance of the centripetal direction in normal conditions can favor existential self-reflection; now instead it qualitatively converts the surrounding space, making danger and otherness ubiquitous. Hence a feeling that is close to the uncanny but that, unlike it, cannot be overcome through social contact. The narrowness brought by the emergency forces us to isolation, to a here-now-being-this-me—what New Phenomenology calls “primitive present/presence”—that is, a present marked by a pessimistic affection of waiting48 (which is also a “bad adviser” insofar it excludes compromise or deferred solutions, and even imaginative escapes). All this makes it impossible to find escape outside, which is usually granted to fear as a circumscribed feeling. It is also impossible to find a socially productive reaction in solidarity, given that “contagious diseases […] affect not only individual bodies but also the social fabric itself. Helping is dangerous, if not deadly for the helper—and often of no effect for the patient” (Horn 2020, 22). d) Protopathic hypochondria. It is also worth noting that the experiencer’s particular somatic reactions, which used to be contextualized in a more widespread manner and now are instead paranoidly focused on a single etiology (COVID), also symbolically reflect the nature of the perceived threat. As we have been taught—among others, by the already mentioned Mattoon case—coughing and throat irritation can be consistent with the perception of poison gas, and skin rashes are common when people believe they have had contact with dangerous chemicals. During the COVID pandemic, similarly, it is normal to pay too much attention to the tiniest change in our bodies and worry at the first manifestations of any symptoms (at the first cough and sneeze!). And it is known that hearing others cough may increase coughing and therefore hypochondriac anxiety.49 But even in the absence of epicritic symptoms somehow connected with strictly organic aspects, the emergency atmosphere gives rise to a disturbed protopathic sensitivity. The lack of lifewordly familiarity and constancy aroused by this atmosphere implies the end of circadian rhythm synchrony, hypochondria, obsessive-compulsive traumatic stress disorders 47 Cf. Fuchs/Micali (2013). 48 It is well known that in conditions of ambiguity, expecting sickness can cause sickness symptoms (Hahn 1999). 49 See Bartholomew, Victor (2004, 242). “From a perceptual perspective, hearing another person cough prompts others to monitor quickly their own throat, thus increasing the probability that someone would become aware of throat irritation and emit a cough” (Pennebaker 1980, 87).

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and addiction of various kinds. A certain (negative) role is also played by face masks, which limit intersubjective understanding and the possibilities of empathizing even with friends and family; masks determine a global renunciation of other people’s faces, smile and more generally their meaningful expressiveness (except maybe the exchange of glances, whose interpretation can however be misleading) always making meeting other people a bit spooky. 5. Uncanny atmospheres A second type of depressing atmosphere is that of the uncanny. Freud’s general approach to the uncanny is well known. He seems to borrow the concept from Schelling’s definition of it as “something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light”, and, without knowing the context of the quotation (Philosophy of Mythology), appears to be particularly interested in the “ought”. This confirmed to him the idea that individuals are split into a deep self containing familiar secrets (fears and desires), and a current self repressing those contents through some inhibiting law (“ought”). Consequently, the uncanny for Freud is a disturbing feeling of disorientation and uncertainty which does not coincide with the encounter with the unusual, because what is unusual is rather the unexpected encounter with the familiar, i.e. the impossibility of a complete de-familiarization of the repressed secret. But the lowest common denominator of uncanny experiences attested by Freud (the “fact of involuntary repetition”) only partially helps us to better understand what an uncanny atmosphere is. First of all, I have to reject the possible objection that an atmospheric phenomenology should only focus on present (and not hidden) phenomena. There are two reasons for this. First, the uncanny refers to something hidden that is manifested in what is present-familiar, and second, the phenomenological epoché necessarily implies a (non-pathological) uncanniness undermining everyday trust in the world. It is worth adding, in particular, that my neo-phenomenological atmospherology turns to philosophy precisely by feeling irritated by situative disorientation. Far from being a topic like any other, uneasiness and the uncanny are for this approach both the starting point (personal disquiet and defamiliarisation) and one of its salient results (insofar as the affective externalization breaks a sedimented introjection of emotional life). In other words: the uncanny as an atmosphere “is not a subjective

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state produced by intrapsychic conflict, as we would find in Freud” (Trigg 2020, 537). Now, there are two caveats to keep in mind. The first is the following: talking about everyday uncanny atmospheres requires abandoning toogeneric definitions of the uncanny, such as “the uncanny emerges when a dark, irrational, essentially Romantic trait within the self or within a society comes to ‘light,’ invades rational space, and refuses to be assimilated into a comprehensible, enlightened agenda” (Johnson 2010, 9). It also requires moving beyond the late-Romantic axiology by which only secret Gothic mansions or dark streets could be real uncanny. Certainly one does not have to go into situations like these to encounter the little “monsters” arising from the uncanny.50 A second caveat is whether the uncanny is a specific atmosphere, or whether any atmospheric perception, insofar as it somewhat implies a phenomenal and ontological disorientation due to outside (non-psychic) and authoritative feelings, is already uncanny in itself: two perspectives that, as we may see, blend in the concrete analysis. a) Ontological ambiguity and vagueness. Just as the uncanny51 is neither only homely nor only unhomely, neither only familiar nor only strange (but rather strangely familiar),52 every atmosphere, being neither inside nor outside, is always uncanny (at least in a mitigated form). This is because of its vagueness and indeterminacy, which question any ontology based on thingly borders and any para-Cartesian dualism between inside (psyche) and outside (material world). Because of their airiness and ghostly elusive coming and going, i.e. because of their violation of the law

50 Just to give an example: uncanny situations “include a ‘crisis of the proper,’ a ‘crisis of the natural,’ ‘a commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar,’ a ‘strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality,’ fears of dismemberment or loss of body parts, or the sudden perception of aspects of the self as foreign, to name just a few. These experiences of the uncanny, all of which are essentially varieties of decentering and uncertainty, are typically prompted by encounters with ‘curious coincidences,’ various kinds of ‘mechanical or automatic life,’ tokens of death, or remnants of the past experienced out of proper place and time” (Sandberg 2015, 18, quoting freely Royle 2003). 51 Also think of the Lacanian term extimité, meaning the merging of inside and outside. 52 “Strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange” (Fischer 2016, 10).

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of non-contradiction and ontological dualism,53 atmospheres both “are” and “are not”. Just as “the feeling of uncanniness is largely resistant to rationality” (Trigg 2020, 334), atmospheres lack the intentional structure of usual emotions and are uncanny insofar as they refuse “to concretise into a circumscribed, objective danger” (Fuchs 2019, 103), so that their components “oscillate between foreground and background” (ibid.). Unlike the atmosphere of derealization (loss of all meaningfulness) and that of horror (when an uncanny atmosphere condenses around certain objects or persons), every twilightness and foggy perceptual situation can therefore be considered weakly uncanny. b) Mise-en-scène and paranoid subjectification. An uncanny atmosphere implies “a changed structure of perception itself—a change that can be described as subjectification and fragmentation” (Fuchs 2019, 110). The loss of appresented aspects present in any normal perception thus leads to a delusional mood because of which “the object becomes instead a mere surface—a simulacrum, a mise-en-scène” (ibid, 112). This defamiliarisation and ambiguity between real and unreal ends up in a paranoid version of the phenomenological “healthy” tua res agitur. This brings out every time a “fatal chain of circumstances” that invalidates rationalistic culture—a culture that is considered superior to the animistic view and uses the idea of “coincidence” to neutralize everything that happens out of the blue. Suggesting a fatalistic supra-personal intentionality—as when Freud finds himself in the same street of a redlight-district again—this affective heterodetermination triggers a deep cognitive dissonance54 in a world now devoid of any wonder. c) Aggressive authority. A dispossession based on the subjectification of what happens and a desubjectification of its agency are especially found in prototypical atmospheres,55 which are immediate and groundless. These 53 What Bernstein (2003, 1113) says of the uncanny—“the opposition between subject and object also falls away with the erosion of the structure of identity; subject and predicate can no longer keep their boundaries intact”—also applies almost entirely to prototypical atmospheres. 54 Dokic (2011) also traces the uncanny, understood as an existential meta-feeling, back to a cognitive dissonance that involves familiarity, wrongly believing that he can disregard much of the vast philosophical bibliography on the subject. 55 According to my atmospheric phenomenology, there are three different types of atmospheres: prototypical atmospheres (objective, external, and unintentional, sometimes lacking a precise name), derivative-relational ones (objective, external and intentionally produced), and even some that are quite spurious in their

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atmospheres attack the perceiver from the outside, this way inhibiting any critical reaction and divergent mood, be it positive or negative. If profound, an atmospheric experience always implies something uncanny, and its irresistible authority can show itself when “the dead and the mechanical, as well as the past and the blindly-necessary […] suddenly appear in the living, the present, and the spontaneous” (ibid, 102). But the uncanny emerges also when Rudolf Otto’s numinous forces us to have religious, aesthetic and even tremendous erotic experiences56 by emitting an anxiousuncanny quality irreducible to the experiencer’s head or soul. d) Repulsive and attractive centripetalism. The uncanny defamiliarisation always consists in a centripetal affect ruled by an anonymous-hidden suprapersonal power, in an affective direction that opposes the centrifugal direction which our being-in-the-world is normally based on. The atmospheric uncanny does not come from the given situation or phenomenon but from the centripetal manner, as such really daemonic, in which it forces us to feel something (for example, to repeat it compulsively) and deprives us of any possibility of control,57 thus corroding our attunement to the surrounding lived space in a way that always invokes both repulsion and allure. e) Bangnis. What’s weird is that a philosophy so strongly focused on affective states as Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology only occasionally mentions the notion of Unheimlich, prefering to talk about “anxiety”, “disquiet” or “restlessness”. However, when using a very rare term like Bangnis,58 meaning a felt-bodily “centripetal excitement” triggering terror and curiosity, Schmitz has in mind precisely what we call uncanny. In fact, Bangnis, not to be confused with Furcht (intentional feeling) and deep Angst (felt-bodily and sometimes even intentional relatedness (subjective and projective). See Griffero (2014, 144; 2017, 27-31; 2019, 95-96). 56 See Dawson (1989). 57 As Freud already makes clear. “The daemonic character of repetition in ‘The uncanny’ seems to come from the compulsiveness of the repetition itself, not from the situation or phenomenon that is repeated. Even something innocent would, if incessantly repeated, be uncanny if we felt that we could not control the repetition. The uncanniness, I would suggest, comes from this feeling of lack of control, of not being at home, of being controlled by someone or something other than oneself. The repetition itself could be viewed as a mechanical, unfamiliar principle regulating the self beyond its possible control and comprehension” (Svenaeus 1999, 246-247). 58 Schmitz (1969, 280-294, 300-306; 2003, 205-222).

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emotion paralyzing the subject), is precisely an atmosphere of anguished “as if” devoid of single menacing objects and objective contours; it is “the atmospheric encompassing, undivided whole of the uncanny (Unheimlich)” (Schmitz 1969, 283). It might be the initial schizophrenic anxiety but also the “normal” undetermined and widespread irritation that acts as a basso continuo, possibly later condensing into more circumscribed (and often casual) moments or objects, which absorb it and therefore take on a spectral character. Schmitz imagines a continuum where sometimes an indeterminate initial Bangnis or uncanniness gives way to an object-precise fear acting as a real anchoring point. One may then wonder whether this relatively objectual focus of Bangnis accentuates or mitigates it. Much depends on whether this focus is (in Schmitz’s Gestalt language) the real anchoring point or rather the condensation zone. In the first case, the more precise identification of the element that triggers the feeling (without being its “cause” in an epistemic sense) definitely subtracts the initial indeterminacy and then transforms it, for example, into fear. In the second case, which in uncanniness is probably the rule, its increasing pervasiveness could even accentuate its menacing nature, at least before the situation pushes us to make some sudden (and therefore relatively extra-reflective) decision. f) Alien corporeality. As a feeling that is spatially poured out and permeates a place, every atmosphere—more so if uncanny—“activates the body” and “becomes profoundly constitutive of our sense of self” (Trigg 2012, 11). Freely applying New Phenomenology’s felt-bodily alphabet, I could assume that a deeper atmosphere of uncanniness (or Bangnis) is characterized in its centripetal directionality by the exclusion of the “normal” rhythmic alternation of contraction and expansion, that is, by an exceptional intensity of the contractive impulse at the expense of the expansive one, whereas a softer atmosphere of uncanniness allows for the alternating felt-bodily rhythm, whose both centripetal and centrifugal direction gives the feeling a tone that oscillates between threat and attraction. The manifestation of something past and unexpected, and even more so Merleau-Ponty’s idea of an older body’s anonymous life, suggest how to make Schelling’s definition of “uncanny” productive (in a deliberately anachronistic way, of course). But the ego is not master in its own body, and this is true in a double sense. The pre-personal and anonymous component of our material bodily perception can certainly be considered as a past which has never been present, as an unconscious always acting

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but resistant to reflection (impersonal bio-anatomy).59 However, there are also felt-bodily components that actively belong to the person without being known by them (impersonal corporeality) except when the usual “focal disappearance” of the body60 in favour of the worldly objects of its engagement allows one to experience them. This impersonality thus acquires a much less dramatic tone. Obviously, being (physically and/or psychically) ill, old, fatigued, injured, weakened, spied on by others— even just being at the disposal of my body-for-others or even mirror experienced61—as well as feeling one’s own body as (sexually or socially) wrong is something uncanny.62 This is so because it implies a dissociation of self and body: I feel my own body, now emerged from its habitual selfconcealment, as an alien, thing-like,63 presence perceived at a distance and as unfaithful because of an inhibited intentionality: a non-possessable body to which I remain an outsider.64 However, a) feeling my body as an alien thing is something always circumscribed and somewhat abstract, since it also implies that I begin trusting the body as mine,65 that the “body as not mine” (uncanny) is nothing but another facet of the “body as mine” (familiar).66 Furthermore, and more importantly, b) losing the smooth flow of our engagements with the world can even be experienced in a positive way. In fact, I can realize that I am not identical with my (physical) body also when my felt body, 59 As Trigg (2016a) claims, referring it back to Schelling’s “barbaric principle”. “The body reveals itself as a recalcitrant existence, something which has its own agenda apart from my intentional projects and goals” (Burwood 2008, 266). 60 Leder (1990). 61 See Rochat, Zahavi (2010). 62 “To be ill would […] mean to experience a constant sense of obtrusive unhomelikeness in one’s being-in-the world […] The behaviour of the body in illness is often no longer under control […]. Of course the body has a life of its own even in health” (Svenaeus 2000a, 126, 131). See also Svenaeus (2000b). 63 See Zaner (1981, 54-55). 64 See Trigg (2016b). 65 This also applies to a house’s uncanny, given that the uncanny is hardly generated by the squalor of a natural place: “the effect of the unheimlich depends on a secure and comfortable starting point, an anchor of domestic comfort. Otherwise, there is nothing to unsettle” (Sandberg 2015, 45). 66 “Dissociation is […] an experience of the uncanny: but far from indicating a separation of self and body, it occurs because I realise I am my body. For example, when I look in the mirror and see this aging body, I may say to myself ‘I don’t recognise this face as me’; yet my horror at what I see is precisely because I do recognise it as me. The origin of dissociation and its peculiar form of selfalienation lies in this recognition and its combination with a sense of ‘otherness’” (Burwood 2008, 274).

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acting a sounding board of feelings and affordances encountered outside, surprisingly activates this or that felt-bodily isle (previously unperceived and not even imagined).67 Like a phantom limb, a felt-bodily isle is uncanny because it is a phenomenon between absence and presence that reveals a life that should not exist (anatomically) but we certainly feel (felt-bodily). In other terms, the impersonal or prepersonal physical body is surely uncanny, showing itself not as mine but “as an it, which has its own nature and rhythms” (Trigg 2020, 560).68 Likewise, my felt-bodily experience, insofar as it witnesses that my felt body belongs to me and at the same time I belong to it69 and can be at its mercy,70 is uncanny—but in a positive way (so to speak). A body whose edges are no longer clearly delineated gives certainly life to a body of anxiety71 but is also the very nature of a felt- and non-organic body able to felt-bodily communicate with its environment precisely because it exceeds the skin boundaries. Also, discovering that what should not emerge instead emerges. i.e. that one is not master in their own (physical and felt) body, is not a negative experience at all in a pathic and atmospherological aesthetics promoting the ability to let oneself go to what happens instead of neurotically trying to control and manipulate it. g) Trema. Jaspers’ well-known phenomenological description of a situation in which everything is unpredictable (see chapter 1) was the starting point of any later psychopathological specification of the uncanny. Patients feel uncanny and that there is something suspicious afoot. Everything gets a new meaning. The environment is somehow different—not to a gross degree—perception is unaltered in itself but there is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light. A living-room which formerly was felt as neutral or friendly now becomes dominated by some indefinable atmosphere. Something seems in the air which

67 See Griffero (2017, 55-67). 68 “The shift from the heimlich to the unheimlich can be understood as a movement of becoming conscious of the body as thing having its own independent history and experiences”. This implies “the uncertainty of whether or not ‘I’ am truly identifiable with my body itself” (Trigg 2012, 35). 69 “A battleground between possession of oneself and oneself as being possessed” (ibid., 301). 70 “The knowledge that within me dwells another self, ambiguous and ancient, of which I am only partially conscious, is a thought more attuned to the sense of being possessed by another body rather than the sense of possessing our own bodies” (ibid., 166). 71 As Trigg (2016b) brilliantly demonstrates.

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the patient cannot account for, a distrustful, uncomfortable, uncanny tension invades him (Jaspers 1963, 98).

Similarly, a definitely uncanny feeling is the one induced by distrust and delusion characterizing what Klaus Conrad calls “trema”, i.e. the first moment of incipient schizophrenia. He exemplifies it through an anxious subject walking alone through a dark forest. In the dark, where it is not possible to cast a glance, “it” spies on us from behind the trees, although we do not wonder what it is that spies on us from that place. It is something totally undetermined, it is the act of spying itself. The spaces lying between what is seen and what lies behind, […] namely the very background against which perceivable things stand out, has lost its neutrality. What makes us shudder is not the tree or the bush we see, the rustle of the tree tops or the cry of the owl we hear, but rather everything that is hidden, all the surrounding space from which the tree and the bush, the rustle and the cry stick out: what makes us shudder is the very darkness and what is hidden as such. (Conrad 1958, 43).

This situation, in which a usually neutral background becomes an aggressive figure and loses its randomness, is the same one finds when, saying “there is something in the air”, one feels a subtle change permeating the environment without being reducible to nameable objectual components. For this reason, however, darkness and the forest are not strictly necessary—suffice to consider how David Lynch’s films are able to arouse deep uncanny atmospheres in banal and familiar environments like a fast food restaurant72—given that anxiety “can arise in the most innocuous situations. Nor does it have any need for darkness, in which it is commonly easier for one to feel uncanny” (Heidegger 2008, 234). An uncanny atmosphere therefore is a feeling that hangs in the air and refers to a situation that is halfway between known and unknown. It appears more or less threatening if only because it’s vague, diffused, non-thematic, all-around centripetal, hindering any impulse to escape and entirely out of one’s control. In a sense, its affordances arouse what in the perceiver should be dead and gone, especially the feeling of being involved and driven by outside powers. The everyday uncanny therefore has exactly the same properties as an atmosphere (at least a prototypical one) and excludes that one can merely perceive it without being emotionally involved and grasped by it. 72 See Seiler (2013, 169-170).

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6. To be continued: what about houses? To conclude, a few words on the specific uncanny of houses. This is not by chance, given that the house is clearly something familiar, but also a mystery excluding those who do not belong to it.73 The neologism “unhomeliness”, which maybe better captures the sense of unheimlich (instead of uncanny, weird, eerie), expresses “the perpetual exchange between the homely and the unhomely, the imperceptible sliding of coziness into dread” (Vidler 1992, 57)74 which took place two centuries ago. The cultural itinerary that led home, until then understood as a secure interior as opposed to fearful and alien invasions, became an uncanny place holding secrets or hiding places—which reflected the “fundamental insecurity [of] a newly established class, not quite at home in its own home” (ibid., 3-4).75 This went hand in hand with urban estrangement, whose outcome was that the uncanny became public (especially in the two postwar periods of the 20th century). This metamorphosis was undergone by typically bourgeois dwelling intimacy,76 whose atmosphere became more uncanny than the external one (while still enslaving people to its comfort). This was a well known phenomenon: in the 19th century, chaotic and threatening external demons were replaced by haunted houses, i.e. by apparently welcoming interiors that, instead, allowing for the re-emergence of what should remain hidden, appeared to be heavily infested by evil forces.77 73 Tatar (1981, 169). 74 Trigg (2012, 215) highlights this exchange between sameness and difference showing that, for example, when one returns to a remembered place, “the familiarity of a preserved memory fuses with the strangeness of an anonymous place”. 75 For an introductory analysis of the uncanniness of monuments, instead, see e.g. Hook (2005): this specific uncanny implies the breakdown of the implicit natural order of history (the separateness of past and present) and of embodiment, through a kind of de-corporealized surveillance extending beyond the confines of the human and disturbing the ego. 76 “In industrialized societies, most of what matters to people is happening behind the closed doors of the private sphere. The home itself has become the site of their relationships and their loneliness: the site of their broadest encounters with the world through television and the Internet, but also the place where they reflect upon and face up to themselves away from others. For this reason it is likely that people are paying increasing attention to their relationship to their own home, to its structure, its decoration, its furnishing and the arrays of objects that fill its spaces, and that they reflect back on it their agency and sometimes their impotence” (Miller 2001, 1). 77 Cf. Vidler (1992, 36).

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That cozy comfort and ease became over time unease and uncanny, proving, once again, that the uncanny should not be considered a property of a given situation as such.78 Indeed, a relatively constant physical space can gradually reveal a very different atmospheric (in this case, uncanny) potential. And yet my claim is that certain spatial and/or architectural configurations make it at least possible for the uncanny to arise (of course, in a more or less intense fashion) while others can never generate it. As I tried to prove elsewhere in reference to Poe’s House Usher,79 its uncanny atmosphere cannot be attributed to the fantasies of the narrator but rather to the house itself. This also applies to postmodern architecture: it seems to incorporate the uncanny insofar as it develops the classic bodily-anthropomorphic paradigm of architecture in a deliberately nonaccommodating way,80 reflecting a restless if not dismembered body.. I will not go into modern art’s architectural tropes and into the reason why a suspicious and anti-bourgeois culture increasingly opposed the too selfsatisfied hygge-ideal (especially strong in Nordic countries),81 understood as a middle class and conservative ideal of comfort, cheer and intimacy. Here it is enough to say that a) a house’s uncanny atmosphere implies “alien presences” that take “by surprise the modern confidence in the inevitability of rational progress” (Sandberg 2015, 22); and that b) a safe and circumscribed place like one’s house easily turns into a threatening one both because it is attacked by something hidden there and because it seals its inhabitants like a crypt, like an intrauterine existence in which only the

78 “There is no such thing as an uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities” (ibid., 11-12). 79 Griffero (2018). 80 Faced with some examples of postmodern architecture “the owner of a conventional body is undeniably placed under threat as the reciprocal distortions and absences felt by the viewer, in response to the reflected projection of bodily empathy, operate almost viscerally on the body. We are contorted, racked, cut, wounded, dissected, intestinally revealed, impaled, immolated; we are suspended in a state of vertigo, or thrust into a confusion between belief and perception. It is as if the object actively participated in the subject’s self-dismembering, reflecting its internal disarray or even precipitating its disaggregation. This active denegation of the body takes on, in the postmodern world, the aspect of an autocritique of a modernism that posited a quasi-scientific, propaedeutic role for architecture. The body in disintegration is in a very real sense the image of the notion of humanist progress in disarray (Vidler 1992, 78-79). 81 For an introduction to hygge, see Bille (2019).

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most traditionalist and Heimat-philosophers (like Heidegger and Bollnow, Sedlmayr or Bachelard) could find consolation.82 There is another aspect of a house’s uncanny which is worth at least mentioning here. “The discrepancy between the longevity of homes and the relative transience of their occupants” (Miller 2001, 107), can arouse, as in the past, the phenomenon of haunted houses (the ghosts being their previous inhabitants). Today, however, this usually translates into a certain anxiety about materially inheriting a house (even in terms of its aesthetics, design, and furnishings left by the previous owners).83 The real and uneasy sense of cohabiting with the past triggered by the meeting of canny and uncanny requires new occupants to employ negotiation strategies. They can, indeed, emphatically feel the need to preserve the afterlife of leftbehind and inherited materials, even taking pleasure in imagining former residents and being let into their secrets (especially if this makes it possible to experience something bigger than the self). However, they can also feel deeply alienated and threatened in their intimacy (is it not always uncanny to sleep in someone else’s bed, where other people were born and maybe even died?) by past situations that cannot be completely controlled and even by objects’ continuing agency (especially if they are ritual objects one has to keep in situ). In both cases the immaterial forces persisting within the house and aroused through things’ ecstasies generate a kind of enchanted atmosphere, which is also uncanny because it evokes a past that should be gone and hidden, and instead does not pass and is manifested in ways that cannot be controlled. Although exemplarily uncanny, however, houses do not enjoy any exclusivity. Freud, just to make an example, tells us84 that he experienced an uncanny shock in a train’s sleeping compartment: for a moment he did not realize that the elderly man in a dressing gown he suddenly saw in the bathroom was nothing but his own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. This uncanny experience can involve people much less inclined to deviant and disturbing experiences than Freud, as is demonstrated by the similar experience surprisingly recounted by Ernst Mach, a scientist entirely averse to psychology.

82 “For the apparently warm and all-enclosing interiors of intrauterine existence were, as Freud pointed out, at the same time the very centers of the uncanny. At once the refuge of inevitably unfulfilled desire and the potential crypt of living burial, the womb-house offered little solace to daily life” (Vidler 1992, 152-153). 83 On all this and on the following, see Lipman (2014, 2018) Lipman & Nash (2019). 84 Freud (1981a, 248, fn.1).

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Once, when a young man, I noticed in the street the profile of a face that was very displeasing and repulsive to me. I was not a little taken aback when a moment afterwards I found that it was my own face which, in passing by a shop where mirrors were sold, I had perceived reflected from two mirrors that were inclined at the proper angle to each other. Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, when I was very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at the other end. “What a shabby pedagogue that is, that has just entered,” thought I. It was myself: opposite me hung a large mirror. The physiognomy of my class, accordingly, was better known to me than my own (Mach 1959, 2, fn.1).

It follows that our life proves to be intimate and alien at once, that we are the site of an anonymous, foreign and menacing—even only because “anterior” latu sensu—(bodily-affective) life, whether this anonymous “it” is the barbaric state of shapelessness preceding the Greek sky (as in Schelling) or a transplanted material organ, the tele-connected global capitalism by which we are secretly led or simply the anonymous body transcending us and which however we belong to. In short, we become even uncanny to ourselves as soon as (for whatever reason) we lose control. When we undergo a crisis in bodily certainty—certainly not only when we are away from home but also in our “normal” non-uncanny life— we realize how not only physically and biologically vulnerable but also really felt-bodily dispossessed we are: we are not at home within our own body because we always coexist with an external-foreign and in this sense “monstrous” presence.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 151 Advertising (and marketing) research, 26 Aesthetic economy (capitalism), 18, 162 Aestheticisation, 15, 18, 96 Affect theories/studies, 85, 147, 170-173 Affective -continuum, 120, 126-128, 148 -culture, 142-143, 168-169 -logic, 179 -turn, 14-15, 20, 85, 108, 129, 172 -we, 129 Affektkomplex, 20 Affordance, 18-19, 31, 43, 69, 79, 87, 126, 131-132, 136, 147, 185186, 194-195 Ahmed, Sarah, 179 Air, 35, 73-75 -terror from the, 177-178 -conditioning, 21, 178 Andermann, Kerstin, 24 Anderson, Ben, 66, 176, 179 Anguish (and anxiety)/fear, 179180, 183, 185-187, 192-195, 198 Anthropology (ecological and social), 26 Anz, Thomas, 111, 119

Arburg, Hans-Georg von, 110-111 Architecture, 24-25 Arletty (Léonie Bathiat), 13 Art, 25 Atmosphere -below the threshold, 54 -changing over time, 54-58, 94-96 -cultivation of, 100 -derivative (relational), 18, 38, 86, 94-95, 98, 143, 146, 155, 168, 179, 190-191 -fake/bad, 100 -giving rise to opposition, 51-54, 58 -ingressive-dystonic (discrepant), 39-46, 80, 89, 91, 117, 141 -intentional production of, 26, 98101, 110-111, 118, 145-146 -management, 144-147 -metaphoric-linguistic effect, 26, 130 -mixed, 92 -non-thetic, 91 -oppressive (depressing), 175-199 -oral, 16 -prototypical, 18, 38, 40, 44-45, 51, 56, 86-87, 89-90, 94-96, 98, 127, 130, 132, 135, 143, 146, 148, 155, 168, 179, 190-191, 195

226

-recognized (but not felt), 50-51, 92-94, 138, 141 -reversed (inversed), 63-66, 89, 141 -spurious (projective), 18, 38-39, 62, 86, 96, 127, 130, 143, 146, 148, 155, 168, 179, 190-191 -supervenient -syntonic, 46-50, 81, 89, 91, 117 -toxic (manipulative)/benign, 101, 165, 171, 173, 177 Atmospheric (the), 92, 141 Atmospheric -(and anchoring point), 95, 124126, 134, 180, 192 -authority, 37, 40, 42-43, 53, 57, 63, 86-93, 95, 130, 141, 189-91 competence, 18, 96-103, 146, 173 -condensation, 95, 124-126, 134, 156, 180-181, 190, 192 -division of powers, 102, 173 -games (encounters), 29-66, 81 -generators, 18, 98, 146 -manipulation, 100-101 -nose, 49 -perception, 49, 51, 54, 93-94, 161, 170, 175, 180, 189 -power, 24 -provisional morality, 101, 103 -turn, 19 (Non) atmosphericness, 91 Atmospherisation, 14, 102, 125, 173 Atmospherology, 18, 29, 37, 39, 66, 82, 85, 96, 98, 128, 130, 134, 147, 153, 157, 159, 170, 172, 188, 194 Atmoterrorism, 21, 43, 177-178 Attunement, 25

The Atmospheric “We”

Aura, 14, 16, 32, 90, 112 Auster, Paul, 55 Bachelard, Gaston, 173, 198 Baensch, Otto, 93 Bahr, Hermann, 105 Bangnis, 191-192 Barsade, Sigal G., 186 Bartholomew, Robert E., 181, 187 Bauman, Zygmunt, 180-181 Becker, Alexander, 111 Bellow, Saul, 30, 64 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron, 93, 115, 117 Benjamin, Walter, 31, 111 Bernstein, Susan, 190 Bille, Mikkel, 25, 63, 145, 187 Binswanger, Ludwig, 117, 127 Blume, Anna, 86 Bobowick, Magdalena, 145 Body -schema, 79 Bockemühl, Michael, 91 Böhme, Gernot, 15, 18-19, 59, 90, 92, 95-96, 98-99, 122, 138, 140141, 146, 162 Böhme, Jacob, 113 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, 25, 88-89, 97, 99, 110-111, 118-120, 126, 142, 145, 198 Borch, Christian, 25, 185 Bourdieu, Pierre, 144, 167 Bradley, Ben, 160 Brennan, Teresa, 175 Brickman, Philip, 161 Broch, Hermann, 33 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 106 Bude, Heinz, 108, 116, 152, 157

Index

Bulka, Thomas, 24, 98, 114, 120, 127 Burwood, Stephen, 193 Caesar, Irving, 105 Carné, Marcel, 13 Carroll, Noël, 119 Causality (bipolar/tripolar), 78 Centripetalism, 191-192, 195 Cézanne, Paul, 108 Character, 76-77 Charisma, 31-32, 90, 96 Ciompi, Luc, 116, 179 Climate, 25, 64, 142-143, 148, 155, 167, 169, 171 Climatology (philosophical), 74 Coates, Dan, 161 Cogito, 36 Colombetti, Giovanna, 122 Conrad, Klaus, 125, 195 Contagion, 110, 139-140, 175-176, 186 Contraction, 65, 81, 147, 187, 192 Coriando, Paola-Ludovika, 107 Corngold, Stanley, 106 Corporeality (alien), 192-194 Costa, Carlos, 26, 115, 116 Costa, Vincenzo, 115-116 Csikszentmihalyi. Mihály, 164 David, Pascal, 112 Dawson, Lorne, 191 de Gaulle, Charles, 83 De Jaegher, Hanne, 175-176 De Matteis, Federico, 25, 87 De Nora, Tia, 145 De Rivera, Joseph H., 137, 142143, 145, 155, 168

227

De Sousa, Ronald, 176 Deaxiologisation, 101, 114 Debussy, Claude, 111 Degas, Edgar, 111 Deleuze, Gilles, 80 Delillo, Don, 55, 71, 75 Delle Fave, Antonella, 161 Denison, John Hopkins, 144 Demmerling, Christoph, 86, 88, 92, 120 Democritus, 17 Descartes, René, 101 Dickens, Charles, 42-43, 50 Diener, Ed, 160 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 109 Disposition, 117, 128 Dokic, Jerome, 190 Durkheim, Émile, 131 Eberlein, Undine, 24 Eco, Umberto, 160 Ecstasy of things, 59-60, 71, 74, 99, 198 Elster, Jon, 115 Emergency (atmosphere of), 175188 Emergentism, 176 Emotion, 115, 130-131 -background, 117-118 -collective, 87, 110 -hygiene, 145 Empathy, 140, 176 Emptiness, 123 Enactivism, 69 Endert, Elke, 116, 179 Epictetus, 166 Epicritic, 80-81, 127, 187 Espinosa, Augustín, 145

228

Excorporation, 51, 76, 132 Expansion, 65, 147, 192 Experience (also involuntary lifeexperience), 29-30, 67-68, 79, 87, 149, 158, 170 Externalisation, 97, 106, 132 Fact (actual/factual), 78 Fact (subjective), 17, 51, 72, 83, 131, 136, 152, 154 Farrell Krell, David, 71 Feeling -atmospheric, 86-88 -basic (existential, background), 20, 92-93, 113, 157, 180 -(and atmospheres) collective, shared, 25, 129-149, 154, 167, 170, 176, 181-182, 184-185 -contrasting, 88 -individual, 88, 133, 140 -intentional (unintentional), 124125 -pure, 123-124 -social, 90 -(also atmospheric) type/tokenidentity, 134-137, 139-140, 147148, 181 Felt-body (felt-bodily) 17, 19, 30, 57, 65, 67, 69, 74, 79-80, 89, 122, 131-133, 136-137, 167, 183, 193 -alphabet, 124, 131, 147, 192 -communication, 17, 43, 51, 76, 79, 81, 89, 100, 132, 148, 167, 181, 183-185, 194 -disposition, 61, 89, 94-95, 105, 136, 142-143, 167

The Atmospheric “We”

-(also affective) involvement, 7374, 79-80, 83, 92-93, 95, 97, 119, 126, 131-132, 141, 151, 165 -isles, 37, 80-81, 194 Ferber, Ilit, 123 Fink, Eugen, 110 Fisher, Mark, 189 Fletcher, Guy, 152 Fog, 31, 35-36 Foucault, Michel, 101 Francesetti, Gianni, 26 Frankfurt, Harry, 166 Frege, Gottlob, 135 Frese, Jürgen, 95 Freud, Sigmund, 188-190, 198 Frey, Christiane, 114 Friedman, William J., 164 Friedrich, Caspar David, 112 Frjida, Nico, 127 Fuchs, Thomas, 116-117, 119, 123, 175-176, 187, 190 Fūdo, 74 Fugali, Edoardo, 185 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 85 Galati, Dario, 120 Gamboni, Dario, 111 Geiger, Moritz, 92, 99, 125, 145 Genius loci, 14, 52, 57, 88 Geography, 24 Gestalt (gestaltic), 68, 75, 91, 118, 124-125, 132, 134, 160, 192 Gibson, James J., 87 Giesz, Ludwig, 111 Gilbert, Margaret, 140 Gisbertz, Anna-Katharina, 109 Gnostic, 15

Index

Goldie, Peter, 126-127, 130, 138139 Großart, Friedrich, 117 Großheim, Michael, 26, 49, 98, 149, 158 Grote, Albert, 78 Gugutzer, Robert, 26, 148 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, 22, 111, 114, 116, 122 Habermas, Jürgen, 79, 85 Habitus, 144, 167 Haensel, Carl, 86, 99 Hahn, Achim, 25, 53 Hahn, Robert Alfred, 187 Hartmann, Eduard von, 127 Hasse, Jürgen, 25, 122 Hatfield, Elaine, 139 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 146 Hauskeller, Michael, 24, 88 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 108, 111 Heibach, Christian, 24, 96, 100 Heidegger, Martin, 20, 22, 71, 85, 92-93, 97, 99, 107, 109, 115-116, 118-121, 128, 132-133, 145, 156, 183, 195, 198 Hellpach, Willy, 118, 123 Helm, Bennett W., 124 Henckmann, Wolfhart, 109, 122 Hennecke, Hans Jörg, 96 Herder, Johann G., 74 Hering, Ewald Hörisch, Jochen, 119 Hofmannsthal, Hugo v., 110, 118 Hook, Derek, 196 Horn, Eva, 74, 187 House (uncanny), 196-198

229

Hygge, 62, 145, 197 Hypocondria, 187-188 Immersion/emersion, 102, 123, 173 Impression (first) 31, 40, 54, 56, 67, 90, 94, 100, 147, 158, 162 In-between, 26, 57, 66, 68, 94, 135 Incorporation, 43, 51, 76, 89-90, 95-96, 132, 148, 176,185 Inflationism -phenomenological, 86, 103, 142, 148 -ontological, 67-73, 81-82, 86, 103, 142, 148 Ingold, Tim, 26, 177 Intentional (intentionality), 134, 180-181, 190 -operative, 85, 180 Intercorporeality, 131, 176, 185 Intermittence, 77, 87 Introjectionism (internalism, antiintrojectionism), 44, 96-97, 105106, 109, 133, 152, 154, 175, 188 Jacobs, Arthur, 127 James Dean-effect, 160 Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie, 161 Jaspers, Karl, 26, 61, 194-195 Johnson, Laurie Ruth, 189 Julmi, Christian, 24, 26, 92, 95 Jung, Carl Gustav, 91 Kammler, Steffen, 182 Kant, Immanuel, 88, 110, 113-114, 129, 158 Kaufmann, Fritz, 118 Kauppinen, Annti, 163 Kenaan, Hagi, 123

230

Ki, 74 Kierkegaard, Søren, 183 Kitsch, 99, 100, 108, 110-111, 145 Kitschen, Friederike, 108 Klages, Ludwig, 112 Kleinginna, Anne M., 120 Kleinginna, Paul R., 120 Klotz, Sebastian, 119, 127 Kluck, Steffen, 98, 158, 182 Koch, Herman, 63 Konzelmann Ziv, Anita, 135 Krebs, Angelika, 111-113, 116, 119, 123 Krüger, Hans-Peter, 118 Krueger, Joel, 129, 131, 135, 138 Kruse, Lenelis, 115, 121 Laermans, Rudi, 178 Landweer, Hilge, 26, 100, 120, 140, 148, 184 Latour, Bruno, 13, Lawrence, David Herbert, 31, 35, 37, 42, 44-45, 52-53, 56-57, 6465, 77-78 Le Bon, Gustave, 176 Leder, Drew, 193 León, Felipe, 132, 140 Lersch, Philipp, 99, 117, 122 Levitation atmosphere, 21 Leys, Ruth, 147 Libet, Benjamin, 171 Life experience involuntary, 19 Life-world (Lebenswelt), 29, 31, 37, 57, 67, 69, 73, 82-83, 211 Lipman, Caron, 198 Lipps, Hans, 121 Lüdtke, Jana, 127 Lynch, David, 195

The Atmospheric “We”

Mach, Ernst, 198-199 Mahayni, Ziad, 25 Management (and organisation) studies, 26 Manifoldness (chaotic), 68, 127 Marquard, Odo, 103 Mars-Jones, Adam, 30, 33 Martin, Mike W., 163 Massumi, Brian, 149 McCormack, Derek P., 26 Meaningfulness (significance), 68, 117, 182 Melville, Hermann, 32 Mendelssohn, Moses, 92 Merker, Barbara, 120 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 85, 131, 135, 180, 192 Metten, Thomas, 177 Metzger, Wolfgang, 124-125 Meyer, Christian, 123 Meyer-Sickendiek, Burkhard, 109, 115, 127 Micali, Stefano, 180, 187 Milev, Yana, 87, 178 Milieu, 15 Miller, Daniel, 196, 198 Mineness, 36, 43 Minkowski, Eugène, 73, 91 Monet, Claude, 115 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 74 Mood (Stimmung), 14, 16, 22, 25, 27, 57, 86, 91-92, 96-97, 99, 105-128, 130, 132-133, 142, 152, 155-157, 160, 169, 172, 181-182 -basic, 118, 143 -duration, 115 -for Schmitz, 123-126

Index

-intensity, 115, 155 -non-producibility, 118-120 -pure, 124 -ubiquity, 116 -uncertainty and dispositionality, 117-118 -unintentionality, 116-117 Morris, William N., 110, 116, 183 Motor suggestions, 17, 37, 75-76, 87, 132, 184 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 126 Musicology, 25 Musil, Robert, 23, 88, 126-127 Nägeli, Hans-Georg, 127 Narrowness, 43, 65, 79, 89, 183, 185-187 Nash, Catherine,198 New Phenomenology, 17, 23, 29, 68, 85, 87, 96-97, 100, 131, 151152, 154, 159, 171, 180-182, 187, 191-192 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 103 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 48, 102, 106107, 112 Nixon, Kari, 175 Nörenberg, Henning, 98, 158 Numinous/numinosity, 31, 45, 87, 191 Ockham, William of, 83 Oishi, Shigehiro, 160 Ontoclimatology, 21 Otto, Rudolf, 87, 191 Páez, Darío, 145 Pamuk, Orhan, 44, 61-62 Pandemic, 177, 182-188

231

Parkinson, Brian, 116 Pathic, pathical, 79, 97, 165 -aesthetics, 18, 29-30, 83, 103, 108, 154, 170, 194 -how, 15 Patzelt, Werner J., 122 Pedagogy, 25 Penetrability, cognitive, 27, 41, 60, 90 Pennebaker, James W., 187 Perception, 68 Personal -emancipation, 89, 95 -regression, 51 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 26 Pink, Sarah, 26 Plato, 17 Poe, Edgar Allan, 39-40, 43, 48-49, 56, 58-59, 197 Politics, 16, 18, 24-25, 32, 42, 74, 85, 100, 102, 110, 139, 142, 144147, 155, 159, 168-173 Posture (Attitude), 97, 119, 142 Present/presence (presentness; primitive/unfolded), 17, 22-23, 51, 67, 76, 82, 108-109, 122, 161, 187 Preusker, Johannes, 97 Prinz, Jesse J., 115 Projection (projectivism), 43-44, 62-63, 69, 71, 86-87, 97-98, 121122, 130, 143, 147-148, 165, 183 Protopathic, 81, 127, 187 Prütting, Lenz, 102 Psychopathology, 25-26, 194

232

Qualia, 15, 18-19, 24, 57, 71-72, 77, 79 Quasi-thing (vs. things; quasithingly), 18-19, 31-32, 36, 44, 66-83, 86-87, 103, 132-133, 151, 165, 182 Raabe, Wilhelm, 89 Rappe, Guido, 82, 88 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 91, 125, 157, 180 Rauh, Andreas, 16, 24, 97, 178 Reality (augmented/attenuated), 73 Recki, Birgit, 112 Reductionism, 45, 67, 75, 82, 87, 117, 154, 172, 175 Reents, Friederike, 109, 114 Reisenzein, Rainer, 115, 117 Resonance (affective, felt-bodily), 47, 51, 65, 74, 79-81, 87, 89-90, 93-94, 103, 105, 131-132, 134, 138-139, 142, 147, 149, 159, 165-166, 168, 170-171, 175-176, 180-182, 184-186 Rest-realism, 81-83 Riedel, Friedlind, 16, 25 Riegl, Alois, 111-112 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 50, 69-71 Rimé, Bernard, 144 Rochat, Philippe, 193 Rodatz, Christoph, 25 Royle, Nicholas, 189 Russell, James, 119 Saam, Nicole J., 107 Sachs, Hans, 48 Salmela, Mikko, 133, 134, 137 Sampson, Tony D., 176

The Atmospheric “We”

Sánchez Guerrero, H. Andrés, 134,139 Sandberg, Mark B., 189, 193, 197 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14, 17, 31, 33, 35-36, 41, 44, 46-47, 54, 59-60, 71, 78, 120 Scassillo, Federica, 25 Schapp, Wilhelm, 29, 67 Scheler, Max, 15, 135, 137-138 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 188, 192-193, 199 Schiller, Friedrich, 114 Schlegel, Friedrich, 114 Schmid, Hans Bernhard, 129-132, 134-136, 140, 143 Schmitt, Susanne B., 26 Schmitz, Hermann, 17-18, 20, 23, 51, 66, 68, 71-72, 77-78, 85-8687-88-89, 91-93, 95-96-97, 99100, 118-119, 123-127, 130-132, 134-135, 138, 140-142, 145, 168, 180, 182, 184, 191-192 Schnitzler, Arthur, 128 Schoenewolf, Gerald, 176 Schouten, Sabine, 25, 94, 101, 102 Schroer, Sara A., 26 Scott Fitzgerald, Francis, 55 Searle, John, 144, 167 Sedlmayr, Hans, 198 Seel, Martin, 90 Seiler, Sascha, 195 Servitje, Lorenzo, 175 Seurat, Georges, 115 Shame (vicarious), 89, 138, 140 Sharing, 133, 136, 138-139, 141, 148-149 Shusterman, Richard, 103 Sidgwick, Henry, 158

Index

Siemer, Matthias, 115, 117 Simenon, Georges, 34, 36, 49-50, 75 Simon, Ralf, 109 Singularism, 68, 82, 99 Situation, 66, 68-69, 99, 127, 131, 142, 156, 165, 167-168, 182183, 195 Slaby, Jan, 85, 88, 93, 94, 98, 117, 132, 136 Sloterdijk, Peter, 21-22, 102, 119, 163, 177-178 Smell, 73 Sociology, 25 Soentgen, Jens, 77, 96 Something more, 14, 58-59, 73-74, 121 Sonntag, Jan, 94 Sørensen, Tim Flohr, 25 Space, lived (predimensional), 37, 39, 55, 73-74, 77, 79, 90, 117, 123, 127, 130, 139, 154, 161, 165, 170, 185-186, 191 Spagnuolo Lobb, Margherita, 231, 235 Spatial turn, 23 Spengler, Oswald, 110 Spitzer, Leo, 20, 106, 108, 113 Staiger, Emil, 118 Stimmungskunst, 108-109, 111, 118 Strasser, Stephan, 118, 121 Straus, Erwin, 15, 117 Strout, Elizabeth, 50 Stuart Mill, John, 158 Style, 143, 167 Sub-atmosphere, 58, 66, 146, 155, 178-179 Subjectification (paranoid), 190

233

Sulzer, Johann Georg, 114 Sumartojo, Shanti, 26 Supervenience, 27, 58-63 Svenaeus, Fredrik, 191, 193 Sympathy, 140, 176 Synaesthetic qualities (characters), 17, 37, 75, 87, 132, 184 Synthesis (passive), 30, 73 Szanto, Thomas, 132, 134 Tarde, Gabriel, 176 Tatar, Maria M., 196 Taylor, Charles, 117 Tedeschini, Marco, 24 Tellenbach, Hubertus, 16, 20, 23, 73, 89, 101, 126, 131 Thibaud, Jean-Paul, 25, 91 Thirlwell, Adam, 51 Thomas, Kerstin, 105-106, 109, 115 Thonhauser, Gerhard, 133, 139, 141 Thoreau, Henry David, 103 Thrift, Nigel, 172 Torvinen, Juha, 25 Trema, 194-196 Trčka, Nina, 142-143, 181 Trigg, Dylan, 130, 180-182, 188190, 193-194, 196 Tugendhat, Ernst, 120 Twilight, 31, 33 Ulber, Maria, 25 Uncanny (and atmosphere of), 4748, 63, 77, 188-199 Usher, Philip John., 177-178 Vagueness, 68, 72, 170, 189-190 Vastness, 65, 79, 92, 126, 186 Vendrell Ferran, Ingrid, 117, 120

234

Victor, Jeffrey S., 181, 187 Vidler, Anthony, 196-198 Virchow, Rudolf Ludwig Karl, 82 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 109 Wagner, Richard, 109 Watsuji, Tetsuro, 74 Weather, 31, 33, 74 Wedekind, Gregor, 112 Wedelstaedt, Ulrich v., 123 Well-being (also as a higher-order, or composite atmosphere), 20, 23, 81, 102, 145, 151-173, 175 -consistency-continuity, 163 -as flow, 164 -indirectedness, 157-159 -intensity, 160-161 -over time, 161-163 -pathic, 164-170 -and politics, 170-173 -widespread, 159-160

The Atmospheric “We”

Wellbery, David E., 105, 108, 127 Welsch, Caroline, 108-109, 114 Whitman, Walt, 101 Wiesing, Lambert, 130 Wigley, Mark, 91 Wind, 31, 33-34, 72-80, 128, 151 Wirtz, Derrick, 160 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 108, 152 Wolf, Barbara, 25 Wolf, Susan, 154 Woolf, Virginia, 34-35, 37-38, 4647, 56, 62, 65 Youmans, Vincent, 105 Zahavi, Dan, 132, 139-140, 193 Zaner, Richard, 193 Žižek, Slavoj, 182-183 Zola, Émile, 59 Zumthor, Peter, 25

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