Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Elements) - Softcover

McCormack, Derek P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822371235 ISBN 13: 9780822371236

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2018

Synopsis

In Atmospheric Things Derek P. McCormack explores how atmospheres are imagined, understood, and experienced through experiments with a deceptively simple object: the balloon. Since the invention of balloon flight in the late eighteenth century, balloons have drawn crowds at fairs and expositions, inspired the visions of artists and writers, and driven technological development from meteorology to military surveillance. By foregrounding the distinctive properties of the balloon, McCormack reveals its remarkable capacity to disclose the affective and meteorological dimensions of atmospheres. Drawing together different senses of the object, the elements, and experience, McCormack uses the balloon to show how practices and technologies of envelopment allow atmospheres to be generated, made meaningful, and modified. He traces the alluring entanglement of envelopment in artistic, political, and technological projects, from the 2009 Pixar movie Up and Andy Warhol’s 1966 installation Silver Clouds to the use of propaganda balloons during the Cold War and Google's experiments with delivering internet access with stratospheric balloons. In so doing, McCormack offers new ways to conceive of, sense, and value the atmospheres in which life is immersed.

About this title

About the Author

Derek P. McCormack is Professor of Cultural Geography at Oxford University, author of Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces, also published by Duke University Press, and coauthor of Key Concepts in Urban Geography.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Atmospheric Things

On The Allure of Elemental Envelopment

By Derek P. McCormack

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-7123-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1 ENVELOPMENT, 
2 SENSING, 
3 ALLURE, 
4 RELEASE, 
5 VOLUME, 
6 SOUNDING, 
7 TENSIONS, 
8 HAIL, 
9 ELEMENTS, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

ENVELOPMENT

What happens when something appears suddenly in the air, something never seen before? Donald Barthelme's short story "The Balloon" describes the sudden appearance of a vast inflated envelope over Manhattan which expands until it covers much of that island. The presence of this balloon, initiated and controlled by an unnamed, unidentified, and omniscient figure with a number of engineers in his employment, provokes many responses. As the event of its appearance unfolds above a bemused and perplexed city, there is little agreement about the real significance or purpose of the balloon; before long, any search for the true meaning of the situation in which the city now finds itself subsides. The narrator even suggests that "situation" does not describe the event of the balloon's appearance because this term already implies "sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension." For the narrator there is no such situation, no play of forces to be untangled, "simply the balloon hanging there." Consequently, for those for whom it becomes a matter of concern, conjecture, or involvement, "it was agreed that since the meaning of the balloon could never be known absolutely, extended discussion was pointless."

No matter how vexing the "apparent purposelessness of balloon" may have been, its presence is not met with a generalized state of indifference; what emerges instead are different ways of relating, affectively, to this enormous aerial thing and to the atmospheres it generates across the city. The failure to find meaning in the event of its appearance is met also with the affirmation of the matter-of-factness of the object-ness of the balloon as it gathers and generates a cloud of affective relations. But rather than a static entity, in the sky above Manhattan the balloon becomes something of a shape-shifter, one whose very form seems to evade delineation. As the narrator recounts, "It was suggested that what was admired about the balloon was finally this: that it was not limited or defined. Sometimes a bulge, blister, or sub-section would carry all the way east to the river on its own initiative, in the manner of an army's movements on a map, as seen in a headquarters remote from the fighting. Then, that part would be, as it were, thrown back again, or would withdraw into new dispositions."

Barthelme's balloon story has been described as a postmodern fable of sorts, sending up as it does the dream of reaching any kind of meaningful narrative resolution. It can be deployed rather differently however: as an imaginative lure for thinking about the relation between atmospheres — as diffuse, unformed spacetimes — and the entities or bodies enveloped by those atmospheres. In the air above Manhattan, Barthelme's balloon is a discrete presence, a "concrete particular, hanging there." It is also an event around which an atmosphere gathers. And yet, as the story unfolds, the balloon becomes a dynamic set of undulating movements and directional tendencies, a shape-shifter composed of both extensive relations and processes of internal differentiation that are neither reducible to an entity nor so diffuse as to be unfelt. Barthelme's balloon, in other words, becomes a device for doing atmospheric things. As a lure for thinking, it becomes a strange attractor: it pulls us toward the possibility of thinking about envelopment as a process through which shapes of change emerge in the tensed space between entities and their atmospheric excess.

THINGS BECOMING ATMOSPHERIC

Despite some expressions of hostility toward the balloon, its presence in the air above Manhattan begins to elicit the emergence of a form of "public warmth." Indeed, the force of this warmth proves strong enough to dissuade the authorities from removing or destroying the balloon. Equally, a certain distribution of feeling emerges across and between the balloon and the people on the ground, a distribution that itself becomes a matter of debate and speculation: "It was argued that what was important was what you felt when you stood under the balloon; some people claimed that they felt sheltered, warmed, as never before, while enemies of the balloon felt, or reported feeling constrained, a 'heavy' feeling." In short, in the air above Manhattan, Barthelme's balloon gathers around itself something that might be grasped as an atmosphere, a vague, differentiated, yet definitely palpable affective spacetime.

The appeal of atmosphere as a concept for naming such spacetimes is almost intuitively obvious, invoking as it does the vague sense of a distributed envelope of feeling, mood, or emotion; how else, indeed, do we account for the diffuse condition of potential palpability that seems to reside between bodies and things? As a way of naming affective spacetimes, "atmosphere" has an ordinary familiarity and everyday currency that precedes its growing visibility as a speculative concept. Its importance is already felt, understood, and acted upon in myriad contexts; anyone who has ever been at or organized any kind of "event," or "occasion," or "do," realizes this. Equally, many practices and crafts, from architecture to advertising, party planning to propaganda, are organized around the promise of acting upon, generating, and staging atmospheres. Their goal is not simply to provide a kind of background against which events happen. The twin promise of atmospheric envelopment is to move bodies to become more or less responsive to their conditions, and to modulate their capacities to act into and within these conditions.

Such is the familiarity of the terms, and the frequency with which they are deployed, that it might seem perplexing to anyone outside the social sciences and humanities that "atmosphere" and "the atmospheric" have recently been (re)discovered, or considered worthy of renewed attention. It might also seem odd that to claim that the atmosphere of a place or situation matters can be heralded as a novel insight. Why then, as Ben Anderson writes, has atmosphere become "good to think with"? As Anderson's own pivotal contribution demonstrates, atmosphere does a number of useful things for scholars in the social sciences and humanities trying to make sense of affective spacetimes. It holds in tension affective spacetimes that are both corporeal and incorporeal, of and emergent from the midst of bodies, while also having a force irreducible to these bodies. It emphasizes the relational qualities of these affective spacetimes as they emerge across and between bodies as dynamic distributions of feeling generated through what Teresa Brennan calls the "transmission of affect." Atmosphere is also useful because it is not restricted to any particular scale: it names a spacetime that can be relatively contained (in a room, for instance) or massively distributed (across crowds, cities, economies, or indeed planets). Regardless of their extent, atmospheres are sustained by the manner in which different bodies, human and nonhuman, move and respond to the conditions in which they find themselves. And they show up through how something of these bodies is expressed, whether as light, heat, color, sound, or gesture. Critically, they have a quality that exceeds any sense in which this experience might be understood as self-contained, or personal. To return to Anderson: atmosphere names the "indeterminate affective "excess" through which intensive space-times can be created." Atmosphere, in short, provides a way of naming diffuse affective fields registering in the sensory capacities of bodies without necessarily being reducible to those capacities. This excess does not, however, mean that atmospheres are beyond intervention. Indeed, they are becoming what Anderson calls the "object-target" of, and condition for, an expanding repertoire of practices and technologies, operating across the domains of the economic, the political, and the sociocultural, designed to generate, amplify, and modulate experiential value. In this context, securing forms of life and the worlds they sustain is a matter not only of maintaining the integrity of territories but also of modulating atmospheres as fields within which certain dispositions to act can emerge or can be prevented from emerging.

As scholars such as Peter Adey, Timothy Choy, Sasha Engelmann, and Tim Ingold remind us, atmosphere is also important because it furnishes a concept for linking the affective with the meteorological: it draws together questions of affect, emotion, feeling, and mood with a concern for the airy, elemental milieu in which entities are enveloped. This milieu is a turbulent and layered envelope around the earth, sustaining different forms of life, and subject to variations of limited calculability operating at a range of scales and over various time horizons. Rendered explicit and potentially governable via various scientific practices, this envelope is increasingly contested as the effects and affects of a range of political-technological interventions are generated, distributed, and resisted, and at different scales. The significance of meteorological variations, processes, and events in this atmosphere is being ever more scrutinized as their origin is denatured, and their disruptive effects become part of the turbulent, emergent urgency of the affective life of contemporary political ecologies.

But meteorological variations are not reducible to the calculative and metrological imperatives of atmospheric science, however dominant this science has become in framing knowledges and politics of the atmosphere. The atmosphere, as an elemental envelope in which life takes place, also matters through the shape of what Tim Ingold has called "weatherworlds." Meteorological variations are felt in domains of experiment and experience that exceed technologies of measurement. They are expressed through changes of color, temperature, and wind speed, and through the felt experience of these changes in ways that resist any neat ontological division between the material and the immaterial, or between surface and sky. Seen thus, the atmosphere is not so much a zone apprehended from a distance but an elemental condition in which bodies are enveloped. Its spatiotemporality is not only meteorological in a climatological sense but also because it shapes senses of feeling or being enveloped in a process akin to an ongoing precipitation of percepts and affects. Ways of describing variations in the meteorological atmosphere — evaporation, condensation, and precipitation — also become ways of tracing modifications in affective experience.

The capacity to sense or be affected by these variations is by no means restricted to the human but extends to nonhuman forms of animal life, and to myriad more-than-human agencies. These variations are sensed when a tree bends in response to wind, or in the slow cracking of rock exposed to the elements. Leaves and rocks may not be moved by atmosphere in the sense of phenomenological experience, but they are affected or "perturbed" by its variations. To make this claim is to refuse what Alfred North Whitehead calls the "bifurcation of nature" into something that, on the one hand, can be sensed as an object of recognition (the atmosphere as a scientific object), and, on the other, that remains as a vague feeling of relation exceeding such recognition (the atmospheric as affective variation). To foreground atmosphere is to refuse to accept the affective and the meteorological as two separate domains, the first pertaining to forms of animate life, and the second existing prior to those forms of life. Insofar as much (if not all) of nonmarine life is enveloped in a gaseous atmosphere, the conditions for affective variation are already meteorological in this sense.

Avoiding any strict division between the meteorological and affective is even more important if we consider how the technical capacity for experimenting with atmospheric envelopes is being extended in all kinds of ways. Certainly, the infrastructures upon which forms of life depend are arguably becoming more atmospheric; that is, they are becoming more ambient, diffuse, and mobile, operating in ways that are responsive to currents and eddies of affective interest while also at the same time generating new inducements to move and be moved that operate below thresholds of conscious attention. Indeed, and notwithstanding the fact that they remain reliant on earthbound systems and sites, the popular adoption of metaphors of the "cloud" suggests that the way in which data, media, and their experiential possibilities are understood is framed increasingly frequently in elemental terms as an envelope of meteorological and atmospheric phenomenon.

The elemental condition of atmospheric envelopment does not pertain to a distinctive ontological or material domain; it is, rather, the force of whatever generates a variation and disturbance that can be sensed in bodies of different kinds while remaining excessive of these bodies. This sensing takes places as the vague, nonrepresentational mode of what in his work Whitehead calls "prehension," a mode of relation that does not need to be understood in terms of the relation between entities. The atmospheric is sensed as something happening that does not need to be an entity; this is something that, as Jane Bennett puts it, "is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension."

ATMOSPHERES BECOMING THINGS

The irony should, of course, be obvious: even if the narrator in Barthelme's story insists that no meaning is to be found in the presence of the balloon, here it has become a lure of sorts for speculating about atmospheres. However, Barthelme's balloon generates atmospheres, and becomes a lure for speculating about the atmospheric, precisely because it is not an atmosphere. It is not diffuse, invisible, vague, or ambient. It is what the narrator calls a "concrete particular," hanging there. It is an entity — unified and relatively contained — presenting a surface and retaining an interior withdrawn from view. Because of this, as a device for doing atmospheric things, Barthelme's balloon also foregrounds the perplexing nature of entities as alluring extrusions into worlds whose essence and relations are always beyond us, entities entangled with other entities in ways not always and not necessarily dependent upon human life. The presence of the shadowy creator of the balloon notwithstanding, its form can be grasped through its relations or "intersections" with other things independent of human direction and intervention. The narrator puts it thus: "Each intersection was crucial, meeting of balloon and building, meeting of balloon and man, meeting of balloon and balloon."

To dwell upon the relations between Barthelme's balloon and other nonhuman things is to displace — partially at least — the figure of the human in this story. It is also to foreground the radically recalcitrant aspect of those things — that is, the aspect of things that does not just always remain excessive of meaning but always remains unavailable to any kind of "meeting" or "intersection" of entities, no matter how close those entities might be. Because of this, even if Barthelme's narrator finally lets us in on the secret of the balloon's existence, something of its nature remains withdrawn from its relations with the world or its participation in the generation of a distributed atmosphere; there persists a kind of irreducible and nonrelational otherness only ever finally disclosed in this story in the guise of some omniscient being.

This way of responding to the balloon as a lure for thinking is more in tune with accounts of entities, objects, and things that are part of the elaboration of various speculative realisms and materialisms across the social sciences and humanities. Of course, attention to objects and things is not new, and can be traced through a range of scholarly traditions in disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology. Much of this work shares the commitment of Barthelme's unnamed narrator to refuse to reduce accounts of objects or things to their incorporation within, or representation by, human experience. In much of this work there is also a concern to develop relational accounts of entities and objects. In important recent strands of thinking, however, the promise and possibilities of thinking with and about things and objects are taken even further. Specifically, in writing by philosophers and social theorists in the areas of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO), the injunction to foreground the independent existence of entities is affirmed with particular force. In such work, entities are defined on the basis that something of them exists which can never be incorporated by any other entity — human or nonhuman. The upshot of this definition is not only an acknowledgment of the participation of things in shaping realities but also the development of a speculative and determinedly entity-centered account of reality: entities are the key points of ontological departure for this account, rather than process or relation or movement.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Atmospheric Things by Derek P. McCormack. Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822371235
• ISBN 13: 9780822371236
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304