Peta Mitchell (2015). Rev. of Atmospheres: Aesthetics of emotional spaces, Social & Cultural Geography, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2015.1072918 Rev. of Atmospheres: aesthetics of emotional spaces, by Tonino Griffero, translated by Sarah de Sanctis, Surrey, Ashgate, 2014, 174 pp., US$109.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-‐ 1-‐4724-‐2172-‐2 This recent translation of Tonino Griffero’s 2010 Atmosferologia: Estetica degli spazi emozionali is a welcome English language addition to a burgeoning corpus of research engaging with space, affect and atmospherics. In cultural geography, this engagement with atmosphere has centred on the work of researchers such as Peter Adey, Ben Anderson, James Ash and Derek McCormack. It is further underscored by several recent themed journal issues, including an ‘aerographies’-‐themed special issue of Environment and Planning D in 2011, an article forum on ‘air’s affinities’ in a 2015 issue of Dialogues in Human Geography and a ‘staging atmospheres’ special issue of the interdisciplinary journal Emotion, Space, and Society in 2015. Where cultural geography’s ‘atmospheric attunement’, to borrow Kathleen Stewart’s (2011) phrase, has largely been spurred by affect theory and has occurred around particular, and increasingly well-‐rehearsed, theoretical reference points—notably Nigel Thrift’s Non-‐Representational Theory, Peter Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air and Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger—Griffero’s thesis emerges from and engages with a somewhat different philosophical tradition. Although Griffero overlooks cultural geography’s robust and growing contribution to research on affect and atmospheres in its entirety (a highly notable and unaddressed omission, given the book’s focus on ‘emotional spaces’), the phenomenological tradition that Griffero principally draws on is similarly one that has received less than comprehensive attention in cultural geographic work related to atmosphere. In his Introduction, Griffero notes that the question ‘what is an atmosphere?’ has, to date, lacked a sufficient answer due in great part to the term’s ‘semantic plasticity’ (pp. 2–3). In response to the ambiguity that surrounds the concept of atmosphere, Griffero promises to ‘accept the challenge’ of definition, stating that he ‘prefer[s] overall an inevitably reductive definition of the variety of the manifestations of atmosphere to the thesis according to which everything is atmospheric (and, consequently, nothing is in the proper sense)’ (p. 3). Some pages later, Griffero proffers his ‘first, approximate, definition [of atmosphere]—as a qualitative– sentimental prius, spatially poured out, of our sensible encounter with the world’ (p. 5), a definition he repeats throughout the book (pp. 36, 108). A reader might be forgiven for thinking that this central definition, with its emphasis on the spatial and presented as it is without citation or footnote, is Griffero’s novel coining. It does, however, owe significantly more than it explicitly acknowledges to phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, for whom ‘emotions are atmospheres poured out spatially [Gefühle räumlich ergossene]’ (Schmitz, 2011, ‘Emotions’, p. 255). Schmitz, founder of the school of New Phenomenology, is, despite this and other occasional ventriloquisms, an important and acknowledged touchstone for Griffero, along with fellow phenomenologists, new phenomenologists and proto-‐
phenomenologists Gernot Böhme, Michael Hauskeller, Ludwig Klages, Maurice Merleau-‐Ponty and Hubert Tellenbach. Apart from Böhme and Merleau-‐Ponty, these are names that rarely, if at all, figure in cultural geographic research into atmospheres—an absence explained in part, perhaps, by the limited number of English language translations of key texts, such as Böhme’s Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (1995), Hauskeller’s Atmosphären erleben (1995), Tellenbach’s Geschmack und Atmosphäre (1968) and virtually all of Schmitz’s work, including his recently published Atmosphären (2014). Beyond providing an albeit oblique English language introduction to these key thinkers on the question of atmosphere, what does Griffero’s book offer, particularly in regard to the question of space? Once again, Griffero’s discussion of the ‘spatial turn’ (p. 36) and its relationship to the notion of lived space and ‘atmospheric perception’ is restricted to a narrowly prescribed set of existential philosophers, phenomenologists, psychologists and mathematicians, namely ‘Heidegger, Binswanger, Minkowski, [Erwin] Straus, Dürckheim, Merleau-‐Ponty, Bachelard, Bollnow’ (p. 37). Interesting and enlightening though this analysis may be, its unacknowledged limitations and lack of explicit criteria for inclusion in or omission from this overview suggest an idiosyncratic and insular approach that potentially threatens the book’s applicability beyond its highly delimited framework. Griffero’s historical overview of the concept of atmosphere in Chapter 2 is more immediately helpful, providing, as it does, a stronger situating of the concept and a more broad-‐ ranging overview of where and how it has been taken up, including in relation to art, aesthetics, design, architecture and urban studies. In his third and final substantive chapter, Griffero proposes an ‘atmospherology’ predicated on the ‘universality of the atmospheric’ (p. 143). It is here that Griffero expressly articulates his position that atmospheres are ‘quasi-‐things’—a term he only indirectly defines, and then only in opposition to metaphor. Atmospheres are, he says ‘not metaphors but quasi-‐things’ (p. 108). This seems an odd formulation, considering that Paul Ricoeur’s (1984) use of the term in his Time and Narrative (‘Artisans who work with words produce not things, but quasi-‐things; they invent the as-‐if’ (p. 45)) is not incompatible with his theory of metaphor, and, as I have argued elsewhere, Michel Serres’s description of the parasite logic of the quasi-‐ object is entirely consistent with the workings of metaphor (Mitchell, 2012, p. 138). Despite this simplistic framing, Griffero’s call to appreciate the ‘ontological [...] status of atmospheres’ (p. 108) is an important one. Atmospheres are, Griffero concludes, ‘elusive qualitative entities, marginalised by the hegemonic reism’ and ‘should be taken seriously, both aesthetically and ontologically’ (p. 148). Griffero’s is a call that cultural geography has certainly already heeded, but what his book may offer is an expanded philosophical ground for the discipline’s atmospheric engagement. References Böhme, G. (1995). Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik [Atmospheres: Essays on the new aesthetic]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hauskeller, M. (1995). Atmosphären erleben [Experiencing atmospheres]. Berlin: Akademie. Mitchell, P. (2012). Contagious metaphor. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative (Vol. 1, K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schmitz, H. (2011). Emotions outside the box—The new phenomenology of feeling and corporeality (R. O. Müllan & J. Slaby, Trans. Entseelung der Gefühle [2010]). Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 10, 241–259. Schmitz, H. (2014). Atmosphären [Atmospheres]. Freiburg: Karl Alber. Stewart, K. (2011). Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 445–453. Tellenbach, H. (1968). Geschmack und Atmosphäre: Medien menschlichen Elementarkontaktes [Taste and atmosphere: Media of elementary human contact]. Salzburg: Otto Müller. Peta Mitchell Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology
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