• 1 Of course, I am brutally simplifying a complex and multifaceted trajectory of reflection. This is t (...)

2The amount of pages that have latterly been dedicated to the concept of atmospheres in the humanities – to the point that some ask whether we are facing an ‘atmospheric turn’ (see Griffero 2019) – first in German and French, then in English and beyond, means that there is no need to provide a literature review here – the interested reader could find plenty of excellent contributions in this regard (e.g. Adey et al., 2013; Bille et al., 2015; Gandy 2017; Griffero 2019; Thibaud 2020). A few words on where my approach is situated within this field, however, are in order. Within the popular, phenomenological interpretation, developed by the likes of Hermann Schmitz, Gernot Böhme, Jean-Paul Thibaud or Tonino Griffero, atmospheres are understood as intersubjective phenomena that are irreducible to subjective perception, and yet are ‘still relative to a subject who feels touched by something partially undecipherable’ (Griffero 2014 [2010], p. 35).1 Atmospheres, accordingly, are both somewhere in between subject and object, as terms such as “quasi-object” or “quasi-thing” seek to convey, and somewhere beyond, as terms such as “something-more”, “more-than” or “je-ne-sais-quoi” gesture towards.

• 2 In contrast to Bille and colleagues (2015) or Griffero (2019, p. 18), I believe that while there is (...)

3The other, main trajectory of atmospheric thinking has developed within the Anglophone world, often in the field of geography, where atmospheres have been approached through affect theory and a post-phenomenological and ‘materialistic’ attention to the conditions of their ontological emergence (e.g. Anderson 2014; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015; Pavoni 2018; McCormack 2018). For some, this theoretical move is controversial. Mikkel Bille and colleagues (2015, pp. 33‑5), for instance, argue that an affect-oriented reading of atmospheres risks overlooking ‘the existential in-betweenness of subject and object’, and therefore ‘los[ing] their material grounding’. Griffero (2019, p. 16) goes as far as excluding it, especially for what concerns the ‘Spinozist-Deleuzian interpretation of affect,’ from the ‘atmospheric discourse’, barely concealing his contempt for an approach he deems ‘notorious’. I disagree. On the one hand, the two approaches are not necessarily incompatible: quite the contrary. Just as Andrea Mubi Brighenti (2010, p. 70) observed as regards the field of visibility, attending to atmosphere needs both ‘a phenomenological sensibility towards the here-and-now’ and ‘an ecological sensibility toward the prolongations of the here-and-now in heterogeneous environments’, and this requires taking into account the affective element. Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology (2007 [1998]; 2014 [1999]; 2016 [2004]), for example, is a compelling, if undoubtedly idiosyncratic, example in this regard (see Pavoni 2018, ch. 2). On the other hand, looking at atmospheres through a ‘Spinozist-Deleuzian interpretation of affect’ is far more effective when it comes to mobilising them conceptually and strategically beyond the subject-object relation, avoiding politically naïve – or slightly conspiratorial – reflections on ‘atmospheric engineering’, while providing a properly materialist complement to phenomenology’s overly vague descriptions, that are ultimately unable to account for atmospheres’ ontological status (Gandy 2017, 358).2

• 3 ‘Consistency’ is defined by Deleuze and Guattari as a ‘“holding together” of heterogeneous elements (...)

4Pointing the reader elsewhere for a more extensive elaboration of this perspective (Pavoni 2018, pp. 45‑68; Pavoni and Tulumello 2023, pp. 215‑246), let it suffice here to qualify that my interpretation of atmospheres builds on the Deleuzoguattarian notion of agencement [assemblage], Sloterdijk’s infrastructural genealogy of atmospheres, and Spinoza’s notion of affect, significantly deviating from phenomenological approaches when it comes to addressing the in-between of atmospheres – that I explore as a matter of infrastructural consistency3 – and their something-more – that I assume to be pertaining to their overflowing vitality. There are, therefore, three qualities that a materialist approach to atmosphere’s consistency and vitality foregrounds, namely: emergence, ordering and excess. An atmosphere emerges from a coming together of bodies, tangible and intangible, abstract and concrete; at the same time, an atmosphere is always ordered or engineered by forces, structures and values, assuming a certain kind of mood and orientation as a result. Yet, an atmosphere somehow remains irreducible to the relations that compose it, and to the forces that orient it. There is a more that each atmosphere carries, a reserve of potential that overflows its present presence and haunts its actual relations as a menacing or promising cloud. This is why an atmosphere can never be reduced ‘to a mere aggregate of many rational decision-makers or many phenomenological experiences’ (Delanda 2016, p. 9; Protevi 2006).

• 4 As Bardin and Ferrari (2022, 256) explain, ‘Metastability describes systems macroscopically stable (...)
• 5 Elsewhere I argued that Sloterdijk’s otherwise compelling account somehow deprioritises such an ‘ex (...)

5Yes, atmospheres do always fall in some kind of ordering, one that is normally dissimulated as being as natural and spontaneous as the air we breathe (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015, p. 129). They keep vibrating nonetheless, under the spell of an overflowing potential. Atmospheres cannot be said to be stable, then. Stability is the property of a system in equilibrium, where forces are no longer in agitation: an atmosphere with no agitation however, lacking that vibratory liveliness Jane Bennett (2010) so effectively described as regards matter, is a dead atmosphere. Sloterdijk (2016 [2004]) helpfully proposed the metaphor of foam to grasp the infrastructural problem atmospheres encounter: like a foam, an atmosphere’s capacity to maintain itself in place depends on oscillating between rigidity, which decreases the resilient capacity of the foam to adapt to change, and flexibility, which decreases the internal cohesion of the foam, threatening dissolution. Reflecting on the notion of agencement, David Lapoujade (2017, p. 204) similarly noted that ‘an aggregate is the more consistent the more it manages to hold together heterogeneous and unstable terms, […] the more susceptible to transformation it is, the more consistency it has.’ The stable/unstable dichotomy is unable to capture the dynamism of atmospheres. In contrast to stability, which in physics or chemistry indicates a system of equilibrium in which forces are no longer in agitation, the notion of metastability zooms in on the pre-individual field of intensity where the potential energy of a system lies – and therefore its capacity to become (Simondon (1995 [1964], pp. 24‑6).4 Neither stable nor unstable, then, atmospheres are better understood as metastable configurations, always ordered (engineered) in some way or another, while simultaneously ‘excessive’ to that ordering. This excess is, in this sense, ‘structural’, that is, not simply relative to a subject’s experience but, more profoundly, to atmospheres’ ontological structure (Anderson 2009, p. 79; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013, p. 8).5 Atmospheres, I suggest, are emergent configurations that harbour an excess of potential – a ‘cloud of probabilities’, to borrow a term from quantum physics – on which they depend in order to remain ‘alive’: this is the vitalism of atmospheres, or their affective life, as Ben Anderson puts it (2014, p. 8). Attending to such a vitalism is all the more important as the politics of urban life implicitly and explicitly revolves around both the fostering, exploitation and valorisation of such an excess potential, as well as its neutralisation, suffocation and repression (Pavoni 2018).

• 6 For a critique of this tendency, see for instance Doel 1999; Berlant 2011; Pavoni 2018.

7The ordinary is the way things go, an everyday refrain that neither predetermines nor structures, and yet guides and orients. Everyday life atmo-rhythms are shaped by wider totalising processes, call them capitalism, neoliberalism, nationalism, including the various (class, race, gender, etc.) fractures through which they are actualised. And yet, the correspondence is not linear, causal, self-evident. Traditional Marxist theory of everyday life has often been too structuralist to grasp this nuance, on the one hand lamenting the way that capital structures the everyday into disciplined routines while, on the other hand, gesturing towards the liberatory exuberance supposedly lying beneath those oppressive iterations.6 There is neither innocence nor doom in everyday life, however. Its ordinary rhythms escape, by definition, unproductive dichotomies such as order/disorder, difference/repetition, freedom/oppression. ‘The two sides always meet,’ writes Maurice Blanchot. ‘The everyday with its tedious, painful, and sordid side […] and the inexhaustible, irrecusable, constantly unfinished that always escapes forms or structures’ (1993 [1969], p. 239). The ordinary is the way atmospheres are affectively tuned and aesthetically sensed in more or less lasting, empowering or debilitating ways, as bodies get stuck and unstuck, caught into all sorts of affective attachments in different ways, that is, in the everyday work of negotiating, adjusting, and adapting to this subtle hum. In her remarkable attempt to attune to this intense fragility, Kathleen Stewart wrote that ‘the ordinary is a circuit that’s always tuned in to some little something somewhere. A mode of attending to the possible and the threatening, it amasses the resonance in things’ (2007, p. 12). There is always a pull. What is the ordinary, in fact, if not a pull that we – comfortably or stressfully – depend on [de-, ‘from’, and – pendere, ‘hang’] in order to go about our lives? In Berlant’s words, the ordinary is a temporal zone ‘of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermittent, often in phenomena not prone to capture by a consciousness organized by archives of memorable impact’ (2007, p. 759). This is the fleeting refrain in which we are situated, an excessive force-field of potentiality that may or may not pick up speed, meaning or intelligibility. This is why there is no definition able to grasp it without immediately losing it: ‘the everyday escapes’ (Blanchot, 1993 [1969], p. 241). There is no mystery involved, however. The ordinary is not only unspeakable, nor simply a je-ne-sais-quoi that evades a subject who is unable to decipher it. More profoundly, the ordinary is structurally excessive, and therefore hardly manageable via the static strictures of descriptive language: we cannot literally translate it or realistically portray it. Yet we can attune to it, falling in tune, going along with its rhythm, since we are always part of it. One is always in the suspense of a suspension. There are consequences. ‘To pursue a condition of suspension is a way of posing the question of the present as an atmospheric condition rather than the expansion of anthropogenic powers’, Timothy Choy and Jerry Zee argue, adding that ‘suspension can also be an injunction to an art of noticing, of living in and thinking with atmospheres, their capacities and contents’ (2015, pp. 201 and 213). Noticing, exploring, experimenting with or ‘attend[ing] to ordinary affects is to trace how the potency of forces lies in their immanence to things that are both flighty and hardwired, shifty and unsteady but palpable too’ (Stewart 2007, p. 3). At the same time, this also means exploring atmospheric incapacitations, that is, the debilitating effects atmospheres might have on bodies and on their ability to thrive: ‘atmospheres carry us away in their buoyancy and lightness, or, conversely, they may sink us, drowning us with heaviness, lethargy or exhaustion’ (Adey 2013, p. 293), and unequally so. As Marijn Nieuwenhuis reminds, ‘certain bodies are psychometrically forced to suffer from “saturated air” and “dry air”, while others delight in more hospitable milieux of “clean air”’ (2016, p. 505). Again, it depends. How should we grasp these dynamics? How should we explore the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011), the ‘wearing out’ (Berlant 2011), or ‘atmospheric violence’ (Pavoni and Tulumello 2023) that slowly deplete the bodies that breathe through the increasingly toxic atmospheres of contemporaneity? And, at the same time, how should we conjure, to paraphrase Stewart (2011: p. 444, 450), a ‘writing and theorising that tries to stick with something becoming atmospheric […] approaching the thing that is happening by attuning to it’?

• 7 ‘People drift about with such lassitude’, wrote Stig Dagerman, by then a reporter for a Swedish new (...)

8According to Deleuze (1986 [1983], p. 206), what characterises the new cinema that emerges from the devastation of the second world war, especially with Italian neorealism, is a novel sensibility to everyday banality, different from the previous cinema’s penchant for a clear narrative constructed around a sensorimotor schema, that is, a coherent correspondence between perception and action. It was not a coincidence, perhaps, that this occurred in the peculiar context of post-WW2 Italy, amidst the psycho-physical and socio-political debris of a country that had both lost and won the war, a contradictory reality that the old narrative genres were no longer able to capture. For instance, in the similar, but far more dramatic context of post-WW2 Germany, Alexander Kluge observed a sort of disconnect between ‘normal time and “the sensory experience of time”’ (quoted in Sebald, 2011 [1999], n.p.), as the country seemingly plunged into a state of collective denial, unable to make sense of the destruction while submerged by the overpowering rhetoric of reconstruction. It fell within an impasse, to use Berlant’s term, namely, ‘a space of time lived without narrative genre’ (2011, p. 199). If, in the short term, the extent of the moral and physical destruction of Germany had a sort of anaesthetising effect on its inhabitants,7 in the more ambivalent aftermath of Italy, neorealism was able attune to the collective mood by means ‘of including the elliptical and the unorganised’, that is, the ‘dispersive and lacunary reality’ that inhabited the rubble (Deleuze 1989 [1985], p. 20). Sensorimotor schemata were thus replaced by strolling, the vague and aimless wandering of the actors or the camera itself through unspecific places, terrain vagues, factories, brownfield land, any space whatever.

• 8 In contrast to Griffero’s understanding of atmospheres as ‘radically evenemential’ and ‘absolutely (...)

9When ‘our sensory-motor schemata jam or break’, Deleuze writes, ‘a different type of image can appear’, an image able to speak for itself not representationally, but affectively (1989 [1985], p. 20]). This is why the attention to the ordinary everyday was crucial, since ‘being subject to sensory-motor schemata which are automatic and pre-established, it [the everyday] is all the more liable, on the least disturbance of equilibrium between stimulus and response […], suddenly to free itself from the laws of this schema and reveal itself in a visual and sound nakedness’ (ibid., p. 3). In neorealism, in fact, ‘the image no longer refers to a situation which is globalising or synthetic, but rather to one which is dispersive’, as if ‘the line or the fibre of the universe which prolonged events into one another, or brought about the connection of portions of space’, had broken (Deleuze 1986 [1983], p. 207). This fleeting dimension can be gestured at, but never ‘immediately’ grasped or ‘realistically’ described. The ordinary can only be ‘shown’ by tearing away those (optical, auditory, tactile, physical, etc.) clichés that structure descriptive narrations and that in this way invisibilise its atmosphere (Deleuze, 1989 [1985], p. 21). Unavoidably, such a ‘showing’ does not belong to the register of resemblance or representation, nor does it belong to that of the event. The everyday, as Blanchot writes, ‘remains always unactualized in its very realization, which no event, however important or however insignificant, is ever able to produce. Nothing happens; this is the everyday […] without event’ (1993 [1969], pp. 241, 243). Even when events do take place, the everyday escapes or surrounds them, as an ordinary hum that belongs to other registers, a blurred background noise that plunges the foreground into indifference, that very indifference that, by being indifferent, allows for difference as such to emerge, and yet can never be brought into the foreground, since it coexists, at once haunting and enabling, with the foreground itself. Hence Berlant’s suggestion: ‘a materialism of the atmospheres points to something more solid [than the notion of ‘event’], like “environment”’, one ‘in which structural conditions are suffused through a variety of mediations, such as predictable repetitions and other spatial practices that might go under the radar or, in any case, not take up the form of event’ (Berlant 2011, p. 100).8

• 9 See also Ceylan’s 2006 movie İklimler [Climates], which from the title seems to explore questions o (...)

12The first is a classic trope of acclimatisation: a person arrives in a new city from the countryside, or from abroad. This is always a matter of having to attune to its distant rhythms, to make them familiar by falling in tune with them. Reflecting on Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, for instance, Jean-Paul Thibaud observes that ‘If not much is going on - little action and laconic dialogues – this is due to the attention focused more on the places and landscapes, gestures and faces, silences and lights.’ This strategy is meant to let the spectators ‘feel the emergence of Tokyo’s atmospheres and the transformation of the characters’ emotional state’ (Thibaud 2023, p. 58): a study in acclimatisation.9

• 10 All quotations are from the film’s English subtitles.

13In the opening shot of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak [Distant], we see Yusuf [Mehmet Emin Toprak] walking through the snow, away from his village. He is leaving. As recession hit, Yusuf was made redundant by the local factory. He is going to Istanbul to look for a job on a cargo ship. ‘Sailors make a lot of money,’ he explains to his cousin: ‘money in US dollars. And you see the world. There’s no economic crisis at sea.’10 ‘Every place ends up looking the same,’ the cousin replies. At a çay evi [tea house] by the dock, an older worker warns Yusuf in a similar, inauspicious tone: ‘At your age I thought the same […] there’s no work and no money on the ships […] it’s an empty dream.’ This emptiness, the hollowed quality of Yusuf’s desire, is expressed by his inconspicuous wandering around an exceptionally snowy Istanbul. Through his walks, smokes, gazes, he is shown as if running idle, out of tune, without the sense of purpose the rhythm of the city would require. The ships and the women – the job and the love – he follows and gestures towards, unconvincingly, equally embody opportunities that he does not seem able to seize: vague promises bound to remain unfulfilled, as the emblematic shipwreck he bumps into on the first day [fig. 1].

• 11 This relation between camera movement and atmosphere is typical of Ceylan’s cinema. Recently, when (...)

23Spinoza’s philosophy offers a precise ontological framework for exploring such instances of debilitation that do not take the shocking form of the event, but rather unfold in slow and unremarkable ways, as bodies are gradually separated from their power to affect and be affected, becoming weaker, slower, gloomier. For Spinoza, a body is not a substance but a mode or relation that unfolds dynamically in variation, oscillating between concatenations that increase and concatenations that decrease its power to act – what Spinoza respectively refers to as ‘joy’ and ‘sadness’. Joy is the empowering of my ability to enter novel relations and thus to think, feel and live more, according to my own nature and constitution. Sadness is the disempowering of such ability: what separates myself from my own powers (Spinoza 2002 [1677a], part III; see also Deleuze 1968). The ethical task, in this context, becomes that of forming ‘adequate ideas’ of what is happening to us: understanding, that is, what makes us stronger, and what makes us weaker. Needless to say, rarely do we know what really makes us flourish or debilitates us, what is truly joyful or sad. In this social chemistry, relations between bodies are in turn influenced by the individual and social ideas about them, which may or may not be adequate: I may be in love with someone who is poisonous for me, who decreases my power to act, and yet I may delude myself into thinking otherwise. Boredom, in this sense, could be interpreted as resulting from an inadequate understanding one has of his or her powers to act: in the belief that there is nothing left to be done, that life no longer has anything to offer, that we have been separated from our powers, we end up being actually separated from them, self-reflexively drawing ourselves into the quicksand of resignation and depression. An inadequate understanding that seems to be indirectly suggested by those blurry images, and that may might be the result of struggling to breathe through a suffocating atmosphere. The emblematic scene here is set in Anatolia, where Mahmut has been carrying out a job assignment. On the way back he stops the car, in the middle of a bucolic landscape. A long shot communicates the photogenic beauty of the landscape. In the subsequent, closer shot of him and Yusuf inside the car, an unusual reverie seems to be animating Mahmut’s gaze: ‘God, what a place to photograph,’ he exclaims. A rare smile crosses his face, illuminated by the sunset light, as he ponders on the best way to shoot the scene. Yusuf proposes setting up the equipment. A few seconds and Mahmut abruptly withdraws: ‘Fuck it, why bother.’ Again, the change of mood is underlined by a symmetrically reversed shot, now showing his face from the other side, in the shadow [fig. 10 and 11].11

• 12 I am paraphrasing from Berlant: ‘After the dramatic event of a forced loss, such as after a broken (...)

26In post-war cinema, writes Deleuze, ‘the character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action’ (Deleuze 1989 [1985], p. 3). If Yusuf aptly expresses this condition, Mahmut embodies another kind of viewer: motionless, still. A viewer who is seemingly plunged into anaesthetised stupor, a condition the film repeatedly expresses by showing him gazing motionlessly at natural, urban or social landscapes just as if he were looking at television static: the sea, the pub customer, the cousin from his balcony, the television itself. Everything is blurred. He is literally prey to a vision that does not affect him in any way, a numbness he is unable to awake from, as if inhabiting a toxic, post-traumatic atmosphere in which he ‘no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust.’12 Commenting on the cinema of Ozu and Antonioni, Deleuze (1995 [1990], p. 160) observed that, ‘with them, the periods in which nothing happens don’t fall between two events, they’re in the events themselves, giving events their depth.’ What, then, when this depth engulfs the subjects to the extent of depriving them of their capacity to act, feel or move? How can this temporal quicksand be shown? Uzak does so by managing to be ‘continually absorbing, even when not much is happening – which is most of the time’, writes Hoberman (2022). We could rephrase it: it manages to be absorbing exactly because not much is happening or, to put it better, because quite a lot is happening that does not pertain to the register of the event. This is what the camera manages to show through its play of contrasts between proximity and distance, focus and blur, stillness and movement. According to what Mahmut Mutman writes, flirting with Jacques Derrida, what Uzak manages to show is the distance of the here and now, its irreducible flight from the present, and presence. As he puts it: ‘If I cannot not give form, the question then becomes how to turn back and pay attention to the everyday, that is, to the inaudibility of the audible, the invisibility of the visible, the distant here […] the distant is then that which is immediate, precisely the event’ (2006, p. 107). More than that, what Ceylan’s film does ‘show’ is the suffocating effect this depth – this atmospheric thickness – produces, its surreptitious capacity to debilitate bodies: once the sense is removed from things, what remains is their unreason, their meaninglessness, and its paralysing effect. Then, why bother?