Affective atmospheres Ben Anderson Department of Geography, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 22 July 2009 Received in revised form 25 August 2009 Accepted 27 August 2009 Keywords: Affect Life Atmosphere Materiality abstract In this paper I reflect on the concept of affective atmospheres in the context of the distinction between affect and emotion that has emerged in recent work on emotion, space and society. The concept of atmosphere is interesting because it holds a series of opposites – presence and absence, materiality and ideality, definite and indefinite, singularity and generality – in a relation of tension. To develop this account of atmosphere I juxtapose Marx’s materialist imagination with a phenomenology attentive to singular affective qualities. By invoking a material imagination based on the movement and lightness of air, we learn from the former about the turbulence of atmospheres and their indeterminate quality. From the latter, we learn that atmospheres are singular affective qualities that emanate from but exceed the assembling of bodies. As such, to attend to affective atmospheres is to learn to be affected by the ambiguities of affect/emotion, by that which is determinate and indeterminate, present and absent, singular and vague. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. A revolutionary atmosphere On the 14th of April 1856, Karl Marx addressed an audience in London at a meeting to mark the fourth anniversary of the Chartist People’s Paper . In a now famous passage, he began by invoking a certain ‘revolutionary atmosphere’ of crisis, danger and hope: ‘‘The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents d small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock. Noisily and confusedly they proclaimed the emancipation of the Proletarian, i.e. the secret of the 19th century, and of the revolution of that century . the atmosphere in which we live weighs upon every one with a 20,000-pound force, but do you feel it? No more than European society before 1848 felt the revolutionary atmosphere enveloping and pressing it from all sides.’’ (Marx, 1978: 577) Marx’s metaphorical use of the term ‘atmosphere’ in this famous address has long interested me. In particular, I have been intrigued by the question Marx addressed to his audience: ‘‘the atmosphere in which we live, weighs upon every one with a 20,000-pound force, but do you feel it?’’ (ibid, 577). His answer is no. He assumes his audience does not ‘‘feel it’’, despite it ‘‘pressing’’ and ‘‘enveloping’’ society from all sides (ibid, 577). Marx’s invo- cation of the term atmosphere is, of course, part of an epicurean material imagination that invokes the element of air alongside the state of a fluid (‘oceans of liquid matter’) and the element of earth (‘hard rock’). Nevertheless, Marx crystallizes the conundrum that for me makes the term atmosphere interesting in the slightly different context of work on spaces of affect and emotion and in relation to the slightly different sense of atmospheres as affective and emotive. How does an atmosphere ‘envelope’ and ‘press’ upon life? How, put differently, to attend to the collective affects ‘in which we live’? In this paper I offer a series of reflections on what an ‘affective atmosphere’ is and does. I do so in the context of the recent invention of concepts, methods, and sensibilities that aim to attune to the prepersonal or transpersonal dimensions of affective life and everyday existence. By which I mean the momentary kindnesses that Stewart (2007) bears witness to, or the way that Brennan (2004) invokes the transmission of boredoms or loves between friends. Intensities that are only imperfectly housed in the proper names we give to emotions (hope, fear and so on). I will argue that it is the very ambiguity of affective atmospheres – between presence and absence, between subject and object/subject and between the definite and indefinite – that enable us to reflect on affective experience as occurring beyond, around, and alongside the forma- tion of subjectivity. I am not alone, however, in being intrigued by the notion of affective atmospheres (Bissell, forthcoming; McCor- mack, 2008). If we understand atmosphere as a term – in Rabinow’s E-mail address: ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa 1755-4586/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005 Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009) 77–81