Tonino Griffero is full Professor of
ATMOSPHERE/ATMOSPHERES What is an “Atmosphere”? As part
Aesthetics at Università degli Stu-
di di Roma “Tor Vergata”, where
he teaches Aesthetics. He has
published several books about
Hermeneutics, German Idealism
and Aesthetics of Atmosphere,
and translated a large number of
books from German into Italian.
Giampiero Moretti is full Profes-
sor of Aesthetics at Università de-
gli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”,
where he also teaches Compara-
tive Literatures. He has published
several books about Romanticism
and Heidegger, and he has trans-
lated large number of books from
German into Italian.
ISBN 978-88-6977-123-1
9 788869 771231
Mimesis International
Atmospheric spaces
www.mimesisinternational.com
$ 21.00 / £ 14.00 / € 18,00
(EDITED BY)
T. GRIFFERO - G. MORETTI
of the book series “Atmospheric
TESTING A NEW PARADIGM Spaces”, this volume analyses a
EDITED BY TONINO GRIFFERO new phenomenological and aes-
thetic paradigm based on the
AND GIAMPIERO MORETTI notion of the "Atmosphere", con-
ceived as a feeling spread out into
the external space rather than as
a private mood. The idea of "At-
mosphere" is here explored from
different perspectives and disci-
plines, in the context of a full val-
We often say that “there is something in the air” or that “there orization of the so-called “affec-
ATMOSPHERE/ATMOSPHERES
MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
is something brewing”, that we feel, who knows why (apparently), tive turn” in Humanities.
like “a fish out of water” or “at home”. It goes without saying that by
expressing this “something-more” of a certain situation we do indeed
refer to atmospheres, to something that is clearly felt even though we
cannot define it, and that one should be in it to really understand it.
MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
ATMOSPHERIC SPACES
 ATMOSPHERE/
ATMOSPHERES
Testing a New Paradigm

Edited by Tonino Griffero and Giampiero Moretti

MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
© 2018 – Mimesis International
www.mimesisinternational.com
e-mail: info@mimesisinternational.com

Book series: Atmospheric Spaces, n. 3

Isbn: 9788869771231

© MIM Edizioni Srl

P.I. C.F. 0241937030
 CONTENTS

Foreword
by Giampiero Moretti 9

Introduction
by Tonino Griffero 11

The atmosphere in the time of the ego-spheres

by Flavia Cuturi 15

Atmospheres of and in geography

by Libera D’Alessandro, Rosario Sommella and Lida Viganoni 31

Technosocial atmospheres: migration, institutional racism

and twitter
by Adele Del Guercio, Maria Anna Di Palma
and Tiziana Terranova 47

Economic atmospheres
by Amedeo di Maio and Salvatore Ercolano 63

Something more. atmospheres and pathic aesthetics

by Tonino Griffero 75

Some notes on atmospheres and financial markets

by Antonio Lopes and Lucio Gaeta 91

Northern american atmosphere (Canada, Alaska, Greenland):

ecumene and nordicity in Canada, climate change
and geostrategies in the far and extreme north
by René Georges Maury 99
E lucevan le stelle. atmospheric, poetic and musical
synaesthesia
by Federica Scassillo 111

The construction of situations and atmospheres

in installation art
by Elena Tavani 129

Authors 147
 Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics
by Tonino Griffero

1. Pathicity

The hero of Poe’s tale

slowly approaches the
“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 low in
the heavens”. Alone on his
horseback he crosses “a
singularly dreary tract of
country […] as the shades
of the evening drew on”
(Poe 1840, 291). Clearly, everything here conspires to evoke a spatial state
1

that is both meteorologically and emotionally tuned, that is to say a climate

we need to understand in a physicalistic way, but also as the narrating self
being felt-bodily involved by a diffused external atmospheric feeling. The
attempt to explain situations like these is the drive behind my long-term
journey from an aesthetics of atmospheres to an ontology of quasi-things,
all within a wider and unprecedented ‘pathic aesthetics’.2 By ‘pathic’ I
mean the affective involvement which the perceiver unintentionally feels
mostly unable to critically react to or to effectively mitigate the intrusiveness
of. This involvement, for me, is the core of the aesthetic sphere (in the
etymological sense of aisthesis) much more so than art and beauty. From a
philosophical standpoint ‒ by freeing feelings from the general social
taboos imposing their seclusion into private life, and therefore aiming at an

1 Hereinafter I will only provide the page reference.

2 Griffero (2014a, 2017, 2016a).
76 Atmosphere/Atmospheres

emotional re-alphabetization ‒ this means rehabilitating and valorizing the

ability to let ourselves go, to be a means of what happens to us rather than
the subjects (or masters) of what we do.
As a ‘thought of the senses’, aesthetics therefore shows itself not as a
gnostic but as a pathic phenomenology (in Erwin Straus’ sense).3 Such a
discipline should make it possible to avoid the frustrations caused both by
transcendentalism, which is always held hostage to the endless analysis of
conditions of possibility, and by interpretationism, which is always necessarily
bound to a deferred sense at the expense of the sensible ‘presence’. Pathic
aesthetics, instead, intends to remain as faithful as possible to the presence/
present – to the way in which “appearances”, regardless of whether or not
they have a substrate, resound in our lived of felt body.4 These appearances
‘in act’ (active and effective – indeed, wirklich) are atmospheric feelings5
and, more generally, the strange entities I call quasi-things: without being full
objects or accidental properties, they are much more present and aggressively
active on us than things in the strict sense.
But this is obviously not the place to go into detail about such matters.
It should suffice to recall that pathic aesthetics, freeing itself from any
constructivist approach – that is, the idea that the world is given only
through some reflective “access” –, rather supposes that there is a meaning
that is always already sedimented outside of us and can be verified
through our felt-bodily and pre-reflexive communication with the world.
Much of this meaning comes indeed from the impressions radiated by
atmospheres and quasi-things – in any case, by entities that, emotionally
tuning our surroundings and spreading out into a horizon of significance
(what Merleau-Ponty would call a ‘style’), generate in our felt (and not-
anatomical) body a specific affective situation. These ecstatic-atmospheric
qualities are salient not despite being apparent and ephemeral, but precisely
because of their ‘twilightness’:6 unlike things, they come and go and we
cannot imagine where they’ve been in the meantime. Just as we cannot
imagine where a given word has gone when it’s on the tip of our tongue.

3 By “the pathic moment, we mean the immediate communication we have with

things on the basis of their changing mode of sensory givenness […] The gnostic
moment merely develops the what of the given in its object character, the pathic
the how of its being as given” (Straus 1963, 12).
4 For the felt-bodily resonance of atmospheres cf. Griffero (2016c).
5 Today much is being written (at an interdisciplinary level) on this topic, starting
from Tellenbach (1968), Schmitz (1969, 2014), Böhme (1995, 2001, 2006, 2017),
and Hauskeller (1995). For an introductory bibliography (in fieri) see https://
atmosphericspaces.wordpress.com/ and the references included in my books.
6 On the atmospheric twilightness see Griffero (2016b; 2017, 103-112).
T. Griffero - Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics 77

In short: learning to ‘experience pathically’, that is, no longer regarding

teleological efficiency as a phenomenologically privileged path, we pay
attention not to our (overestimated) role as subjects but to the pathic
‘mineness’ that precedes egological solidification and the subsequent
cognitive dualism (subject/object).7 Such an atmospherologic program,
fully consistent with the interdisciplinary affective turn in many humanistic
disciplines oriented to qualitative investigations, conceives of human beings
not as ‘subjects-of’ but rather as ‘subject-to’: namely as living beings that,
without the illusion of always being the masters in their own house, are
educated to expose themselves (in the right way)8 and to understand that
affective involvement sometimes leads to emancipation rather than to an
alienating mediation.

2. Atmospheres

Starting from the (neo)

phenomenological redefinition of
philosophy as a self-reflection
regarding “how one feels” within
one’s environment, one claims the
right to examine experience so as to
discern its atmospheric charge. This,
however, presupposes the overturning
of the Western introjectionist
metaphysics (Schmitz 1964-1980)
and the de-psychologisation of the
emotional sphere. Feelings must
therefore be understood not as internal
properties (attributes-accidents) of
the psychological subject but as external constraints, relatively stable and
authoritarian entities around which the subject has to revolve. Exactly like
climate conditions, they “tinge” and modulate the lived and predimensional
space9 whose presence resonates in our felt body. And this is still the case
today. In fact there is no evidence that the modern affective life is less permeated
by moving atmospheres than the ancient one.10

7 Cf., for example, Wiesing (2014).

8 See especially Böhme (2008, 188-201).
9 On the kind of space implied by atmospherology see Griffero (2014c).
10 Schmitz (1973, XVIII).
78 Atmosphere/Atmospheres

When perceiving that “there is something in the air”, namely a “that”

and “how” irreducible to the cognitive “what” and to elementary sense-
data, one does not consider things (cohesive, solid, continuous objects),
but rather chaotic-multiple and quasi-thingly situations endowed with their
affective significance, whose petulant focalisation would destroy their very
atmosphericness. I therefore define the atmosphere as a spatial and not a
psychic state, an example of the passive synthesis, largely inter-subjective
and holistic, that precedes analysis and influences in a felt-bodily way the
perceiver’s emotional situation from the outset, often resisting any (more
or less conscious) attempt at projective transformation. However, here
I will omit any further explanation and simply say something about the
supervenience and the associationistic inexplicability of atmospheric first
impression, with the help of the protagonist of Poe’s tale.
a) Let’s come back to the first atmospheric glimpse of the house of
Usher: “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” (293). As already mentioned, this specific
climatic atmosphere is not only a meteorologic event but also a feeling
poured out into a certain space: in fact it “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” (ibid.). Obviously,
wind and clouds on a stormy night here contribute to the holistic atmosphere
as much as the (later described) anthropic elements. “The under surfaces
of the huge masses of agitated vapour”, in fact, “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” (305). And it is plainly evident that
this “hanging about” must absolutely not be understood as a mere literary
metaphor, but as the extremely fine linguistic expression ‒ irreplaceable
and therefore by no means only metaphorical ‒ of the felt-bodily heaviness
and inaction we experience, for example, when we are depressed.
The specific felt-bodily resonance of that atmosphere, regardless of
what could be said about the specific architectural qualities of the building,11
is certainly also due to its irreducible linguistic vagueness. The protagonist,
in fact, is greatly disturbed by what seems to be “a mystery all insoluble”
(291) in the house of Usher, because, “while, beyond doubt, there are
combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus

11 For urban and architectural atmospheres see Griffero (2013, 2014d).

T. Griffero - Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics 79

affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations
beyond our depth” (292). This clearly means that atmospheres supervene
on certain environmental (also
physical-material) conditions, but
without reducing themselves to those
conditions, even when the latter
amounts to the “uncanny” but “barely
perceptible fissure, which, extending
from the roof of the building in front,
made its way down the wall in a
zigzag direction, until it became lost
in the sullen waters of the tarn” (294).
Atmospheres, in fact, are a “something
more” generated by a specific place
and not (or less) by another, all other objectual elements being equal.
Far from underestimating the importance of the objectual elements
as well as their expressive qualities, I think that through their ecstatic
potential they ‘generate’ atmospheres that would never exist without
them. Usher himself seems to point this out very lucidly: first of all when,
revealing that he is an externalist (in pectore), he even refers to “the
gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about
the waters and the walls” (301; emphasis are mine); secondly, when
he emphasises (unfortunately following the kind of naive dualism that
atmospherology precisely wishes to avoid) “an influence which some
peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion” had,
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” (297). This (still
too dualistic) relationship between the physical and the psychic can be
better explained here by a holistic ‘in-between’, namely by a felt-bodily
communication (lived intercorporeity) or, to put it differently, a relation
that precedes the relata which, strictly speaking, become two clearly
distinct poles (subject-object) only later.
b) The synaesthetic (and not only ocular) perception of the house of
Usher resonates felt-bodily in the protagonist. Indeed, everything already
begins with his first 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”. Everything here evokes “an utter
depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more
properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter
80 Atmosphere/Atmospheres

lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping off of the veil”. 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”
(291), 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 or terrible” (ibid.). He realizes “the futility
of all attempt 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” (298). This means that
this atmospheric perception is so precise and authoritarian that not
even the imagination, some cultural code or a condition of safety can
convert into an experience of the sublime. And this is more than a literary
suggestion, because involuntary everyday-life experiences often show
this kind of affective (atmospheric) felt-bodily involvement in situations:
when visiting a certain apartment for the first time, for example, we
feel affective qualia whose rational explanation sounds only like a flat
rationalisation ex post.
The desubjectification of atmospheres must not make us forget that
their quasi-thingly effect is still relative to a subject. But, if the variable
intensity of their impression also depends on the subject, their phenomenic
apparition is something quasi-objective. People are not, therefore,
surrounded by things that are devoid of meaning but by things and
quasi-things (static or in motion), which are always already affectively
connoted: in other words, people are surrounded by amodal affordances
(Gibson 1999) which permeate the space in which they are perceived and
that being, within certain limits, no less inter-observable and repeatable
than perspective properties, seem to “demand” special objectivity. For
instance, the unease and the feeling of being spied on, aroused in us by
a dark wood, is (more or less) affectively and bodily felt by anyone who
shares such an experience. In opposition to the associationist temptation
or, even worse, the conventionalist one, one must then restate that this
atmospheric affordance of disquietude is the immediate irradiation of a
quasi-thingly feeling that is spatially poured out. Association, if anything,
comes after and is certainly not arbitrary. Those who claim, for example,
that the willow is “weeping” only thanks to an analogical relation to past
experience should nevertheless explain 1) how it was possible that the
very first experience was already associationistic and 2) why it is just
the weeping willow and not, for example, a pine tree that suggests that
specific impression.
T. Griffero - Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics 81

3. Atmospheric Games

Even if an atmosphere lies not so much in the eye of the perceiver, but is
rather a relatively objective feeling we encounter in the external space,
I do not embrace in toto Hermann Schmitz’s too radical campaign of
desubjectification of feelings. With the purpose of a wider practical
applicability of this approach, I therefore prefer to admit that there are
various types of atmospheres: in short, they can be 1) prototypic (objective,
external and unintentional, and sometimes lacking a precise name), 2)
derivative (objective, external but intentionally produced and always
arising from the relationship between perceiver and objects) and 3) even
quite spurious in their mere relatedness (subjective and even projective).
These different types of atmospheres can then generate various types of
emotional games,12 which I’ll describe very briefly.
A) An atmosphere might be antagonistic to our previous mood and
overwhelm us when we enter a certain space (what Böhme calls ‘ingressive’
moment), appearing refractory to our (more or less conscious) attempt
at a projective re-interpretation and transformation, be it the harmlessly
oppressive atmosphere of the lift, when “the hands are kept at the side or
used to steady the body by grasping a railing [, when] the eyes are fixed
on infinity and are not brought to bear on anyone for more than a passing
glance” (Hall 1966, 118); be it the sacral atmosphere, so engaging that
it captures even those who walk into the church only to steal, or that of
joy, which “in a ‘pub’ or at a party may ‘infect’ the newcomers, who may
even have been depressed beforehand, so that they are ‘swept up’ into the
prevailing gaiety” (Scheler 2008, 15). And this impermeability is exactly
what the protagonist of Poe’s tale feels. In fact, he naively guessed 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. (292)

It’s certainly true that, sometimes, a simple physical movement in space

cancels and replaces the previous atmosphere: for example, after leaving a
room filled with a tense atmosphere, we no longer feel it. In the tale, on

12 For a first outline of an atmospheric phenomenology, see Griffero (2014a, 129-141).

82 Atmosphere/Atmospheres

the contrary, for diegetic reasons that, however, reflect everyday situations
(the terrorist threat, for example, is today so ubiquitous that it hovers over
all airports, from London to Bangkok, and impregnates all our discursive
practices), the first atmospheric impression becomes even more intense
through the change of the observation point. Nor is it alleviated by a following
and more reflective reasoning based on a reductionist-objectual strategy.

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. (304; emphasis are mine)

What he feels is a unintentional and groundless atmosphere, made no

weaker by the erroneous dualistic assumption that, unlike living beings,
the inanimate cannot radiate affective qualities and therefore felt-bodily
communicate with the perceiver.
B) But an atmosphere can also find us in tune with it (syntonic moment)
to the point that we don’t even realize we have entered it, even if others
may be emotionally affected by it: this explains the apparent absence of
atmosphere of certain situations, best explained mainly by the (gestaltic)
insufficient contrast between figure and ground. 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 atmospheres (conscious aversion and overwhelming
awe or unnoticed sense of wellbeing and pride) is still the same spatial-
emotional quality of intimidating vastness.
C) “‘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.’”. This is how Charles Dickens (Hard Times) brilliantly expresses
a situation of affective externalization with no corresponding subjective
and felt-bodily resonance, an interested studium without a disturbing and
attracting punctum, “which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to
me)” (in the words of Barthes 1981, 27). Regardless of whether it is perceived
as antagonistic, the atmosphere can be recognised without being really felt
in the body ‒ hence the controversial discussion on whether or not there is
at least a minimal affective ingredient in every cognitive account ‒ or can
T. Griffero - Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics 83

even be experienced in an opposite way. The first case, of an atmosphere

being recognised without being felt-bodily perceived, is that of Faust, who
perceives the atmosphere “of order, peace and contentment” in Gretchen’s
“small neat room” (Goethe 1962, 263), without really sharing it. That is to
say, one can recognise the objective “roots” of an atmosphere but in a not
affective and coercive manner: “A lucky star’s above, but not for me…”,
as the song says. And indeed, this very resistance, maybe even conditioned
by the inability to let oneself go, can in turn create a qualitatively different
and even antithetical atmosphere, as in the case of Schadenfreude. “We
all know from experience that our melancholy can be dispersed by the
serenity of the environment (by irradiation), but it can also be re-sharpened
by contrast” (Hellpach 1960, 120, n. 48), or that, to make another example,
sometimes an atmosphere of joy is so dull and conventional that, rather
than making us rejoice, it might even end up making us sad. It is what
Rilke’s Malte emblematically feels in the middle of a festive crowd, whose

faces were full of the light that came from the carnival booths and laughter
welled up and poured from their mouths like puss from an open sore […]
People stopped me and laughed and I felt that I should laugh too but I couldn’t.
(transl. W. Needham)

D) Also, an atmosphere can sometimes elicit a resistance that leads

the perceiver to try to change it (sometimes successfully, as in the case of
superficial and passing feelings). However, the very intensity of the protest
of the subject’s mood in this antagonistic encounter is indeed the best proof
of the outside and objective effectiveness of the atmosphere he reacts to.
E) Something even more common is the fact that an atmosphere may not
reach the necessary threshold to be sensorially-affectively observable, thus
causing an embarrassing emotional inadequacy for oneself and for others.
This happens, for instance, when one euphorically joins a community
pervaded by a tragic atmosphere, or when one, unfamiliar with the habits
and ways of life of a certain area, feels unexplainably out of place.
F) Furthermore, we cannot overlook the fact that an atmosphere may
change in the course of time. This explains why “an apartment which
is barely adequate becomes uninhabitable to some people at the exact
moment that a rising apartment house next door cuts off the view” (Hall
1966, 171). The are many reasons for this. An atmosphere may change,
for example, even because of a slight change in the perceptual space (a
fully illuminated landscape turns into a different one when it appears
to us in the backlight, or the atmosphere of magnificence of a building,
at a close distance, may turn into an atmosphere of decay) or because
84 Atmosphere/Atmospheres

of a change in the climatic conditions, such as when the atmosphere

of sadness suggested by a shaded space brightens up when the cloud
disappears. But it also may change due to an additional cognition ‒ such
as when growing doubts gradually undermine a charismatic atmosphere
or the unveiling of the fictional or even manipulative character of a
seemingly natural atmosphere cancels its effects ‒, or perhaps because of
the end of a sensory illusion, such as when the atmospheric effect of the
mountains changes if we photographically ascertain that they are less and
less steep than they appear or than we might imagine, or when we realise
that in any perceptual framework the left is always optically privileged
(Thibaud 2003, 294). Even more, an atmosphere may also change
because of a contrast among itself and its unwanted sub-atmospheres, or
because of a purely personal experience, such as when the atmosphere
of a hospital ceases to be angst-inducing because we need it urgently or
because, working there, we feel that it is a sort of second home to us.
Or, more simply, because of a change in the physiological conditions
of the perceiver: in fact, “when our stomachs are ‘out of sorts’ they
can cast a pall over all things. What would otherwise seem indifferent
to us suddenly becomes irritating and disturbing” (Heidegger 1979, I,
99). Simply put, non-prototypical atmospheres are subject to a relative
cognitive penetrability, because what we know can modify our initial
feeling (especially over time).
G) To conclude, an atmosphere may be so dependent on the perceptual
(subjective) form as to both involve the transition from a feeling to another,
perhaps even axiologically opposite, and to concretise itself even in
materials that normally express different or opposing affective qualities.
This is why “a drink seems to taste better in a dark and dimly lit bar”
(Dichter 1964, 360) or why something familiar can become something
uncanny (like in Poe’s tale):

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
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. (294)

In such cases physical identical materials radiate an almost identical

atmosphere, which in a different (subjective and objective) context
resonates in a relatively different way. To mention but a few well-known
and wholly idiosyncratic examples, this happens in T.S. Eliot’s “April is the
T. Griffero - Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics 85

cruelest month”, in Cioran’s belief that self-disdain could be strengthened

by the beauty of a landscape, or in Proust’s “madeleine moment”, not to
mention the phonosymbolic atmosphere of a word like “Parma”.

The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit, after reading
the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone
were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he
would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was
compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses
in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid of that heavy
syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirred, and of all that
I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets.
(Proust 2010, 467)

Similarly, it may also happen that a diffused atmospheric feeling

condenses itself into things and/or persons that become, therefore, its
centre of irradiation, without being its cause (or anchorage point, to
put it with Schmitz). The fact that the atmospheric fear of a visit to the
dentist does not direct itself towards the real cause (the pain as anchorage
point) but may rather spread a negative aura on the dentist as a person,
the tools he uses and even the gossip magazines in the waiting room
(condensation area), explains very well that the intentional (or formal)
object of a feeling, always presumed by orthodox phenomenology, is
often just something apparent.
So let’s sum up this detailed phenomenology of atmospheric games.
Except in the case of suggestive but extremely rare prototypical ones, in
everyday life atmospheres are rather affordances that, existing ‘between’
object (better: the environmental qualia) and subject (better: their felt body),
are filtered and relatively changed by the perceiver. However, by stating
this I do not mean to fully embrace a projectivistic relativism. In fact, if
by feeling an atmosphere we ipso facto alter it, no “first” and antagonistic-
dystonic atmosphere could ever overwhelm us: we would only feel what
we are already feeling and would invariably project it outside. On the
contrary, atmospheric perception is a prominent example of a more general
affective enactivism (Slaby 2014): whether we surrender to an atmospheric
situation, or fulfill (more or less voluntarily) the ‘affective action’ we
respond to, the truth is that without external affective (atmospheric)
conditions and constraints we wouldn’t experience certain feelings. Or at
least we wouldn’t consolidate only incipient and vague emotions, ending
up being condemned to emotional autism and deprived of our legitimate
right to have an emotional (also atmospheric) destiny.
86 Atmosphere/Atmospheres

4. Atmospheric Authority

Atmospheres have authority.13 Of course, like that of speech acts, this

authority also depends on certain necessary contextual requirements. For
example, being in a church as tourists, waiting for the bus to take us elsewhere,
is very different from being there as believers waiting for a true encounter
with God. But in other cases (the prototypical ones) an atmosphere is rather
violently imposed on the perceiver without any precondition, authoritatively
reorienting his emotional situation and proving totally refractory to any
projective adjustment. The reason is that the atmosphere I am externally
feeling is mine not because I possess it (possessive sense of the pronoun),
but only because it concerns me (subjectivising sense of the pronoun).
The prestige or “force” through which an atmosphere constrains and
enthralls the perceiver, in the absence of physical coercion, is such that it may
even inhibit any critical distance. The angst-inducing atmosphere produced,
for example, by the news media predisposes those who are enmeshed in
it to see enemies everywhere or at least to overestimate the dangers of the
outside world. This binding authority clearly reminds us of Ruldof Otto’s
‘numinous’. In fact, just like the numinous, every atmosphere a) is the less
linguistically circumscribable the more deeply felt, and “in a way” known it
is; b) it can be generated but not rationally communicated; c) it is engaging
for the felt-body with consequences on the physical body (it is “hair-raising”,
it makes your “limbs tremble”, it gives you “goosebumps”, etc.); d) it is
contagious, because “like stored-up electricity, [it] discharg[es] itself upon
any one who comes too near”; e) it is attractive not despite the fact that it
terrifies but because of it; f) it is supervening with respect to sense-data that
are merely its occasio; g) it is especially active on emotionally predisposed
minds, since “impression [...] presupposes something capable of receiving
impressions, and that is just what the mind is not, if in itself it is only a tabula
rasa” (Otto 1936, 18, 164).
I therefore don’t wish to relegate the issue of “power” and authority to
sociology, for example through the socially desirable trend of adjusting
our own feeling to the one we encounter and to culturally determined
emotional norms in order to reduce a stressful cognitive dissonance, or,
even worse, to some biophysical force (like pheromones, for example).
Indeed, I would like to stress that, if not all atmospheres, at least the
prototypical ones ‒ especially when they generate mixed (and therefore
discrepant) feelings rather than homogeneous ones ‒ claim an absolute

13 See Griffero (2014b).

T. Griffero - Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics 87

validity and thus inhibit, at least in principle, any real possibility of choice
and critical reaction in the perceiver. The binding authority of the (not
metaphorical) “happy” atmosphere of a meadow does not come from a
subjectivist-fictional inference (“it is as if the meadow were happy...”), but
rather from the authoritative effect of felt-bodily resonance of that percept
(that meadow) in the perceiver.
This authority may take many forms: we can think of the pedagogical
atmosphere, of vicarious shame (Griffero 2017, 79-92) but also of the
depressive field that envelops therapist and patient (Francesetti 2015, 8,
12). A very simple example, dear to Schmitz, is that of a merry person who
does not hope to cheer up a very sad person but rather tries to mitigate
or completely conceal his own joy in order to respect the sorrow of the
other. It is precisely because atmospheric sadness “claims entirely and
exclusively for itself the space of lived presence” (Schmitz 2009, 81) that
the sad person normally feels legitimated to be immersed in the atmosphere
he radiates and entitled to more or less explicitly protest against what, being
a discrepant atmosphere, he regards as an unjustified (unfair?) happiness.
Generally speaking, the atmospheric feelings inherently endowed with
greater authority inevitably prevail. It may be the vanity of things perceived
in a cold winter morning or in an anonymous non-place; symbolically, it
may be the solemn gravity that impresses one even if walking into a church
for superficial reasons; it may be the law that intimidates the defendant
until he thinks that he is smarter than the jury; it may be the wrath that
persecutes one who feels threatened by someone or something (to the
point of paranoia); it may be the mutual trust felt by those who feel it is
irreducible to the logic of give and take; it may be the violence of certain
“earworms”, or, finally, the atmosphere of love that justifies at least part of
the crazy things one does “for love”.
That’s enough for now. The authority
of prototypical atmospheres, which
properly exists only when it quasi-
thingly overcomes all of the
perceiver’s critical scruples, teaches
us to understand and appreciate, even
in our daily lives, the meaning of a
Lutheran famous statement. In fact,
paraphrasing this sentence, we often
find ourselves in the condition of
saying “Here I stand. I cannot feel
otherwise”. It is exactly what Poe’s hero discovered: he felt quite a specific
88 Atmosphere/Atmospheres

atmosphere ‒ “I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and

irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all” (295) ‒ long before the final
and material catastrophe. However, when he saw the rapidly widening of the
once barely-discernible zigzag fissure and felt the “fierce breath of the
whirlwind”, when he looked with horror at “the mighty walls rushing asunder”
and “the deep and dank tarn at [his] feet closed sullenly and silently over the
fragments” (309), he was observing nothing but the fulfilment of his first
atmospheric impression of the House of Usher.

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