- 1 For the Aesthetics of Atmospheres see my German and Japanese Books: Böhme 2001, 2005, 2006 a,b, 200 (...)
- 2 This article has been published in French in the proceedings of the 1st international congress on a (...)
1Our general theme, Making atmospheres1, has a provocative character. It sounds slightly perverse, even paradoxical. Making - does that not have to do with something tangible? With the world of concrete things and apparatuses? And atmosphere
- is that not something airy, indefinite, something which is simply
there and comes over us? How is one supposed to make atmospheres? Well,
there is one sphere in which that has actually been going on for a long
time: the art of the stage set. In it we have a paradigm which not only
encourages us in our enterprise but endows the idea of making
atmospheres with objective reality2.
2The term atmosphere
has its origin in the meteorological field and refers to the earth’s
envelope of air which carries the weather. It is only since the 18th
century that it has been used metaphorically, for moods which are “in
the air”, for the emotional tinge of a space. Today this expression is
commonly used in all European languages; no longer it seems artificial
and is hardly even regarded as a metaphor. One speaks of the atmosphere
of a conversation, a landscape, a house, the atmosphere of a festival,
an evening, a season. The way in which we speak of atmospheres in these
cases is highly differentiated - even in everyday speech. An atmosphere
is tense, light-hearted or serious, oppressive or uplifting, cold or
warm. We also speak of the atmosphere of the “petite bourgeoisie”, the
atmosphere of the Twenties, the atmosphere of poverty. To introduce some
order into these examples, atmospheres can be divided into moods,
phenomena of synaesthesia, suggestions for motions, communicative and
social-conventional atmospheres. What matters is that, in speaking of
atmospheres, we refer to their character. With this term character
we already bring our understanding of atmospheres close to the sphere
of physiognomy and theatre. The character of an atmosphere is the way in
which it communicates a feeling to us as participating subjects. A
solemn atmosphere has the tendency to make my mood serious, a cold
atmosphere causes me to shudder.
3The scholarly use of the term atmosphere is relatively new. It began in the field of psychiatry, specifically in Hubert Tellenbach’s book Geschmack und Atmosphäre
[Taste and atmosphere] (Tellenbach, 1968). Here, atmosphere refers to
something bordering on the olfactory - such as the climate of the
homeland or the smell of the nest, that is, a sphere of familiarity
which is perceptible in a bodily-sensuous way. Since then, atmospheres
have been researched in detail by phenomenology. Talk about atmospheres
plays a part today in interior design, town planning, advertising and
all fields related to the art of the stage set - that is, the creation
of backgrounds in radio, film and television. In general, it can be said
that atmospheres are involved wherever something is being staged,
wherever design is a factor - and that now means: almost everywhere.
4Now,
this matter-of-fact way in which atmospheres are talked about and
manipulated is extremely surprising, since the phenomenon of atmosphere
is itself something extremely vague, indeterminate, intangible. The
reason is primarily that atmospheres are totalities: atmospheres imbue
everything, they tinge the whole of the world or a view, they bathe
everything in a certain light, unify a diversity of impressions in a
single emotive state. And yet one cannot actually speak of “the whole”,
still less of the whole of the world; speech is analytical and must
confine itself to particulars. Moreover, atmospheres are something like
the aesthetic quality of a scene or a view, the “something more” that
Adorno refers to in somewhat oracular terms in order to distinguish a
work of art from a mere “piece of work”; or they are “the Open” which,
since Heidegger, has given us access to the space in which something
appears. Seen in this way, atmospheres have something irrational about
them, in a literal sense: something inexpressible. Finally, atmospheres
are something entirely subjective: in order to say what they are or,
better, to define their character, one must expose oneself to them, one
must experience them in terms of one’s own emotional state. Without the
sentient subject, they are nothing.
5And
yet: the subject experiences them as something “out there”, something
which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession
of us like an alien power. So, are atmospheres something objective after
all? The truth is that atmospheres are a typical intermediate
phenomenon, something between subject and object. That makes them, as
such, intangible, and means that - at least in the European cultural
area - they have no secure ontological status. But for that very reason
it is rewarding to approach them from two sides, from the side of
subjects and from the side of objects, from the side of reception
aesthetics and from the side of production aesthetics.
6The
conception of atmospheres as a phenomenon has its origin in reception
aesthetics. Atmospheres are apprehended as powers which affect the
subject; they have the tendency to induce in the subject a
characteristic mood. They come upon us from we know not where, as
something nebulous, which in the 18th century might have been called a je ne sais quoi, they are experienced as something numinous - and therefore irrational.
7The
matter looks different if approached from the side of production
aesthetics, which makes it possible to gain rational access to this
“intangible” entity. It is the art of the stage set which rids
atmospheres of the odour of the irrational: here, it is a question of producing atmospheres.
This whole undertaking would be meaningless if atmospheres were
something purely subjective. For the stage set artist must relate them
to a wider audience, which can experience the atmosphere generated on
the stage in, by and large, the same way. It is, after all, the purpose
of the stage set to provide the atmospheric background to the action, to
attune the spectators to the theatrical performance and to provide the
actors with a sounding board for what they present. The art of the stage
set therefore demonstrates from the side of praxis that atmospheres are
something quasi-objective. What does that mean?
8Atmospheres,
to be sure, are not things. They do not exist as entities which remain
identical over time; nevertheless, even after a temporal interruption
they can be recognised as the same, through their character. Moreover,
although they are always perceived only in subjective experience - as a
taste or a smell, for example, to return to Tellenbach - it is possible
to communicate about them intersubjectively. We can discuss with one
another what kind of atmosphere prevails in a room. This teaches us that
there is an intersubjectivity which is not grounded in an identical
object. We are accustomed, through the predominant scientific mode of
thinking, to assume that intersubjectivity is grounded in objectivity,
that detection of the presence and determinateness of something is
independent of subjective perception and can be delegated to an
apparatus. Contrary to this, however, the quasi-objectivity of
atmospheres is demonstrated by the fact that we can communicate about
them in language. Of course, this communication has its
preconditions : an audience which is to experience a stage set in
roughly the same way must have a certain homogeneity, that is to say, a
certain mode of perception must have been instilled in it through
cultural socialisation.
9Nevertheless,
independently of the culture-relative character of atmospheres, their
quasi-objective status is preserved. It manifests itself in the fact
that atmospheres can be experienced as surprising, and, on occasions, in
contrast to one’s own mood. An example is when, in a cheerful mood, I
enter a community in mourning : its atmosphere can transform my
mood to the point of tears. For this, too, the stage set is a practical
proof.
10All the same, can one really make atmospheres? The term making
refers to the manipulating of material conditions, of things,
apparatus, sound and light. But atmosphere itself is not a thing; it is
rather a floating in-between, something between things and the
perceiving subjects. The making of atmospheres is therefore confined to
setting the conditions in which the atmosphere appears. We refer to
these conditions as generators.
- 3 Cf. Böhme, 2004, Chapter III.2, "Theorie des Bildes".
11The
true character of a making, which does not really consist in producing a
thing, but in making possible the appearance of a phenomenon by
establishing conditions, can be clarified by going back to Plato’s
theory of mimesis.3
12In the dialogue Sophist, Plato draws a distinction between two kinds of performing art, in order to unmask the mendacious art of the Sophists (Sophist, 235e3-236c7). There is a difference, he argues, between eikastike techne and phantastike techne. It is the latter which interests us here. In eikastike techne, mimesis consists in the strict imitation of a model. Phantastike techne,
by contrast, allows itself to deviate from the model. It takes account
of the viewpoint of the observer, and seeks to make manifest what it
represents in such a way that the observer perceives it “correctly”.
Plato bases this distinction on the practice of the sculptors and
architects of his time. For example, the head of a very tall statue was
made relatively too large, so that it did not appear too small to the
observer, or the horizontal edges of a temple were curved slightly
upwards, so that they did not seem to droop to the observer (Lamb et
Curtius, 1944, p. 17). This art of phantastike is perhaps
not yet quite what we mean by the art of making atmospheres, but it
already contains the decisive feature: that the artist does not see his
actual goal in the production of an object or work of art, but in the
imaginative idea the observer receives through the object. That is why
this art is called phantastike techne. It relates to the subject’s power of representation, to the imagination or imaginatio. We come close to what concerns us through the skenographia developed by the Greeks as early as the fourth century BC. In his Poetics 1449a18 Aristotle ascribes this to the tragedian Sophocles. The classical philologists believed that skenographia already
implied perspective painting, an invention frequently attributed to the
Renaissance (Frank, 1962, p. 20). They claimed that the
geometrical doctrine of proportion, in particular the theorem of
radiation we find developed in the Elements of Euclid, was derived from skenographia.
For in order to create spatial depth through painting, perspectival
foreshortening of the objects represented - buildings, trees, people -
is needed. In scenography, therefore, we have an art form which is now
directed explicitly, in its concrete activity, towards the generation of
imaginative representations in the subjects, here the audience. It does
not want to shape objects, but rather to create phenomena. The
manipulation of objects serves only to establish conditions in which
these phenomena can emerge. But that is not achieved without the active
contribution of the subject, the onlooker. It is interesting when
Umberto Eco claims precisely this for all pictorial representation (Eco,
1976, p. 32, footnote 7): It does not copy the object, he asserts,
but only creates the conditions of perception under which the idea of
the object appears for the viewer of the image. That may be overstated,
yet it is true for Impressionist painting, for example. That painting
does not aim to copy an object or a landscape, but rather to awaken a
particular impression, an experience in the onlooker. The most
convincing proof of this is the technique of pointillism. The colours
the painter wishes the onlooker to see are not located on the painted
surface but “in space”, or in the imagination of the onlooker.
- 4 See Eckert, 1998, esp. the chapter: "Mehr Licht! – Die Lichtbühne", p. 106-113.
13Of
course, the art of the stage set has by now advanced beyond pure
scenography. Wagner’s operas seem to have given particular impetus to
this development, firstly because they demanded a fantastic ambiance in
any case and, secondly, because they were intended to act especially on
the feelings, not just the imagination (Schuberth, 1955, p. 86,
p. 95). But the breakthrough came only in the 20th century, with
the mastery of light and sound through electrical technology4.
Here, a stage art has now been developed which is no longer confined to
the design and furnishing of the stage space but, on the one hand,
causes the action on the stage to appear in a particular light and, on
the other, creates an acoustic space which tunes
the whole performance. At the same time, this has made it possible for
the art of the stage set to leave the stage itself and spill over into
the auditorium, or even into space itself. The spaces generated by light
and sound are no longer something perceived at a distance, but
something within which one is enclosed. This has also enabled the art of
the stage set to expand into the general art of staging, which has
applications, for example, in the decor of discotheques and the design
of large-scale events such as open-air festivals, opening ceremonies of
sports events, etc. (Larmann, 2007).
- 5 Böhme, 2001, chapter IX.
14The
present dominance of light and sound design also enables us to discern
in retrospect what the making of atmospheres consists of in the more
object-related field. It becomes clear that what is at issue is not
really visual spectacles - as was perhaps believed by practitioners of
the old scenography - but the creation of “tuned” spaces, that is to
say, atmospheres. The making, as long as it concerns a shaping and
establishing of the geometrical space and its contents, cannot therefore
relate to the concrete qualities possessed by the space and the things
within it. Or, more precisely: it does not relate to the determinations
of things, but to the way in which they radiate outwards into space, to
their output as generators of atmospheres. Instead of properties,
therefore, I speak of ekstases5 - that is, ways of stepping-outside-oneself. The difference between properties and ekstases
can be clarified by the antithesis between convex and concave: a
surface which, in relation to the body it encloses, is convex, is
concave in relation to the surrounding space.
15We are concerned, therefore, with ekstases, with the expressive forms of things. We are not accustomed to characterising things in terms of their ekstases,
although they are crucial to design, for example. In keeping with our
ontological tradition, we characterise things in terms of their material
and their form. For our present purpose, however, the thing-model of
Jacob Böhme is far more appropriate. He conceives of things on the model
of a musical instrument (Böhme, 1922). In these terms, the body is
something like the sounding board of a musical instrument, while its
outward properties, which Böhme calls “signatures”, are moods which
articulate its expressive forms. And finally, what is characteristic of
things is their tone, their “odour” or emanation - that is to say, the
way in which they express their essence.
16Tone and emanation - in my terminology, ekstases
- determine the atmosphere radiated by things. They are therefore the
way in which things are felt present in space. This gives us a further
definition of atmosphere: it is the felt presence of something or
someone in space. For this the ancients had the beautiful expression parousia. Thus, for Aristotle, light is the parousia of fire (De anima, 22b17.).
17What I, harking back to Plato, called phantastike techne,
would no doubt today be called design. We have oriented ourselves here
by a prototypical area of design: stage design. But for our purpose it
is important to modify the traditional understanding of design,
according to which design amounted merely to shaping or configuring.
That understanding is already prohibited by the extraordinary
importance of light and sound, not only in the field of the stage set
but also in advertising, marketing, town planning, interior design. One
might speak of a practical, or better: a poetic phenomenology, because
we are dealing here with the art of bringing something to appearance. A
term used by the phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz is very apt here: he
speaks of a “technology of impression” [Eindruckstechnik]
(Schmitz, 1999). Admittedly, this term is used polemically, being
applied to the generation of impressions for propaganda purposes in the
Nazi period, or what Walter Benjamin called the “aestheticizing of
political life” (Benjamin, 2003, p. 269). Let us therefore speak
more generally of the art of staging. On the one hand, then, we
have preserved the connection to our paradigm of the art of the stage
set and, on the other, we have included in this expression the purpose
for which atmospheres are predominantly generated today: the stage set
is itself a part of the staging of a drama or opera. The art of
atmospheres, as far as it is used in the production of open-air
festivals or in the build-up to large sporting events such as the
Football World Cup or the Olympic Games, is their staging. The role of
the generation of atmospheres in marketing is that of staging
commodities. The commodities themselves are valued, in the aesthetic
economy where they now serve only relatively little to satisfy basic
needs, for their staging-value, that is, they are valued to the extent
that they help individuals or groups to stage their own lifestyles. And
finally, in democracies, or more precisely media-democracies, in which
politics is performed as if in a theatre, the generation of atmospheres
has the function of staging personalities or political events.
18If
we review these examples, it emerges that the attention which is now
paid to atmospheres in aesthetic theory has its material background in
the fact that staging has become a basic feature of our society: the
staging of politics, of sporting events, of cities, of commodities, of
personalities, of ourselves. The choice of the paradigm of the stage set for the art of generating atmospheres therefore mirrors the real theatricalisation of our life. This is why the paradigm stage set
can teach us so much, in theoretical terms, about the general question
of the generation of atmospheres, and therefore about the art of
staging. But in practical terms, too, there ought to be much to be
learned from the great tradition of stage set design. That will happen
indeed, but one should not expect that it will be possible to say very
much about it. For the art of the stage set has been transmitted up to
now, like traditional crafts, in master-pupil relationships, by
collaboration and imitation. The guiding practical knowledge is tacit knowledge.
It is all the more pleasing to find now and then, in the many books
which exist on the subject of the stage set, something explicit about
the craft. In conclusion, I will give an example of such knowledge from
the praxis of the stage set. It is found in, of all places, a philosophical dissertation, Robert Kümmerlen’s book Zur Aesthetik bühnenräumlicher Prinzipien (Kümmerlen, 1929).
19Kümmerlen writes about the use of light on the stage. He argues, we should note, that an atmosphere is created on the stage with light. He then defines the effect of the light-atmosphere more precisely by saying that a characteristic mood is imparted by it to the performance. As examples, he mentions somber and charming
moods - that is, moods with a synaesthetic and a communicative
character. Finally, he also recognises the status of the “in-between
existence” typical of atmospheres: “The lighting on its own generates a
fluid between the individual structures of the performance”. But now,
let me give the quotation in full:
The
space to be contemplated is given its brightness by the lighting; stage
performances are only made visible by light. The first function of
lighting, the simple provision of light, creates, with the brightness,
what might be called the atmosphere in which the space exists. The
light-atmosphere, achieved in the most diverse ways, varies the space;
through the lighting the performances take on a characteristic mood. The
space creates an effect in its totality; the lights of the special
representation produce a self-contained impression; the space stands in a
unifying light. With the illumination of the whole scene a “unified
character” is produced. A uniform mood emanates from the space; for
example, the representation of space is subjected to a “muted” light. We
find that three-dimensional objects “gleam” in a regular light; the
space appears, for example, as “charming” or “somber”. The lighting on
its own generates a fluid between the individual structures of the
performance. A specific mood is contained in the space represented
through the ethereal effect of brightness (Kümmerlen, 1929, p. 36).