Atmospheric Attunements

TLDR

The paper proposes an analytic attention to charged atmospheres of everyday life, questioning how circulating forces generate atmospheres, spawn worlds, animate attachment and detachment, and form the live background of living. The authors analyze several small cases where the sense of something happening becomes tactile, using them to generate questions about how forces reside in experiences, conditions, dreams, landscapes, imaginaries, and lived sensory moments. The study finds that atmospheric attunements are simultaneously palpable, sensory, imaginary, and abstract, possessing rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans, and capable of pulling senses into alertness or inciting distraction or denial.

Abstract

This paper proposes an analytic attention to the charged atmospheres of everyday life. It asks how circulating forces are generated as atmospheres per se, how they spawn worlds, animate forms of attachment and detachment, and become the live background of living in and living through things. Writing through several small cases selected out of countless potentially describable moments and scenes in which the sense of something happening becomes tactile, I try to open a proliferative list of questions about how forces come to reside in experiences, conditions, things, dreams, landscapes, imaginaries, and lived sensory moments. How do people dwelling in them become attuned to the sense of something coming into existence or something waning, sagging, dissipating, enduring, or resonating with what is lost or promising? I suggest that atmospheric attunements are palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial.