Abstract
The paper shows the crucial role of affordance theory within an aesthetic phenomenology of atmospheres (atmospherology). This explains atmospheric feelings as qualities supervening on expressive but not necessarily pragmatic affordances. As feeling possibilities, they express what it affords a person to do but, above all, to feel. This approach aims at enriching the phenomenological tradition of emotional realism according to which external affective qualities (atmospheres and affordances) are conditions of the possibility of any relationship between the subject and the world and thus represent an essential part of our emotional life. They do not result from a simple projection from the inside to the outside, nor are they completely dependent on the perceiver, whose relatively different resonance is actually due just to a different corporeal filtering of the same affordance-based and atmospheric first impression. Both affordance theory and atmospherology are clearly opposed to the constructivist approach, advocate for the thesis of direct perception, and focus on the affective meanings of our lived environment involves perceivers felt-bodily.
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Notes
- 1.
Without fully embracing the radical neo-phenomenological campaign of desubjectification of all feelings initiated by Hermann Schmitz in the 1960s (for an introduction to this philosophical stance, see Schmitz, 2019), I prefer to admit (at least since Griffero, 2014, 144) that there are three different types of atmospheres: prototypical atmospheres (objective, external, and unintentional, sometimes lacking a precise name), derivative-relational ones (objective, external, and sometimes intentionally produced as well as dependent on the subject/world relationship), and even some that are spurious because of their relatedness (subjective and projective, that is, also related to single objects and projected by the subject to the outside world).
- 2.
Provided that “the properties of essence [or being; NdA] are neither subjective in the local sense nor in the causal sense,” and have a phenomenal priority irreducible to an associationist explanation, Metzger claims that “the theory of empathy, according to which the Gestalt qualities of perceptual things are ‘actually’ the feelings of the observer, which they somehow ‘transfer’ into those things, is not a continuation of the theory of the Gestalt quality of feelings, but the complete destruction of its actual meaning and a clear fall into atomistic modes of explanation” (Metzger, 1941, 61, 70).
- 3.
It is true that banks may look different, but I doubt that they can do without a style that is impressive, intimidating, and a sign of power, or that a court of law could be based in the second floor flat of an anonymous building: their atmosphere of impressiveness and/or opulence can also be perceived by those who simply observe it from outside.
- 4.
The works of Tellenbach (1968), Böhme (2017a, 2017b), and, above all, Schmitz (1969, 2009, 2014) were seminal for my atmospherology (although they never refer to affordances). Due to bibliography constraints I will just mention some of the affordance scholars consulted for this paper (Michael, Still, Ambrosini, Bloomfield, Latham, Vurdubakis, Bonderup Dohn, Borghi, Chow, Costantini, Estany, Martínez, Gillings, Ginsburg, Heft, Jones, Lu, Cheng, Normal, Prosser, Reybrouck, Stoffregen, Turner, Kaptelinin, Withagen, Young, Zipoli Caiani).
- 5.
For an overview of the various positions on affordances I refer the reader especially to Heras-Escribano (2019).
- 6.
- 7.
Considering true perception to be an integrally pathic-corporeal state, there is no need to distinguish (as Straus, 1935 does) between sensing and perceiving.
- 8.
I.e., the effort with which a percipient who feels attacked by a dystonic atmosphere tries in vain to transform it by projecting (unconsciously) his own emotional desires and even (consciously) acting in such a way as to modify the encountered atmosphere.
- 9.
They segment the space of our daily life by their being attractive or repulsive, relaxed or tense for example, thus also determining behavioral differences (but also differences in class, taste, cultural level, etc.).
- 10.
Griffero (2014, 136–139; 2021, 54–58). I would simply reply to Arbib’s objection (Arbib, 2021, 257) that any change still assumes the atmospheric first impression as a parameter. In a theatrical performance, the scenes may well change, but the leading atmosphere does not change radically from scene to scene (one ironic moment certainly does not turn the whole of Hamlet into a comedy).
- 11.
I merely mention here the possibility that the atmosphere par excellence can be conceived of as a relationship preceding the relata, thus escaping the ever looming dualism.
- 12.
Scheler (1923, 239).
- 13.
Here I’m especially thinking of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism toward the paradigm of an acosmic thinking subject (1945, 307, 310, 372, 405, 523, and passim). Cf. also his theory—unfortunately outlined in pages that are still vague-metaphorical—of horizons of significance (ibid, 523), atmospheric styles, and physiognomic characteristics.
- 14.
According to which when a quality (moreover affective) appears to us in the external world, it would necessarily be projected (hydraulically) by the subject on that external world, as such wrongly considered, physicalistically, lacking in qualities (especially tertiary).
- 15.
See Arbib (2021, §4.3).
- 16.
In brief: by pathic I mean (Griffero, 2019a) an aesthesiological attitude based on the fact of abandoning oneself to lived experience instead of judging it, of being subject to something instead of being subject to something. This obviously means criticising the dominant western attitude of activity.
- 17.
Without going so far as to claim—as later Merleau-Ponty did through too-metaphysical notions like chiasma and flesh designed to merge activity and passivity—that perceiving does not mean watching things but rather being watched by them, i.e., that seeing is always a response-gaze.
- 18.
See especially Böhme (2017b, 37–54, 23 for the quotation).
- 19.
An atmosphere as a whole may be the “supervening” result of micro-affordances not perceived as such, and even become an invariant in a certain culture (for this Böhme distinguisches between atmospheric and atmosphere).
- 20.
“For example; socks afford the easier wearing of boots which afford the attachment of crampons which afford the climbing of snow-covered slopes which themselves become “affordable”, that is to say climbable” (Michael, 2000, 112).
- 21.
To give even just an idea of the problematic nature of the subject: this claim to differentiation of the perceived atmosphere implies that there are thetical and non-thetical (background) affordance-based atmospheres, central and peripheral atmospheres, potential and actual atmospheres (the only ones that are such in the proper sense), atmospheres in competition with each other (for various reasons), atmospheres that fall below the perceptual threshold, etc.
- 22.
This is a central notion in Schmitz, also denoting the ontological character of atmospheres (see Griffero, 2017a). For me, unlike full things, quasi-things are not endowed with borders, not separated from other things, not lasting over time and not inactive if not touched, etc.
- 23.
There are affordance-based atmospheres whose greatest affective resonance may require a static contemplation and even, if not above all – as Klages’ “eros of distance” assumes (Klages, 1922) – a(physical and psychic) distance that is in principle unbridgeable.
- 24.
The lack of perception of the prevailing atmosphere, in fact, generates gaffes in those who do not perceive it and enables others to socially stigmatize them, etc.
- 25.
For a recent approach to atmospheres and affordances that completely excludes their relationality in favor of a fully immersive holism prior to any relationship, see Begout (2020).
- 26.
It is the basic degree of realism that is sufficient for the lifeworldly intersubjectivity (Griffero, 2021, 67–83).
- 27.
For an (also literary) phenomenology of these atmospheric “games” see Griffero (2021, 29–66).
- 28.
An analogy worthy of further investigation is Chemero’s distinction (2003), borrowed from Dennett, between properties like “lovely” (existing independently of an actual perceiver) and “suspicious” (meaningless in the absence of the percipient’s assessment).
- 29.
I gladly leave to neurophysiologists a deep – but not phenomenological! – description of the structure and processes that allow the perceiver to feel affordance-based atmospheres.
- 30.
It includes notions like narrowness/vastness, contraction/expansion, direction, tension, dilation, intensity, rhythm, privative expansion/privative contraction, protopathic tendency/epicritic tendency, felt-bodily isle formation/felt-bodily isle decrease, etc. See Schmitz (2011) and Griffero (2017b).
- 31.
Nuremberg crowd can actually be “for them a thrilling atmosphere of national solidarity; for us, a chilling atmosphere of Nazi fanaticism” (Arbib, 2021, 258), but as a consequence of the same majestic, impressive, and immersive choreographic staging (simply filtered and politically addressed differently ex post).
- 32.
For more details on the application of the concept of atmosphere to aesthetics and architecture, see Griffero (2019a, 3–20, 99–136).
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Griffero, T. (2022). They Are There to Be Perceived: Affordances and Atmospheres. In: Djebbara, Z. (eds) Affordances in Everyday Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08629-8_9
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