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Time and Atmosphere
Mădălina Diaconu
Abstract
Phenomenological investigation into atmospheres as spatial feelings has paid little attention thus far to their multifaceted temporality. Ambiances are not only situated but situational; they have an intermittent existence and modify time perception. Certain moods need time to evolve, and prolonged exposure to them may change their character. The passing of time itself generates atmospheres—ages are stereotypically associated with dominant moods, and seasonal rhythms influence well-being. Moreover, ambiances shape epochs and are socially contagious. While the idea that generations can be assigned a prevailing mood is not new, the terms Zeitgeist and Zeitzeichen have been framed by an idealist philosophy of history. The theory of atmosphere does not necessarily cultivate sensitivity to ambiances as an end in itself, but also discloses structures of power, a critical examination of strategies for staging atmospheres in art, media, and society at large being indispensable for developing atmospheric literacy.
Key Words
atmosphere; time; collective moods; historicity; emotional manipulation; post-truth; film
1. Affective spaces
The notions of time and history dominated nineteenth-century philosophy according to Foucault, whose heterotopia anticipated the spatial turn.[1] The neophenomenology of atmosphere itself epitomizes this reorientation towards space. Hermann Schmitz repeatedly defined an atmosphere as “a total or partial, but always substantially expanded occupation of a surfaceless space in which something is experienced as appearing.”[2] More recently, he translated philosophizing itself into spatial concepts and described it as “the human’s reflection on finding oneself in one’s environment.”[3] Gernot Böhme, too, who first introduced the concept of atmosphere in aesthetics in its broad meaning of a theory of sensibility, plainly states that “the term atmosphere is applied to humans, to spaces, and to nature.”[4] Paradoxically, the first and most frequent examples used by Schmitz and Böhme regard situations that are inextricably linked to specific moments or periods of time, such as when referring to the moods of spring mornings, thunderstorms, Sundays, stage fright, festivals, and Christmas Eve dinners. Despite their slight disagreement in certain respects, Schmitz and Böhme conceive of an atmosphere primarily in spatial terms, as a “lived” (Böhme) or “surfaceless” space (Schmitz), such feelings being nothing other than “spatially effused atmospheres.”[5] Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the experience of atmospheres is described in a spatial register: subjects “step into” an atmosphere (a phenomenon called ingression[6] or diving, Eintauchen[7]), and subjects spread or emanate specific atmospheres into the environment,[8] whose source when considered collectively is that of the social environment.
Furthermore, Schmitz has subtly unveiled the layers of lived spatiality that underlie the structures of physical, objective space and introduced a series of categories for their dynamic properties: filling and emptying, expansiveness, and a peculiar depth called voluminosity (Voluminosität); these are followed by directionality (associated with condensation areas and anchorage points), before the subject finally constitutes the three-dimensional space.[9] Even weather, silence, and sound—phenomena that are commonly associated with time—are investigated in neo-phenomenology with respect to the qualities of their felt spatiality, as when a silence appears solemn, tender, or oppressive.[10] This hegemony of space over time in the exploration of atmospheres remains noticeable, yet is less prominently and explicitly mentioned in the next generation of scholars in atmospheric studies. Occasionally, their formulations easily may be misunderstood, as when Tonino Griffero emphasizes that, unlike common things, quasi-things “do not seem to have actual tendencies of a history”;[11] in fact, this denial only serves for Griffero to propound the claim of their pure existence in the present. However, this presentness represents only one level in the complex architecture of the temporality of atmospheres.
Despite the multifaceted and intricate articulation of atmospheric timefulness, the confined space of a single paper restricts one roughly to the following simplification: The first section expands in general on atmospheric temporality beyond the aforementioned situational presentness of ambiance. The second section discusses temporal aspects of atmospheres in natural environments. The third multiplies them in the context of historical atmospheres. Finally, given the attention that has been paid lately to the “making of” atmospheres, the last part briefly mentions a few techniques used in literature and film to create ambiances by manipulating the reader or spectator’s experience of time.
2. Beyond presentness
The aesthetics of atmosphere undisputedly bears the mark of a philosophy (albeit not a metaphysics) of presence and perception and was instigated by Gernot Böhme’s “rebellion” against the prioritization of intentionality in phenomenology and the logocentrism of art theory, which sought to decipher a work with hermeneutical tools, that is, by reading the traces of past and tradition. In contrast to this semantically mediated experience, atmospheres, he claims, can only be felt by exposing oneself to them in situ. This double emplacement—of the subject and of its experiential counterpart—correlated with situatedness, both in a spatial sense and in the meaning of conditioning subjective factors, and with presentness: atmospheres “are only possible in the present experience.”[12]
As mentioned before, Griffero reiterates this in actu status of atmospheres when he denies their historicity: “In their atmospheric and quasi-thingly effect, the night, anxiety and the wind […] don’t ever get old and don’t show any temporal patina,” but manifest “absolute ‘presentness’” and newness.[13] Further, Griffero connects this feature to the quasi-things’ relative immateriality and the coinciding of their essence and phenomenality. Put differently, quasi-things do not continue in anything in their radical eventfulness and transience. While things occupy a position in space for a certain time, quasi-things exist intermittently, such that the question of where they come from before appearing or where they disappear to makes no sense. This principle concept of “broken biography,”[14] or existence in interval, differs from the latency of things that exist before having been perceived and keep existing after they disappear from our perceptual horizon. Although actuality, intermittence, and transience involve temporality, my claim is that atmospheric temporality includes further aspects. To stay with Griffero’s own examples, wind and night can last longer or shorter, they may begin and end swiftly or smoothly, depending on the season and the climate, and all these objective temporal qualities modulate the feeling of atmosphere. In fact, atmospheres are spatiotemporal phenomena that emerge in a physical or imaginary place like art, have a certain duration, and vanish through controlled interventions or by themselves suddenly or by gradually fading out.
Upon closer inspection, the in situ dimension of our experience of atmospheres transcends the subject’s physical localization as presence onsite, given that situatedness also may involve subjective perspectivism: the experience of the same place may vary to some extent depending on the subject’s age, gender, and sexual orientation, class, ethnoracial background, and biography. In this respect, Willy Hellpach suggests that for people who grew up in the mountains, the lowland inspires melancholy and is desolating, whereas the narrow horizon may make plain-dwellers feel oppression and angst.[15] Without sharing the phenomenological assumption of a universal subject, atmospheric studies could hardly claim the possibility of an intersubjective agreement on the presence and character of atmospheres. For the same place may evoke familiarity or, on the contrary, trigger the feeling of uncanniness. Social environments, too, are subject to various experiences—think of a police station or a hospital—and what may appear as “cool” to some people may emanate a repellent sterility and coldness to others.
The physical and subjective situatedness of atmospheres is complicated by the situational dimension of their experience. In Schmitz’ view, a situation represents the most fundamental and concrete type of experience in life. Situations consist of meanings related to facts, programs, and problems and are holistic and internally diffuse, individual aspects being melded together into a manifold, even chaotic wholeness.[16] Among situations in this broad sense, impressions present the most interest for our topic because they come to the fore at a certain moment; the experience of an atmosphere is precisely imbued with impressions. According to Schmitz, atmospheres and situations overlap; atmospheres can develop without situations, such as the cyclothymics’ (private) emotional imbalance, and common situations may lack atmospheres. However, collective atmospheres always occur within situations.[17] Above all, the situational dimension of atmospheres means that they are unstable configurations that depend on a multitude of factors. Sometimes a tiny disturbance can suffice to “spoil” a feeling and a small piece of information, a word, or a simple gesture can change an atmosphere: situations are transitory par excellence.
If we agree that there is no ambiance without a living and sensitive subject (be this a human or nonhuman animal body), then we must also consider whether the experience of an atmosphere results from the interaction between its timefulness and the subject’s own temporal flow. This idea is admittedly not new, but the theory of atmosphere interprets it in terms of emotional qualities rather than temporal fluxes. Think of the ingression in an atmosphere. Entering a space, I may feel a certain mood that definitely is not mine, but that of spontaneous attractions, embarrassments, frights, and so on. After a while I may get attuned to the encountered atmosphere and join in or, on the contrary, remain so disturbed that I prefer leaving that place to altering my mood. From the subject’s perspective, entering the room has interrupted or modified the quality of the previous emotional flow. Moreover, certain moods affect our time perception in daily life, as Heidegger’s analysis of how profound boredom (Langeweile) brings about “the lengthening of the while,” that is, expanding the temporal horizon, exemplarily shows.[18] Or let us take the example of a depressive person for whom the world is not only as heavy as lead but whose physical and mental processes themselves also slow down. Imagine now that this person joins a cheerful party; the resulting collision between his or her lentitude and the collective exuberance or the fast tempo of the music can either intensify sadness or, in case he or she can “get in the mood,” act refreshingly, as if he or she were feeling alive again. The opposite situation also can be imagined: melancholic tempers find themselves “at home” in a monotonous landscape and fuse with “moody” blues. In the case of syntony, attunement to the encountered atmosphere takes place imperceptibly.
Yet not all atmospheres are perceivable at once, as when I am surprised by the discrepancy between my own mood and the encountered atmosphere. Other ambiances are apprehended gradually: the uncanniness of a place may insidiously creep into consciousness over time. In a third stage, after the first impression and the time it takes to realize a localizable mood, the experience of atmosphere can fluctuate in intensity and leave more or less long-lasting memories. Living for a longer time in a certain landscape or social environment more often than not leads to habituation to its atmosphere: the tourist’s “wow”-feeling in a splendid landscape is blunted over time, the hecticness in the editorial department of a daily newspaper is felt as normal by its journalists. Atmospheres are internalized and, as in olfaction, to which the concept of atmosphere is closely related, their feeling vanishes. While hitherto the aesthetics of atmosphere has focused on encountering atmospheres, it would be no less interesting to consider the long-lasting effects of living in certain atmospheres and how ambiances constitute everydayness. Dwelling in toxic atmospheres, be they polluted landscapes, devastated neighborhoods, social environments obsessed with competition and performance, or dysfunctional societies corroded by intolerance, corruption, violence, or racial and gender prejudices, leave profound traces behind, from burnout to trauma. Atmospheres significantly affect well-being, such that their theory transcends aesthetics, engaging moral and political aspects. In particular, toxic atmospheres raise the issue of how to develop strategies of resistance, resilience, and atmospheric conversion. The commonly used concept of attunement (Einstimmung) is a neutral term for ideological contamination and emotional contagion, when in the medium or long run toxic atmospheres often succeed in “infecting” a society. In his crusade against the primacy of interpretation in aesthetics, Böhme draws attention to the power of sensitivity and urged its cultivation. Later scholars, like Jürgen Hasse, caution that the cultivation of the feeling and attentiveness toward atmospheres are not meant “for meditative reasons” but to expand philosophizing. Atmospheric studies appear as “a seismographic field that not only allows us to sense the effectiveness of dispositifs of power, but also to reflect about them.”[19]
Another time-related dimension of experiencing atmospheres apart from the first impression (encounter) and habitualization (dwelling) is recognition, as when a subject recognizes an ambiance. Notwithstanding that atmospheres are always felt in the present, their experiences also are memorized and can trigger a déjà-vu feeling upon their return. For example, preferences for a certain kind of landscape, weather, or music and film genre evolve over time by saving memories of atmospheric experiences. The ages themselves trigger associations with specific dominant moods; the child’s outburst of vitality, the insouciance of youth, and late-age depression are stereotypes whose hasty generalization must be avoided without being considered completely false. It is precisely their relative stability that justifies expectations about intersubjective situations and social environments. Think of a child’s birthday party compared to daily life in a retirement home, to take two contrasting examples. Age illustrates best the entanglement between natural—in this case biological—and social factors of atmospheres.
3. Temporality of natural ambiances
Atmospheric studies often mention weather events like sultry heat and biting frost; different times of the day, be it morning, night, or twilight; seasons; and even days of the week, mostly Sunday.[20] Natural cycles affect mood and, indirectly, well-being; seasonal affective disorder is the scientific name for what is commonly known as winter blues yet also may cause depression in the spring and early summer.
A famous forerunner of the association between atmospheres and the time of the day is the concept of acedia. Translated as ‘despondency,’ acedia was originally conceived by Evagrius Ponticus as applying to monks who suffer from a sluggishness of hearing, lack of concentration, emptiness, a sense of futility, boredom, moroseness, and in general a slackening of the tension of the soul that results in carelessness toward oneself and others.[21] Acedia in the wide meaning of weariness with the world and life spread outside monastic circles, later being associated with melancholy and depression and the Romantic mal du siècle, from Lord Byron to Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. Its initial religious source explains why this dangerous state of spiritual inertia and indolence was feared as the “Midday Demon”: the monk was believed to be exposed to it mainly at midday, after having finished his morning duties, when he could afford a few moments of personal freedom and leisure, yet was also left alone with himself. The probability of the mood thus depended on the structure of the day in a specific cultural, and geographic, setting.
The widespread midday siesta in Southern Europe is also closely related to natural cycles. Urban atmospheres in general result from the interweaving of city planning and the residents’ habits, with both factors being influenced by daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms. The same place that successively hosts a Christmas market, a skating-rink, and a music film festival, like the City Hall square in Vienna, develops different atmospheres over the course of a year. Atmospheres return at the same place and their recurrence depends on both climatic actants and human agents, regarded in their interdependence. The trustworthiness of natural rhythms entitles one to expectations regarding the emergence of an atmosphere, and this anticipation is an attitude that mediates between the unplanned ingression into an atmospheric space and the deliberate staging of atmospheres. Before being felt in presence, ambiances can be awaited, and these predictions may then be fulfilled, exceeded, or fail. To sum up, on one hand, atmospheres are unstable because of their embeddedness in situations; on the other, categories of places and temporal units relatively reliably generate specific atmospheres; otherwise general descriptions of the atmosphere of twilight, fog, or rain, for example, would make no sense.
Contemporary artists occasionally play with expectations regarding the occurrence of atmospheres, with the aim of producing estrangement or enabling reflection. To recall a well-known example, Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project (2003) mixed sun and fog in the artificial environment of the Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern with the intention of constructing nature, to replace looking at exhibits with looking up, to rethink the institution of the museum, and also to oblige visitors to decelerate, to shift to a contemplative attitude and “be with the weather.”[22]
The phenomena of transition such as twilight are particularly interesting. In Griffero’s view, semi-darkness inspires “at times certain levity, at times sadness, if not even a real disquietude, at times the sense of the futility of things, and often, once spatial directionality has faded, extreme and antithetical moods such as full satisfaction or absolute desperation.”[23] This variation is, among others, modulated by the duration of the transition from day to night. While Eugène Minkowski enjoyed “watch[ing] the night slowly fall upon the earth” (my emphasis) and letting himself be gradually wrapped in semidarkness, Friedrich Ratzel disliked the late afternoon, in particular in spring, when “there is not even space for it before evening arrives.”[24] Griffero explains this divergence by emphasizing that indeterminacy favors the genesis of atmospheres,[25] which makes longer transitions more propitious for generating atmospheric effects than short, barely noticeable twilight intervals. Put differently, (at least certain) moods need time to evolve, and objective duration must be acknowledged as an atmospheric factor.
Temporal extension also modulates the quality of an atmosphere. For example, it is basically deceptive to claim that there is an atmosphere of rain, given that its mood strongly varies with its intensity, duration, and its relation to the previous weather condition: a strong, short, summer rain after a period of drought is refreshing; a cold rain in late autumn or the months of persistent rain, so expressively described by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude,[26] causes deep spleen. The same can be said about night, the Sunday rest, the holiday feeling, and an endless sunny summer: duration converts moods, making the most enjoyable atmosphere eventually unbearable.
Let us now take two examples for how two different ambiances appear to abolish time and transform it either into the blissful infinity of a moment or a never-ending torment. An episode in Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities depicts the atmosphere of suspended time as a contemplative, almost mystical experience. Ulrich and his sister Agathe lay on the grass in a garden on a beautiful summer day and, after a while, their conversation comes to an end.
A noiseless stream of lustreless blossom-snow floated through the sunshine, coming from a group of withered trees; and the breath that carried it was so gentle that not a leaf stirred. No shadow fell from it on the green of the lawn, but it seemed to darken from within like an eye. The trees and shrubs, tenderly and lavishly foliated by the young summer, which stood aside or formed the background, gave the impression of stunned spectators, who, surprised and spellbound in their gay costumes, took part in this funeral procession and celebration of nature. Spring and autumn, the language and silence of nature, the magic of life and death mingled in the picture; hearts seemed to stand still, taken from their chests, joining the silent procession through the air. “My heart was taken out of my chest,” a mystic said: Agathe remembered this.[27]
Time and space seem to dissolve, yet their suspension takes place in situ and within time, without excluding perceptible movement and the awareness of passing time, given Agathe’s successive impressions. As for Meister Eckhart, to whom Musil alludes, a special moment can become coextensive with eternity: “Time stood still, a millennium weighed as lightly as an opening and closing of the eye” in a transfigured world.[28] The prerequisites for such an atmospheric fusion with the world is to abolish intentionality and regress to an almost vegetal condition.
While Agathe felt like she was dreaming, the crew of the Austro-Hungarian Arctic expedition from 1872-1874 experienced a never-ending nightmare when their ship was trapped in ice during the winter. Historic reports, and their literary reinterpretation by Christoph Ransmayr,[29] describe the tedium of everyday life during four months without sun, two of which were spent in complete darkness at incredibly low temperatures, isolated from the world and almost chained to each other. The monotony was only interrupted by their fear that the ship would be crushed by the movements of ice they could hear in darkness. The men fought against feelings of solitude, helplessness, uselessness, and despair, including attacks of madness. Inactivity and the disassembling of the daily program led to the disruption of their biological rhythms; a strong discipline was required to maintain the appearance of normality with the aid of daily rituals. In addition to narratives, formal features of the crew members’ diary entries, mainly their concision, stereotypical formulations, and repetitions translate the dullness of their everydayness.
This historic episode suggests that atmospheres sometimes evolve from the interlocking of rhythms, as when the discrepancy between human rhythms and the natural rhythms of seasonal change at the North Pole contributed to make the crew’s unwilling hibernation unbearable. Privations related to physiological needs (fresh food, movement, light) and psychological needs (to see vegetation and animals, socialize, and the like) lasted intolerable lengths. It goes without saying that the two-year exposure to the Arctic atmosphere (in its double, physical and affective, meaning) in the nineteenth century cannot allow any comparison with present-day tourists’ excitement during comfortable cruises. Historical polar expeditions in general teach us that patience, determination, self-discipline, and a faith that keeps hope alive are required to resist adverse atmospheres over a long period of time. All these are unusual virtues in the theory of atmosphere, which commonly emphasizes passivity and prompts us to cultivate our sensitivity to ambiances. The question of how we can dwell in inhospitable ambiances reconnects aesthetics with moral philosophy.
In addition to the relevance of duration for generating or transforming ambiances, the passing of time itself makes a specific atmosphere emerge. Romanticism only made explicit what had been already experienced for centuries, namely that ancient sites are felt as venerable and ruins trigger melancholy. In premodern times, art used remains of the past to warn of the ephemerality and vanity of human enterprises. This interpretation has almost been inversed nowadays, when deserted sites draw attention to their power of regeneration. Uncultivated land (Brache) may seem empty, yet an industrial fallow (Industriebrache) emanates sheer desolation, as remarked on by Jürgen Hasse; the disquiet forlornness evoked by an abandoned place may develop over time into the specific mood of a fresh, still chaotical-creative beginning, provided that the entropy of nature conquers the place or the latter is appropriated for new uses by homeless people, teenagers, dog owners, experimental artists, and other subcultures.[30] For example, although the forests of Monti Pisani in Tuscany were abandoned by the peasants, traces of their past cultivation, such as trees, terrace walls, or drainage systems, are noticeable everywhere. Wandering through them, Andrew S. Mathews confesses that the lack of care makes them “somewhat melancholic”; however, this impression neither emerges spontaneously through immersion nor results from letting the genius loci act upon him, but develops by “reading” histories of these “ghost forests.”[31] Mathews’ notes, photographs, and sketches record the “longue durée encounters between humans, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and soils,”[32] and confirm the complexity of the anthropocene landscapes, which leave behind any possible dichotomy between culture and nature. While Hasse’s wasteland is successively “filled” with different atmospheres, Mathews’ haunted landscape reveals how an atmosphere is generated by the intricacy of times.
4. The mood of times, and time for moods
The phenomenology of atmosphere frequently describes ambiances radiated by human settlements, institutions, and places. Although their history is not irrelevant to their ambiance, it is again the space that stands in the foreground: the past leaves only traces for the present experience. But does not history as such have its own atmospheres? This question does not refer to the cultural history of moods, some of which coincide or are related with aesthetic categories (for example, tragic, sublime, grotesque, picturesque), but the moods of the times themselves, which may indeed be reflected by the artistic preferences for specific atmospheres in different epochs. Griffero cautiously claims that “it frankly seems impossible to entirely de-historicise atmospheric perception,” using as an example the fluctuating appreciation of exposure to the sun in the Western world during the last few centuries.[33] In fact, it suffices to recall that each crisis, revolution, and war triggers intense emotions to suggest the hypothesis that history itself might be reread as a collection and succession of collective atmospheres. The focus on the historicity of ambiances suggested here does not deny their spatiality. Social atmospheres, too, literally take place in specific societies and cultures, spread out and define special sites known as lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora), but this merely urges us to extend the theory of atmospheres to social sciences and social aesthetics.
A brief retrospective of the art and philosophy over the past two centuries proves that many generations and epochs can be assigned a prevailing mood. The nineteenth century started in Western Europe with the mal du siècle or the world-weariness of the Weltschmerz (Jean Paul) and ended in the belle époque with a highly neurotic and asthenic generation of intellectuals and artists. During the last century, German expressionism mirrored the crisis of the Republic of Weimar; the imminence of what would become World War II was anticipated by the “coolness” of the inter-war decades;[34] the gloominess of the immediate post-war years shaped the feeling of absurdity; the economic and technological boom of the 1960s triggered a visionary enthusiasm that inspired audacious architectural projects; the 1980s brought on stage the fear of an ecological apocalypse, and so on. More recently, the mood of our time was characterized as the oppressive feeling of a “permanent emergency”[35]; the pandemic was only one of its manifestations, being replaced meanwhile by the vicinity of wars, political polarization, and the intensification of migration flows.
Since and before Goethe’s Werther triggered a suicidal wave, moods have been feared for their contagious effects, although the debate about the best explanatory model for their spreading (through empathy, imitative sympathy, epistemic influence, mutual influence, contagion, imitative hypnotism, and so on) is still undecided.[36] Collective moods always arise in a specific historic situation and result from a combination of natural phenomena (epidemics, natural catastrophes) and social aspects (social tensions, structures of power in functional or dysfunctional societies including political interests in manipulating the population by staging ambiances). This entanglement of factors makes any attempt to reduce the emergence of an atmosphere to a single event or person absurd when regarded as its cause, no matter how emotionally powerful or influential this may have been. Atmospheres do not obey the logic of univocal determination, but respond to a context. Retrospectively, it turns out that artists often resemble seismographers who have a fine organ for what is in the air prior to an open, often violent, outbreak.
The knowledge of how collective moods may inflame the sociopolitical body is not new. Before our age came to realize that shared emotions may be media and discursive constructs and scholars started to unravel the use of manipulative techniques in the economic and political realms, collective atmospheres were feared in earlier political regimes as endangering the status quo by spreading “unreasonable” ideas. The reign of emotions was thought to degenerate in revolutions, while politics should be governed by rational ideas. The recent theoretical revival and more general rehabilitation of emotions represents a reaction to the long hegemony of cognitivism. The age of atmosphere has been announced by a wave of “post”-movements: post-modern and post-hermeneutic, post-semiotic, post-(inter)textual, post-colonial, and post-truth. Nonetheless, this is not the first time that a repressed affectivity strives for recognition against a rationalism that has become mandatory—think, for example, of Romanticism or the Baroque. A historical reconstruction of theories of mood and affectivity (and related terms) may point out a certain recurrence of the “time for mood,” in the sense of periods of time that manifest a heightened interest in emotions.
The recent international rise of atmospheric studies may testify to the contemporary need for emotions, although the intellectual and social genealogy of this research field would require a special, extensive discussion. Among other questions, it would be worth asking whether the concept of historical atmosphere in the aforementioned sense of a collective mood at a certain moment is interchangeable with the concepts of Zeitgeist (spirit of the time/epoch) that Herder put forward in the eighteenth century and Goethe, Hegel, Dilthey, and Jaspers later elaborated, or Zeitzeichen (signs of the time) from the last century. From the outset, it is striking that both Zeitgeist and Zeitzeichen characterize the specificity of an age in a cognitive register: spirit and signs must be deciphered, interpreted, and understood. Moreover, Zeitgeist corresponded to an idealist philosophy of history and was conceived of as consisting of assumptions, patterns of behavior, moral ideas, and beliefs. The spirit of a time pertains to mentality rather than to an attitude mediated by emotions.
Apart from Hegel’s own interpretation of the Zeitgeist as the expression of a historical necessity (the objective spirit), the concept had an anti-emancipatory touch, expressing the dominant way of thinking, feeling, and acting in a certain epoch. Almost surprising nowadays is the fact that in the nineteenth century, the Zeitgeist often negatively was connoted as a form of conformism that obstructed creativity and subordinated the individual to the collectivity; in the twentieth century, the concept increasingly resembled ideology. Occasionally, people representing the Zeitgeist were accused of narrow-mindedness, since their horizon was confined to the present and ignored alternative Weltanschauungen, as these can be revealed by the study of the past. This obsession with the individual’s freedom is less prominent in the present phenomenology of atmosphere, although scholars such as Gernot Böhme and Jürgen Hasse warn of the manipulation through staged ambiances in “aesthetic capitalism,”[37] and urge a reconstruction of critical theory that would include the notion of atmosphere. As for Zeitzeichen, its kinship with the phenomenology of atmosphere is even looser, given that this concept is usually associated with the theology of the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council, which required the modernization of ideas and practices of the Catholic Church.
Another sign of the time that has lately illuminated the centrality of emotions is the concept of post-truth. The term was coined to express the increasing tendency to ignore or deny factual evidence and react instead mainly based on feelings and personal beliefs. Post-truth thus characterizes an epistemic social environment and is not, properly speaking, an atmosphere, yet this is rooted in a radical collective mood, namely mistrust. Resistance to evidence requires the conviction that all facts are ultimately subjective constructs resulting from processes of selection, interpretation, and presentation that, consciously or not, serve specific interests. If truth might be said to be one, on the other side of it the subject finds a diverse range of phenomena, such as non-intentional errors, willful ignorance, lies with or without manipulatory intentions, political spin, indifference toward what is true, self-delusion, and cynicism.[38] If Lee McIntyre is right to claim that such subjects do not accept that truth exists independently of our feelings toward it and to warn that “post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy,”[39] then the issue of collective atmospheres that prevail at a certain time and may impede the acceptance of evidence-based facts also must be taken seriously by the phenomenology of atmosphere. The aesthetics of atmosphere has extensively analyzed the staging of moods in artistic media; its application to media, including social media, would be rewarding, as it would meet a broader social interest beyond lovers of art and beauty.[40]
5. Coda: Making temporality in art
An awareness of the power of media to manipulate people by staging atmospheres can also open the way for reading them through the filter of temporal categories. To confine the discussion to film, paradigmatic for the interweaving of atmosphere and historicity are propaganda films. For example, in her analysis of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary, The Triumph of the Will (1934), about the congress of the National-Socialist Party that was held in the same year in Nürnberg, Christiane Heibach disclosed the cinematic stratagems of deliberately construing atmospheres under the innocent label of merely recording an existing collective mood.[41] Heibach distinguished three atmospheric layers related to this film: first, the atmosphere that was experienced by people who attended the event and were filmed; second, the atmosphere in which the film was watched by contemporaries in German cinemas, who could have become electrified by the atmosphere, developed a fear of Hitler’s ascension, or reacted with a mix of fascination and repellence; and thirdly, the situation in which later generations revive the past atmosphere staged in film, knowing well the subsequent historical developments. The spectators who hadn’t eye-witnessed (erleben) the event can only reconstruct (nacherleben) the past social mood, and the film may misleadingly suggest that the German people unanimously supported the Nazi regime. Fortunately, manipulation is not infallible, yet if constructed atmospheres keep being propagated over a longer time, they can irreversibly indoctrinate, claims Heibach, who points out that becoming aware of the construction of ambiances—or, put differently, atmospheric literacy—has moral implications.[42]
Regarding cinematic techniques, The Triumph of the Will creates a euphoric and mobilizing atmosphere through the “rhetoric of the montage” and the “choreography of the masses,” among others; both produce a rhythm that paradoxically suggests a dynamic order, while inducing ecstasy at the same time.[43] More generally, the medium of film can manipulate our sense of time through the mediation of atmospheres in various ways: sound design (soundscapes, music) and the use of slow- and fast-motion expand or compress temporality; freeze-frames suspend time; the montage can produce rhythmicity or fragment the flow of time through jump-cuts; long takes create temporal flows; and so on. In addition, the mise-en-scène and the photographic quality of digital films can be used to suggest historicity and “fake” a past time. Evidently, historicity is multiplicated into a mise en abyme when spectators watch old movies on historical subjects. Given the specificity of means that each art has at its disposal to produce and modulate temporality in experience, it goes without saying that an extensive art-related analysis is needed; however, it suffices for the present aims to remark that artistic temporality does not automatically generate atmospheric effects, just as, conversely, the temporal horizon in the experience of an atmosphere may not transcend the present.
To conclude, “presentness” as the claim that atmospheres are experienced solely in the present moment identifies a single aspect of the multifaceted temporality of atmospheres. However, this includes experiential qualities of the perceiver, such as the continuity or disruption of the stream of life, reminiscences of past atmospheric experiences and the anticipation of others, the subjective appreciation of duration, and rhythmicity. Also the atmospheric experience depends on the interaction between the subjects’ own temporality, partly influenced by their temper and current mood, and the ambiance of the encountered settings. Places more strongly radiate atmospheres during certain moments of the day and under specific weather conditions. Moreover, individuals are always immersed in collective moods that vary over time and evolve from the synergy of physical factors, sociohistorical settings, and their representation in art and media which does not exclude manipulative intentions. In a societal context in which voices urge us to become a “time-literate society,”[44] that becomes able to think beyond the individual’s lifespan to an intergenerational scale, the phenomenological aesthetics of atmosphere would certainly benefit from acknowledging that ambiances have a spatiotemporal complexity that demands a polytemporal way of thinking.
Mădălina Diaconu
madalina.diaconu@univie.ac.at
The author is Dozentin for philosophy at the University of Vienna and has published extensively on phenomenology, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, and on urban aesthetics. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Published on September 12, 2025.
Cite this article: Mădălina Diaconu, “Time and Atmosphere,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres” (lecture from 1967), Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité no. 5, octobre 1984, 46-9.
[2] Hermann Schmitz, Atmospheres, trans. Lorenzo Marinucci (Milano: Mimesis International, 2023), 35 (in Original: Atmosphären, München: Alber, 2014).
[3] “Sichbesinnen des Menschen auf sein Sichfinden in seiner Umgebung,” Hermann Schmitz, Sich selbst verstehen. Ein Lesebuch, selected and introduced by Michael Großheim and Steffen Kluck (Baden-Baden: Alber, 2021), 35.
[4] Gernot Böhme, Atmospheric architectures: the aesthetics of felt spaces (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 13.
[5] Schmitz, Atmospheres, 51.
[6] Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (München: Fink, 2001), 46-7.
[7] Schmitz, Atmospheres, 73.
[8] See Böhme’s concept of ecstasy (Ekstase) as a dynamic quality that radiates into the environment.
[9] Schmitz, System der Philosophie III.2. Der Gefühlsraum (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969), 185-360; Schmitz 2023. It is worth mentioning that when he investigates temporality, Schmitz does not connect it with his theory of atmospheres (e.g., Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand. Grundzüge der Philosophie, Chap. “Chronologie (Die Zeit)“, Bonn: Bouvier, 1990, 247-74).
[10] E.g., Schmitz, “Intensität, Atmosphären und Musik” in: Atmosphären, 78-91. This chapter was not included in the English translation of the volume from 2023.
[11] Tonino Griffero, The Atmospheric ‘We’. Moods and Collective Feelings (Milan: Mimesis International, 2021), 76.
[12] Böhme, Aisthetik, 52.
[13] Griffero, The Atmospheric ‘We,’ 76.
[14] Griffero, The Atmospheric ‘We,’ 77.
[15] Willy Hellpach, Mensch und Volk der Großstadt (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1960), 163.
[16] Schmitz, Kurze Einführung in die Neue Phänomenologie (München: Alber, 2014), 47.
[17] Schmitz, Atmospheres, 65-6.
[18] Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 152.
[19] Jürgen Hasse, Die Aura des Einfachen. Mikrologien räumlichen Erlebens (Freiburg, München: Alber, 2017), 312.
[20] E.g. Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 57-9. Griffero dedicated an entire book chapter to “twilightness” in Quasi-things. The Paradigm of Atmospheres (New York: SUNY Press, 2017, 103-12), but discussed it only in relation to light, not to the moment of the day. On the Sunday mood see the film Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt?, directed by Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht (1932).
[21] Gabriel Bunge, Despondency: the Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Acedia (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s University Press, 2012).
[22] https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101003/the-weather-project.
[23] Griffero, Atmospheres, 58.
[24] Minkowski and Ratzel apud Griffero, Atmospheres, 58.
[25] This implies also that meteorological phenomena like fog would be in principle more atmospheric than a bright day.
[26] Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (London: Penguin, 2014).
[27] Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, vol. II (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), 1240.
[28] Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1241.
[29] Christoph Ransmayr, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, trans. John E. Woods (Grove Press, 1991).
[30] On the ambiance of wasteland, see Jürgen Hasse, Was Räume mit uns machen – und wir mit ihnen. Kritische Phänomenologie des Raums (Freiburg, München: Alber, 2014), 266-75.
[31] Andrew S. Mathews, “Ghostly forms and forest histories,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (University of Minnesota Press, 2017, G145-56), G145, G147.
[32] Mathews, “Ghostly forms,” G146.
[33] Griffero, Atmospheres, 21.
[34] Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
[35] Griffero, The Atmospheric ‘We,’ 175-99.
[36] Griffero, The Atmospheric ‘We,’ 176-7.
[37] Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017).
[38] Lee McIntyre, Post-truth (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2018), 6-10.
[39] McIntyre, Post-truth, 13.
[40] Noteworthy in this respect is Yana Milev’s “Design governance and breaking news: das Mediendesign der permanenten Katastrophe,” in Atmosphären. Dimensionen eines diffusen Phänomens, ed. Christiane Heibach (München: Fink, 2012), 285-303.
[41] Christiane Heibach, “Manipulative Atmosphären. Zwischen unmittelbarem Erleben und medialer Konstruktion,” in Atmosphären, ed. C. Heibach, 261-81, here 267.
[42] Heibach, “Manipulative Atmosphären,” 281.
[43] Heibach, “Manipulative Atmosphären,” 268, 271.
[44] Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: how thinking like a geologist can help save the world (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 173.