Introduction: atmospheric politics and state governance

Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air. (Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2)

The terror of our times consists in the emergence of a knowledge of modernized elimination that passes through a theory of the environment, the strength of which is that it enables the terrorist to understand his victims better than they understand themselves. (Sloterdijk 2009)

The recent “taking to the air” (Connor 2010, 9) in the social sciences has resulted in a rich number of contributions which look at and into the air as a site of imagination, inspiration, reflection, power and resistance. The move of complementing the traditional focus on geography with an aerography is led by a heterogeneous group of scholars, practitioners and thinkers, including architects (see Gissen 2013, Tavares 2008), cultural geographers (see McCormack 2009; Martin 2011, Engelmann 2015), philosophers (see Irigaray 1999; Böhme 2013, Griffero 2014), anthropologists (see Ingold 2010), but also artists (see Wagenfeld 2008; Nut Brother 2015), rediscovered poets (see Groves 2011 on Paul Celan) and, of course, an older and more established body of literature from the “natural sciences” (see Miller and Edwards 2001; Womack, Bohannan, and Green 2010). This growing body of work emerges, perhaps not entirely incidentally, at a time of an increasingly visible breaking down of air. The Global Burden of Disease project (in BBC 2016), the world’s most comprehensive epidemiologic databank, stated earlier this year that air pollution is globally the leading environmental cause for diseases and the fourth-highest risk factor for death (behind high blood pressure, dietary risks and smoking). The French feminist thinker Irigaray and Marder (2014), famous for her atmospheric critique of Heideggerian ontologies, recently published a commentary with the telling title: “Without clean air, we have nothing”.

The problem is, of course, that clean air has for a long time been thought of as mere “nothing”. The artistic interventions of Wagenfeld (2008) and Nut Brother (2015) are both, albeit for different purposes and in different ways, intended to make visible that which is normally seen as or said to be formless, immaterial and invisible. Irigaray asks for a similar “remembering of the air” as a process of reflection that starts from the premise of the air’s simple being-thereness, or, as Mitchell (2011, 534) puts it, “[r]emembering the air means we need to recognize its materiality and its mediating power”. This requires a certain level of attentiveness to air, which, as Jackson and Fannin (2011, 438) write, “is not founded on the gesture of destructive critique, but on modulation, variation, on tempering and toning down attachment to solidity.” Writing for a geopolitics of air, Adey (2015) similarly reminds us that we have to consider its material, affective, chemical, ecological and visual affinities.

It would not be accurate to say that the air has politically always been conceived of as a mere void. Whitehead’s (2009) account of nineteenth-century Britain shows how smoky atmospheres gradually emerged as a biopolitical concern of state regulation. In fact, the nature of air means that atmospheric governance always has had a very intimate connection with the body. The Polish philosopher, Monika Bakke (2006, 10), writes that “we consider our right to breathe as a basic human right, one identical with the right to live. Yet, our access to air is restricted, manipulated, and politicised”.

The subject of our political relationship to air is a theme that connects all three articles in this special section. Anna Feigenbaum and Daniel Weissmann’s empirical analysis of the “atmospheric marketing of military and police equipment” demonstrates how material and the immaterial affects are in the process of changing traditional policing cultures. Their contribution focuses on the affect that such changing atmospheres of fear and corporeal fragility have on the representation of the traditional “warrior cop”. My own article complements this affective atmospheric approach by arguing for a more materially oriented relationship to the air, a relationship which is not located outside the body but actually part of it. I look at the chemical materiality of atmospheric interventions in the deployment of gasses for the purpose of law enforcement to argue for an understanding of politics that is not purely representational but bodily mediated through the practise of breathing. The contribution of de Larrinaga looks at the question of the politicisation of the atmosphere through a more historical lens. His article combines theories of Foucauldian biopolitics with Sloterdijk’s (2009, 26) concept of “atmoterrorism”, a term which does not refer to an opponent but a modus operandi, in an effort to genealogically trace the way in which gassing has evolved as a specific spatial governmental strategy.

The articles assembled in this section certainly do not constitute the first attempt at studying the air’s “mediating power” through a political lens. Virilio ([2010] 2012, 41) has earlier argued for an “aeropolitics” that supplants the “old [geo]politics of the droit du sol.” The work of Sloterdijk (2009, 50), on which both my own and de Larrinaga’s articles draw, asks us from a more ecological perspective to look upwards at the “weapons of the air” whose very name [Luftwaffe] “lays claim to a certain competence in matters of atmospheric intervention”. Sloterdijk’s work on atmospheric manipulation and spherical methods of insulation has thus far helped inspire analyses on the “political ecology of urban air” (see Graham 2015), physical and atmospheric modes of securitisation in the “fortress city” (Klauser 2010), and the atmospheric of policing (the subject of two contributions in this special section).

We do not anticipate nor expect that these and our contributions will constitute an end to the debate on atmospheric politics. The 2013 sarin attacks in Syria and the subsequent decision to award the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has firmly centred attention on the politics of atmospheric policing. The ongoing refugee crisis, the rising tide of nationalism and general “crisis of sovereignty” mean that the policing and securitisation industry is predicted to grow by 30% in the next four years (Markets and Markets 2014). The same marketing forecast anticipates that demand for gas will soon be spreading on a global scale. It is therefore evident that more research on the political and legal ramifications, but also on the physiological and chemical aspects of atmospheric policing, is urgently needed. The contributions in this special section do not provide definitive answers to the future of the governmental taking to the air, but are rather a tactical attempt to create awareness on the ethics of atmospheric policing. Similarly to Tavares (2008) air-dynamic cartographies, air appear in our contributions both affectively and materially “as a central element of interventions, for it is the element which should be carefully regulated and protected in order to preserve the life of the population, as it was the material through which, in the paradigmatic ‘exceptional atmosphere’ of the concentrations camp, was used as the medium of mass murder”.

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Notes on contributors

Marijn Nieuwenhuis

Marijn Nieuwenhuis is Teaching Fellow in International Relations and East Asia. His research is at the intersection of Political Geography and International Relations. His current research focuses on the “politics of the air” and deals with questions of technology, pollution, security, territory, and governance.