Affective atmospheres and the enactive-ecological framework

ABSTRACT

The phenomenology of atmospheres is recently gaining attention in debates on situated affectivity. Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate affective forces into an identifiable and unitary gestalt. They point to a blurred, pathic, relational, and pre-individual form of experience which has been described in terms of ecological affordances. Despite its relevance in diverse areas of research such as architecture, phenomenological psychiatry and aesthetics, a thorough analysis of the phenomena of affective atmospheres from an enactive-ecological perspective is missing in the literature. This article aims at clarifying how and to what extent affective atmospheres can be accommodated into ecological-enactive understandings of the environment in terms of affordances. To do so, I review four perspectives on ecological affordances – the gibsonian account, the relational account, affective affordances, and the Skill Intentionality Framework (SIF) – and contrast them with the ontological and epistemológical principles that ground the phenomenology of atmospheres. I argue that only the field perspective developed in SIF is compatible with the phenomenology of atmospheres. From this perspective, affective atmospheres can be understood as phenomenological counterparts of context sensitivity, that is, as the holistic and pathic background feelings that make certain affordances more salient than others. As a conclusion, the analysis in this article shows the potential of the phenomenology of atmospheres to enrich the ecological-enactive cognition framework. It also highlights the opportunity to construct a situated understanding of affectivity that is informed by phenomenological perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective atmospheres
• affordances
• enactive congition
• ecological psychology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Iñigo Romero Arandia, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Hanne de Jaegher for a careful reading and comments to earlier versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. New phenomenology – not to be confused with French new phenomenology (Simmons & Benson, 2013) – was developed by the German philosopher Hermann Schmitz in the 1980s (Schmitz, 2019; Schmitz, 1964–1980/2005), but it is only recently achieving recognition within academic philosophy. The main endeavor of Schmitz’s philosophical system is to overcome the psychologistic-reductionist-introjectionist ontology that has dominated western philosophy. Accordingly, the somehow grandiose label of “new” phenomenology points to his distance with two tendencies of German phenomenological tradition: its alleged internalist orientation and the tendency to turn back to Husserl’s phenomenological framework as the standard phenomenological method. The aim is to move away from apodictical justifications or transcendental speculation of contemplating essences. Although Schmitz is inspired by Husserl’s method, his phenomenology is no longer transcendental or ego-centered and aims to free itself from classical commitments to truth, essence, and the “dogma” of intentionality (Blume, 2010).

2. We can distinguish between the ontological claim and the epistemológical claim on atmospheres. The first is held by Griffero (2017), who describes atmospheres as substance-like entities or quasi-thing. In his words, “quasi-objective atmospheres are certainly entities and not only interactions, properties (let alone merely physical ones), or necessarily agent-related aspects” (Griffero, 2022, p. 93). The epistemological claim, instead, understands atmospheres as specific features of experience, that is, as specific structures of our access to the world. This perspective is held by Svenaeus (2013), Anderson (2009) and others. In this work, I maintain a skeptical position about the ontological claim (whether they are entities, relations, or properties) and adopt an epistemological perspective.

3. I raise these points not to diminish the relevance of this valuable research and its impressive conceptual development. Although these phenomenological considerations have not been taken into account in current formulations of affective affordances, I do not think that this theoretical gap could not be redressed by their proponents. What I claim here is that any phenomenological theory of affective affordances will need to distinguish between structurally different forms of affects.

4. This concept has been derived from gestalt psychologists (e.g., Goldstein, 1934/1995) and has recently been coined by Shaun Gallagher to describe the enactive conception of the self as dynamic patterns (Gallagher, 2013) and also to describe the multiscalar and multifactorial character of the self and mental disorders (Gallagher, 2022). However, here I refer to the configuration of the dynamic structure of the field of relevant affordances. While Gallagher grounds his conception on a form of interventionist causality between multiscalar factors, I shall not endorse his conception of causality here.

5. Slaby’s concept of “affective arrangements,” which refer to heterogeneous ensembles that organize in layouts of affective intensities (Slaby, 2018; Slaby et al., 2019), is built to account for the differential contribution of heterogeneous elements to the overall affective atmosphere. Affective arrangements are seen as distributed pre-individual affective intensities that contribute to the formation of concrete entities and subjectivities. Although both atmospherology and Slaby might have similar explanatory aims, they arise from different thought traditions. While the concept of affective arrangements is built from the Spinoza-Deleuzian tradition and cultural affect studies, atmospherology builds on the phenomenological tradition. This paper restricts to the phenomenological aspect of atmospheres and their contribution to EE theories. Although exploring the connection between cultural affect studies and EE theories would be a valuable study in the area, that falls beyond the scope of the present paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Basque Government under grant IT 1668-22 to the IAS-Research group and the research project “Outonomy” PID2019-104576GB-I00 by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. EG was supported by the Specialization of Postdoctoral Researchers Fellowship of the University of the Basque Country.