Question Two

This short text is adapted from a chapter entitled “Eco-olfactory Art. Experiencing the Stories of the Air We Breathe” published in Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance, edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr (Routledge, 2021).

Often perceived as an abstraction, the air—usually unnoticeable and unnoticed—is hard to conceive as a material object because we are so entangled in it. It is nonetheless a very material reality: mainly composed of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, argon, and other traces of noble, and greenhouse gases, it is also—even when it's not overtly polluted—carrying an infinity of microscopic particles, aerosols, molecules, and organisms. Air is the stuff in which we dwell: an enveloping pool of weightless, invisible, overall imperceptible chemical matter in which all aerobic organisms constantly bathe and breathe—without thinking about it, up to 30,000 times a day! It circulates through our bodies and constitutes our most primal habitation, the atmospheric womb which gave us—and continually gives us—life.

Yet we are forgetful creatures. We don't really know the air, just like we didn't know our mother's womb. Unless they are significantly, visibly, disturbed, environments tend to elude perception: fish cannot know or understand water because they are living in it, in the same way, humans cannot really grasp the air until they eventually choke on it. To remediate this sort of gap in experience, Marshall McLuhan posits that we need art to create “anti-environments” that allow us to perceive, relate to, and understand what otherwise remains imperceptible to us. In the case of air, the solution to bring it into people's sphere of experience could be to render it artistically sensible, or “explicit,” to slightly misuse Peter Sloterdijk's expression. As a means of achieving this, Eva Horn suggests adopting an “aesthetic of air,” that would bring it to the forefront of our perception and consciousness.

But how could the visual arts provide an adequate experience of something as invisible and intangible as the air? Images are distanced, detached from one's corporeal experience and interconnectedness with the world. To create this new aesthesis—in the original Greek sense, “to perceive”—and, from there, let us experience the physical and socio-political stories of the air we breathe, several artists, outside of the dominant optical realm, have started working with gas and airborne materials such as vapors and odoriferous molecules in original and impactful ways. From a medium of life—and sometimes of violence and contagion—air has thus recently become the medium for an art primarily meant to be inhaled.

Smells in particular, because of their invisible but undeniable, unescapable airborne presence, prove particularly effective to conjure atmospheric anti-environments: they need air to travel and be perceived, and in return, they make air noticeable. In the context of art, especially within artworks invested with an environmental mission, they turn the instinctive, vital act of breathing into a conscious one, and the air into a material, invasive presence. Thereby, olfactory artworks can act as catalysts to let us discover the air and feel our entanglement with it as pneumatic beings. They serve as transcorporeal (see the work of Stacy Alaimo) Trojan horses that inoculate us with an embodied knowledge, consciousness, and material understanding of the air.

- Clara Muller, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

Some Notes About Air, by way of “But Not Tonight” and Proust’s Recherche

Oh God, it’s raining 

But I’m not complaining

It’s filling me up

With new life

What occasions such a feeling? What are the conditions of the state depicted here? What exactly, if we take them seriously, do these opening lines convey? Eventually, we will learn that the speaker, the narrative voice, is outside, alone, at night. Deceptively, though, these initial lines are simple and even obvious, with a cadence and rhyme scheme verging on the sing-song; they nevertheless lead up to what can only be described as a singular experience. What is at stake in this experience is already suggested by the initial mention of “new life” — a phrase that seems like a cliché when taken out of context and without further explanation. At this point, the question still remains: where exactly does this feeling come from? 

Something of a neglected entry in their discography — due at least partly to its complicated release history, and therefore also to its uncertain status within the discography — Depeche Mode’s 1986 song “But Not Tonight” departs in both theme and tone from their other work from around that time. Most immediately, we might look to “Stripped,” for which it was originally the B-side, to see that the group’s darker tendencies are never far off. Considered alongside the lyrical content of their foreboding Black Celebration, released the same year, “But Not Tonight” is an outlier, and its lyrics paint a very different picture. Most of the album’s songs focus on interpersonal relationships and deal with themes of death, jealousy, and lust. In contrast, the lyrics of “But Not Tonight” are strictly in the first person and, most importantly here, focus on the weather. 

Drawing solely from the lyrics, what is described here is a profound feeling, largely brought about by the weather. In its discrete aspects, the weather simply occurs, to a great, yet subtle and unanticipated — indeed, unanticipatable — effect. As Sedgwick has noted, the effect of the weather will always be a surprise, a mystery, the predictive capacities of meteorology notwithstanding (The Weather in Proust, 4). Such an experience intimately involves chance to the extent that it cannot be brought about by any measure of effort. As the speaker goes on to state in the second verse:

Just for a day

On a day like today

I'll get away from

This constant debauchery

Whether we take this “debauchery” in general or as referring to the group’s other, darker content, its function here is to stand in for the workings of habit, in contrast to the experience recounted throughout the song. As one of the only references to a time outside of the present moment detailed by the lyrics, these lines indicate that even the removal of, the putting out of work of habit — though it sets the stage for the experience in question here — cannot guarantee it; this is where the weather comes in. After the negative reference to habit, the second verse goes on to evoke the wind:

The wind in my hair

Makes me so aware

How good it is to live

Tonight

Besides being a somewhat more straightforward variation on the opening lines, this is the first instance of the weather acting directly — that is, physically — on the speaker, thus placing him outside. The rain, of course, tends to fall on us, but this explicitly occurs only in the third verse; here, though, the speaker has wind in his hair. This gives the first tangible clue as to the statement that begins the chorus, which grows longer and reveals more with each repetition, that: “I haven’t felt so alive / In years.” In the verse, no explanation is provided for the consequent appreciation for life. Therefore, it is worth emphasizing that this feeling arises, contextually speaking, solely in response to the wind; it would be hasty and reductive to read it, instrumentalizing the “debauchery” previously mentioned, as a moment of redemption. Instead, because of its absolute newness and its life-giving quality (to give only a couple of reasons), I wish to suggest that this is an aesthetic experience — furthermore, one triggered primarily by an encounter with the atmosphere. 

The wind has a peculiar place in this evocation of atmosphere, as well as in atmosphere more generally. Turning for a moment to a passage from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu — a text famously preoccupied with the vicissitudes of weather — we can find a resonance with “But Not Tonight” on exactly this point. The passage in question, which finds the narrator alone at home in his bedroom, details a similar situation: taken by the surrounding weather, the surrounding atmosphere, he has an intense aesthetic experience that is situated in a decidedly present moment, and that has no view — or, perhaps, no strictly positive view — to any other time. In fact, the passage culminates with the statement that “I would have sacrificed my former existence and my life to come . . . for such a unique state of soul” (3: 18). Though many facets of the atmosphere influence this feeling, it is arguably the air (as a carrier of both temperature and sound) that carries the passage. Not only does the air in his room make him aware of the “so cold” weather, but it also allows the sounds from the street to permeate his bedroom “as though the outer walls of the house had been dismantled” (3: 17-18). As the passage continues, “the change of weather on certain days makes us pass at once from one note to another” on what is named as “the violin within” (3: 18). The sounds from outside, since they are bound up with the weather and therefore with this variation, cannot be discounted, especially insofar as they are carried by the air. The air, then, “carries” both the temperature (which affects the narrator’s internal state) and the sounds (which lead to a “new sound” within the narrator) in constituting the experience detailed in this passage, as well as the passage itself, in the way that it figures the experience — internal weather, internal sounds — with reference to those external forces. 

Both of these examples suggest that a feeling arises between us and the air. This idea is not without its precedent; as Gernot Böhme has suggested, atmosphere is something that occurs between the subject and the object, between the subjective and the objective (Atmospheric Architectures, 23). But what makes the wind such a singular component of the atmosphere? Why is the air in particular, even when the wind is not blowing, able to carry so much and to affect us so deeply? The air, of course, tends to carry what we generally regard as other facets of the atmosphere — calling only on “But Not tonight,” we can cite here the rain, the stars, and the moon, but also the moving air itself, as wind. But what is made possible by all of this? Though I can only offer some suggestions here, I wonder if the air might have this power — which, precisely, is not a power, a subtlety that renders it all the more decisive — simply because it always surrounds us. In other words, perhaps the air carries the atmosphere into us because it does not respect boundaries, an attribute that would make air the part of the atmosphere most responsible for de-linking it from weather, strictly speaking. The air, as we feel it and as we are felt by it, makes our surroundings at any given time atmospheric. 

At the same time, this is to say that the air has already given an atmospheric nature — an atmospheric air, so to speak — to the spaces we inhabit. As Dora Zhang writes with reference to Henry James and the question of atmosphere: “If atmospheres require sensitivity to perceive, it is because their existence seems tentative, always verging on the brink of metaphoricity, not to say fictionality . . . Air is after all the figure of ungraspability and, by extension, unreality” (Strange Likeness, 64). This is not to diminish the concreteness, the democracy, of atmosphere; as Zhang goes on to say, “insofar as atmospheres exist only as they are sensed by a perceiver, they seem entirely subjective and private, but they also have a kind of objective, public existence because they can be felt by multiple perceivers and are not reducible to any one person’s sensation” (Strange Likeness, 66). With this in mind, as well as an enlarged idea of atmosphere beyond its association with weather, I suggest that a focus on atmosphere might provide an alternative to traditional philosophical discourse around the aesthetic. After all, if atmosphere is “not reducible to any one person’s sensation,” then it will resist the errors that have befallen a large part of our aesthetic thinking. 

- Bryan Counter, University of Buffalo

Works Cited

Böhme, Gernot. Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, edited and translated by Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

Gore, M.L. “But Not Tonight.” Performed by Depeche Mode (Sire, 1986).

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols., translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1981).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust, edited by Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 

Zhang, Dora. Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020).