Atmospheric Politics

Definition

Atmospheric politics names the exercise of power through the direct administration of air — climate, scent, humidity, light, and sound — rather than through walls, gates, or surveillance. The wiki carries the concept through Peter Sloterdijk's "Atmospheric Politics" (cited in Solomon's chapter via the Space Reader) and Jonathan D. Solomon's Hong Kong thesis: "Atmosphere itself may be neutral; it is wielded on both sides of Hong Kong's economic and political divides. The clouds of teargas in Admiralty and the perfumed air of the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall are both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong's political establishment… While atmosphere may be neutral, the condition of interiority is not." The concept's premise is that atmosphere — the neutral, sensed, pre-intellectual medium (atmosphere) — is nonetheless administered: "The hierarchies that determine how space is occupied are not based on solids and voids… but rather by manipulation of atmosphere. The public and private spheres are defined by public and private 'spheres, or atmospheres." Its nineteenth-century prehistory (via David Gissen, cited by Solomon) is the ensnared circulatory city: architects Pierre Patte and Eugène Hénard, engineer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, and "civic planner Georges Haussmann, who 'ensnared water, gas, trees, stone, and animal and human ablutions into a circulatory vision of an urban streetscape… designed to circulate both nature matter, "bourgeois" concepts of leisure-nature, and state-capitalist notions of nature.'" Its modern caesura is Sloterdijk's: the 1848 Palm House at Kew Gardens — "combined active and passive environmental management" for colonial palms — which "marked a clear caesura in the history of building" by "recognizing the inherent relationship between organisms and their atmosphere."

The concept is the atmospheric face of the power-and-space debate: where that debate's other positions operate through visibility (panopticon), boundary (gate-keeper), sensor (non-place), or plan (permeability), atmospheric politics operates through the air itself — "Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one another."

Key Thinkers

• Jonathan D. Solomon — the concept's Hong Kong theorist: "atmosphere is wielded on both sides of Hong Kong's economic and political divides"; teargas and perfume as equivalent instruments; interiority — not atmosphere — as the non-neutral condition.
• Peter Sloterdijk — the theoretical source: "Atmospheric Politics" (Space Reader, 2009); the Palm House caesura; the Dutch Pavilion as "an operational unit of the sprawling triad of space station, greenhouse, and Human Island" (not yet paged — see log).
• David Gissen — the conceptual historian of urban atmosphere: nineteenth-century Paris's ensnared circulatory streetscape circulating "'bourgeois' concepts of leisure-nature, and state-capitalist notions of nature"; environmental risk in post-war Manhattan (not yet paged — see log).
• Georges Haussmann — the first administrator of urban air on the cited account: the circulatory streetscape as state-capitalist nature.
• Reyner Banham — the technical ancestor: the "well-tempered environment" (1969), atmosphere's engineering lineage (see ambient-conditioning).

Related Concepts

• atmosphere — the medium itself: felt, calculated, conditioned, and — in this concept — wielded.
• ambient-conditioning — the designed production of atmospheric states; Hong Kong's cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air as its urban-scale deployment.
• power-and-space — the debate this concept joins: power operating through air rather than walls, sensors, or plans.
• interior-urbanism — the condition atmospheric politics governs: the continuous interior whose hierarchies are allocations of atmosphere.
• interiority — the non-neutral condition: "While atmosphere may be neutral, the condition of interiority is not."
• noopolitics — the neighbouring mind-politics: both govern through environments rather than subjects.
• hostile-architecture — the material-weapon sibling: teargas as hostile atmosphere.
• smellscape — the olfactory instrument: "prodigious scents" as the mall's class technology.
• heterosmia — the sensory regime the stratified atmospheres produce.
• biopower — the administration of life-environments the atmospheric administration extends.
• privatised-public-space — the ownership frame: who may own and clear the air of a "public passageway."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the concept's founding statement: teargas and Pacific Place perfume as "both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong's political establishment"; "Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata"; the atmosphere genealogy (Wigley, Banham, Lavin, Kipnis; Gissen's Paris; Sloterdijk's Palm House); the artworks' atmospheric public realm (Eliasson, Liu, Blur Building, Dutch Pavilion; The Good Life's outdoor atmospheres).
• Architectural Atmospheres (Borch ed. 2006) — the volume's experience-and-politics frame, the chapter's nearest conceptual neighbour in the wiki.
• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the olfactory politics: heterosmia and aromatopia as smell-regimes, the museum's engineered anosmia.

Open Questions

• Is Solomon's verdict — "Atmosphere itself may be neutral" — sustainable? If strata are distinguished by cooled, perfumed air, is the neutral air an analytical fiction, or the strongest possible indictment: a medium so neutral it can be wielded by anyone (atmosphere)?
• Does the teargas/perfume equivalence hold? Teargas disperses publics; perfume filters them. Both administer air, but do they belong to one concept or two (expulsion vs stratification)?
• Sloterdijk's caesura is a greenhouse moment (sustaining colonial specimens); Gissen's is a circulatory moment (moving nature through the street); Solomon's is a retail-civic one (filtering publics by air). Are these one history of atmospheric politics or three?
• Can atmospheric power be counter-administered — the Umbrella Movement's barricades, supply depots, and phone charging stations as an attempted counter-climate of Admiralty? The chapter documents the occupation's "temporary urbanism" without naming it a climate.
• What would an ethics of atmospheric administration look like — and is "the adaptability of atmosphere to structure the public realm outdoors" (The Good Life projects) its experimental wing or its co-optation?