Structures of Atmosphere

Author: Jean Baudrillard Year: 1968 (extract from The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, Verso, 1996; reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006) Source type: chapter (extract, Intimus pp. 37–42; from The System of Objects pp. 30–3, 36–41) Raw file: raw/chapters/baudrillard-2006-structures-of-atmosphere.md

Summary

"Structures of Atmosphere" is the Intimus editors' title for an extract from Jean Baudrillard's first book, The System of Objects (1968), analysing the modern interior as a cultural system of signs. Baudrillard argues that the modern living space is organized by a counterpoint between DESIGN (the calculation of function) and ATMOSPHERE (the calculation of materials, forms and space) — "two aspects of a single functional system" whose paired needs advertising always voices together. Through this system, colour is stripped of its traditional psychological and moral overtones and becomes an abstract value ("shades," the calculated balance of hot and cold), while materials lose their "symbolic naturalness" and become polymorphous, combinable cultural signs: wood is "no longer wood-as-material but wood-as-component." The result is that "warmth," "nature" and authenticity survive only as signified values — "a purely signified warmth… characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source" — and the entire modern environment is "transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE," a logic "no object can escape, just as no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity." The editors introduce him as exposing "a cultural inheritance linking material, form and space," in which the interior is understood outside its historical frame as "an applied, disjunctive and randomly accumulative space of inhabitation." (Note: the raw file's header reads "Intumus: Interior Design Reader" — an OCR corruption of "Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader," and "Juleanna Preston" for Julieanna Preston.)

Key Claims

The design/atmosphere counterpoint: "The term 'interior design' sums up the organizational aspect of the domestic environment, but it does not cover the entire system of the modern living space, which is based on a counterpoint between DESIGN and ATMOSPHERE" (p. 37). "The two structure a single practice; they are two aspects of a single functional system" (p. 37). See design-atmosphere.
Play and calculation on both sides: both design and atmosphere "mobilize the values of play and of calculation – calculation of function in the case of design, calculation of materials, forms and space in the case of atmosphere" (p. 37); in advertising "the technical need for design is always accompanied by the cultural need for atmosphere" (p. 37).
The interior as sign-system (editors' framing): interior furnishing, inclusive of colour, is "a cultural system of signs that is reliant upon the contrast of 'hot and cold' and the interplay between objects and the humans that live among them"; the interior is thereby understood "outside of its historical frame as an applied, disjunctive and randomly accumulative space of inhabitation" (editors' introduction, p. 37). See domestic-interior, semiotics.
Traditional colour is moral and bound: in the traditional system "colours have psychological and moral overtones"; colour is "circumscribed by form; it does not seek contact with other colours, and it is not a free value"; "Tradition confines colours to its own parochial meanings and draws the strictest of boundary-lines about them" (p. 37); colours "are simply metaphors for fixed cultural meanings" (p. 37) — at its most impoverished, "the language of colours is little different from the languages of flowers, dreams or the signs of the Zodiac" (pp. 37–38). See connotative-symbolism, symbolism.
The bourgeois interior's moral refusal of colour: "The traditional treatment of colour negates colour as such, rejects it as a complete value"; the bourgeois interior reduces it to discreet 'tints' and 'shades' — "Grey, mauve, garnet, beige" assigned to velours, woollens, satins, fabrics, hangings and 'period' forms — which "imply a moral refusal of both colour and space"; colour is "deemed too spectacular, and a threat to inwardness" (p. 38). See chromophobia.
Zero-colour as moral standing: "The world of colours is opposed to the world of values, and the 'chic' invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favour of being: black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing" (p. 38). See whiteness, taste.
Colour's liberation and its relapse: "It was painting that liberated colour, but it still took a very long time for the effects to register in everyday life"; the bright-colour interior (bright red armchairs, sky-blue settees, multicoloured kitchens) "suggests a liberation stemming from the overthrow of a global order," contemporary with the functional object — "synthetic materials, which were polymorphous, and… non-traditional objects, which were polyfunctional" (p. 38).
The obscenity of colour: "There is a kind of obscenity of colour which modernity, after exalting it briefly… seems to end up apprehending in much the same way as it apprehends pure functionality: labour should not be discernible anywhere – neither should instinct be allowed to show its face" (p. 38). In serially produced objects, by contrast, "bright colour is always apprehended as a sign of emancipation – in fact it often compensates for the absence of more fundamental qualities (particularly a lack of space)" (p. 38).
The reign of pastels: 'natural' colours "turn out to be nothing but an impossible echo of the state of nature," taking refuge in "a puritanical order of compromise with nature. This is the order, or reign, of pastels"; pastels "aspire to be living colours but are in fact merely signs for them, complete with a dash of moralism" (p. 39). See simulation-hyperreality (the sign standing in for the living colour as an early formulation of the simulacrum's logic).
Hot and cold as the atmospheric fundamental: "So far as colours are concerned, 'atmosphere' depends upon a calculated balance between hot and cold tones. This is a fundamental distinction which – along with a few others (components/seats, design/atmosphere) – helps to endow the discursive system of furnishing with a high degree of coherence" (p. 39). Every 'value' is "defined by this contrast between two poles" (p. 39). See structuralism, atmospheric-values.
Signified warmth: 'functional' warmth "no longer issues forth from a warm substance, nor from a harmonious juxtaposition of particular objects, but instead arises from the systematic oscillation or abstract synchrony of a perpetual 'warm-and-cold' which in reality continually defers any real 'warm' feeling. This is a purely signified warmth – hence one which, by definition, is never realized: a warmth characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source" (p. 39).
Wood's being — and its dismissal as value judgement: wood "lives and breathes and 'labours.' It has its latent warmth; it does not merely reflect, like glass, but burns from within. Time is embedded in its very fibres, which makes it the perfect container, because every content is something we want to rescue from time… In short, it is a material that has being" (pp. 39–40); 'solid oak' is "a living idea for each of us, evoking as it does the succession of generations, massive furniture and ancestral family homes" (p. 40). Yet "the distinction between natural and synthetic substances… is strictly a value judgement. Objectively, substances are simply what they are: there is no such thing as a true or a false, a natural or an artificial substance. How could concrete be somehow less 'authentic' than stone?" — "the inherited nobility of a given material can exist only for a cultural ideology analogous to that of the aristocratic myth itself in the social world" (p. 40).
Materials as homogeneous cultural signs: the manufacture of synthetics "means that materials lose their symbolic naturalness and become polymorphous, so achieving a higher degree of abstractness which makes possible a universal play of associations among materials, and hence too a transcendence of the formal antithesis between natural and artificial materials"; "These materials, though disparate in themselves, are nevertheless homogeneous as cultural signs, and thus susceptible of organization into a coherent system. Their abstractness makes it possible to combine them at will" (p. 40). See semiotics.
The logic of atmosphere: because furniture comprises movable elements in a decentralized space with a lighter structure of assembly and veneers, 'abstract' woods (teak, mahogany, rosewood, Scandinavian) come to the fore; their colours too "are always abstract – an object of mental manipulation along with everything else. The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE, which is no longer produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element" (p. 41). See atmosphere, atmospheric-values.
Taste superseded by the system: the success of the whole no longer belongs to "the inconsistent and subjective system of tastes and colours, of de gustibus non est disputandum, but… occurs in the context of the constraints of abstraction and association" (p. 41). See taste.
Total integration — even nostalgia is a system component: "There is nothing at all – not antiques, not rustic furniture in solid wood, not even precious or craft objects – that cannot be incorporated into the interactions of the system"; the teak-veneered chest with a futuristic metal cube and a sixteenth-century carving is not inconsistency, for "the consistency here is not the natural consistency of a unified taste but the consistency of a cultural system of signs"; a 'Provençal' room or an authentic Louis XVI drawing-room "can attest to nothing beyond a vain nostalgic desire to escape from the modern cultural system"; "An exposed ceiling beam is every bit as abstract as a chrome-plated tube or an Emauglas partition"; what nostalgia paints as "an authentic whole object is still nothing but a combining variant," signalled by the very word 'ensemble,' which "serves to reintroduce any conceivable element… into the logic of the system" (p. 41).
The commodity-logic closure: the system's incorporation of signs "is irreversible and limitless. No object can escape this logic, just as no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity" (p. 42). See consumerism, capitalism.
Note 2 — colour and gender: "'Loud' colours are meant to strike the eye. If you wear a red suit, you are more than naked – you become a pure object with no inward reality. The fact that women's tailored suits tend to be in bright colours is a reflection of the social status of women as objects" (note 2, p. 42). See gender-and-the-interior.
Note 4 — the substantialist myth: synthetics partially realize the "substantialist myth" of baroque stucco — "the notion that the whole world could be cast from a single ready-made material"; the dream that "a 'machine of machines' would replace all human gestures and institute a synthetic universe" is "the most primitive and repressive aspect of the myth as a whole, for it continues to enshrine a pre-mechanist alchemy of transubstantiation" (note 4, p. 42).
Note 5 — wood-as-component: teak is "no longer a primary natural material, dense and warm, but, rather, a mere cultural sign of such warmth, and by virtue of that fact reinstated qua sign… in the system of the modern interior: no longer wood-as-material but wood-as-component. And now, instead of the quality of presence, it has atmospheric value" (note 5, p. 42). Note 6: exoticism "evokes the myth of an escape via 'naturalness'"; these are "'secondary' woods, embodying a cultural abstraction that enables them to partake of the logic of the system" (note 6, p. 42). See presence.
Note 7 — the integrated shortcoming: the proliferation of antiques and craft objects "does indicate a shortcoming of the system – but a successfully integrated one" (note 7, p. 42).

Connections

Concepts: design-atmosphere (the counterpoint this extract names) · atmospheric-values (colour/material "values" as calculated signs) · atmosphere (the sign-system sense against the phenomenological sense) · semiotics (the interior as a cultural system of signs) · structuralism (values defined by contrast between two poles; hot/cold as constitutive binary) · consumerism (serial objects; colour compensating for absent qualities; the commodity-logic closure) · domestic-interior (the modern living space as "applied, disjunctive and randomly accumulative") · interior-design (the term that "does not cover the entire system") · chromophobia (the bourgeois moral refusal of colour; zero-colour dignity) · colour-hierarchy (from moral symbolism to abstract shades) · whiteness (black/white/grey as "dignity, repression, and moral standing") · taste (de gustibus superseded by abstraction and association; chic as elimination of appearances) · the-decorative (colour's proclivity towards embellishment; the 'vulgar' bright) · connotative-symbolism (colours as metaphors for fixed cultural meanings) · gender-and-the-interior (note 2: women's suits and the status of women as objects) · simulation-hyperreality (the pastel as "merely a sign" for the living colour; the "impossible echo" of nature) · ideology (the manifest discourse beneath which "a latent discourse is continually deploying its contradictions"; "ideological connotations and latent motives") · sterility-of-perfection (the sociological ground of the cold, perfect interior) · presence (quality of presence traded for atmospheric value) · symbolism (colour bound to fixed meanings)

Authors: Jean Baudrillard (author) · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston (editors of the reprint; their introduction frames the extract as exposing "a cultural inheritance linking material, form and space")

Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — 'interior design' as a term that does not cover the whole system; design and atmosphere as two aspects of one functional system · ornament-vs-purity — colour as embellishment against form; the moral economy of purity and 'vulgarity' · truth-and-illusion — signified warmth with "the absence of any source"; the pastel as sign without a living referent (the domestic register of the sign's substitution for the real)

Related source notes: Batchelor — Chromophobia (the art-historical chromophobia this sociological account confirms at the scale of the bourgeois interior) · Baldwin — The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (the decorator's lived "warm atmosphere of a private, personal place" against the signified warmth of the system) · Taylor & Preston — Proximities (the anthology's introduction; taste's alliance to consumption) · Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (the volume's other pole: the felt intimacy whose nostalgia-market Baudrillard's "material and maternal dream that now feeds a high-priced nostalgia" commodity-analyses) · Deyong — A history of style and the modern interior (the historical frame Baudrillard's system assumes) · Csikszentmihalyi — Design and Order in Everyday Life (the counter-empirics: objects as personal symbols, not system signs)

Direct Quotes

"The term 'interior design' sums up the organizational aspect of the domestic environment, but it does not cover the entire system of the modern living space, which is based on a counterpoint between DESIGN and ATMOSPHERE." (p. 37)

"In the discourse of advertising the technical need for design is always accompanied by the cultural need for atmosphere. The two structure a single practice; they are two aspects of a single functional system." (p. 37)

"And both mobilize the values of play and of calculation – calculation of function in the case of design, calculation of materials, forms and space in the case of atmosphere." (p. 37)

"In the traditional system colours have psychological and moral overtones." (p. 37)

"Above all it remains circumscribed by form; it does not seek contact with other colours, and it is not a free value. Tradition confines colours to its own parochial meanings and draws the strictest of boundary-lines about them." (p. 37)

"Even in the freer ceremonial of fashion, colours generally derive their significance from outside themselves: they are simply metaphors for fixed cultural meanings." (p. 37)

"The traditional treatment of colour negates colour as such, rejects it as a complete value." (p. 38)

"Grey, mauve, garnet, beige – all the shades assigned to velours, woollens and satins, to the profusion of fabrics, curtains, carpets and hangings, as also to heavier materials and 'period' forms, imply a moral refusal of both colour and space." (p. 38)

"But especially of colour, which is deemed too spectacular, and a threat to inwardness." (p. 38)

"The world of colours is opposed to the world of values, and the 'chic' invariably implies the elimination of appearances in favour of being: black, white, grey – whatever registers zero on the colour scale – is correspondingly paradigmatic of dignity, repression, and moral standing." (p. 38)

"It was painting that liberated colour, but it still took a very long time for the effects to register in everyday life." (p. 38)

"There is a kind of obscenity of colour which modernity, after exalting it briefly as it did the explosion of form, seems to end up apprehending in much the same way as it apprehends pure functionality: labour should not be discernible anywhere – neither should instinct be allowed to show its face." (p. 38)

"At the level of serially produced objects, by contrast, bright colour is always apprehended as a sign of emancipation – in fact it often compensates for the absence of more fundamental qualities (particularly a lack of space)." (p. 38)

"Furthermore – and this is their paradox – such straightforward and 'natural' colours turn out to be neither. They turn out to be nothing but an impossible echo of the state of nature, which explains why they are so aggressive, why they are so naïve." (p. 39)

"This is the order, or reign, of pastels… Instead we encounter only the pastels, which aspire to be living colours but are in fact merely signs for them, complete with a dash of moralism." (p. 39)

"So far as colours are concerned, 'atmosphere' depends upon a calculated balance between hot and cold tones." (p. 39)

"'Functional' warmth is thus a warmth that no longer issues forth from a warm substance, nor from a harmonious juxtaposition of particular objects, but instead arises from the systematic oscillation or abstract synchrony of a perpetual 'warm-and-cold' which in reality continually defers any real 'warm' feeling." (p. 39)

"This is a purely signified warmth – hence one which, by definition, is never realized: a warmth characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source." (p. 39)

"Wood draws its substance from the earth, it lives and breathes and 'labours.' It has its latent warmth; it does not merely reflect, like glass, but burns from within. Time is embedded in its very fibres, which makes it the perfect container, because every content is something we want to rescue from time." (pp. 39–40)

"The question we must ask, however, is whether this 'warmth' of wood (or likewise the 'warmth' of freestone, natural leather, unbleached linen, beaten copper, or any of the elements of the material and maternal dream that now feeds a high-priced nostalgia) still has any meaning." (p. 40)

"The distinction between natural and synthetic substances, just like that between traditional colours and bright colours, is strictly a value judgement. Objectively, substances are simply what they are: there is no such thing as a true or a false, a natural or an artificial substance. How could concrete be somehow less 'authentic' than stone?" (p. 40)

"In the end, the inherited nobility of a given material can exist only for a cultural ideology analogous to that of the aristocratic myth itself in the social world – and even that cultural prejudice is vulnerable to the passage of time." (p. 40)

"These materials, though disparate in themselves, are nevertheless homogeneous as cultural signs, and thus susceptible of organization into a coherent system. Their abstractness makes it possible to combine them at will." (p. 40)

"The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE, which is no longer produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element." (p. 41)

"That used to be true for the inconsistent and subjective system of tastes and colours, of de gustibus non est disputandum, but under the present system the success of the whole occurs in the context of the constraints of abstraction and association." (p. 41)

"There is nothing at all – not antiques, not rustic furniture in solid wood, not even precious or craft objects – that cannot be incorporated into the interactions of the system, thus attesting to the boundless possibilities of such abstract integration." (p. 41)

"The point is, though, that the consistency here is not the natural consistency of a unified taste but the consistency of a cultural system of signs." (p. 41)

"An exposed ceiling beam is every bit as abstract as a chrome-plated tube or an Emauglas partition." (p. 41)

"What nostalgia paints as an authentic whole object is still nothing but a combining variant, as is indeed signalled by the language used in speaking of provincial or period 'ensembles.'" (p. 41)

"The word 'ensemble,' closely related to 'atmosphere,' serves to reintroduce any conceivable element, whatever subjective associations it may carry, into the logic of the system." (p. 41)

"No object can escape this logic, just as no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity." (p. 42)

"'Loud' colours are meant to strike the eye. If you wear a red suit, you are more than naked – you become a pure object with no inward reality. The fact that women's tailored suits tend to be in bright colours is a reflection of the social status of women as objects." (note 2, p. 42)

"…it is no longer a primary natural material, dense and warm, but, rather, a mere cultural sign of such warmth, and by virtue of that fact reinstated qua sign, like so many other 'noble' materials, in the system of the modern interior: no longer wood-as-material but wood-as-component. And now, instead of the quality of presence, it has atmospheric value." (note 5, p. 42)

Open Questions

Baudrillard's analysis targets 1968's high-modern furnishing system (teak, chrome, leatherette). Does the system hold for the contemporary interior — or have 'authenticity markets' (artisanal, reclaimed, "biophilic" materials) changed the structure, or merely re-run note 7's "successfully integrated shortcoming"?
Is the "material and maternal dream that now feeds a high-priced nostalgia" (p. 40) a deliberate counter-position to Bachelard's imagination of matter — the same volume containing Bachelard's Poetics of Space extract — and what would a direct Bachelard/Baudrillard debate on warmth look like?
The text treats 'warmth' as pure signified — yet Baldwin's decorator's practice claims a real "wonderful warm atmosphere of a private, personal place." Can Baudrillard's system account distinguish signified warmth from achieved warmth, or does his commodity-logic closure (p. 42) deny the distinction altogether?
Does the hot/cold calculation anticipate the contemporary "atmosphere" industry (Böhme's staged atmospheres, render culture, lighting design) — and is the phenomenological "atmospheric turn" an escape from the sign system or its refinement?
Note 2's claim that bright colour marks "the social status of women as objects" is aphoristic rather than argued — how would it survive contact with Ardener's ground-rules or with the Intimus editors' reclamation of the decorative as self-expression?
The extract ends by folding object-logic into commodity-logic ("no product can escape the formal logic of the commodity"). What happens to the antique — the object Baudrillard says is integrated as a "combining variant" — when it is also claimed (elsewhere in The System of Objects) as the only object escaping seriality? Is the antique's double status a contradiction in the system or its masterstroke?