Paulo Tomas Sallis
January 2023
Where Does Affect Live?
Introspectively Investigating How and Why I am Affected by Objects and Art.
Whilst Looking Through the Lens of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
My aim is to analyse how my perception and relationship to both artwork and object alike is impacted and redirected by applying theories and terms to the mental stories that I have made for them; so that I can start to make sense of the origins of my own behaviour and rituals. The main influence for this, perception experiment, is that I have been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder within the last two years; this diagnosis has provided solace and reasoning in some moments, but this acceptance still doesn’t allow me to deeply understand my particular and purposeful attachments to objects and furniture. I will be moving between two different styles of writing: the academic and the auto-theoretical. Narrating things that are unconnected, but personally resonate together in one big conglomerate; melting the divide between what is considered factual and biased, or the non-fiction and the deeply personal, whilst still demarcating these zones through italics and indents to facilitate an understanding that I’m moving across zones.
The most prominent theory that will be introduced is Affect Theory. What is an Affect? An affect, for example, could be the physical bodily response to a negative situation. A body has performed an action, our mind makes a judgement on whether its negative or positive, and our body responds in a way that can supply us with further information. It’s a theory that attempts to organise affects into categories, that follows the science of emotion and emotional contagion between human and non-human bodies. It’s the opposite of what Cartesian Dualism represented, which is an outdated perspective, of the mind and body relationship. It predates modern medicine; coined by René Descartes (1641) a seventeenth century philosopher, he believed that the mind and body are in fact two separate entities that cannot affect one another. In fact, it was the force that separated medicine and science from the church, creating what we continue to feel in the present about the ways in which the body, not the brain, are prioritised in modern medicine (Gendle, 2016). Affect theory, in philosophy, is now considered to be entangled with nearly every aspect of the human condition, that author Lisa Blackman would describe as a “Mindful Body” (2021, p9).
Not so much a theory, but a term that is completely at the mercy of Affect theory and ontology is Jane Bennet’s “Thing-Power”: which I plan to run through, not only my personal experiences, but the dialogue that I have with other writers, such as: Don Norman, who writes about how Affect, and the expected impacts of affect on a consumer, is referenced by product designers. He uses the analogy of a poorly made product and a person’s expected response to it to illustrate, what he believes to be, the three main levels of processing in the brain. To develop on from the very object-centric view that Norman introduces, I will be referring to Susan Stewart, an American poet, who talks about the “biome” of an object and the relationships between bodies within the context of the collection. I will also be discussing the affective agency of the opposite of an object, or something physical: Atmospheres. Referring to the writings of Gernöt Bohme, a prominent German philosopher of the twentieth century, who discusses atmospheres in reference to their character and performance. At times, I may make jumps between different authors within a short period of time (especially when emotional resonances are concerned), to then return to them later – I’m honouring the mind in this writing, not just through demarcated styles of writing, but as one body. The artworks, and my experiences of them, will be drawn from my visit to the Hayward Gallery’s “Strange Clay” Exhibition. Firstly, because they’re the most recent artworks that I have physically negotiated with, so I’ll be able to apply the theories of affect to it more authentically; and secondly the associations to clay and porcelain are of the domestic and the everyday, the idea of home was difficult to overlook when I was present in the space. The objects I will be discussing, will be ones that have had an affective impact on me. Objects that I have been unable to let go of and create unease. For example,
The Water Can, being a thing that deeply saddens me, and transports me back to a time when I was deeply unhappy. That metal thing with a plastic top, has now been sitting upright, perched within a wooden wine box, lined with old charcoal dust (from previous storage), on top of a chest of drawers, for at least four years now. It feels shameful because the biggest worry being, I can’t bring myself to throw it away, as much as I want to, but it’s too stressful; it all started with the label saying explicitly, do not domestically recycle. There was this obsessive and constantly circulating guilt and imagination that I would be committing a heinous act if this was to end up in the bin, and subsequent landfill. It made me so upset that I thought it was vibrating and could almost see this dark purple halo surrounding it, I felt both taunted and haunted. Taunted by something that was there, clear as day, that has a metal body. But also, I felt haunted because there was no entity there that rationally could be forcing me to feel this way.
Jane Bennet concocts an affective repositioning for the subject of the thing, denoting that it has “Thing Power”; a thing breaking free from, and cutting the ties that bind a thing, to a non-body that has no affective power, in comparison to that of a human body. Breaking this down, an object is detached from its ‘object’, it is no longer a drinks can, for example, it is a cylindrical metal body with a hole. It can reform, it can melt, it can dent, the thing can reflect light, it sits in the world without a notion of what it was ‘meant to do’. In this newly found perception, it is a body, an affecting body, that can impact human and non-human bodies.
Affect theory, the theory of being impacted by the affect (the exchange, the taking on of another’s emotions or physical sensations unconsciously, the chemical transference of affect between bodies) of another person or object. Simply, that we are emotionally and physically impacted by the emotions and sensations of other people and objects.
My first and only summer, after coming back from my first year of London living, my space, my childhood bedroom, that I had always loved, gave me panic. My things were not my things anymore, I now realise that thing-power can cause negative affect; when the object of the moment, isn’t loved, nor recognised anymore as it once was in either awe or in compulsive ethical purpose. It feels dirty, I felt dirty, like grotesque insects were crawling up my spine. Did I throw it away. No. My unhappiness at the house was so intense, I lived with my aunt nearby for the remainder of the summer.
Bennet describes thing-power as a moment, which would suggest that this moment can end, or it can twist. I still saw it as a thing, not an object (or at least its origins), but what was emanating and pulsating from it, was this visual sense of panic. As if it was some ominous dark column imbued with something maleficent and threatening.
For Bennet to concoct these new perspectives, she delves into the auto-theoretical and deeply personal in her writing; auto-theory is a form of writing, whereby using the autobiographical, the experience of the self and the subsequently biased consciousness and entangling that with already existing theoretical and philosophical structures, it can produce a whole picture that is equally concerned in both fact and emotional discourses. Auto-theory could also be seen as automatic; the information that makes it self-known automatically to a writer, it's about challenging as well as finding a harmonious balance between what is considered fact and what is considered biased or personal. To further clarify this, I want to use a point made by Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist, who states that “Writers and artists, however brutally honest they might be in source of their self-assessments, are frequently blinded and biased as well. Making it difficult at times to ferret our truth from expectation.” (Jamison, 1994 (p57)
Bennet declares that through a fleeting, but a transcendental moment or exchange between the thing [body] and the human [body], the character of the thing, its affective vibration, its electro-magnetic field; an individualistic identity can be acquired. In her words “The strangely vital things that will rise up to meet us in this chapter— a dead rat, a plastic cap, a spool of thread—are characters in a speculative onto-story.” The story will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other.” (Bennet, 1957 (p4) Bennet deems what she means by an ‘onto-story’ as “an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable and mineral.” (Bennet 1957 (p8) The ‘onto-story’ style of writing is a removal of the demarcated zones and spaces between equally affective bodies. ‘Onto’, being an abbreviation of the term ontological; a philosophical framework that negotiates with and debates what a body, an entity, an ‘object’ or a thing is, and what this means in the ideas of existence. Bennet uses storytelling to illustrate what ontology does:
“On a sunny Tuesday morning on 4 June in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, there was:
One large men’s black plastic work glove
One dense mat of oak pollen
One unblemished dead rat
One white plastic bottle
One smooth stick of wood…
When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me.” (Bennet, 1957 (p5)
Bennet then goes onto to say that one thing led her to another, “that if the sun had not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat” and so on; she saw them in a constructed assemblage that bennet herself was assembled into, as not a human per se, but as another body. Human bodies cannot control things. Bennet argues that human bodies do not, or cannot, enact an ‘imperium’ onto themselves, and do not control it – referring to the relationship between human and in-human bodies, that absolute power does not exist. Nobody has control of another. We as humans like to think we sit at the peak of this hierarchy, but I will use the example of throwaway culture to discredit this notion; when something is intentionally set free into the world, there is no control. It goes by and moves by either its own material agency, or that of natural forces. What consumerism and industrialisation has caused is, in the simplest way, too many things. It’s not like they are catalogued from the point of purchase to the moment they are discarded – so the idea of a hierarchy of materials has been formed, consequentially the aesthetic to emotional impact, gets worse with every evolution of the consumer industry.
Bennet mentions American consumerism; the rapid production and purchasing of objects, mirrored by the equally rapid want to replace them – and that these consumerist cultures “Conceal the vitality of matter” (1957 (p5). By this, I have determined that she’s referring to the lack of the singular moment, what Bennet described as the rise to the ‘absolute’, the perceived divine – the transcendence to beyond the object, they are a bodied thing. Now with this rapid discarding of ‘future things’, this moment never happens. The objective reckoning never happens.
How the ‘vibrancy of matter can be concealed’ through consumerism, and subsequently, poorly made products reminded me of when
I was walking on my estate and saw this shaped piece of metal which seemed to of been made from a larger circle and a smaller circle situated on top, I picked it up and it turned out to be a grey poor-grade plastic and I dropped it immediately out of disgust; so, I was now complicit in its littering. I collect small, ‘charactered’, pieces of metal and wood that live in a box, behind a wardrobe door; I have an out of sight, out of mind relationship with these ‘things.’
But I had such immediate distain for this thing, due to its plasticity. Immediately, its value was worthless, as plastic isn’t a sustainable or long-lasting material, and personally I find the promise of longevity attractive.
An artist and artwork which is concerned and discusses the impacts of consumerism is “Regular/Fragile” by Liu Jianhua.
B. 1962, Ji’an, China.
Regular/Fragile, 2002-03.
Over a thousand white porcelain pieces.
Responding to aviation disasters that happened in China, 2001, Regular/Fragile uses porcelain casts of children’s toys, household domestic products and clothes, referencing the items that were found in and around the crash sites. Jianhua’s son was hospitalised at the time of these incidents, and it brought them to reflect on the “fragility” of human existence. Porcelain carries the expectance of ‘fragility’ and fracture, commenting on human existence in reference to the objects cast. The abundance of objects is to not only declare, perhaps the lives lost in the disasters, but what Jianhua believes is the disturbance and hinderance resulting from consumerism. I entered the space of “Regular/Fragile”, as could be argued by Bennet, a part of this “collection” or “assemblage” myself; there was a tension. Just before entering this space, you are verbally made aware that all works in the exhibition are fragile, and that their demarcation has been made apparent through interference, such as ropes or tape, or that the piece itself has declared its own zone and that we must understand it is not an invitation to physically engage. I’d also like to ask, can this be seen as a collection, or an allegory for one, as these are the casts of the items that were in fact, the collection.
Bennet’s ideas of thing-power, of seeing yourself in the collection (or assemblage in her case), that we as human bodies cannot “exact an imperium onto ourselves” (1957 (p2), that there is no hierarchy between bodies. Stewart’s point, that the objects within a collection, aren’t what they once were, they’re context and positioning in the world is dependent the result of what it’s next too, would suggest that: I was a part of this collection myself, and my presence was giving context to the objects, and vice versa. They contextualise and reconfigure how we are seen as bodies.
In this context, my experience is that innate human behaviour to find meaning for a thing, the opposite of thing-power, but objectification in the most literal sense. This installation was situated within, and grew out from, the corner of the room so within most viewpoints felt expansive beyond what I could see, as if it were a whole room that surrounded myself in the centre of the collection. For each item that I tuned into, there was this need to state, that’s a hammer, that’s a shoe and so forth, but they’re none of these things because they’re porcelain. I really struggled with this back and forth in the gallery, I couldn’t quite pin down what they were, because they were, at least, two things at one time: I see the form of an object, but they’re not objects, they’re things made of porcelain that have physically lost any practical and applicable sense of what they were.
Going back to the original feeling of tension, these things felt so precariously suspended it created a sense of unease and anxiety – one person in the space said, “think of all the bubble wrap”. Jianhua has achieved fragility, but fragility that is also recognised by an audience. As being a part of the collection, I would say that their fragility is at the discretion of human-bodies; they’re fragile because we deem them as valuable, if their value, monetary or otherwise, was inconsequential, they wouldn’t be so well preserved, if at all. But it’s the action of treating something as fragile, rather than expendable, that causes anxiety.
What is their affective disposition, on myself personally? Do I think that these casts can hold the affective values of the items cast? No. They have been diffused through the porcelain. I would argue that Bennet’s Thing-Power, the affective power of a thing, isn’t present if these are seen as separate things. But, seeing it as one thing, as the entirety of Regular/Fragile, it’s a body that causes unrest and uncertainty. Parts of its body have landed on the ground but are undamaged; it feels as if the greatest amount of transferable affect that can happen between bodies is in its set-up. I feel anxious and sweaty thinking of stacking irregularly shaped porcelain pieces and hanging porcelain with a singular piece of translucent thread. There’s a danger.
Jianhua and Bennet’s concerns with mass-consumerism is also one of Norman’s concerns, discussing affect from the perspective of a designer. “Emotions, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems… so if aesthetics would change our emotional state” (Norman, 2004 (p18), then the quality of those worsening aesthetics and materials within a sense of material hierarchy, would produce negative affect for the user or the designer. I’d like to make a link between Bennet’s comments on production with Don Norman’s experiences and comments regarding negative affect and the “Visceral”. To introduce them, Don Norman’s “Levels of Processing” are a proposed system (the Visceral, the Behavioural and Reflective Levels), a way of compartmentalising, what he believes, are the three key levels of perception and emotion in the brain, to better understand how the different parts of the brain interact and form the learning, training and behaviour as one system, and as separate systems. Norman says that “the visceral level is preconscious, pre-thought. This is where appearance matters, and first impressions are framed. Visceral design is about the initial impact of a product, about its appearance, touch and feel. The behavioural level is about use, about experience with a product. But experience itself has many facets: function, performance and usability.” (2004 (p37)
Norman, similarly, to Bennet, introduces the topic with a personal story:
“After dinner, with a great flourish, my friend Andrew brought out a lovely leather box. “Open it,” he said proudly, “and tell me what you think.” I opened the box. Inside was a gleaming set of old mechanical drawing instruments…
“Lovely,” I said. “Those were the good old days, when we drew by hand not by computer.” Our eyes misted as we fondled the pieces.
“Buy you know,” I went on, “I hated it. My tools always slipped, the point moved before I could finish the circle, and the India ink – ugh, the India ink – it always blotted before I could finish a diagram. Ruined it!” …
“Yeah,” said Andrew laughing, “You’re right, I forgot how much I hated it. Worst of all was too much ink on the nibs. But the instruments are nice, aren't they?"
"Very nice," I said, "as long as we don't have to use them." (Norman, 2004 (p63)
The “visceral design” led them into a false sense of security with great positive affect – everything from the initial appearance of the leather box (“reflective design” instilling a sense of nostalgia and memory from a similar previous sense of affect), they felt so satisfying as tactile pieces or things. This is where Bennet’s “Thing Power” is reversed. The transcending singular moment (the divine moment or “the absolute”) happens before the knowledge of product, object, and usage comes into play. So how did this happen. Its transcendence was lost by the unexpected arrival of negative affect, when the two started to remember when they would use these tools; that they were temperamental, had a difficult grip and not made for purpose. So, in this case, Jane Bennet’s Thing-Power is very much grounded in what Norman describes as “bottom-up processing” (Norman, 2004 (p65). Visceral to Reflective levels of processing where instinctual (visceral) behaviors are enacted through a sense of behavioural curiosity and investigation, to then be led up to the reflective level, for a conscious and aware rude awakening of how these objects are. They went from thing to object, rather than object to thing. They fell from an affective grace. Now, what can happen when multiple objects or bodies are involved?
The Plastic Sweets Box of One-Use Plastic:
When collecting turns into something that isn’t healthy, but classes itself through obsessive and compulsive eyes, that it was, in a sense, about surviving. This thing(s), that remains present in a drawer, is something that didn’t make me feel as uncomfortable as “That metal thing with a plastic top”. I was 15, a teacher bought some squishy, chewable sweets into school. They went round the corridors and stairs passing them out, near to the end of the day. I said, “Where’s that box going to go?”, They replied with, “The Bin.” I spiked up and said with such conviction, “I’ll take it, it might be useful storage.” Gives me a bizarre expression and hands it over. The smell of this box, which it still retains today through it plastic seals, was a sweet and fruity aroma that was heavenly. I take it home. It gets thrown on the desk. Until. In my bedroom or the family kitchen, whenever I was in possession of one-use-plastic-wrapping, whether it was bubble wrap or for pitta breads. It would go into my pocket and follow me up and would then be stored and sealed in this box. To then be put into the box, then in the drawer of the bedside table, until another piece made its way in. I’d like to say, a couple of weeks had passed, the box was full, and the obsession has dissipated, as if some unappointed challenge had been won. However, the box now also remains in that very same drawer; but positive affect still emanates from it, when I lift the lid and smell the untouched, undiluted flavour and smell of the sweets that were once sealed within it.
The ‘Furniture’:
I wanted, and still want, anything free, that could be so easily and generously bequeathed onto me. Three wooden chests of drawers, One wooden clothes rail, Two bedside tables, One Ikea white shelving unit, One vintage desk, One wooden Chair, One wicker chest, One Mirror, One industrialist leather and black painted steel armchair. In memory, this is how I start to recollect all my furniture, as a list.
However, as detailed by Norman and what he describes as “Top-Down Processing” (Norman, 2004 (p65), reflective memory takes you down to the visceral, the body, not the behaviour of what it does, but how the body immediately engages, to then travel back up through the behavioural, to return to the reflective level. So, I’m currently, right now, in the process of reflectively returning to my childhood bedroom, where I can pinpoint where thing-power happened.
I saw the chest of drawers in an assemblage, or them became one thing. The shape of the room was a triangular, irregular hexagon, so most furniture had to line one wall. The chests of drawers sat in a row, going from tallest to shortest. I’d study how the lines and boundaries of one intersected, matched or were completely different to another, as a series of rectangles and lines, like a Mondrian painting. Their acquisition started from a place of purpose, I wanted storage, I was obsessed with the idea of storage and being in an abundance of storage. But they became a visual feature just as much as they were an apparatus for hiding clutter.
The furniture was caught in the act of becoming, not furniture, but the building blocks in which my life was surrounded by, but I honestly, felt, as if, they were part of me, and I was a part of them. They were my only source of identity in that space. Nothing on the walls, bare and blank. When my family thought to reduce the furniture in my room, I forbade it, because I thought that, they could be useful one day, stuck in the realm of domestic fantasy and future life, to bring them with me like my little box of tricks and things.
But, most importantly, they are the things to daydream alongside with.
Returning to Jane Bennet, I can say with confidence, that the power of the “thing” is always prevalent within how I initially look. A thing only becomes an object when I set an intention to use its domestically known and built function. Otherwise, myself and things engage in an out of focus staring contest. Seeing who can daydream for longer. But the true meaning of “thing-power”, is to not only notice an object through thinghood, but to feel its thing-hood as an affecting body with power.
Ben Highmore writes about his favourite armchair and the thingly world; stating that demarcating thingvalue to either “cultural symbolism” or that we ‘as owners imprison the thing within the meanings we give it’, is far too commonplace for Highmore. Instead, he thinks that the thing, in this case his chair, should weigh in on this discussion, rather than proposing something that “isn’t the chair’s point of view.” (Highmore, 2010 (p86) I haven’t come at this from the perspective of the thing until now, only how my perception of it transforms it into, or makes me aware, that it is an affecting body on me. Will we ever know; what the position of the object/thing is, or is it only our subjective emotional biases that can answer these questions in response to how we feel they affect us? Or is it the space surrounding the thing, the thing shaping my perception? Well, Susan Stewart, an American Poet, talks about the “biome” of an object and how a thing can be perceived as being located outside of the world; her book called “On Longing”, has a chapter called “The Secret Life of Things”; she introduces the idea of the miniature. The non-human bodies that can be held by a human body and the miniature in reference to the collection is centered around the idea of unintentionally manipulating the contexts and associations of it. By placing pieces of miniature into a new biome, a box for example, the world in which they inhabit no longer exists – their context is now subject to the other miniature around them, and vice versa. “To reveal a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception – is a constant daydream of the microscope: the daydream of life inside life, of significance multiplied infinitely within significance.” (Stewart, 2007 (p55) In terms of what Stewart refers to as the “biome” (2007, (p155), a new world within a world, a pocket world, I see it less as revealing narratives and actions, and more that they become a reality for the creator of the
“microscope” (2007, (p155). You could see this as a more intimate and physical translation of “ThingPower”: the things previously known as objects, have been made to sit amongst one another, but not for the benefit of eventual connection, but as a series of random things. The narrative happens when the collecting and placing, in a box, has a pause.
When a collection is in motion, which for me, is a continuous but not completely conscious and perceived practice; this practice has travelled from the reflecting upon a thing or kinds of a thing, to then follow into a pattern of behaviour. Where actions or reactions are built or become so inbuilt into the Visceral level over either the evolution of a species, or repetitive behaviour. So, this pattern of collecting for me, that I mentioned earlier in reference to the box of things, has become pre-conscious. I find the noun a ‘collection’ and the verb ‘collecting’, quite peculiar in this context. It is something that is done, but is not entirely conscious, if at all – the noun comes after the fact of doing, and the verb also comes after to describe what has been done. They reflect the result not the act.
I’ve mentioned a box of bits that I keep in a cupboard, it is an old shoe box: There is a piece of driftwood with two holes, a skinny 15cm long piece of leather, orange cardboard, organic tea packaging that is adorned with gold leaf, a variety of rusty screws that I removed from an antique vintage chest, small folded pieces of metal mesh, an antique lock, a rectangular sample of blue stained canvas and dark brown leather, small lengths of florists wire – and more. What I mean by an intimate thing-power, is that I sit with these items, not recalling what they or what they once did, but what they do as one body, how do they behave. Stewart describing it as “the daydream of life inside life” and my giving of agency to these items, that they are the things to daydream alongside with, changes it entirely for me. I haven’t made a point to separate reality from thing-daydream-reality before.
It reminds me of when Norman says that “the visceral level is pre-conscious, pre-thought”, and that “visceral design is the initial impact, appearance, touch and feel.” (Norman, 2004 (p65) So, what if the initial daydream of thing-power, is pre-conscious, but, the memory of this daydream, resurfaces to the reflective level, the level of memory and sentiment. It’s not that the transcendental moment of thing-power can twist after it is existing for a long period of time, like I thought earlier about the metal can, but instead, the memory of the moment can turn, due to affects occurring in the present.
By affects occurring in the present, what could they be, or what could they channeled from. This is where I’d like to introduce the idea of the atmosphere as an affective agent, which is antithetical to a physical item. Gernot Böhme states that atmospheres are not only “vague, but intangible” (Böhme, 2018 (187), so how can they affect us? I want to open this dialogue with “Atmosphere” by Edmund de Waal.
Edmund de Waal
B. 1964 Nottingham, UK.
Atmosphere, 2014.
286 porcelain vessels in 9 aluminium and plexiglass vitrines.
Humbling. This was the word I thought of as soon as I stepped into this naturally lit room. I felt humbled by looking up and looking under them. They’re positioned above, out of reach; channelling into subgenres of the divine and ideas of faith and what Bennet calls “the absolute”. Thing-Power, when an object transcends its objecthood and becomes a thing; what’s perplexing about these structures, porcelain and plexiglass alike, they were never deemed an object, so they are already simply a thing. In contention with Jianhua’s Regular/Fragile, where I felt a difficulty to separate object from thing, which I now realise is due to the nature of the environment. A space where I was expected to think, to observe and to negotiate. There was nothing visceral or unconscious about it, and the moment of Thing-Power, as I understand, happens when expectations aren’t present, you are simply overtaken by a new way of looking. So, I couldn’t comfortably separate object from form in the case of her work.
In the construction of Waal’s “Atmosphere”, he was referring to the breath. Studying how the gaps and silences, between breathes, cause slight changes to how the material is manipulated, creating one vessel within the space of one full breath cycle through a potter’s wheel. Each individual porcelain vessel has the impression of each individual breath – and the impressions of the changes in his body, his posture, the durability and the stamina of his hands. So, each vessel is an expression of a singular breath, they’re different entities that symbolise a singular affective moment in a fleeting time frame that could last a minute or even less.
I wonder if these vessels were viewed differently; presented within a chronological framework of rows; showing the affective transform as physical matter. Now even if that were the case, most of the vitrines are glazed, to different degrees, so all information, excluding quantity (as seen from below), is inaccessible; and this ambiguity is shared with atmospheres. This ambiguity is investigated in Gernot Böhme’s essay “The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres.” He is trying to pin down what the culturally shared phenomenon of Atmospheres is. He opens this discussion through detailing that “It is only since the eighteenth century that it has been used metaphorically, for moods which are “in the air”, for the emotional tinge of a space.” I feel that this idea of an ‘emotional tinge’ is reflected in how I have experienced objecthood and thing-hood, particularly in terms of the sentimental. Stewart says that “the souvenir is not simply an object appearing out of context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in the present; rather its function is to envelope the present within the past.” (Stewart, 2007 (p151) Within the context of the atmosphere, a place could be considered a souvenir, and its function remains the same due to the subject’s decision to return. Böhme says that an atmosphere doesn’t exist without the subject, the same applies to a souvenir. So, what I would propose is that memory and atmosphere are one in the same, within this context. For example, an incident occurred in a church, that created an affective atmosphere; when that subject would then go into a different church, I feel that the emotional tinge could still be impactful, an association has now been built. Böhme also says that atmosphere’s need to be ordered in order to understand them, this would be considered as one type of atmosphere. Another would be walking into a space and immediately sensing an atmosphere through the affect of others.
As Böhme writes that atmospheres morph and shapeshift, even in the tiniest fractals; but also, that atmospheres act as the collective tuning of a space. The atmospheric layers in Waal’s work are the plexiglass vitrines, as he calls them, and although they’re full of individually handmade vessels, and there are nine of them, I feel that they form one body. One atmosphere; but an atmosphere that is influx and moving within its means. “They do not exist as entities which remain identical over time; nevertheless, even after a temporal interruption they can be recognised as the same, through their character. Moreover, although they are always perceived only in subjective experience – as a taste or a smell, for example.” (Böhme, 2018 (p188) The ways in which Waal has approached atmospheres, is very similar to that of Böhme’s description: Waal decided to not only have each vessel as the result of one breath, but to keep the impressions of his fingers and other small imperfections. I see the plexiglass boxes as permanent, an atmosphere is always present, but it can be activated in subtly different ways, in this case, the character of the atmosphere are the porcelain vessels.
To further the discussion of atmosphere I will use a personal story of affect in the workplace.
I was working in a pub from September to January, during when the pandemic was still very much an issue; I had tested positive for covid just after Christmas. I knew instantly that my telling my boss would cause a lot of negativities, due to the tone of previous atmospheres when other employees have called in sick, that I feel he has initiated. Or it was a feeling of anticipation for his reaction, that made an atmosphere apparent. I told him that I tested positive and couldn’t come back to work New Year’s Eve; to which he replies very argumentatively and passive-aggressively. I didn’t think much of it because I know that this is a pattern of behaviour. A week passes and I return to work. The silence was deafening. Not that everyone was silent, or the pub was, but I felt that everything drained of colourful substance as soon as I stepped in the door. There was an atmosphere, an affect, that he had transferred onto my colleagues, which then washed over myself. A week passes, I continue to feel more on edge, my chest was tight, something wasn’t right. So, I hand-in my weeks’ notice. I have considered working for other pubs in my local area, but since that exchange, I have felt a similar sense of atmosphere as a customer; making me reconsider whether I should work in an environment of a similar disposition again.
So, returning to the idea I proposed, I do feel that an atmosphere can be carried to a sense of similar place, and to conclude this point, Stewart comments that “the souvenir invokes the displacement of the past.” (2010, (p157) The subject, or in this case, myself, am experiencing a temporal displacement of sorts.
Böhme says, “one must expose oneself to them, one must experience them in terms of one’s own emotional state, to define their character” (2018 (p189), similarly to Bennet. What I’m struggling with is seeing atmosphere and affect as separate ontological agents. What I feel an atmosphere might be, is where the affect lingers in either an area or between people for longer, which is what makes an individual supply it with subjectattachment, i.e., atmosphere. Böhme describes, “the subject experiences them as something ‘out there’ […] something which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power (2018, p188).” Again, I would describe this as overreactive (or at least this kind of atmosphere, one that is made between human-bodies), almost nuclear affect; because in contrast with Bennet and “thing-power”, that happens between a body that is already considered affective, and another body that gains the perception of being an affective body.
I’ve previously described my relationship to things as a staring contest, Highmore explains that “at certain hours of the day or night, it is very convenient to watch intensely how things rest… these worn-out surfaces, the scratches that hands have left on things, the often tragic and always charged atmosphere of things, they all produce a pull towards the reality of the world.” (Highmore, 2010 (p86) He then goes onto say “the eternity of human atmosphere”. This is the kind of atmosphere that I hadn’t previously considered, but the one that was the most important. By ‘human atmosphere’, Highmore is referring to, I guess you could also say ‘biome’, where the impressions, smells and traces of humans are. A clump of hair in the corner of the room, a worn sweaty sock, tea stains on the duvet cover; I was so caught in the atmosphere theme in general, I forgot how things, human things, not objects, can create an atmosphere. The atmosphere, in this case, is what would be perpetuating the presence of affect from the objects.
To conclude, my main aim was to analyse the changes in how I see my relationship to objects and art postexposure to affect theory and subsequent theories such as Bennet’s Thing Power and Norman’s Levels of Processing; reiterating that I have OCD and the struggles with, not so much sentimentality, but guilt when attempting to let physical items go. The focus of this, was to see how theories such as affect, and thingpower can recalibrate this perception. “The conventional way of distinguishing shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does.”
(Sedgwick, 2003 (p37) I feel that the conscious inclusion of deeply person auto-theoretical material was in support of this aim; their presence amongst the academic allowed me to relive the experience, whilst simultaneously looking through the perspective of the author and theory I was discussing at that moment.
So, to answer my question, how has my perception on objects and art changed?
I no longer see ‘The Water Can’ as a device or a function, it is simply its name. I see it for what it physically is, a body, made of aluminium. Since it’s been in my surroundings, I’ve always been affected by it, but supplying verbal information; with reference to Bennet describing ‘things’ as bodies, that we cannot impose a hierarchy, or that a hierarchy of things doesn’t exist, has allowed me to subsequentially move beyond this misconception. A misconception, that was further disproven by Bennet and Liu Jianhua respectively, by their comments on mass consumerism, Bennet said it “conceals the vitality of matter” and Jianhua says that it’s a distraction; we can’t be positioned at the top of this hierarchy of bodies if we are being negatively impacted by an over exhaustion of stuff. Norman entered at this stage with his comments on aesthetics from the perspective of the designer, suggesting that poor aesthetics, or a poor immediate visceral impression, would result in negative affect. His ideas around the visceral have allowed me to view “thing-power”, for example, and rationalise them; seeing them through levels of processing as a chain of events, particularly when I returned to an auto-theoretical approach, like when I was discussing seeing the furniture in an assemblage. The vitality that Bennet mentions can only be observed if the thing has its own space and boundaries, otherwise it becomes a new kind of conglomerate. This has similarities in its production of negative affect to that of geographers and artists, in what they refer to as a plasti-glomerate; this is where plastic and other materials become so concentrated in the sea, they create a rock like form. The vitality of matter would now only exist for this as a new body, the opportunity for the previous things have been lost. This loss of individual vitality can also be seen within the themes of the collection. Stewart’s comments on the ‘biome’ have many more possible implications then I first predicted. The ‘biome’ can of course be a box, but can also be a bedroom, a kitchen cupboard, a shelving unit; they’re still located elsewhere, but are accessed through different parameters. For example, the bedroom is the epitome of a person being a part of the collection, as Bennet would put it; everything is relative to each other, the stool with the pile of poorly folded clothes next to the tangled pile of electrical leads. When they’re in this state, they’re relative as in terms of the collection. And, as Ben Highmore puts it, “To watch an object ‘rest’ is to notice it not ‘working’ while also recognising that it has work to do.” (Highmore, 2010 (p47) The moment they are in rest, the narrativity that Stewart refers to happens, and Bennet’s “Thing-Power” moment occurs. I originally thought that the moment of “thing-power” can twist and happen for long periods of time, I now realise through Gernot Böhme and Highmore discussing atmospheres, that this is not the case. The affective moment happens when the subject is impacted by the thingly affective body; I thought that atmospheres were an overreactive form of affect that lingered, so we felt the need to name it, to try and make it a tangible agent and subject. That perspective changed when Highmore started talking about the “Human Atmosphere”, something I had completely missed. This kind of atmosphere takes on the unconscious-perception of a haze; that nothing is specific or defined, it’s just one big mass of stuff with human-made imperfections and qualities that are site-specific to that place. What I concluded from Highmore is that atmospheres are indeed present, within their own agentic ability, but they do not cause affect; they perpetuate and store the affect that has already been exchanged within the boundaries of a space. It’s the same when someone would visit a place with strong contextual similarities to a place when affect occurred. The atmosphere is born out of affect that has happened, whether in the last few seconds, or last few months. There are many directions I could take this work into, one that has sparked a prominent interest, is the presence of mass consumerism and Jianhua’s comments of distraction have stuck with me; to look more deeply at the affective impact of consumerism and production, where the affective bodies are made, and what happens between factory and ownership, and even after ownership.
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